Dear Readers:
Still on the theme of the destructiveness of war. In this case, we are talking about the destruction of vital infrastructure.
Once a war is over then one is faced with the necessity to rebuild everything that one has just destroyed.
I have this piece by reporter Alexei Degtyarev. The topic is destroyed airports. There is a man named Yury Morozov, who heads the Department for Special Infrastructure Projects, under the Russian Ministry of Transportation. Morozov announced plans to rebuild and/or repair a series of airports in Russia’s new regions, including airports in: Donetsk, Luhansk, Mariupol, Kherson, and Zaporozhie.
According to Morozov, the airports in Luhansk and Mariupol suffered the least amount of damage, so that reconstruction of these two may proceed right away. The others may have to wait until 2027, and the project as a whole is slated for completion in 2030.
Awful Avalanche 
Reading across all the media, it does seem as Ukraine’s active fighting is over and everyone wants to create illusions about what a peace might look like. As if nato still has some influence…
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When the Bandera Ukies and the Yanks finally quiet down, who’d expect anything less from Russia but the rebuilding of the Donbass infrastructure? Not me. It’s sane, rational and understandable.
What’s made me “laugh” recently is the yippity-yippity yippiting from our favourite nazi nitwits, the Baltic States. Why yes, they say, brandishing the equivalent of wooden swords, we’ll teach those damn Russkies a lesson they won’t soon forget! I think it was Estonia’s turn today, after Latvia stuck out its chest the other day. With 7600 crack troops, Estonia seems to have more bravado than even Micron with his 20,000.
The Russins don’t know whether to laugh or cry. I mean, pfft. Not only that, yer NATO has given Finland and Norway the duty to contain the Russian Northern fleet — good luck with that, guys. And of course, the megapowers of Denmark and Sweden have to bottle up the Baltic so that armed galleys from Russia, their rowers selected from the Cossack hordes and timed by a coxswain selected from the Russian oligarchy giving up his valuable vacation for the motherland, can be sunk by a Swedish hero with a standard issue NATO automatic rifle from the shore. But if the Russians get really stroppy, well, there are always Saab Griffens ready to bomb the tribesmen of Russia at their workplace. Even better luck with handling the Russian Navy, there, me old hearties of Scandinavia, and er, oops, Finland. You’re having much better luck dismantling your social safety nets; Sweden has the highest disparity in income between the lumbering super-rich and the peons anywhere in Europe. Better get those ’60s and ’70s ideas of cradle to grave social security out of your heads. You just have to read some Swedish detective fiction, or better, the BBC dramatizations of same on TV and radio. Some are available on Youbloob.
Yes, you wonder what passes for brains in what we commonly think of as Europe. Mousse, I think. Quivering, wobbly mousse, terrified it might melt and run out of their leaders’ ears. It makes no sense, but by golly, tell the European leaders that. They’re convinced, just like “F”loyd The Man with the Moves Austin, and Lord David Ca-moron, that dem dere Russkies are out to get us all. In our beds. At night, stealthily, and will steal all our hand tools to take back and trade in Russia for coloured beads from friends and family. Or something.
Blighty itself is of course economically screwed anyway. Few fish and chip shops can afford to run deep fryers only a few hours a day (tradition) due to energy costs — the Guardian wrote a brilliant article on their disappearance last year. And pubs? Closing everywhere — Covid killed them off. Sure, you’ll find fish and chips and pubs in the ancient capital of Londinium, but that place is about as like GB as chalk is to cheese. Always was, even fifty years ago when I lived there. Oh well. The hollowed-out hinterlands foretell the fate of EU countries. Goodness knows how the UK will feed itself in future. I know, get rid of fifty million useless mouths.
And possibly, the UK’s fate foretells that of North America after Biden and the neocons have finished with it, destroying freedom of speech and the assumed right of a roof over its citizens’ heads.
2030 Israel? Where was that place, again? Newsflash! on April 18/24 Israel attacked Iran with drones carrying bubble gum. The idea is to gum up the nuclear works.
The world as run by the USA elites is the opposite of sane, rational and understandable, unlike Russia — even if I find their version of life not that endearing — too conservative for me. But anyone with the mildest observational skills and interest already knew that Russia is consistent and the US makes up rules on the spot. Too bad I have to live a lie in the West. I think. Maybe.
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Mousse-brains? Not to be confused with Moose-brains!
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Hey…hey…comrade, let’s not destroy the few vestiges of decency left in this country, Bullwinkle represents what’s good in America !
To younger or more sensitive readers: You will be relieved to know that Boris & Natasha fail to bump-off America’s favorite moose, Bullwinkle with the Improvised-Explosive-Device shown above.
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To be sure, the good-natured Bullwinkle is indestructible! Boris knows it too, he’s just kidding around.
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The topic of who will rebuild Ukraine is one I’ve thought about myself. At this point I believe the entire country will eventually come under the administration of a new government that is friendly to Russia, after of course the Nazis are driven into the EU where they’ll become their problem, and richly deserved.
I think Chinese finance will play a big role, especially in the agricultural sector as China needs the food exports. Villages that are still viable can be quickly restored using prefab buildings, which are fast becoming the norm in new construction. The housing in most villages was substandard anyway, so not much lost there.
Where the most attention is needed is on roads. As a Russian friend once said to me, “there are no roads in Russia, only directions.” Doubly true of Ukraine. They’ll need a crash program to build all-weather roads that can support heavy trucks. Again, China can supply the financing since roads are part of the agricultural supply chain.
We see a lot of destruction in the war videos, but it’s not like the entire country has been destroyed. Large areas are relatively unscathed, so the situation, while bad, is not as hopeless as it first appears. One thing I would look at is consolidation of villages that are no longer viable into larger villages or towns. This could be done in conjunction with road development.
If Ukraine had rational leadership this would have all been done by now, just as it has in Russia. It will happen though, it just requires sensible people who are given half a chance, and there’s still plenty of them in Ukraine – all they need is to get the monkey off their backs, which Russia is doing as we speak.
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Excellent comment, especially about the importance of building good roads and highways. Consolidating villages and towns in larger conglomerations is also a good idea, I think.
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Rebuilding airports… and roads: in the Peak Oil future, there’s going to be a lot less of that. It’s sad, but inevitable. The way we fly and drive now — for those who are rich enough to do that! — is going to be as outmoded as riding horses and buggies seems to us in these times. We will WANT airports and roads made from asphalt, but we won’t be able to HAVE them.
Humanity is using oil faster than we’re finding new pools of it.* The term “depletion allowance” has been around since the 1960s. That was/still is a tax break given to oil companies in recognition of how their property is worth less as the oil gets sucked out of it. It’s a simple geological fact — just like drinking a milkshake, eventually the wet stuff empties out. The Earth is not growing more oil underground. We’ve got the easy stuff, like when drillers could shove a pipe through the dirt in west Texas and oil would blow out of the top of the derrick. That’s why mankind has to make wells in the depths under the Gulf of Mexico, and on the permafrost of the Arctic Circle. Peak Oil is also an underlying factor of why the Westies are so keen to break Russia into a bunch of smaller countries. That will make it easier for corporations (“nations” are not going to matter so much in the corpofascist future, only companies) to grab the oil and methane supplies there. But I digress…
Our hydrocarbon-burning lifestyle is going to sputter out like a burning candle by 2050. It’s not like we will wake up one day and BOOM! there will be nothing, but it will be harder and harder to get the stuff, and it will cost more and more. “Rationing by price” is the term. What it means is that rich people will get what they want and average people will get screwed. It’s already happening. What are you paying to fill your tank these days?
(As a bicyclist in a town with good trams and trains, I pay nothing! Last time I bought petrol was in November 2022 when my daughter was down here and I rented a car to drive to Adelaide. I look at prices when I pedal by the servos — Aussie for “service station” — and laugh. It was $2.35 per litre at some I saw yesterday. That would be about $8.35 for a U.S. gallon in the local currency. And that was for the crappy blend with 10% ethanol. On the plus side, since an Aussie dollar is only worth about 2/3 of a U.S. one, it would be like paying $6.65 in American money for a gallon if you could do a currency exchange at the till. Not far above what I’ve read some of the prices are on the U.S. West Coast.)
Within your lifetime — unless you die prematurely from Covid complications — you will see an end to the “jump on a jet liner and go across the world like you were getting on a city bus to drive across town” culture. Commercial planes will still be flying, but they will be a rare treat unless you’re loaded. So there won’t be a need for so much airport construction.
There was a dystopian novel titled “Ministry For The Future” written not long ago by a well-known American sci-fi author named Kim Stanley Robinson. One of the plot points was how a benevolent-but-secret United Nations dictatorship saw how the global warming catastrophe was unfolding. So it staged a massive simultaneous attack in which more than 100 airliners were shot down by missiles all across the world. Eco-terrorists were blamed, but none were ever caught — imagine that! Suddenly, most average people decided that flying was not such a good idea. Greenhouse gas accumulation circumvented! Unfortunately, there are no benevolent dictators like that Ulmanis guy from Latgalia who you wrote about, so the actual crash of airline travel is going to be even more chaotic than 100 shoot-downs.
The amount of hydrocarbon energy needed to keep up the road network is massive, too. Not just what you put in your tank. Look at the amount of goo that’s needed for a blacktop road. If it’s made of concrete slabs, there’s massive energy inputs needed to make that stuff too. Travel will still be happening, especially with trucks. But all that will be needed — and affordable — in most places will be one or two lanes in each direction.
I look at the massive road construction projects I see in my town (most of which are toll roads, so corporate parasites are going to try leeching off the public until their business case collapses and The State has to take over) and I think “there’s money that’s being pissed onto the pavement.” Fortunately, the local .gov is also expanding the train network. More public debt, but for a good cause. When debts are defaulted on in the coming Financial Collapse Jubilee, at least the tracks and tunnels will still be there, unlike the imaginary “money” that will evaporate in a keystroke. Again, though, I digress.
Russia has to rebuild the Donbas airports and roads now, of course. It will help cement the loyalty of the newly acquired (re-acquired?) territories. That will also make the Russosphere look more desirable than whatever is left of Banderistan, which will be lucky if it can still maintain Third World living standards. (Unless the nazIsraelis are driven into exile there — hey, it happened when they were pushed out of Egypt, Persia and Judea, so there’s precedent! — and they resettle there. Instead of “making the desert bloom”, substitute the word “minefields”…) Russia will have enough of the cheap greasy stuff to pull that off. It’s also got the engineering talent.
Meanwhile, it’s been a month since the Key Bridge collapse in Baltimore, and they still haven’t been able to pull that ship out, have they? Are you familiar with the comedy movie from the 1960s titled “The Mouse That Roared”? In which the Grand Duchy of Fenwick, a Lichtenstein-sized pipsqueak in Europe, declared war on the then-mighty United States, knowing it would be defeated but it would get a swack of that sweet, sweet Marshall Plan reconstruction money? Hilarity ensured when an American nuclear bomber crashed there and the Grand Duchy found itself with an arsenal of nukes, so it couldn’t lose. The U.S. should try something like that with Russia, but I don’t think Putin and crew would want the place.
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It was never supposed to end like this. We were supposed to have super-fast jets that could get us around the world in a couple of hours in stylish luxury cabins. Oh, and personal jetpacks to commute to work every day. The key was to find some alternative (and semi-magical) energy source! Like anti-matter warp power, or whatever it is that drives the Starship Enterprise.
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Yes, and thanks to ZETA we were going to have cheap and unlimited electric power, and before that we were told that nuclear power would be too cheap to waste time metering it.
On the other hand, the less establishment science fiction writers were telling us that (as in Walter Van Tillburg Clark’s “The Portable Phonograph”), we would be living in caves and fighting each other with clubs . . .
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