Thread by @JoohnChoe

This is an important piece of the Ukraine grain theft puzzle coming out from Cook, Ivanova & Pitel in FT.

It's showing us what Russian wealth extraction strategy is going to look like for southern Ukraine.

ft.com/content/86d2be…

This specific smuggling/laundering strategy - mixing raw resources together to disguise origin - is a proven, profitable, relatively low-risk kleptocratic strategy.

This is what Russia does with coal in the so-called Luhansk & Donetsk People's Republics.

patreon.com/posts/66297971

This has a somewhat interesting hedging effect when commodity prices increase, and the value of the ruble falls.

A rubles-only currency zone is like a cell's phospholipid bilayer; the charge differential across it is energy that can be harnessed.

joohn.substack.com/p/rubles-only-…

Look through ISW's summaries in early June, and the "rubles institutionalization" pattern you see in Kherson is the formation of another currency-exploitation zone.

Pensions are important for other reasons (it's financing terrorism) but fit here too.

facebook.com/choejoohn/post…

If you really look at the grain theft problem in historical context, what really jumps out at you is that it's not "theft" - this is a somewhat clumsy term - as much as it is a very specific form of kleptocratic exploitation. And it goes back years.

facebook.com/choejoohn/post…

And, again, once you ask the hard-to-pin-down questions, not just "who's doing this" but "why" and "what are their address and phone numbers"...

It ends in a frankly pain-in-the-ass verification problem named Nimetullayev.

Anyway I'll wrap this up soon.

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