The North-EAST passage

Covid lockdowns did nothing for Putin's paranoia, or rather contributed greatly to it. A recent The Rest Is Politics (no link, because translation work has taken my eye off the ball for the last few weeks, so I can't point specifically to a particular edition – though I imagine it was influenced by articles such as this one in the New York Times [with the helpfully explicit title 

U.S. intelligence weighs Putin’s two years of extreme pandemic isolation as a factor in his wartime mind-set.

]...

<NYT-article>

...Throughout the pandemic, Mr. Putin has retreated into an intricate cocoon of social distancing — though he allowed life in Russia to essentially return to normal. The Federal Protective Service, Russia’s answer to the Secret Service, built a virus-free bubble around Mr. Putin that far outstrips the protective measures taken by many of his foreign counterparts.

Mr. Putin has been holding most of his meetings with government officials by video conference, often appearing in a spartan room in his Moscow estate, Novo-Ogaryovo. Even when foreign dignitaries arrived, they sometimes didn’t get to see Mr. Putin in person; the secretary general of the United Nations, António Guterres, had to make do with a video meeting when he visited Moscow last year....

Putin and his national security advisers,   in a meeting days before the invasion

... 

</NYT-article> 

...)

Poor Vlad – 'alone and palely loitering';  but he was in thrall not to la belle dame sans merci but to Mother Russia. He spent two years in timorous isolation, dreaming of going down in history as Vladimir the Great, leader of the Make Яussia Great Again movement.

<election-aside>
A recent BBC news reporter, looking forward to Putin's predicted and predictable landslide in the forthcoming 'election' said all Putin's opponents were either in exile or in prison; I think one group of possible opponents were missing from this analysis: the dead.
<election-aside>

Anyway, paranoia: to add to the geo-political realities, he found that Gaia herself was conspiring against him. This week's The Climate Question discussed the effects of global warming on Russia's coastline. Whereas hitherto that coastline has been protected from all but the most well-equipped of research vessels it is now, for 4-5 months of the year, open to all-comers. And Russia's response has been to miltarize much of a coastline that formerly had been protected by natural conditions; at,  presumably, great expense.

<parenthesis>
According to Rory Stewart, in that same podcast,   Russia's miltary spending is '40% of its budget'. I'm not sure what this means, and he didn't do his usual thing of quoting chapter and verse. But he was sure of the number: 'Four zero' (lest we should think it was a paltry 14%,  a mere 6 or 7 times the UK's).
</parenthesis>

Meanwhile, out at sea, Russia enjoys the paradoxical benefits of increased hydrocarbon exports  – made possible by the global warming caused by hydrocarbon exports already made along more expensive sea lanes: the North East Passage.

At the end of that edition of The Climate Question, another global warming paradox is introduced: the melting of the Arctic ice-sheet (and the Arctic is just ice – there isn't a continent underneath it, as in Antarctica) – has changed the Earth's gravitational field, with a counter-intuitive result: in the southern hemisphere global warming raises sea-levels. But in the north, with less ice exerting less of a pull on the water, the sea-level is falling. There's more to it than that, which was beyond my O-Level Physics with Chemistry (which I described elsewhere as the 'hasty...

<2024-afterthought>
I think 'perfunctory' would have been a better choice
</2024-afterthought>

... genuflection at the altar of Mammon that ... we Lotus Eaters were allowed to make on the way to a Greek class'); I recommend the last few minutes of  The Climate Question (in  this regard, I mean  – it's all worth a listen.)

That's all she wrote.

b