In Shelley’s most famous poem, the relics are described of Ozymandias, the ancient ruler with his “sneer of cold command” and his ill-fated power projection:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Wess Mitchell, whose grand strategy for Trump was announced this week in Foreign Affairs, the platform of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, places Trump among the rulers of ancient Sparta, then beside Metternich and Bismarck, in expanding his empire while avoiding “delusions of grandeur”.
Trump’s first target is the Kremlin, Mitchell has reported, not to make peace but to neutralize Russia, while Trump swings his guns around to aim at China.
“Today, the weaker rival is Russia. This has become all too obvious as Ukraine has chewed through Moscow’s military resources. The United States should thus aim to use Russia’s depleted state to its advantage, seeking a détente with Moscow that disadvantages Beijing. The goal should be not to remove the sources of conflict with Russia but to place constraints on its ability to harm U.S. interests. This process should begin by bringing the war in Ukraine to an end in a way that is favorable to the United States.”
In this new podcast with Dimitri Lascaris, the two legs of the Ozymandias strategy are analyzed – the correlation of political and military forces in Europe and Asia, as Trump and his men calculate their strength; and the money they are counting to earn themselves from the rearmament of Germany, Japan and other allies whom they plan to supply.
The miscalculation in this strategy is that it concedes that Russia is now stronger on the Ukrainian battlefield than the US and its forces; likewise, China is stronger now for a special military operation in Taiwan than the US and its allies aim to be in a few years’ time. The conclusion is plain – Russia’s security interests in Europe dictate accelerating its westward drive across the Ukraine, while China’s security interests are best served by moving against Taiwan sooner, not later.
As the podcast also reveals, so long as they can pocket billion-dollar riches now, which their placemen at the Pentagon, US Treasury and Department of Commerce are fixing, Trump and his men can afford to ignore the outcome for Ozymandias in the long term.
This is the strategy of fighting one war at a time while making lots of money in the meantime. In tactics it relies on the operations of fraud ahead of the operations of force, and counts on the power of propaganda to convince the world that all Trmup wants is for the killing to stop.
In this new podcast the word that podcasters are afraid to say aloud, for fear of sounding “lunatic leftists” – Donald Trump’s phrase – is imperialism. Listen to the presentation with Nima Alkhorshid and Ray McGovern here and for the compelling evidence, read on.
Yevgeny Krutikov is a former Russian military intelligence officer in the Balkans who now writes politico-military and intelligence analyses for Vzglyad. Because of the intention of his sources and their target audience, Krutikov’s papers are more a bellwether of formed policy thinking than influencer of policy decisions yet to be made.
Krutikov is also an Afrikaans-speaking specialist on Africa, a bird fancier, and a pin-up devotee. His posts of birds and girls appear regularly in his Telegram channel Mudraya Ptitsa (lead images).*
Krutikov has just published a report entitled “How will the reform of the State Department affect Russia’s interests”. This is an analysis of a New York Times publication of the day before, reporting the leak of a “draft of a Trump administration executive order proposes a drastic restructuring of the State Department”. The US newspaper concluded: “It was not immediately clear who had compiled the document or what stage of internal debates over a restructuring of the State Department it reflected. It is one of several recent documents proposing changes to the department, and internal administration conversations take place daily on possible actions. Some of the ideas have been debated among U.S. officials in recent weeks, though it is unclear to what degree they would be adopted or how active the draft is, officials said.”
In Krutikov’s analysis, there are two conclusions of fact expressed ideologically, the first leading to the second. In contrast to “the conservative ideology with which Trump came to power”, “the key moment for maintaining tension between the United States and Russia was precisely the imposition of ‘values’ artificially invented by America on the whole world. The withdrawal from the diplomatic practice of ‘promoting democracy’ and the liberal-leftist agenda is in itself a positive phenomenon…This environment consists almost entirely of liberals and leftists, and Trumpists are rare there. Consequently, there is simply no one to formulate new principles of foreign policy in a concentrated form.”
Neither of these answers directly the question of Russians interests which Krutikov posed in the title. They can be inferred in a third, implied conclusion: the “liberal agenda” and “leftist ideology” are anathema to Russian interests — because they are in retreat in Washington and absent in Moscow, and because “the conservative ideology with which Trump came to power” is shared by the Russians, the end-of-war terms the Trump Administration is proposing do not threaten Russian interests.
The Russian text has been translated verbatim without editing, illustration, reference, or clarification.
In the State Department’s readout of Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s telephone call to NATO Secretary-General, Mark Rutte, Rubio said: “while our nation has been committed to helping end the war, if a clear path to peace does not emerge soon, the United States will step back from efforts to broker peace.” That was last Friday, April 18.
Rubio was repeating what he had said in Paris two days before, following his talks on what he has called “specific outlines of what it might take to end the war”. In his brief press conference at Le Bourget Airport, Rubio repeated himself five times in as many minutes.
“We are now reaching a point where we need to decide and determine whether this is even possible or not, which is why we’re engaging both sides…So we came here yesterday to…try to figure out very soon – and I’m talking about a matter of days, not a matter of weeks – whether or not this is a war that can be ended. If it can, we’re prepared to do whatever we can to facilitate that and make sure that it happens, that it ends in a durable and just way. If it’s not possible – if we’re so far apart that this is not going to happen – then I think the President’s probably at a point where he’s going to say, well, we’re done. We’ll do what we can on the margins. We’ll be ready to help whenever you’re ready to have peace. But we’re not going to continue with this endeavor for weeks and months on end.”
Again: “there’s no – no one’s saying this can be done in 12 hours. But we want to see how far apart it is and whether those differences are – can even be narrowed, if it’s even possible to get movement within the period of time we have in mind.”
And again: “we need to figure out here now, within a matter of days, whether this is doable in the short term. Because if it’s not, then I think we’re just going to move on, from our perspective. The President feels very strongly about that. He has dedicated a lot of time and energy to this, and there are a lot of things going on in the world right now that we need to be focused on. So, this is important, but there are a lot of other really important things going on that deserve just as much if not more attention.”
And yet again: “we need to figure out whether it’s even possible within the short term. I can tell you this: This war has no military solution to it. It really doesn’t. It’s not going to be decided with – neither side has some strategic capability to end this war quickly…If it’s not going to happen, then we’re just going to move on. We’re going to move on to other topics that are equally if not more important in some ways to the United States.”
And for the fifth time: “now we’ve reached the point where we have other things we have to focus on. We’re prepared to be engaged in this as long as it takes, but not indefinitely, not without progress. If this is not possible, we’re going to need to move on… But if it’s not going to happen, we need to know now because we have other things we have to deal with.”
Trump then repeated Rubio’s repeats. “If for some reason one of the parties makes it very difficult, we’re just gonna say you’re foolish, you’re fools, you’re horrible people, and we’re just gonna take a pass. Hopefully, we won’t have to do that…And Marco’s right in saying we’re getting – we want to see it end.”
This is nothing if not orchestration.
The interpretation it prompts is that there is a US default position which Trump and his men have already discussed and to which they have decided they will revert. Alternatively, they haven’t agreed yet on what to do, and the repetitions of Rubio and Trump are a negotiating bluff to press for more concessions from Kiev, Moscow, and the European capitals.
In fact, the default is both – a Trump bluff which Rubio has been told to repeat; and a plan for warfighting against both Russia and China, though not at the same intensity at the same time.
That’s the objective. The means are to reorient the bulk of US forces to warfighting against China; avoid a two-front war with Russia and China simultaneously; and increase the capacities of the European states to continue the fight against Russia in Ukraine while retaining, even reinforcing the troop, missile, and nuclear weapon reserves of US firepower in Europe.
“Sequencing is a strategy,” Mitchell declaimed last October, “for gaining an early advantage in that competition—not a solvent for the underlying fact of competition. The whole point is to manage time wisely by using the proxy wars that are underway in Ukraine and Israel to increase our own capacity to wage war, so that a larger and more consequential war may yet be avoided due to our enhanced strength. If a sequencing strategy fails in its immediate aims but nevertheless delivers a significant plus-up in the West’s collective capabilities, it will still leave us better off than we would otherwise have been for fighting a future war in the Indo-Pacific when it comes.”
The Trump default in the present “peace negotiations” with Russia is the Mitchell-Colby war against both Russia and China, but not simultaneously – it’s the military strategy of the 18th century homily, the stitch in time to save nine.
Practical evidence that this is what is happening at the moment is at the Polish border with the Ukraine, where the recent evidence reveals the US Army is withdrawing its military stores, men, missiles, and transport base at Rzeszow.
“The priority for peacemaking in Europe has to be Russia and the United States. It has long been US imperial policy since 1945 to break, block, and destroy the capability of the Russians, either in the form of the Soviet Union or the Russian Federation, to form a level of partnership, cooperation, and economic and political power in Europe that threatens American hegemony in Europe. So now, at the present moment, what is Trump’s default position on that – on US hegemony? In answer, Mr Trump is the best enemy Russia has ever fought against.”
“What’s Trump’s default position if he can’t get a peace plan? Arguably right now he doesn’t know. And he doesn’t have much time before the mid-term Congressional elections come on which he’ll have to fight, not against a clear Democratic Party presidential candidate, but locally against Republicans who will be held responsible for inflation and every other ailment that Trump’s tariff war will have caused at the local level.”
Listen to this discussion with leading Indian military strategist, Lieutenant-General Ravi Shankar, aired from Chennai on April 21.
It’s Easter for Christians, and President Donald Trump’s message is a religious one.
He aims to be one of the angels of deliverance whom the gospels report to have showed themselves at the tomb of Jesus Christ after the crucifixion. Rolling the stone from the entrance to the tomb, and in place of his corpse, the appearance of the angels confirmed the resurrection.
“Through the pain and sacrifice of Jesus on the Cross,” Trump has tweeted, “we saw God’s boundless Love and Devotion to all Humanity and, in that moment of His Resurrection, History was forever changed with the Promise of Everlasting Life.” He went on: “America is a Nation of Believers. We need God, we want God and, with His help, we will make our Nation Stronger, Safer, Greater, more Prosperous, and more United than ever before.”
Trump had announced his own personal divine deliverance last July, when he was grazed in an assassination attempt. “It was God alone who prevented the unthinkable from happening. We will FEAR NOT, but instead remain resilient in our Faith and Defiant in the face of Wickedness.” He repeated his divine deliverance in his inaugural address of January 20: “I was saved by God to make America great again.” In Congress on March 4, Trump repeated the divine mission. “I believe I was saved by God to make American great again. I believe that.”
On Palm Sunday he added that he was “in prayer with Christians celebrating the crucifixion and resurrection of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ—the living Son of God who conquered death, freed us from sin, and unlocked the gates of Heaven for all of humanity.” The White House log identified Trump’s only event of the day was to play golf from mid-morning until mid-afternoon.
In this new podcast, Nima Alkhorshid leads the discussion of what Trump is expecting to be believed in the negotiations he is holding with Russia and with Iran; and of what he and his officials are actually doing. Click on the podcast here.
At 10 on Monday morning this week, the official White House log shows that President Donald Trump was preparing himself to greet the President of Salvador who was arriving at the White House door in an hour’s time.
But in a tweet Trump composed beforehand, he announced: “The War between Russia and Ukraine is Biden’s war, not mine. I just got here, and for four years during my term, had no problem in preventing it from happening… President Zelenskyy and Crooked Joe Biden did an absolutely horrible job in allowing this travesty to begin. There were so many ways of preventing it from ever starting. But that is the past. Now we have to get it to STOP, AND FAST. SO SAD!”
Trump was falsifying what he had done himself to escalate the war against Russia from 2017 to 2021. He was also concealing the executive order he had signed four days before, on April 10 at 8:45 am. In that paper Trump agreed to the Biden Administration’s charge of “harmful foreign activities of the Government of the Russian Federation—in particular, efforts to undermine the conduct of free and fair democratic elections and democratic institutions in the United States.” For that reason, Trump agreed to extend Biden’s executive order to continue economic warfighting against Russia, including the threat of new tariffs.
Trump is now hiding what he has just agreed and signed. He has omitted to tweet a record of his agreement with Biden on the Russian enemy. There is also no White House announcement on April 10 of Trump’s order to continue the economic guns firing in the war.
“We did not have any high expectations here in this regard,” the Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov responded, saying as little as possible to expose the Kremlin’s knowledge of Trump’s deceit.
In fact, in Trump’s first term the president added two new laws intended to widen the scope and multiply the number of Russian targets for sanction targets; at the same time, Trump made it more difficult for a successor president to ease or lift his Russia sanctions. Now that Trump is his own successor, he is continuing the Biden war which Obama and Trump had started.
Trump has refused to authorize his appointees at the State Department, Treasury, and National Security Council (NSC) to allow even limited easing of sanctions for the food and fertilizer trade that was under discussion last month in Saudi Arabia as part of the Black Sea “ceasefire” which Trump had discussed on the telephone with President Vladimir Putin.
But there is just one form of sanctions relief which Trump has introduced – this is an indirect benefit to the Russian oligarchs who are already under sanctions designations. It’s not an offer to lift the individual sanctions; it’s a scheme for not prosecuting violations when the Russians find ways to evade the sanctions (or pay bribes in the intermediation). This Trump move is being concealed.
According to the Baker McKenzie law firm of Chicago, “Task Force KleptoCapture, one of the Biden era enforcement initiatives, has been disbanded. This was announced in a memo issued by US Attorney General Pam Bondi on February 5. This was a task force within the US Department of Justice focused on enforcing the sanctions against Russian oligarchs. This was the task force behind many of the high-profile asset seizures that were widely reported in the press, such as luxury yachts.”
But the Russian oligarchs are impatient for direct, open sanctions relief from Trump. For this they are looking to Kirill Dmitriev to negotiate terms with Steven Witkoff; read more here.
So far, however, the yachts and mansions concession is all that Trump and Witkoff have agreed to. Even the YachtBuyer in its report on the superyacht market acknowledges that the asset brokers and oligarch intermediaries are cautious, warning that “any perceived softening on oligarch-linked assets could draw political and legal backlash from Ukraine’s allies, especially in Europe.”
How this is playing out in the courts on both sides of the war can be followed in the legal challenge Oleg Deripaska and his Rusal group of aluminium companies fought and lost late last year in Australia, and in the retaliation they have commenced in the Russian courts last week.
The complex legal argumentation and the Russia-hating government policy which motivates the continuing sanctions to stop worldwide movement of Russian minerals and metals, and the multi-billion dollar retaliation which the Deripaska and the Kremlin are now threatening if the sanctions aren’t lifted, are, as a Russian business source in Dubai puts it, “pushing the accelerator and brake pedal at the same time for Trump, for Witkoff, their business associates, and the government agencies they are trying to run.”
In a new court move in Kaliningrad, revealed by a Moscow newspaper yesterday, Oleg Deripaska, the Russian aluminium oligarch who has been under personal US sanctions since before 2014 – his Rusal companies since 2018 — has begun a retaliatory strike against the Anglo-Australian Rio Tinto Corporation, the world’s second largest metals and mining corporation. Deripaska’s method is to retaliate for the sanctions cutting off the alumina supplies he owns in Australia by cutting off the mining company’s raw materials and railway access at its Oyu Tolgoi mine in Mongolia, one of the largest and most profitable copper deposits in the world.
Kirill Dmitriev (lead image) is the Stanford and Harvard educated official appointed by President Vladimir Putin to persuade American businessmen to invest in the profits to be made from dismantling US economic sanctions against Russia.
Today at the Kremlin (April 11), he tried again in fresh talks with Putin and Stephen Witkoff, President Donald Trump’s negotiator.
Dmitriev was just fourteen years of age when he first arrived for schooling in California where neither he, nor anyone else, had ever heard of Vladimir Lenin’s 1904 booklet on the difference between revolutionaries and opportunists in politics; Lenin’s title had been “One Step Forward, Two Steps Back.” All Russian adults schooled before Dmitriev know that phrase.
But on April 4 in Washington, when Dmitriev invited Russian reporters to ask whether he had made any steps forward in his talks with the Americans, he replied: “Yes, definitely. I would say that today and yesterday we made three steps forward on a large number of issues.” Either Dmitriev was making a mockery of Lenin’s three steps, or he was revealing his total ignorance of them.
At home in Moscow no one has dared to fault Putin’s emissary for transforming the direction of Lenin’s three steps. Nor has anyone asked Dmitriev to say concretely what his three steps are, or in what direction. The closest he came to that in his remarks in a Washington park were that he has been discussing “possible cooperation in the Arctic, in rare earth metals, in various other sectors where we can build constructive and positive relations…[and] active work on restoring air travel.” One of the “other sectors” Dmitriev mentioned is an Elon Musk project to fly to Mars.
That Dmitriev is proposing to open sectors of the Russian economy which are legally closed under national security control – at the same time as the US is escalating its military power projection from Greenland to Alaska – has been noted by the Russian Foreign Ministry, which has been trying to curb Dmitriev’s powers, as well as his tongue. Dmitriev has retreated, ingenuously telling the BBC: “first of all, I am focused on economics and investment, so I don’t comment on political issues.” Then he did just that. “There are already very good results. So the stop of the hitting the energy infrastructure is a major, major result. And frankly that is a good result for Ukraine.. for Russia, for the world.”
Dmitriev was referring to President Putin’s undertaking to President Trump during their telephone call of February 12 to halt Russian strikes on Ukrainian energy targets. This partial ceasefire by the Russian side has been ignored by the Ukrainians and their US and NATO advisors. Although the Kremlin notice warned that “in the event of a violation of the moratorium by either party, the other party has the right to consider itself free from obligations to comply with it”, there has been no Russian retaliation yet.
When Lenin had begun his three steps a century ago, he warned: “When a prolonged, stubborn and heated struggle is in progress, there usually begin to emerge after a time the central and fundamental points at issue, upon the decision of which the ultimate outcome of the campaign depends, and in comparison with which all the minor and petty episodes of the struggle recede more and more into the background.”
In the record which the Russian and American negotiators have been making since the presidents’ telephone call, the outcome to date is nothing but “minor and petty episodes”. Dmitriev is the only Russian official to say otherwise.
According to the official White House schedule, President Donald Trump doesn’t start his day until lunchtime when he sits down with his political heir, Vice President J.D. Vance, at 12:30. He has more lunches with Vance than he receives briefings from his secret services on the threats of his enemies.
Trump knows to keep his friends close, his enemies closer. But the President rarely meets in public with his closest protégés, the Cabinet Secretaries; even more rarely with his political allies, the Republican Party leaders of the Senate and House of Representatives; almost never with his wife, the First Lady of the United States (FLOTUS).
He doesn’t meet with the leaders of foreign states unless Vance is present.
He doesn’t like extended press conferences with these foreigners, preferring instead what the White House calls “press gaggles”. These staged impromptus range from four to twenty minutes in duration in the Oval Office, in the back of Air Force One, or on the run from his Florida mansion to his golf course. In the official record since his inauguration on January 20, the most frequent physical event on Trump’s daily agenda is golf.
The most frequent documentary event is a Trump tweet; these are issued at a rate of one per hour through the 24 hours of each day.
At 1:18 pm on Wednesday, April 9, Trump tweeted his declaration of war against China. “Based on the lack of respect that China has shown to the World’s Markets,” Trump declared, I am hereby raising the Tariff charged to China by the United States of America to 125%, effective immediately. At some point, hopefully in the near future, China will realize that the days of ripping off the U.S.A., and other Countries is no longer sustainable or acceptable.”
At the same time Trump retreated from his tariff strikes against those countries which have signalled they are ready to kow-tow and pay more in tribute. “Based on the fact that more than 75 Countries have called Representatives of the United States, including the Departments of Commerce, Treasury, and the USTR [United States Trade Representative], to negotiate a solution to the subjects being discussed relative to Trade, Trade Barriers, Tariffs, Currency Manipulation, and Non Monetary Tariffs, and that these Countries have not, at my strong suggestion, retaliated in any way, shape, or form against the United States, I have authorized a 90 day PAUSE, and a substantially lowered Reciprocal Tariff during this period, of 10%, also effective immediately.”
This was the most significant retreat by Trump in his term so far. It follows the collapse of stock prices on the US and international exchanges, and the sharp rise in yields (borrowing costs) for the US Treasury’s 10-year and 30-year bonds. “This is Trump’s capitulation to markets,” editorialized the Financial Times. “He has saved face by keeping tariffs on China…The stunning climb down from the US leader came after a week of turmoil in global markets, with trillions of dollars shed in equity prices around the world, a sharp sell-off in US bonds, and a plunge in oil prices to levels last seen during the coronavirus pandemic.”
What has happened, according to the Japanese-owned financial paper in London, is a “regime shift whereby US Treasuries are no longer the global fixed-income safe haven.”
Trump filled the rest of his afternoon, first with a photograph session with several motor-racing champions and speedway promoters, and then with signing a fresh set of presidential edicts (aka executive orders).
To reassure himself on who rules, Trump has installed two baroque, gilt-framed mirrors on the Oval Office wall, mounted at head level so that when Trump enters or leaves the office he can see himself alongside the portraits of George Washington (conqueror of the United Kingdom) and James Polk (conqueror of Mexico), and above the bust of Winston Churchill (conqueror of the Germans).
Trump is also backing down on his threat to attack Iran and destroy its air defences, missile batteries, and nuclear enrichment sites. Listen to the podcast discussion of Trump’s vulnerabilities as viewed from Moscow and Teheran, analysed with the method of the historians of the last emperors of Rome when their empire was collapsing, and their military leaders plotted putsches.
Until recently it was impossible to grow bananas in Russia except in the greenhouse of Count Pyotr Sheremetev at Kuskovo. That eighteenth-century establishment was so costly to operate, the fruit was a rarity meant for the tsar’s table, and not too tasty either.
More than two hundred years of Russian banana history have elapsed since then with the revolutionary outcome that bananas have become the most popular fruit among ordinary Russians – and the bananas are now much tastier than the aristos ever knew. The reason is that almost all the bananas eaten in Russia are grown in Ecuador.
That was until a year ago, when an American plan to recruit the Ecuadorian government to the Ukrainian side in the war against Russia intervened at the same time as the Ecuadorian humpback fly threatened to leap out of shipments of bananas as they landed in St Petersburg and Vladivostok ports. In February 2024, a partial ban was imposed by Rosselkhoznadzor, the federal sanitary inspection agency, on the importation of Ecuadorian bananas.
This has cut the total tonnage of banana imports to Russia by 21% in 2024 compared to the average annual tonnage of the period, 2018-22. For Russian consumers this has meant a banana crisis — fewer fruit in the market to buy, and at a rising price. Over the two years 2023 and 2024, the average price for a kilogram of bananas as measured by Rosstat grew from 80 roubles to 146 roubles – a jump of 83%.
While banana growers in India, Turkey and Indonesia then offered their own bananas to fill the supply gap, government officials announced in Moscow they were considering domestic production. In November 2024 Oksana Luth of the federal Agriculture Ministry announced she was studying a national greenhouse plan for commercial banana production. Andrei Platonov, head of a grower organization called the Association for Development of Subtropical Agriculture, told the press that the growers in his group would soon launch a homegrown banana crop for the first time. “If everything goes well, by the end of this year we will show you bananas grown in Russia,” Platonov told Tass.
On this prospect, President Vladimir Putin has reversed himself.
Putin is the only official in Russian history to have inaugurated a line of banana boats carrying the fruit to St. Petersburg – except that when he did so one Monday in March 2010, the banana boat line had already been operating with specialized refrigerated containers for several months, and with other transport technology for several years before that. The real reasons for the president’s banana interest were, firstly, a move by a St. Petersburg importer named Vladimir Kekhman to establish a commercial monopoly of the imports, driving his competitors into bankruptcy; and secondly, Gazprom’s campaign to lobby the Danish government to drop its opposition to the laying of the first Nord Stream gas pipeline on the Baltic seabed.
That story was first told here. The banana skin proved to be a slippery one. Kekhman’s business collapsed in the British and Russian courts, and his Joint Fruit Company (JFC) went broke. Much later, in September 2022, the Danish government secretly assisted in the destruction of the second Nord Stream pipeline off Denmark’s Baltic Sea island of Bornholm.
Putin then revealed that he is the first Russian leader since Sheremetyev to be growing bananas himself in a greenhouse at his Moscow region dacha at Novo-Ogarevo — and to have invited the press to film the fruit ripening on the tree. That was nine months ago in July 2024.
On bananas Putin has not so much slipped as reversed direction. In 2014 the President was sure, he told a meeting with agriculturalists, that “we are not going to grow bananas here, but we have many crops that can certainly be very competitive.” Eight years later, in June 2022, Putin acknowledged: “No matter how hard we try, we will be unable to substitute bananas, despite our achievements in plant selection, of which our colleagues have reported today. We can, of course, produce them by using LNG to maintain greenhouses in the required condition. But it cannot be produced commercially, can it?”
Putin answered that question seven weeks ago. “Mr Manturov [Deputy Prime Minister, former minister of trade and industry], who is present here, is nodding his head. We discussed this matter with him. I have already spoken about this: just as in agriculture, when agricultural producers begged us: ‘Just don’t let anyone else into our market, we will do everything ourselves.’ Except for bananas, of course. But they started growing bananas, too. It’s a bit expensive, though, and it’s not necessary.”
At the Kremlin, necessity is measured in response to public discontent and then to lobbying by interest groups, or vice versa.
Accordingly, it has been announced that bananas may soon be officially designated for state support for the growers. Sergei Izmalkov, the agriculture minister in the southwestern region of Stavropol has declared that “in order to qualify for certain measures of state support, it is necessary to give bananas the opportunity to be an agricultural crop in the Russian Federation. The Ministry of Agriculture of Russia is working in this direction, and I think there will be results in the near future.” Izmalkov’s plan calls for federal funding of fifteen hectares of greenhouses to be built at the regional town of Nevinnomyssk at a cost of Rb1.4 billion.
Mikhail Minenkov, administrative head of Nevinnomyssk, has confirmed that the banana- growing complex is being built, with the expectation that the first crop will be harvested and distributed commercially in a year’s time. According to Minenkov, passion fruit, mango, avocado, almonds, and pistachios will also be grown at the Nevinnomyssk plantation. “The project is new and interesting for the country and for the region,” Minenkov has told the press. “We have experience in projects in the field of agriculture. Once it sounded strange for Nevinnomyssk that we would grow apples and cherries, but today these projects have been implemented.”
Telephoned last week for a progress report on how his bananas are growing, what the harvest volume will be, and what price for consumers, Minnenkov asked for an email, but then refused to answer the questions.
In fact, there is the general policy that in conditions of wartime mobilization and the hostility of both Ecuador and Denmark, Russia ought to be producing bananas, and so the budget money ought to be going out to growers in the southwest. In practice, however, they have no bananas.
