Verschatse Didier

[Verschatse Didier @DidierGMM]

A pragmatic approach would include a reality check of the actual deliverables against the sensationalism, and the short-term market and electoral gains it serves, which you’re also contributing to.

The EU still imports Russian gas, but Russian crude and refined petroleum products are a very different story. More importantly, the Iran conflict and the disruption of oil flows through the Strait of Hormuz have been a much larger shock to global oil markets than Ukrainian strikes on Russian refineries alone.

And the Trump administration’s own narrative is telling. Trump initially claimed that the disruption of Hormuz barely affected the US because it produces enough oil of its own. Now, with American fuel prices soaring, he is highlighting the importance of oil flowing through the strait again, while shifting the blame for high prices towards Ukrainian strikes on Russian refineries.

The reality is that global oil markets don’t work according to political talking points. Even if the US is less directly dependent on Gulf imports, it is not insulated from global price shocks. And while Ukrainian strikes can tighten refined-product supplies, that doesn’t make them the primary explanation for the wider energy shock.

If we’re talking pragmatism, let’s look at the actual data and distinguish the relative impact of each factor, rather than selectively invoking whichever explanation happens to serve the political narrative of the day.

[Verschatse Didier @DidierGMM]

@d_foubert Apparently … the flags

[Verschatse Didier @DidierGMM]

@lunadreaamy @kalanoros 5=5 🤷‍♂️

[Verschatse Didier @DidierGMM]

@DogGoneSilly @theliamnissan No fear the U.S. Postal Service will make sure the check arrives after the election date, invalidating it? Never mind inflation. 😉

[Verschatse Didier @DidierGMM]

@StevenErtelt @3rdDownDraws Qualitative academic research by Daniel Dennett and Linda LaScola indicates that advanced seminary education, particularly the historical-critical method of studying scripture, often causes clergy to reevaluate and lose their belief in the supernatural.

[Verschatse Didier @DidierGMM]

@anaboYaynsuR @xcor057 @IAPonomarenko 🤣

[Verschatse Didier @DidierGMM]

@Sir_Cuit @lindholm_jimmy 😜🤣

[Verschatse Didier @DidierGMM]

Point is that - even an LLM can confirm - you undermined your own claim. A non-sentient LLM would probably have spotted the fallacy immediately, sparing you the attempt at a rebuttal and the loss of patience. 😉

Your original claim was: “By cutting spending as much as Bolojan has, he intentionally put Romania into recession.”

That's the point you still haven't established.

Romania was already in a very weak economic position when Bolojan came in, with a huge fiscal deficit, extremely high inflation and essentially stagnant growth. The current measures are certainly contractionary to some degree, and I'm perfectly willing to concede that rapid fiscal tightening can itself weigh on demand and growth. The European Commission actually expects ongoing fiscal consolidation and high inflation to significantly depress domestic consumption in 2026, with GDP growth of only 0.1%. But that's a very different proposition from saying that Bolojan intentionally put Romania into recession.

And whether we call the measures austerity, fiscal consolidation or fiscal adjustment is largely beside the point. I used “fiscal adjustment” in the technical sense: reducing the fiscal deficit through some combination of higher revenues and lower expenditure. That's also how the IMF and European Commission describe what is happening. In fact, the IMF estimates that more than two-thirds of the 2025-26 adjustment comes from revenue-enhancing measures rather than expenditure cuts.

Even MMT's functional-finance approach doesn't amount to “spend whatever you want”. Its argument is essentially that government fiscal policy should be judged by its economic consequences rather than by an arbitrary requirement to balance the books, with real resource constraints and inflation still mattering. So yes, there is a legitimate argument about whether government should cut spending during weak economic conditions, and what it should spend money on. I'd certainly distinguish productive investment in infrastructure with demonstrable economic returns from politically motivated or economically dubious projects - whether stadiums, megachurches or anything else. Some such projects may even be commercially viable; the point is that the economic case needs to be made for the particular project, rather than assuming that either spending or cutting is inherently good.

You then gave medical-leave arrears as evidence. But that doesn't establish your original claim either. Even accepting your point that companies are waiting years for reimbursement, that is a pre-existing problem, not evidence that Bolojan deliberately created a recession.

And the same applies to your broader argument that austerity can cause or deepen a recession. I already conceded that to some degree. But “this policy may have contractionary effects” does not logically become “he intentionally put the country into recession.”

So by all means argue that the pace, composition or timing of the fiscal consolidation is economically damaging. That's a legitimate argument. But that's not the claim you originally made.

And it certainly doesn't absolve the previous administrations from scrutiny either. That's why I brought up the wasteful practices of the preceding years, including the extensive use of reserve-fund allocations for local projects. The Fiscal Council recorded 159 central-government reserve-fund allocation decisions in 2024, with the Development Ministry alone receiving 18.2 billion lei, including funding for local-development programmes. The repeated use of such discretionary mechanisms raises very legitimate questions about patronage and electoral incentives. You can't simply ignore that history and then attribute the entire economic problem, and the resulting recessionary pressure, to the government that is now trying to deal with the accumulated fiscal imbalance.

You claimed intentionality and causation: that Bolojan deliberately put Romania into recession. The evidence you've provided doesn't demonstrate either.

[Verschatse Didier @DidierGMM]

@NeluJr @AdrianP_doc Got it, so it’s not Bolojan 🤷‍♂️ Which makes the rest of the point about austerity rather moot, even if I’d agree with it to some degree. Or are you saying the wasteful spending of the last decades was actually a good thing?

[Verschatse Didier @DidierGMM]

@AugustKrontcnr @HavryshkoMarta Yes, those two passages are a dead giveaway of a Kremlin narrative, which, contrary to her claim, would actually go down rather well at a Moscow cocktail party.

[Verschatse Didier @DidierGMM]

As if there wasn’t already a recessionary economy and EU-highest inflation before Bolojan, not to mention years of spending outside the original budgets through “reserve funds”, effectively using them as discretionary pots for local projects and, conveniently, electoral gain. A traditional practice in Romanian politics to keep mayors in line.

The fiscal adjustment is painful, obviously, but how long are we supposed to keep PSD and its various populist spin-offs, like AUR, in the saddle, even as a shadow majority from the “opposition”, by pretending that the fiscal hole appeared with Bolojan?

And on the medical-leave example: is there actually any evidence that the state has simply postponed paying an existing obligation? The first unpaid day isn’t a postponement of payment. It’s a change in the law that removes that day from the entitlement. Inconvenient if you’re on medical leave, certainly, but that’s quite different from the state postponing payment of something it is legally obliged to pay.

[Verschatse Didier @DidierGMM]

@rouleur66 @jk_rowling Jesus surely is

[Verschatse Didier @DidierGMM]

If you don’t care about arguments, why did you make any yourself, albeit fallacious and rather weak ones?

Anyway, thanks for the demonstration. Your response nicely illustrates exactly what I was talking about: dismiss the Ukrainian agency argument, dismiss the European alternative as having “no future”, when the contrary has been empirically demonstrated for the many, and specifically for my own Russian-speaking, among others, adult offspring, provide no substantive counterargument, dismiss the human(ity) factor, and then threaten that Ukraine, and those willing to support its self-determination, will have to “pay” for choosing a different path from perpetual Kremlin dependency.

So much for the thinly veiled “neutrality” argument, with aggression barely concealed underneath. At this point, your position looks considerably closer to the Kremlin’s framing than to any genuine concern for Ukrainian neutrality, agency, or living standards for the many versus the few.

Go live in your autocratic, kleptocratic economic paradise, and GFY while you’re at it.

[Verschatse Didier @DidierGMM]

Of course you would have your own anecdotal BS, wrapped in a “no true Scotsman” argument, which is easily countered but ultimately irrelevant. I too have extensively travelled, lived and worked in Eastern Europe since 1980, including in UA and RU. I have supported refugees as well, and know many Ukrainians who voluntarily returned to UA to join the defence of Ukraine.

So all you have is that the east is supposedly “closer” to Russia than to Kyiv economically, which I already addressed by explicitly talking about maintaining good relations with Russia(ns). Note that I did not say Moscow or the Kremlin. It’s a human trait to choose what is more beneficial to you and your family at any given moment. It’s basic survival.

But by reducing your argument to (national) economic strength, you’ve effectively undermined your own initial argument and reinforced mine. The whole point of Ukraine’s European rapprochement was precisely that it offered more than economic growth: empirically, closer integration with Europe has meant stronger language protection, anti-corruption mechanisms, transparent and established procedures for public procurement, greater institutional protections, social safety nets and higher living standards, while those circumstantial ties with Russia could still be maintained.

That was the agency being exercised across Ukraine: choosing a European future while still being perfectly capable of maintaining cultural, linguistic and personal ties with Russia and Russians.

So once again, are you really that gullible? Because at this point it sounds rather like you’re the one stuck in the Kremlin fairy tale.

[Verschatse Didier @DidierGMM]

Of course he knows. GDP per capita tells you nothing about the current or historical distribution of income or wealth within a population. He’s been pushing this kind of framing for the benefit of the tech oligarchy - and its growing political influence through populism - for years now.

[Verschatse Didier @DidierGMM]

The “neutrality” ship sailed a long time ago. The Kremlin has been escalating at every turn over the last 2-3 decades as the Ukrainian population exercised its own agency and chose, through several election cycles, increasing rapprochement with the EU while still maintaining relations with their Russian brothers and sisters. Only hardcore denialists, the gullible, and the Kremlin-complicit can seriously deny the existence of that Ukrainian agency.

That would have been neutrality: a sovereign Ukraine choosing its own relationships while maintaining good relations with Russia. It was simply never convenient for the Kremlin, which had every reason to fear that its own population might eventually discover that it too had agency, after decades of social engineering and global gaslighting.

And the language argument is another red herring. Ukraine’s Russian-speaking population was not some newly discovered minority whose rights suddenly needed Moscow’s protection. The dominance of Russian in much of Ukraine was itself partly the product of centuries of imperial and Soviet Russification, including periods when Ukrainian-language publishing, education and cultural activity were explicitly restricted or suppressed.

Canada, Switzerland, Belgium etc. didn’t need an external great power threatening their sovereignty in order to accommodate linguistic minorities. They developed their own arrangements as sovereign states. And closer integration with Europe would hardly have meant abandoning minority languages either. Quite the opposite: linguistic diversity and minority-language protection are well-established European principles.

So the argument that Ukraine somehow needed to remain in Moscow’s sphere of influence to protect Russian speakers is simply another false justification for keeping the whole of Ukraine subordinate to the Kremlin’s sphere of influence. A sovereign Ukraine was perfectly capable of protecting Russian speakers and other linguistic minorities while simultaneously developing its Ukrainian national language and integrating with Europe.

Instead, the Kremlin increasingly equated EU/Europe/Western integration with NATO, and the rest is irreversible history: escalation, corruption, murder and invasion.

And then there is this supposedly “Russian-speaking” Ukrainian friend from the east of UA who is allegedly hiding in Ukraine to avoid forced mobilisation. Ask yourself why this supposed “friend” didn’t simply stay on, or travel to, the Russian side of the frontlines to welcome the Russian army or militias? On the occupied side, Ukrainian men have themselves been subjected to Russian forced mobilisation and sent to fight against Ukraine. They weren’t exactly treated as some privileged class of “Russian brothers” either. Quite the contrary, they were treated as an expendable pool of manpower for the frontlines.

But I suspect you know all that, and you don’t sound gullible… so what is it? Complicit?

[Verschatse Didier @DidierGMM]

Because he routinely struggled to maintain attention during his intelligence briefings, he didn’t necessarily absorb what he was being told. There’s testimony from multiple briefers to that effect. He could, of course, pay closer attention when speaking with other leaders, and he certainly seemed to pay attention when it came to Putin. That distinction matters: having intelligence available to you isn’t the same as actually absorbing and understanding it, unless, of course, it happens to serve his own interests … and Putin’s.

[Verschatse Didier @DidierGMM]

What’s also questionable is “all of you” making the assumption that this automatically creates some sweeping new “legal precedent”. It doesn’t. And it isn’t simply a matter of “Ukraine vs. Russia” either. The relevant context is Russia’s internationally wrongful war of aggression, the resulting obligation to make reparations, and the extraordinary measures already taken in response to that aggression.

As a historian, BDW should know that the principle itself is hardly unprecedented. After Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, the UN Security Council established a compensation mechanism that held Iraq liable for the damage caused by its invasion, with compensation ultimately funded from Iraqi oil revenues. The UN Compensation Commission eventually awarded $52.4 billion and, after more than three decades, confirmed that Iraq had fulfilled its international compensation obligations.

Likewise, after WWII, German reparations were explicitly to be met in part from German external assets, while post-war Italy was required to make reparations to countries including Greece and Yugoslavia, with Italian foreign assets among the sources identified for those payments.

None of that means the legal questions surrounding Russian sovereign assets are trivial. They aren’t, particularly where sovereign immunity, Belgium’s exposure to liability and the specific legal mechanism for using the assets are concerned. But those are questions about how this particular reparations mechanism can lawfully be implemented, not evidence that using Russian assets somehow creates a general precedent allowing states to confiscate one another’s property at will.

And that is where the “this could happen to you tomorrow” analogy falls apart. This isn’t about inventing a general rule that allows Belgium, the EU or anyone else to confiscate foreign sovereign property whenever they dislike another government. It is about the legal consequences of a specific act of aggression, and how responsibility for the resulting damage can ultimately be enforced.

The precedent isn’t “we can take anyone’s assets”. The historical precedent is that aggression can create an obligation to pay reparations, and that the international community has previously devised mechanisms to make an aggressor pay for the damage it caused.

[Verschatse Didier @DidierGMM]

But the point is moot and already covered by the “recycling” point I made. By calling it “MSM”, you’re already implying the very interconnectedness you’re now presenting as your point. I’ve already conceded that news gets recycled across interconnected media outlets.

What you haven’t addressed, however, is my actual point: the term “MSM” itself has been weaponised as a propaganda label by media platforms of at least equal size, not least on X, and all very accessible and widespread in Europe, and your susceptibility to it is demonstrated by your recycling the term yourself.

So I’ll take note of your failure to address that point.
😉

[Verschatse Didier @DidierGMM]

If you still have to use the term “MSM” to make the point that a lot of news is being recycled, you’ve missed the fact that the term itself has been weaponised as a propaganda label by media platforms of at least equal size, not least on X.

But I suppose you missed the more recent propaganda memo too: call it “legacy media” whenever you need to distinguish your own echo chamber from media that doesn’t conform to your bias.