Executive Summary

• The West is extremely vulnerable to financial and currency de-stabilisation through precious metals
• Access to energy supplies will be the real weapon used in the battle over Ukraine (and future geo-political wars)
• Why sanctions against Russia will not succeed
• The East is mobilizing to become less dependent on the West

If you have not yet read Is Part 1: Ukraine: A Perspective from Europe available free to all readers, please click here to read it first.

Russia’s strategy towards Ukraine appears to be to ensure NATO is excluded from Ukrainian territory, the irony being that if NATO members hadn’t interfered with Ukrainian politics in the first place the current crisis would not have occurred. As it is, at a minimum she will seek to secure Donetsk and Luhansk and force the Kiev government to drop any ambitions to join the EU economic bloc.

The fact that NATO is divided between on the one side the US and UK plus all its ex-communist members and on the other the great European welfare states, requires there to be two distinct levels of Russian strategy. They must not be confused with each other, one macro and the other micro.

Macro-Geopolitics Linked To Gold

At the higher level there is the geopolitical clash with the US. This is not just a matter of Ukraine, but it is rapidly becoming the Shanghai Cooperation Council versus America. The US is also embroiled in territorial disputes between its allies and China over mineral rights in the South China Sea. The Middle-East now sells more oil to China than the US, and by leaving the US sphere of influence will fall increasingly under the SCO’s spell. Presumably, America has woken up to the threat to its hegemony from the powerful alliance that is the SCO, together with the loss of Pakistan and India into that sphere of influence. It goes further: even Turkey, a long-standing NATO member, plans to defect to the SCO, apparently a personal project of Recep Erdoğan, the recently re-elected Prime Minister.