THE REAL REASONS FOR THE RUSSIAN-UKRAINIAN WAR: THE RETURN OF GEOPOLITICS IN THE ERA OF "DEFICIT OF EVERYTHING".

Deficit #1.

• According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), more than 80% of additional oil demand by 2040 will come from developing countries, but access to cost-effective sources is declining.
• The EROEI (Energy Spent for Energy Production: Cost Is Not Money, but the Amount of Energy) for shale oil in the US has fallen to ~5:1, while traditional oil in Saudi Arabia has >30:1.
• Rystad Energy estimates that by 2030, about 60% of the world's oil fields will exhaust commercially viable potential.
• According to the World Bank (2020), the production of graphite, lithium and cobalt must increase by 500% by 2050 to meet the climate goals of the Paris Agreement.
• BloombergNEF (2022): Demand for lithium in 2040 will be 40 times greater than in 2020.

There is a decrease in the availability of (physical and financial) energy: a linear decrease in the specific energy received by the oil industry. The production of crude oil is globally declining (possible only with the exception of Saudi Arabia). In the United States, only 70%! (Art Berman) with 100% in government statistics under "Oil Production" is actually crude oil. All other 30+% of "unconventional oil" are products with a lower energy value: other liquid gaseous liquids, biofuels, useful residues from oil refining, etc. The peak of acceptably affordable oil is hidden under cover gradual, but inevitable, decrease in the margin of old explored large reserves.

After the crisis of the 1970s, the world also changed significantly in terms of diversification of sources: there were many offers of carbohydrate alternatives such as LNG. However, globally, the world in the old hydrocarbon economy loses the conditional Joule/dollar of investment every year. Economically feasible energy intensity cannot be compensated by old energy industries - green energy and electrical technologies come to the forefront of this specific compensator.

Numerous countries that have invested in renewable energy and rushed to proclaim the "cheapest energy alternative" on many charts are coming to the realization that a second round of even larger investments is needed to keep this green energy on its feet. We need huge storage systems for non-permanent RES and the inclusion of their cost and mandatory construction in the investment plans of already built and future projects (which, by the way, DTEK is actively engaged in in Ukraine). These steps will turn the cost structure of "cheap green energy" upside down and further complicate the problem of energy affordability in the global economy.

The spring "Spanish blackout - 2025" was the first bell that reminded politicians of the long-standing remarks of experts: they forgot to add a battery to the conditional electric car of the national energy and double the cost of the entire system. And this is the problem of all economies that jumped headlong into the energy transition. However, modernizing the systemic approach to balancing the operation of RES will require mainly not money (this is the last task) - but a huge amount of "green" minerals and materials for batteries and related infrastructure.

According to the "Critical Materials Strategy" (US Department of Energy, 2022), shortages of lithium, nickel, rare earths and graphite threaten the transition to RES. The European Commission in the "Critical Raw Materials Act" (2023) states: "90% of the supply of rare earths to the EU depends on third countries — mainly China."

The perfection of RES technologies, the industry's commitment to electric transport, have made a certain set of so-called "green minerals" (metals) an integral part of energy power, the insufficiency of purely market mechanisms for obtaining it, made it not so much a part of corporate energy power, but a state-corporate (Keynesian-Fordist) affair.

"Trump understands what many still ignore: energy is power. Unlike its predecessors, it sees energy dominance as the basis of economic power and global influence. His vision applies not only to oil, but also to ensuring the security of all US energy resources: oil, gas, coal, nuclear power, pipelines, oil refineries, artificial intelligence, critical minerals (my note). His aspirations for Greenland, Panama, Canada, and Gaza are no coincidence; It refers to territory as an energy lever, a strategic game for control in a world where power will be dictated by access to resources, which are becoming scarcer and extraction is becoming more expensive."

The unevenness (in contrast to oil-gas and coal) distribution of mineral energy made the territories of "green wealth" zones of classical geopolitical confrontation. Because there is no more old-fashioned cheap energy left in an unpacked third country. For these reasons, the struggle for leading technological roles and monopolies of brokerage supply of the necessary components of the new technological order and green energy as its component (in combined or separate roles) began.


Deficit #2

• 2/3 of the territory of the Russian Federation is permafrost. According to NASA and IPCC forecasts, temperatures in the Arctic regions are rising 3 times faster than the global average. By 2050, more than 50% of the permafrost may melt, which will make the construction and operation of infrastructure for the exploitation of the mineral base in these territories too expensive or simply useless. "In the face of climate change, infrastructure and mining in the permafrost zone will be exposed to increased risks of destruction, requiring a redistribution of economic activity to the south." According to the Arctic Council (2021), by 2050, 70% of infrastructure facilities in the permafrost zone of the Russian Federation will be "partially or completely destabilized." In 2019, Roshydromet admitted that "the projected destabilization of permafrost calls into question the implementation of long-term projects in the North."

• According to a study by the World Resources Institute (WRI), by 2040, more than 50% of the world's population will live under water stress.

There is a projected active reduction of geoclymatically stable areas. How to understand it in practice? 2/3 of the territory of the Russian Federation is an eternal permafrost that has come into motion. In a couple of decades, only the coastline in the north and the European part of the country will remain industrially stable (the map is large, but the territory has begun to shrink sharply); it will also begin to fall out of the list of economically viable territories: the Mediterranean; parts of the state of California and the coast of the South-East of the United States; southern India and Bangladesh; agricultural plains of northern China and its large cities of the tropical part, etc. Climate change systematically hits food growing areas: from grain zones to areas for growing bananas, coffee and olives for globe markets.Just like with energy, but in greater dynamics, we are losing territories of stable food reproduction for a globalized market. Therefore, with the growth of supply crises, food and the territories behind its production become the next resources of power after energy and cause a corresponding predatory craving.

Paradoxically, territories rich in food capacity also systematically have the best nature-economic resources for life and industrial development - they have the best climate and water (in one configuration or another).

Climate change will actively take away nature-economic resources from nations. Therefore, control over it (control of territories) for some is an additional rent power, for others - preservation of the potential for the reproduction of the industrial base, and the socio-economic stability of modernity. Conflicts for such a resource are already in full swing: 1) Russia's war against Ukraine; 2) India VS Pakistan; 3) the unfolding of the confrontation between Egypt and Ethiopia; 4) the Central Asian struggle for the resource of rivers, etc.

Such a new struggle for territories is for the first time associated with the inevitable loss of existing resources of native territories, the loss of physical viability of its individual parts (and not the loss of colonies or influence), which is existential for nation states (and their corporate capitals).

The wars unfolding between the centers of technological imperialism (the United States, the EU, China) will be fought not for the accumulation of new capital, but for the minimal reproduction of the existing one. In this competition for the future, the Russian Federation has chosen the struggle for the European territories of the imperial past, which in the medium term should leave it with the status of a resource broker of the world and ensure the reproduction of the current architecture of the Russian government with its rent-based nature of accumulation. By the way, part of the reproduction of this global role are the African adventures of the russian "Wagner" paramilitaries near the mineral zones. According to S&P Global, russian PMCs are present in 23 African countries, primarily in regions with rare earth metals.

With the need for natural resources such as fossil fuels and metal ores, paleomodernity (a kind of "modernity without modernization": a combination of external infrastructural or technological modernity with the deep inertia of feudal, imperial or ^tribal.) is based on resource colonization, settler imperialism and war capitalism. New lands need to be occupied, annexed and colonized. The population already living on them is relocated or killed, and new "productive" - or rather, extractive - populations are settled in their place. Striving for raw materials as the basis of its economy and society, paleomodernity had two historical forms — external and internal. In the face of the Metacrisis (borrowed from Daniel Schmachtenberger), the Kremlin leadership chose a survival strategy that turned to old and understandable archaic tools, rejecting modernist perestroika. During the presidency of dmitry medvedev (2008–2012), there was indeed a certain rhetorical and institutional return to modernist ideas in Russia, at least on the surface. Although most of them remained unfinished or decorative, this period is considered a "soft" moment in the history of Putinism — a time when the Kremlin temporarily played the game of modernization: from Skolkovo to "e-government." However, further liberalizations in the economy required a transformation of the regime, and the elites did not muster up the courage to do so, returning to the old methods of "maps and territories".

Internal problems and "Ukrainian" interests of the Russian Federation:

1)the melting of permafrost will "seal" for a long time any market use of the mineral base (not oil);

2) the old reserve base of the oil sector is linearly losing reserves with low cost, and this can only be compensated by new drilling with much lower ROE and revenue (in order to prevent the appearance of Arctic Russian oil, Saudi Arabia still has a lot of competitive cheap oil to replace); As the energy transition takes hold around the world, Russia's revenues from oil, gas and coal exports are steadily declining (2024-25 is a turning point), which will put corresponding pressure on the economy, society and the state. This will mark a major turning point for Russia. The onset of climate change comes at a time when the Russian oil industry is facing the end of the long West Siberian era. But no new major provinces were discovered to take its place on the same scale, and there were no fundamental technological breakthroughs, such as unconventional oil for dense rocks, that would change the picture.

3) The infrastructurally accessible and convenient mineral base of Ukraine is strategically important for two techno-imperial centers at once: the EU and the USA. The interception of Ukrainian resources from them was and is in the interests of a competitor - China. Executor - Russia;

4) The catastrophic collapse of fertility and stability of food regions of the world makes the Ukrainian sector of the world bread basket especially attractive for control (power over world food supplies, especially to hungry countries, rich in "green minerals" for exchange). And adding the Ukrainian agricultural sector to their own would create a food export giant from Russia.


Russia's interest in Donbass, which took shape in the form of post-Soviet nostalgia for the locals, the revival of old imperial images for its own citizens, is nothing more than a bright ideological wrapper, the purpose of which is to divert attention from the true motive. "Special identity", "language of communication", "the angle of the cross on the dome of the temple", "the socialist liberation of industry from the tight clutches of the old Ukrainian oligarchy" - all these are ideological "fairy tales for the poor" and a red rag for intellectuals-interpreters (who have a weakness of anti-cynicism for the clichéd texts in which these ideological wrappers are framed). The Kremlin elite successfully uses this technique of "software" justification for mobilization for war. The primitiveness and prosaic nature of the lust for power, which requires constant maintenance of the stability of the receipt of rent from resources (as the backbone of the regime) and seizure for this purpose through the blood of neighboring countries, requires a preliminary explanation to the people of the climatic, geographical, geological, political, economic and demographic reasons for the "fall" of their own system. A qualitative solution to these negative factors is a problem and cannot be solved without political transformations, so "do not change" and "grow with new lands and their resources" has become a formula for reproducing what is now called the Russian Federation.

A number of official documents of the Russian Federation recognize the catastrophic consequences of climate change for the territory of Russia:

The documents  "Fundamentals of State Policy in the Field of Climate ^Development" (2020) are about:

• the threat of desertification of the south of the Russian Federation (Rostov, Astrakhan regions, Stavropol Kraj)
• freshwater scarcity of 25–40% in strategic regions by the 2040s
• loss of up to 10% of productive soil cover in the southern part of the Russian Federation

At the same time, analytical notes of the Russian Academy of Sciences from 2015–2020 recorded:

"Climate change poses a threat to technological sovereignty and logistical sustainability in Southern and Eastern Russia. It is necessary to search for new resource zones."

The Russian Federation recognizes that its own territories are losing their resource capacity and there is a strategic need to seize new, more stable resource regions — directly indicated in political and scientific documents.

The war started in 2014 is a real attempt by the Russian Federation to preserve access to resources of strategic value in the XXI century. Russia's occupation of Donbas is a deep geo-economic calculation. The focus of interests is on resources that have long-term strategic value (coking coal, graphite, manganese, copper, nickel, lithium, cracking gas, potential rare earth elements. Putin's flirtations with Trump in the post-election 2025 telephone ^{conversations} only betrayed his original plan, albeit greatly modified by the war "not in three days": we are talking about a proposal to extract rare minerals together with the United States both on the territory of the Russian Federation and on the occupied! lands of Ukraine.

The continuation of the policy of seizing "reserve lands" by a large-scale war in 2022 is a hysterical and reactive response to Kyiv's slipping out of sight (fear of forever losing control and access to Ukraine's resources and tools to restore the viability of the already captured territories of the East). Russia is not growing lands in the war with Ukraine, but is trying to compensate for the loss of its own resources.

Without control over the waterways, the "resources" of Donbas for the Russian Federation turn into ballast and do not pass into the status of available economic "reserves". "Up to 85% of the needs of the Donbas industry were provided by the Siverskyi Donets-Donbas channel, the source of which depends on the recharge of the Dnieper basin."; Any separation of this system from the rest of the hydroelectric network of Ukraine creates risks of man-made degradation and collapse of water supply." (from the statements of the State Water Agency of Ukraine)

Donbas is a geoeconomically inferior enclave, and the Russian Federation must either go further to the Dnipro (Izyum Junction /Kharkiv Region/; Middle Dnipro /Dnipropetrovsk Region/; Dnipro-Donbas Channel), or will be left with unnecessary territory and an increasingly toxic problem. After the destruction of part of the infrastructure and the loss of control over the sources, the shortage of water for the industrial restart of Donbas is critical. Therefore, Russia's refusal from the so-called. "goals of the SMO" is the rejection of Ukraine's natural economic resources in full. Otherwise, the Kremlin's ulterior motive requires control over territories that go beyond the regions of Ukraine that are already brazenly inscribed in the Russian constitution.

There is no "security problem of the Russian Federation", which would be solved by Ukraine leaving its own regions and creating "buffer zones", but this is a partial solution! for the Russian Federation to the problem of access to the borders that will solve the problem of water supply for the resource exploitation of Donbas and the South (+ Crimea). For Ukrainians, cutting this scenario will mean strategically undermining plans for a comfortable reproduction of the regime in the next cycle of the arrival of the sons and daughters of the Kremlin towers. For whom Ukraine "in three days" should have been given as compensation.

A halt in any form of protracted Russian-Ukrainian war immediately raises a set of questions: how will we use the resources for which such a fierce struggle was/is taking place, and which we manage to defend?; how can we build the right national wealth from this, without losing democracy and building its main core - the middle class?

The continuation of the rentier Russian model (their intentions regarding Ukraine) constitutes a fundamental problem of the resource curse and requires the second and subsequent stages of their modern "over-industrialization": a step-by-step increase in the degree of processing and complexity of the initial products and services of our economy ("mineral deals" should conditionally turn into "battery deals", etc.). Models of experiencing the so-called resource curse can be different: the Norwegian way: through the Sovereign Oil Fund invests profits from production in technology and the social sphere; Chilean: creation of a state lithium company to control export rents and domestic processing, etc.

We must determine our own path and instruments of state policy, which must avoid all sharp corners. The problem is that in a net extractive economy, the state turns into a primitive trader of raw materials. The bureaucracy redistributes the wealth extracted from the earth, leaving behind generous assistance. Competence ceases to matter, the bureaucracy turns into an “elite” - a tight circle of people characterized by mutual enrichment, ingrained loyalty and hostility to outsiders. A vicious circle: the more the state relies on natural resources, the less it invests in human capital. The lower the human capital, the more parasitic the state is and the higher its dependence on resource extraction. In extractive countries: the higher their incomes, the less democratic their political regime was.

"Eco-realism as an initial national political approach and ideology to post-war capital accumulation: the first stages and relevant systemic projects." - From today we must start talking about this and unite for the sake of project thinking and the development of an adequate systemic state policy.

And these questions should already be answered:

• If we win, how to use the picked territories and their potential with dignity and adequately?
• Should the rent model be avoided through "green industrialization" and what industrial clusters do we need for this and where will they be located? Sources of new national wealth?
• Transition to eco-realism as a new ideology of state development or "IMF recommendations"?


P.P.S. A big unfinished republican course awaits us.