Month: January 2024

Authored by Mike Shedlock via MishTalk.com,

A close friend told me that my articles are generally too gloomy. He asked me to put together a list of ten good things that could happen in 2024.

Ten Positive Things That Could Happen

1. The war in Ukraine ends

2. The war in Gaza ends

3. AI leads to to amazing medical advances

4. Battery advances reduce the cost of producing batteries by 50 percent and increase the milage per charge by 50 percent.

5. Huge rare earth deposits discovered in the US and Canada with mine permits quickly granted.

6. Mexico agrees to refine the rare earths avoiding NIMBYism and environmental concerns in the US and Canada, which reduces global dependence on China.

7. Republicans and Democrats come up with a compromise solution to the border crisis that works, is quickly adopted, and pleases nearly everyone.

8. Huge advance in desalination techniques provides cheaper ways of converting salt water to fresh water.

9. New cures discovered for several types of cancer reducing or ending the need for chemotherapy.

10. President Javier Milei’s Libertarian economic plan and government worker reduction in Argentina is a huge success.

Points #1, #2, and #10 have some controversial elements.

Eventually, the war in Ukraine will end, but the most likely way is a settlement that causes some loss of territory to Ukraine. A similar setup applies to Gaza.

Regarding point #10, socialists are probably not rooting for Milei. I believe the other 7 things would be welcome by at least 99 percent of the people.

Things Considered But Discarded

• Neither Trump nor Biden is a presidential nominee. This could be a good thing, but who would the replacements be? Besides, over half the nation might not agree that it’s a good thing.

• China gives up on uniting with Taiwan. That would certainly be a good thing but I find that too outrageous to consider possible.

• Doctors finding many ways of wrapping brains on metal trays to keep us from the heat.

It’s Good News Week

The Lesson of 1975 for Today’s Pessimists

Wall Street Journal writer Andy Kessler writes The Lesson of 1975 for Today’s Pessimists

Intel had invented microprocessors only four years earlier. Memory for computers cost maybe a half penny a bit. Eight kilobytes ran around $300. Your current 256-gigabyte iPhone would have cost more than $10 billion. My high school had just installed a clanky Teletype machine with a paper-tape punch and reader and a 110-baud modem to dial into the district’s computer. In the first of many flips, I showed teachers how to use it.

I remember seeing an ad in 1976 in Byte magazine, the bible for homebrew enthusiasts, for a $666 Apple computer. It was more of a circuit board and looked limited. My friends and I were already on our way to starting our own company, MicroTek, to sell our home computers. We were all in, until our parents said we had to go to college.

But here’s the thing: Peering through the thick smoldering smog of the ’70s, you could barely make out the dawn of this new era of opportunity. Amid fears of Paul Ehrlich’s “population bomb” and global cooling, 50 years of amazing innovation and invention were about to begin.

Back then, multimillion-dollar mainframe computers with punched cards and dot-matrix printouts ran corporations. Minicomputers cost tens of thousands of dollars and sat in scientific labs. My homebrew machine cost me $700, funded by several years of various jobs including slinging Stewart’s Root Beer. That was a lot of money. Minimum wage was $2.10.

AI will usher in knowledgeable and friendly automated customer service any day now. But there is so much else on the innovation horizon: osmotic energy, geothermal, nuclear fusion, autonomous farming, photonic computing, human longevity. Plus all the stuff in research labs we haven’t heard of yet, let alone invented and brought to market. Remember that generative AI spent a long time incubating in labs and has been out only a year. Critics dismissed mRNA until it could provide rapid-response vaccines.

I had not seen that article when I came up with my list. I ruled out fusion. It won’t happen in 2024.

The above link is a free link if you wish to read the whole article.

Happy New Year!

Bitcoin may have made upward of 100,000 U.S. dollar millionaires as it enters its sixteenth year.

As CoinTelegraph’s William Suberg reports, data shows that the number of wallets containing BTC worth at least $1 million is up nearly 300% since the start of 2023.

Bitcoin is now the ninth most valuable asset in the world as it celebrates its fifteenth birthday.

Fifteen years to the day that the genesis block was mined, Bitcoin has a market cap of around $900 billion.

The past year has marked a renaissance for Bitcoin hodlers, with BTC emerging from the pit of its longest-ever bear market to gain 160% in USD terms.

Now, per on-chain analytics firm Glassnode, Bitcoin “millionaires” number more than 91,000.

Measured as unique addresses with a balance of at least $1 million, the tally – while not yet at all-time highs seen in November 2021 – is still nearly four times higher than on Jan. 3, 2023.

“Let us not forget that Bitcoin is the 9th most valuable asset in the world. In less than 15 years, it surpassed 7,963 other assets to accomplish this,” author Oliver Velez commented on Bitcoin’s metamorphosis.

“By the end of 2025, I suspect it to be in the top three. We shall see.”

Meanwhile, “wholecoiners” – those unique addresses containing at least 1 BTC now number more than 1 million for the first time, Glassnode shows.

And interestingly, it has been the largest among these crypto millionaires that have been the biggest buyers of both Ethereum and Bitcoin in December.

As Goldman Sachs Crypto team highlight, value held across cohort group (separated into addresses whose balance included a number of native units within a certain range) for BTC in Dec were mostly flat across the smaller cohorts, but has increased by +3.0% for the largest cohort (BTC addresses with balances above 100K BTC), marking two months of consecutive inflow…

BTC network for Dec continued the previous month’s trend of increased transactional activity, with average daily transaction count and mean transaction fees increasing +3.4% and +124.6% MoM.

But, while the BTC/ETH pair remains significantly depressed…

Demand for Ethereum was even greater than for Bitcoin in December, especially among the very largest whales.

Value held across cohort groups (separated into addresses whose balance included a number of native units within a certain range) for ETH in Dec saw a notable decrease of around ~1% for the smaller cohorts, but an increase of +4.7% for the largest cohort (ETH addresses with balances above 1M ETH)…

Similar to BTC network, ETH network activity continued its previous month uptrend of increased transactional activity, leading to average daily transaction count and mean transaction fees up +4.6% and +26.6% over the month.

Unlike BTC network which showed a slight downturn in address metrics, average daily active addresses and average daily new addresses for ETH is also up +11.4% and +15.1% respectively over the month.

CoinTelegraph’s Marcel Pechman notes that Ether’s price increase has also been boosted by research published by Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin on Dec. 28, which proposes a method to reduce the load on validators, theoretically reducing the number of required signatures by 70% and making the process more quantum-resistant.

The proposal offers three solutions:

1. decentralized staking pools,

2. a “light” staking method and,

3. a rotation between accountable committees.

Finally, Ethereum’s upcoming upgrade, Cancun, is set to undergo testing starting on Jan. 17.

It aims to lower transaction fees and introduces new features for bridges and staking pools.

Notably, it will include Ethereum Improvement Proposal 4844, or “proto-danksharding,” which will enhance rollup networks’ efficiency by temporarily storing transaction data in a new format called “blobs,” significantly reducing layer-2 transaction fees.

Data shows that Ether’s rally has been fueled by increased network and ecosystem use, dominance in terms of DApp deposits, and expectations of further improvements stemming from upgrades. Those changes will likely solidify its leadership in terms of smart contract processing and staking mechanisms.

Authored by James Rickards via DailyReckoning.com,

In 2023, we saw the outbreak of a banking crisis (that isn’t over), a new Middle East war break out in Gaza, two states ban Trump from the ballot in the 2024 elections and the mainstreaming of AI, among other things.

All I can say is strap in, because 2024 is setting up to be even more chaotic than 2023.

That’s right, 2024 will be more tumultuous and shocking than 2023.

Let’s first address the election.

My primary focus is on markets and the economy, but I’m also an attorney. Though I’m not a constitutional scholar, I studied constitutional law under an exceptional professor.

And the decisions by the Supreme Court of Colorado and Maine’s secretary of state to ban Trump from ballots in their respective states are questionable at best.

First off, it’s not even clear that the constitutional provision they cite, Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, even applies to presidents. Here’s what it says:

No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.

As you can see, it doesn’t reference a president, only “electors” of president and vice president. Some legal scholars argue that it does apply to presidents, but the question isn’t settled.

I Say You’re Guilty!

In the second case, it’s evident that Colorado and Maine exceeded their authority by claiming Trump participated in insurrection.

Trump has never been formally charged with insurrection in a court of law. He’s certainly never been convicted of insurrection. That’s a critical legal standard that hasn’t been met.

But the Supreme Court of Colorado and the secretary of state of Maine have taken it upon themselves to decide that Trump actually committed insurrection. They’ve essentially convicted him without due process.

It’s like being suspected of murder in one jurisdiction, but not being charged with murder, much less convicted of murder. But then an outside jurisdiction says no, we think you’re guilty of murder so you can’t hold this or that position in our jurisdiction.

Again, where’s the due process?

Colorado and Maine say Trump doesn’t have to be formally convicted in order to ban him from the ballot, that they don’t have to meet that standard.

Headed for the Supreme Court

The Supreme Court prefers to avoid election cases, but it’ll have to take up this one.

I predict that the Court will rule against Colorado and Maine, as well as any other state that follows their example.

Trump will appear on primary ballots in all 50 states, as well as in the general election should he be the Republican nominee.

And he will be. His lead over the other Republican challengers is enormous. No one can recall a non-incumbent with such a large lead in the polls. Meanwhile, all the 91 criminal indictments against him only increase his popularity because most people realize they’re politically motivated.

But that’s not to say that Trump won’t be found guilty on one or more charges. The trials will occur in deep-blue areas with overwhelming Democratic voting majorities. It’s hard to imagine that a heavily biased jury won’t find Trump guilty on one or more charges.

There’s actually a plausible scenario in which Trump may be behind bars on Election Day. That’s OK. There’s no legal or other prohibition on electing an incarcerated convicted felon as president.

The man with orange hair may be in an orange prison suit, but that won’t stand in his way.

Then there’s Joe Biden to consider…

Biden Won’t Make It to November

I’m reiterating my prediction that Joe Biden will not be the Democratic nominee for president. He’s the most unpopular president in modern history,with a recent poll revealing a 37% approval rating.

Biden’s problem is not just his age, but the fact that he actually is mentally and physically impaired. He cannot complete sentences, recall facts or form coherent thoughts.

The idea of Biden conducting high-level negotiations with Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping borders on the impossible. He’s simply not fit to be president, and everyone knows it even if Democratic operatives and media sycophants don’t want to mention it.

I’m not even getting into his corruption, which, despite the media’s refusal to address it, is a legitimate concern. Despite what Biden’s apologists say, there’s actually solid evidence that Biden is guilty of corruption.

Regardless, that leaves the question: Who will replace Biden as the Democratic nominee?

To repeat what I said in November, the most likely replacements are Gavin Newsom, Jay Pritzker, Gretchen Whitmer or Jennifer Granholm.

All four were or are state governors. They’re all about the same ideologically; take your pick. Forget Kamala Harris; she’s simply too much of a liability.

There are plenty of wild cards in play as we head into the 2024 election, but as of now I’m sticking to my prediction that Trump will win back the White House in 2024.

Should Be a Banner Year!

To repeat my other forecasts for 2024: China, the U.S. and Japan will all fall into recession, probably in the first part of the year. The EU is already in recession. So a rare global recession will be the result in 2024.

I also predict that Russia will advance toward ultimate victory in Ukraine, though the fighting will continue beyond this year.

There will be no negotiated settlement in 2024 unless Zelenskyy is ousted, which is possible.

Meanwhile, if escalation scenarios play out in the Middle East, even in part, expect oil prices to go to $150 per barrel or higher. That will put the U.S. and Western Europe in a recession worse than 2008 and the earlier oil shock of 1974.

In the 1974 recession, the Dow Jones index fell 45%. That would equate to a crash of over 15,000 Dow points from today’s levels.

The market could decline at least 30% on a recession alone, and as much as 50% if either the Ukraine war or Israeli war escalates, or a global financial crisis emerges. Don’t rule it out.

The major sectors that will outperform even in a falling market are energy, defense, agriculture and mining.

Commodities will be a mixed bag in 2024.

Basic commodities such as copper, iron ore, coal, non-precious metals and agricultural produce will generally decline as the recession unfolds. Gold and silver should perform well based on declining interest rates and a flight to quality.

Energy will be volatile. It will tend to go down based on economic weakness, but occasionally rally on geopolitical fears.

A bigger and more acute Stage 2 of the banking crisis is coming after the quiet period that has prevailed since June.

This new crisis will be focused on about 20 banks with $200–900 billion in assets — the so-called midsized regional banks that are not too big to fail.

Crises of this sort can feed on themselves and cause losses that go far beyond the particular banks that may be most vulnerable. A new global financial crisis could be the result.

May you live in interesting times, says an old Chinese curse. We do live in interesting times, and they’ll only become more interesting in 2024.

Get ready.

The United States has become the world’s largest exporter of liquefied natural gas, surpassing Qatar and Australia for the first time. This development is at odds with the Biden administration’s goal of becoming the world’s climate leader. 

Bloomberg data compiled through Dec. 31 shows the US exported 91.2 million metric tons of LNG in 2023. This is a record for the Western country and was made possible by the restart of the Freeport LNG export terminal in Texas, which was closed for months after an explosion rocked the facility in June 2022. 

 The US surpassed Qatar, previously crowded ‘king of LNG exporters’ in 2022 after export volumes dropped for the first time since 2016 by 1.9%. Australia ranked second. 

Alex Munton, director of global gas and LNG research at consulting firm Rapidan Energy Group, told Reuters that LNG exporters in the US rose for two reasons: 

“The return of Freeport LNG to full service, which added 6 MT and the full-year output of Venture Global LNG’s Calcasieu Pass facility that added 3 MT more than in 2022.” 

Most US LNG exports depart from terminals across the Gulf Coast with top destinations in the Netherlands, the UK, and France for the first half of 2023. 

The US only joined the LNG export scene in 2016 amid an abundance of shale gas and growing demand for gas globally.

More than a year later, the US stands as the largest beneficiary of the destruction of Russia’s Nord Stream pipeline system under the Baltic Sea to Europe.

Authored by J.G.Collins via The Epoch Times,

Since roughly the last year of World War II, the U.S. dollar has enjoyed what one-time French finance minister Valéry Giscard d’Estaing once called the “exorbitant privilege” of being the world’s reserve currency. It’s had that position since roughly 1944, when it seized the role of the world’s currency hegemon from the British pound sterling.

But now, that standing is threatened by a whole variety of U.S. policies and assaults by our foreign adversaries. And the results for the dollar—and the people of the United States—could be catastrophic.

How We Got Here

By July 1944, it had become clear that allied advances over the Nazis in Europe all but ensured the Allies, and particularly the United States, would dominate the postwar world. It was then that 730 delegates from 44 countries convened at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, to reestablish the postwar global monetary order.

Together, they agreed to a multinational system whereby global currencies would be convertible to the U.S. dollar at fixed exchange rates that could be modified, if necessary, within a very narrow band. The dollar, in turn, would be convertible to gold at $35 an ounce. It was left to the United States to ensure that the dollar/gold exchange rate remained stable.

But by 1971, social welfare spending on Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society,’’ the Vietnam War, and dollar investment in overseas businesses, factories, and other assets, as well as balance of payments deficits resulting from imports from more fully recovered Japan and Europe, had greatly expanded the amount of dollars in global circulation. U.S. officials recognized the nation’s gold reserves were insufficient to honor its commitment to convert dollar into gold at $35 an ounce. That year, Europeans started converting small amounts of their dollar for gold. Then, the British asked for a “guarantee” of the dollars they held in reserve.

A currency crisis was brewing. And the United States needed to circumvent it before it happened.

So in August 1971, President Richard Nixon, at the urging of his advisers, convened a secret meeting at Camp David over three days, concluding on Aug. 15, a Sunday. That evening, the president announced to the world in a nationally telecast statement a purported “temporary” closing of the gold window—prohibiting conversion of dollar to gold—to stop any run on U.S. gold reserves. That “temporary” closing lasted until 1975, when a meeting of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), another legacy of Bretton Woods, approved a “managed” or “dirty float” of currencies at a conference in Jamaica. The IMF was to operate to maintain stability via some ambiguous “guardrails,” at least nominally, but central banks—including the U.S. Federal Reserve, the Bank of England, Bank of Japan, et al.—were able to intervene to support their respective currencies.

The dollar was—finally and officially—off the gold standard and was now a “fiat currency”—meaning the dollar had value in the United States simply because the government said it did.

But in other countries, after President Nixon closed the gold window, the U.S. dollar became, with other currencies, essentially a commodity. If you wanted to buy U.S. property or securities, or acquire U.S. products, you needed to obtain dollars to pay for them. Since the dollar had been overvalued by its link to gold, closing the gold window caused the dollar’s value to decline and inflation to increase.

To ameliorate some of the decline, President Nixon’s Treasury Secretary, William Simon, made a secret deal with Saudi Arabia in 1974 whereby the United States agreed to sell arms and give protection to the House of Saud in exchange for the Saudis investing their U.S. dollar reserves from oil sales in U.S. Treasurys instead of some other “hard” asset.

Oil had been traded in U.S. dollars almost everywhere since the Lucas Gusher at the Spindletop oil field in east Texas was discovered in 1901. The Saudis explicitly guaranteed to maintain the pricing of their oil sales in U.S. dollars. The 1974 arrangement with the Saudis helped the United States to run government budget deficits, and to improve its balance of payments deficit, as well as to maintain the global demand for the dollar, termed “petrodollars” after the Saudi deal, because any country that wanted to buy oil had to buy U.S. dollars to buy it.

Where We Are Today

In 1974, when Secretary Simon arranged his deal with the Saudis to avoid a “dollar crisis,” our national debt was roughly 32 percent of GDP. We were winding down our decades-long involvement in Vietnam and Southeast Asia and had secured a detente with Cold War adversaries China and the Soviet Union.

Today, the United States is over $34 trillion in debt, around 120 percent of our GDP—more than it was even during World War II. A bit over $7 trillion of that—the value of the entire U.S. annual budget—is held by foreigners. We are on our way to $1 trillion a year in debt service, more than our defense budget. And the $10 your grandmother stuck in your birthday card that was lost in the commotion of your birthday party in 1971 would, if found today, be worth $1.20.

And in the world, the United States is engaged in escalating conflicts with two powerful, nuclear-armed, adversaries, China and Russia, as well as the war Iran’s terrorist proxy, Hamas, is waging on our ally, Israel.

• Citing three current and former U.S. officials, NBC News reported that China’s leader Xi Jinping boldly told the U.S. president that he intends to acquire Taiwan, a vital interest of the United States. Not only do we (and the rest of the world) get most of our chips from Taiwan, but 50 percent of the world’s maritime container traffic passes through the Taiwan Strait.

• The Ukraine-Russia war continues and has escalated in the last few days with no end in sight. In a conflict where U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin has pledged American prestige by asserting in October that we will “deliver what it takes, for as long as it takes, so that Ukraine can live in freedom.” But just last month, President Biden seemingly walked back his commitment by saying the United States will back Ukraine “as long as we can.”

• U.S. Navy forces deployed to the Red Sea to protect shipping and deter Iranian belligerence against Israel were attacked by Iranian-backed Houthi militants in Yemen. Scores of U.S. armed services members have been injured in Iraq and Syria in similar attacks.

Within our own borders, violent protests that went unchecked after the death of George Floyd, the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6, and the Marxist-inspired pro-Hamas protests have rattled the sense of American stability among foreigners more than at any time since the Vietnam War.

Given all that, it should not be a surprise that other countries are moving to de-dollarize their holdings. The world has growing concerns about the stability of the United States and our ability to meet our debt obligations. The Saudis, whom we have relied upon for 50 years to help maintain demand for the U.S. dollar as the world’s global reserve currency, had announced that they are joining the BRICS, the international coalition of Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa. Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates joined the same day.

Were that not enough, now the Biden administration is contemplating a policy that cannot help but exacerbate de-dollarization. According to the Financial Times, the United States and the G-7 “are actively exploring ways to seize Russian central bank assets” in their countries to fund Ukraine because political opposition to continuing Ukraine support in the United States and Europe threaten the flow of money that has kept Ukraine afloat. The paper reported it had seen a document written by the United States that said, under international law, “G7 members and other specially affected states could seize Russian sovereign assets as a countermeasure to induce Russia to end its aggression.”

Robert Schiller, the Nobel Prize-winning Yale economist, reportedly told Italian news outlet La Repubblica in an interview published Sunday that he warned against the tactic. “[T]his will be confirmation for the Russian leader that what is happening in Ukraine is a proxy war [and] it could paradoxically turn against America and the entire West,” Mr. Schiller said. He warned it could create “a cataclysm for the current dollar-dominated economic system” because it would sow doubt among other countries that their investments in U.S. Treasurys, markets, and financial institutions could be seized by the United States in a political dispute.

America’s “exorbitant privilege” has allowed us to roll up extraordinary levels of debt in exchange for, basically, IOUs we’ve given to our creditors. And given our level of debt, and particularly our debt-to-GDP ratio, our trading partners are now questioning our ability to repay it, the same as any other creditor.

In addition to this fiscal environment, malicious actors from foreign countries seeking to undermine the United States for their own geopolitical advantage, particularly China, are actively pursuing efforts to subvert the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency. Part of their strategy is to close trade in their own currencies.

Summary

The U.S. dollar is under assault by the global market. While we continue to enjoy the largest, most transparent, and best regulated capital markets in the free world, and the largest per capita consumer market, the other elements of dollar supremacy are eroding. Its status as the world’s reserve currency—its “exorbitant privilege”—is unlikely to last into the next decade. That will have enormous negative consequences for American citizens for the latter decades of this century. Interest rates needed to fund our debt will soar, closing out other alternative, productive investments in businesses and innovation.

Congress must absolutely get a handle on our spending to make vigorous, real, reductions and have the courage to raise taxes principally on its own donor class so that we get to a balanced budget no later than 2030. To grow our way out of debt as we did our World War II debt, we must make our nation more productive and more resilient. That means graduating more chemical engineers and computer scientists and fewer social workers and grievance studies graduates. It means fiercely protecting our technology and re-shoring high value-added manufacturing. It means making smart policy choices, across the board, to keep our people healthier, our children far better educated and much more physically fit to reduce healthcare costs. And we need to ensure our family structures and institutions are more resilient so that charities and families—not governments—support our most challenged citizens.

If we don’t, we will come to the day the dollar dies—and with it, the republic.

Despite ongoing conflicts, threats from AI and the imminent climate catastrophe, global optimism is seeing an uptick for 2024.

As Statista’s Anna Fleck details below, according to the latest data from Ipsos, a global average of 70 percent of respondents say they feel optimistic that their 2024 will be better than 2023. This is 15 percentage points up from last year, which was the lowest score on record since Ipsos started running the survey.

You will find more infographics at Statista

Of course, a global average as a single figure hides the differences between countries.

For instance, when looking at an international breakdown, India has a relatively high share of people feeling positive about their coming year. Out of the 34 countries polled, it comes out on top, with 91 percent of respondents feeling more optimistic about 2024. This has risen 11 percentage points from last year when 80 percent of respondents said they felt optimistic looking ahead.

As the chart shows, optimism has improved in the United Kingdom too, up 11 percentage points from last year, which is one of the greatest improvements across all of the countries polled.

This comes off the back of a year considered to be particularly bad for the country by 83 percent of Brits in 2023.

At the more cynical end of the spectrum stand France and Japan, with only 46 percent and 39 percent of their respondents, respectively, feeling more positive about next year.

However, Argentina, with its crippling inflation, was the country with the highest share of people saying that 2023 was a bad year for their country, at 88 percent. Yet hope wins out, with 69 percent of Argentine respondents saying that 2024 will be better for themselves.

Authored by Denes Albert via ReMix News,

Of the 18 German-made Leopard 2AG main battle tanks sent to Ukraine, only a few are still in operation, with the rest either destroyed or broken, according to German Green MP Sebastian Schäfer, who serves as the defense expert for the party.

“The situation in Ukraine is very difficult at the moment. We need to do more at all levels; the government and industry are called upon to do more,” he wrote on the X social network.

He also underlined his position in letters to Rheinmetall and the French armaments company Nexter.

Footage of the destroyed Leopard tanks littering the battlefields in Ukraine has been widely broadcast by pro-Russian accounts on social media.

However, other countries have also sent their Leopard 2s into action, and it was unclear how many of the tanks provided directly by Germany had even seen action.

Die Situation in der Ukraine ist gerade sehr schwierig. Wir müssen auf allen Ebenen mehr tun, Regierung und Industrie sind gefordert. Das habe ich in Briefen an @RheinmetallAG und @NexterKNDS deutlich gemacht. https://t.co/NhtAoYZY3T

— Sebastian Schäfer (@sebastian_es_) January 2, 2024

So far, the weapon has not had the effect on the battlefield that the Ukrainians were hoping for.

Meanwhile, not only has the Ukrainian counteroffensive failed, but Russia is even making gains along the front.

Schäfer had visited a repair workshop in Lithuania together with Defense Minister Boris Pistorius (SPD) before Christmas to get an idea of the situation, following which the Green Party member stated: “Unfortunately, it is clear that only a very small number of the battle tanks supplied can still be used by Ukraine.”

He said they were no longer combat-ready due to battle damage, wear and tear, and shoddy repair attempts by the Ukrainians.

“There is also obviously a problem in that the Ukrainian army sometimes attempts to repair the tanks, which then leads to further damage,” Schäfer said, adding that there is a shortage of the required spare parts from Germany.

He suggested that the Ukrainians implement better training for the mechanics on site or provide better instructions. The costly transportation of damaged tanks is also sometimes not the best solution.

Schäfer insisted that more aid and weapons should flow to Ukraine to help it win the war effort.

Read more here…