- 00:00Feels like a significant escalation. Does the US and the US actually and President Biden gave the blessing to Vladimir Zelensky to use these very big missiles a couple of days ago. Does that come with a guarantee that if Russia escalates, the US is there to protect them? Well, I think that this is a slew of questions that we do not yet have the answers to. Francine And just to recap some of the news that we just got in the last few minutes, because this all feels fairly significant is what we got from Vladimir Putin was signing into a decree allowing Russia to fire nuclear weapons in response to any kind of massive, massive conventional attack on its soil. That would include drones, that would include presumably long range missiles that Russia would view aggression against itself or its allies by non-nuclear state backed by other nuclear powers as a joint attack. In summary, basically saying that if there was an attack on Russia by a member of a coalition, that would be seen as an attack by sort of the full coalition, i.e., even if it’s a non-nuclear power aided by a nuclear power, that would be seen as a joint attack. This is something that Putin has been talking about and designing into as a decrease since September. This is officially happening now and it comes, obviously, Francine, just on the heels of that sort of news that we got from Joe Biden, basically permitting the Ukrainians to begin using some of these attack arms within Russian territory in the Kursk region, not sort of all across Russia, but within that region. They have a a range of about 300 kilometers. And this is coming at a time right now when we understand, again, from Ukrainian news agencies that those first missiles have been deployed. So what we are getting this morning in the last few minutes is Putin on the one hand signing a decree that says that any sort of coalition strike that is backed by a nuclear power, even if it’s by Ukraine non-nuclear, striking within Russia, could see a nuclear response. Again, that is why there is seen a huge move into the Haven assets over the last few minutes. You can see it on this sort of German treasure. German bonds have been being being bought up. You see the euro moving, you see gold moving, You see everything moving because there’s a lot of uncertainty as to what this means. Again, when we think about the possible red lines in Ukraine, that when they are drawn, this sort of goes back to what we’ve been hearing from Olaf Scholz, who has been much more reticent for, one, to support any of these strikes within Russia, presumably to try to avoid a situation that could escalate severely. But early on, these attack comes I mean, again, as you said, there are American made army tactical missile systems. There’s these supersonic guided missiles. Will we know what they’ve hit this morning? And what this means in terms of escalation is a market, just as you know, before they find out, they just want to get out of risky assets. I think that that’s where you have to assume that people want to get out of risky assets. When you hear sort of Russian nuclear response in the same breath as a strike within Russia by some of these US made weapons, that you’re going to get a lot of fear within the market. Right. And this is exactly the kind of thing that Olaf Scholz has been talking about at the G20 when he was asked basically, will you follow Joe Biden? Will you begin to deliver your own long range missile, the Taurus system that has an even further range than these US attack arms? Will you be able to deliver those? Will you begin to deliver those to Ukraine? He said, No, absolutely not. My position is unchanged and that comes after he is really the only G-7 leader to have had any contact with Vladimir Putin. They just had a call this Friday and basically saying that Putin had not really changed his position on anything. And he’s, of course, also fighting his own election within Germany, where some of the Germans are really very concerned about possible escalation. And many of the voters here, particularly on the far right and the far left, which are doing very, very well here, want to see less involvement in Ukraine, not more involvement. So this is a story that obviously has huge ripple effects within domestic politics across Europe. But as you can see this morning, across the markets with getting us catching a bid here from the German bonds and across really the whole sort of haven complex right now.
Stream Schedule:
U.S. BTV+
No schedule data available.
