Записки на полях C-кода

https://x.com/YLatynina/status/1994363693979619516
Очень показательную картинку мне составил Грок. Объем транзитных грузов через порты Латвии (а это 80-95 всех грузов) упал с 74 млн тонн на пике в 2014 до 36 млн. в 24.
Обратите внимание, что пик был еще в 2014 и с 1991 все росло.

https://x.com/YLatynina/status/1994377386335322123
This is extraodinary. Riga since 1282 was a major trading hub in Baltics, with around 18% of all Russian empire trade passing through it in 1913. Now the number is officially exactly zero.

As to railway transit, it dropped from peak post-Soviet 58 m in 2011 to 11,5 m in 2024, with profit dropping from peak +27m in 2011 to net loss of -39m in 2024, and corrsponding drop in number of jobs.

These guys have managed to wreck not only their own transit economy, but the ages-long pattern of trade.

The population of Riga dropped by 34% since 1991, the population of Latvia as a whole by 29%, from 2.66m to 1,8, and this is only officially (it may be 100-150.000 lower)

There is a clear pattern here than remind of the fate of the great Mediterranean ports of antiquity, like Ephesus or Antioch. When the trade across the Mediterranean ceased, after the Arab conquest, they became dead piles of stone.

This is exactly what is happening to Baltic ports, and this is irreversible, because when things cool, there will be no incentive to Berlin and Moscow to trade via Baltic states (former Hanseatic cities) – the trade will bypass them entirely, and the profits will be split by Berlin and Moscow, none going to Riga.

The Latvian politicians were all frantic that accession in NATO will protect them from Russia. But how can NATO guarantee that Russia wouldn’t shift all its freight traffic to St-Petersburg and Ust-Luga?

A hybrid war is a game that can be played by both sides. In fact, there is no need for Putin to conquer Baltic states. In a couple of generations there will be nothing left to conquer, the same as with Ephesus and Antioch.

Their whole reason of being was transit. When you change a prospering transit state into a border fortress, this means that you bleed population, money and prosperity – and the beauty of it for the old Europe and Germany was that the Baltic states did this all to themselves voluntarily.