Vladimir Ilyich Lenin's Ukraine

It is the emergency manager's job to provide domain awareness

Domain awareness is a vision of an uncertain future [Shutterstock image]

Are you working the Russia-Ukraine Crisis?

If you are an emergency manager, you need to be working this job.

You don’t need to provide situational awareness; everyone has plenty of that. You need to be providing domain awareness, that is, an understanding of how events halfway across the world interact within their environment and how they could impact you.

It is your job to penetrate the fog of media coverage and focus on what we know and what we can reasonably expect; to apply a reasonable worst case mindset to an uncertain future…

The harder the Ukrainians fight, the worse the outcome is for them [By Homoatrox - Own work, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=114655114]

Background

On February 21, 2022, Vladimir Putin telegraphed a trajectory toward war in a dark and rambling televised speech to the nation that was filled with historical grievances, conspiracy theories, and outright fabrication.

In it he said, among other things, that Ukraine was controlled by Nazi's and drug addicts and that those particular Nazi's and drug addicts owed him money.

But he also said something else that was very interesting. He said Ukraine does not exist as a separate country. That it was created by the Bolsheviks, by Lenin himself in fact. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin's Ukraine, he called it.

He wanted to reinforce to the Russian Army that, once the order to invade is given, rather than leaving Russia and entering a sovereign nation, it will be on its home soil.

This is because, historically, one of the worst places that you could ever hope to find yourself is fighting the Russian Army on its home soil. Just ask Napoleon, or Hitler, for instance.

So this is our premise. Our reasonable worst case scenario presumes that the Russian Army, fighting on what it considers to be Russian soil, never—ever—gives up.

The scale of the humanitarian catastrophe continues to grow [Shutterstock image]

Reasonable Worst Case Scenario

The Russian Army continues to press forward, slowly and relentlessly, to victory, without regard to how ugly the victory is or how long it takes. The war in Ukraine not only gets worse, it gets immeasurably worse. And the harder the Ukrainians fight, the worse the ultimate outcome is for them.

For clues to that ultimate outcome, we need to look no farther than Russia's last war, when it went into Syria in September 2015. Like Bashar Al- Assad's brutal crackdown of opposition rebel groups there, the conflict in Ukraine descends into long, grinding urban warfare and Kyiv ends up like Homs or Aleppo, the major cities of Syria that were utterly destroyed.

The scale of the humanitarian catastrophe continues to grow--as do the calls for help. There is an enormous need for not only supplies but expertise, especially medical expertise. Many answer the call, but the average American struggles to find ways to help.

Assad's crackdown killed an estimated 100,000 and displaced nearly 11 million, half the Syrian population. If we apply that ratio here, the 2.1 million who have already left Ukraine grow into 4, then 8, then 10 million refugees. This has ramifications far beyond Europe.

Thousands of refugees begin to arrive as planeload after planeload disembark at airports across the nation: Atlanta’s Hartsfield, O’Hare, LAX, Dallas/Fort Worth, Denver International and John F Kennedy in New York. They arrive desperate, with little that they don’t need—including money, shelter, medical and emotional support.

Once his costly victory is achieved, it is up to Putin to rebuild the vanquished country. But he does not. Just as in the eastern separatist regions of Donetsk and Luhansk where the infrastructure has been destroyed by fighting and the people feel abandoned, Ukraine becomes a desolate, sad place, without hope or opportunity.

Much has been said about the cyber threat and threats to the supply chain, as well as the shocks to world markets and the possibility of $200 oil. But the commodity shock extends well beyond oil to iron and steel, nickel, aluminum and other base metals. And basic foodstuffs. Russia and Ukraine combined account for 30% of the world's supply of wheat for instance. And 25% of corn. On top of that, the Fed is still in QE, or quantitative easing mode, it is still massively buying bonds.

The money supply combined with recent enormous shocks across primary commodity inputs are poured gasoline on the underlying smoldering inflationary pressures that have emerged over the past several months.

The retail gas rice is up 14% from last week and 50% from one year ago. Bloomberg reported yesterday that rents in Manhattan just hit an all time high.

The inflationary curve goes from steep to asymptotic. From high to straight up. And there is no telling how high it will go. Maybe higher than we have seen in our lifetimes. Businesses and families across the US scramble to figure out how to navigate a prolonged hyperinflationary environment.

Finally a seemingly mundane issue, the price of bread, becomes explosive. Bread is heavily subsidized by governments in the Middle East including Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, Libya, Lebanon, Morocco, and Yemen. Over 70 million Egyptians rely on subsidized bread, for instance, the price of which rose 80% between 2020 and December 2021 and it now at a 14 year high.

Governments are unable to maintain subsidies on food staples and price hikes for bread trigger violence across the region, much worse than we saw in the Arab Spring in 2010. Libya, Yemen and Tunisia, poor countries that were already teetering on the edge, descend into famine, ushering in yet another humanitarian crisis across the Middle East and North Africa.

…

This scenario is presented as an example, as “food for thought”. And just like the old adage about mathematical models, this scenario is wrong, but it can be useful. You can use your version of this reasonable worst case scenario to trigger discussions across your organization—conversations that serve to connect the dots and to surface impacts, obstacles and unmet needs—thereby enabling “domain awareness”

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