RE: Russia and Ukraine
April 22, 2024 at 3:59 pm
(This post was last modified: April 22, 2024 at 4:15 pm by The Grand Nudger.)
Forget the military reality. For better and for worse the russian regimes real project these last few years has been to make their own people ignore it, and it's been largely successful.
They are a country much like the us was at the height of our misadventure in the middle east. Even the criticism against the war, in russia, is misinformed and largely self serving to the regime. They're a petrostate that has destroyed their overall ability to produce fossil fuels, and spends what's left on vain personal projects for the oligarchy. Their domestic infrastructure crumbles as we speak, while they pour more money, and ever more money, into a losing foreign war with no upside even in peace.
They're losing a thousand men a day...and sure...maybe theyre criminals and outcasts, but criminals and outcasts could still build houses and dig sanitation back home. They spent decades worth of production of a country they are not and which they cant replace trying to make good on a three day war which...obviously...has not gone as planned. The ruble is worthless. Let me rephrase, the ruble is even more worthless than it was before. The whole russian domestic economy works on microloans and the debtors have been sent off to die.. their survivors aren't getting paid for that trouble... and largely because they cant recover bodies. At least officially. Unofficialy, they wouldn't pay even if they could, and they cant.
Thus, "not well". In the end, much of this isn't even their fault, for a novel sense of things not being their fault...because a failure to monetize ukraine (the step 2 missing) isn't a failure of planning per se, but a failure of reality as it is. It was one of the only places that had less than russia before the war..... If you're going to invade someplace, and tell your folks that you need to invade said place to still have stuff, it had better be a real land of milk and honey but as we see, bringing the military reality back into the picture fully, russia is incapable of invading such places - and they know it. Every russian who dies in ukraine is a russian who will not get the chance to die in poland, or germany.
They are a literal mass of sunk cost - and that's the whole enchilada right now.
They are a country much like the us was at the height of our misadventure in the middle east. Even the criticism against the war, in russia, is misinformed and largely self serving to the regime. They're a petrostate that has destroyed their overall ability to produce fossil fuels, and spends what's left on vain personal projects for the oligarchy. Their domestic infrastructure crumbles as we speak, while they pour more money, and ever more money, into a losing foreign war with no upside even in peace.
They're losing a thousand men a day...and sure...maybe theyre criminals and outcasts, but criminals and outcasts could still build houses and dig sanitation back home. They spent decades worth of production of a country they are not and which they cant replace trying to make good on a three day war which...obviously...has not gone as planned. The ruble is worthless. Let me rephrase, the ruble is even more worthless than it was before. The whole russian domestic economy works on microloans and the debtors have been sent off to die.. their survivors aren't getting paid for that trouble... and largely because they cant recover bodies. At least officially. Unofficialy, they wouldn't pay even if they could, and they cant.
Thus, "not well". In the end, much of this isn't even their fault, for a novel sense of things not being their fault...because a failure to monetize ukraine (the step 2 missing) isn't a failure of planning per se, but a failure of reality as it is. It was one of the only places that had less than russia before the war..... If you're going to invade someplace, and tell your folks that you need to invade said place to still have stuff, it had better be a real land of milk and honey but as we see, bringing the military reality back into the picture fully, russia is incapable of invading such places - and they know it. Every russian who dies in ukraine is a russian who will not get the chance to die in poland, or germany.
They are a literal mass of sunk cost - and that's the whole enchilada right now.
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