Russia and Ukraine

[Ivan Denisovich]

I said nothing about it collapsing soon (though I wouldn't be against such thing) merely that every day of Ukraine bleeding it makes it closer to collapse which should be obvious as one can't keep country on war footing indefinitely. As to my sources - https://krytykapolityczna.pl/swiat/rosja...-protesty/

You will have to run it through translator.

Well this article certainly paints a grimmer picture than anything else I've seen in a serious publication. 

Naturally we hear about shortages of things that have to be imported, and different problems that you'd expect in a wartime economy. 

Of course since I don't know Polish I haven't heard of the periodical before, but Googling around it does seem to have a good reputation, and of course I like that fact that it has a progressive orientation. 

I suppose it comes down to a war of attrition, and which country can keep itself afloat longer while sustaining the war. Famously, Russia tends to win wars of attrition. Ukraine's economy of course is not in good condition, so how well it keeps going depends entirely on how much money other countries give it. With America now wanting to disengage from the whole fiasco, I don't think it's a very optimistic picture. 

So if we go back to my earlier question, about what we can hope for from the EU's recent promise of a loan. If the plan is just to keep Ukraine from total failure until Russia's economy completely collapses, or until the people of Russia organize some kind of glorious democratic revolution to oust Putin, I don't have much confidence in its success. 

Russia, and before that of course the Soviet Union, has been America's designated enemy since the Cold War. A great deal has been written about it that was intended to shape public opinion. I tend to be skeptical of publications with obvious political agendas. I have never been to Russia, but I know for a fact that much of what is written about China in the Anglophone media is pure fiction. The desire to make China into an enemy is very unfortunate. 

For example, the Economist magazine, which is supposed to be a serious periodical, is sort of a joke among people who know China well, because it confidently predicts the collapse of China's economy every six months or so. But China's economy never cooperates with that prediction, and recently even the Economist admitted that economically China has "won" 2025. 

A while back I mentioned on this forum how China has built many miles of high speed rail for other countries in Asia, and someone replied immediately, in a sort of knee-jerk way, that everything China builds is of poor quality. That's simply not true, but someone who has never been to China or ridden on its trains feels confident in passing judgment, based on no experience at all. 

Anyway, I bring up this tangent because even supposedly serious publications in the Anglophone world can be wildly distorted by ideology, and I think we have to be especially cautious when reading about America's economic competitors. This does not mean that what Putin says is true of course. Only that anti-Russian reporting may also be misleading. 

So I appreciate you linking me to an article from a perspective that I haven't seen before. Thank you again.

Things are really simple here - russia is a rogue state (and one hilariously incompetent considering how long ago war was supposed to end) guilty of starting war (and it's not its first one) and threat to Europe in general and Eastern Europe in particular. Thus money spent to keep it bleeding itself are money well spent. I also would argue that Europe need send more weapons and ammunition as every russian killed is a russian that will not be in any other potential battlefield, nor will he help with rebuilding if it ever comes to that.