8 ms·

I find it rather worrying in the long term. Russia has been an extremely inefficient and corrupt state for the past 2 decades. Export oil & gas, import everythi

I find it rather worrying in the long term. Russia has been an extremely inefficient and corrupt state for the past 2 decades. Export oil & gas, import everything else, let the cronies pocket the proceeds, while having most manufacturing, defense and tech exist mostly on paper. People like Rogozin were promoted based on the loyalty and willingness to give a cut of the pie further up the ladder. Currently this trend appears to be reversing. The country is getting increasingly authoritarian [0], the economy is switching from a highly corrupt trickle-down-oil-money model, to centrally managed industrial economy driven by the war needs. I don't like where this is going. If Russia is pushed back into its borders, it will take a couple of years to ramp up weapons production and will retry. If it manages to successfully take over Ukraine, it will very likely press forward to attack other ex-USSR states. If China decides to join the party and rally out against Taiwan, we pretty much have a guaranteed WWIII until mutual exhaustion. [0] https://meduza.io/en/feature/2022/07/14/vladimir-putin-enacted-more-than-100-new-laws-today-here-are-the-ones-you-need-to-know https://meduza.io/en/feature/2022/07/14/vladimir-putin-enact...

Wertigoyr 4y ago
Russia has plenty of things missing (chips etc.) This will take much more than just a few years.
- lotusmars 4y ago
  Sanctions will be lifted or eased long before tech embargo hits. Putin has too many points to cause pain for European politicians. For example grain shortage caused by his naval operations will cause hunger in North Africa. Revolts and refugee influx to Europe will follow. It’s enough for Europeans to put pressure on Ukraine to surrender. If it doesn’t they will spoon-feed it arms so it will surrender by fall.
  - Wertigoyr 4y ago
    I also assume that they will have to surrender but the price will be much much higher than Putin though. This will not motivate Putin to push forward.
  - JeremyNT 4y ago
    I feel like a protracted proxy war in Ukraine was never really on the table. What we've seen so far is the US and its allies forcing Russia to pay a "price" for its adventurism. The value of this is both to act as a deterrent against future actions and to strengthen Ukraine's negotiating power when it ultimately surrenders. I suspect that at a certain point everybody will be satisfied with the level of pain exacted, Ukraine surrenders, and Russia ends up with at least a large chunk of Ukraine.
    - lotusmars 4y ago
      Not a critically high price anyway. Gas prices cover everything and complicit German politicians don’t consider stopping paying. Looks like Putin’s gamble played well once again, he knows his European counterparts well.
    - qaq 4y ago
      Don't judge people by yourself Ukraine will not surrender.
      - Wertigoyr 4y ago
        It might be like this. It's already tremendous impressive how the Ukrainian people stood up to Putin. But bombing so many civilians means after a while a tremendous loss as well. It's just speculation and the hope would of course be Putin just getting out of Ukraine but Putin just has much less to loose besides his own death.
      - lotusmars 4y ago
        Europeans will force it to, unfortunately.
        qaq 4y ago
        Russians already tried to force something, will not work. No Ukrainian president will ever sign because he/she will be overthrown the next day.
NicoJuicy 4y ago
We're not there by far. Russia is doing really really bad on the battlefront. But i do agree it could become dangerous if China gets stupid ideas too. But, they currently don't have the capacity to strike an amphibious assault + their military seems to be similar to the Russian one. So yes, it could become worrisome if it happens. But i don't think that China has much to gain with attacking Taiwan from my POV. Ukraine had found a gas supply in Crimea in 2008, that could replace all Russian gas imports in Europe. That's very different than a chip factory that is set to selfdestruct during an invasion and that needs machines that are literally made by ASML+ Imec ( Europe) Ps. I was more worried about that part at the start of the war than now.
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  > But i do agree it could become dangerous if China gets stupid ideas too. China has been backing Russia and it's anti-Western allies in the region (e.g., Serbia). Mostly, I think, for the value of keeping the West focussed on Russia in Europe to any “stupid ideas” they might try in their region.
  - NicoJuicy 4y ago
    Well, china's growth comes from the west and not from Russia/Serbia.
inglor_cz 4y ago
As the Spartans famously said: "If". Ukraine gets massive support from the club of the richest countries on the Earth, and, unlike Germany or France, the Anglo-Saxon behemoths seem to be committed in full. So is Poland, the necessary logistics hub for supplies. Russia is alone, even Iran refused to sell their drones to them. The full impact of this economic and military imbalance cannot be seen yet. The Ukrainian army is in midst of switching their entire weaponry from the old Soviet models to the new Western ones. This is a grueling logistical task even in peace, much more so in war. But with each new type of equipment mastered (HIMARS, M-777, Panzerhaubitze 2000, in the future possibly Western tanks and jets), the total capability edge of the UAF over their Russian counterparts grows. You can already see how the Russian offensive momentum has evaporated. They only managed to take very modest pieces of land over the last month or so, and basically none in July.
- qaq 4y ago
  HIMARS is a very formidable addition to the arsenal, but in general quantities supplied are extremely modest to really turn the tide. Hopefully the deliveries will step up.
  - lotusmars 4y ago
    They won’t. Europeans drag their feet on arming Ukraine and pressure it to surrender (“peace”). The reason is gas and fear of refugee influx to Europe from hunger in Africa. Plus Germans paying Russia billions for gas beats any arms supplies possible. And they will not stop doing it.
    - inglor_cz 4y ago
      "beats any arms supplies possible" Very observably not. Russia seems to be actually incapable of buying any modern weapons for the billions of euros it receives from Germany. Even China considers such cooperation too risky. The technical level of Russian equipment deployed in the battles in Ukraine has gone downhill since February. Now they are pulling really old stuff (designed or even manufactured in the 1950s-1960s) from storage. And some of their auxiliaries from the separatist republics literally use WWI and WWII small arms. Money matters in war, but it cannot substitute for a missing/inadequate supply chain. You can't bury the enemy in an avalanche of euros, you actually need to procure the necessary equipment.
dragonwriter 4y ago
> If Russia is pushed back into its borders, it will take a couple of years to ramp up weapons production and will retry Or the current regime will collapse. That often happens with large scale defeats, especially without a democratic outlet for internal change within the system.
- lotusmars 4y ago
  Why should Putin’s regime collapse? Ruble is strong, people got +20% instant raise because of sanctions. Germany pours billions into Russian economy. Save for Netflix not working anymore, life in Moscow is even better than pre-war.
  - dragonwriter 4y ago
    > Why should Putin’s regime collapse? Historically—not universally, of course, but frequently enough to be noteworthy—people have been observed to be displeased with leadership that unproductively transforms large numbers of their youth into corpses.
    - lotusmars 4y ago
      Listen to recordings of calls to Russian soldiers’s mothers. The families fully support invasion. They are glued to TV and Telegram which explain that Ukrainians bomb themselves and Russian soldiers are brave liberators fighting against gay Nazi Americans. Besides that soldiers send a lot of stolen goods back home. There was an infamous video from the office of a transport company with dozens of soldiers sending loot like washing machines.
  - deepsun 4y ago
    People in Russia can swallow poverty, injustice, corruption no problem. But they cannot swallow war defeat. This tsar is weak, need a better tsar who wins.
    - lotusmars 4y ago
JumpCrisscross 4y ago
> don't like where this is going I do. Worst case, we wind up with Russia under China’s thumb. Not ideal. But Pyongyang isn’t rolling tanks over its borders. Best case: a disassembly of the Russian empire. Why Moscow tells Siberians and Tatars what to do is an anachronism, start to finish. It sort of made sense when the Kremlin had its head screwed on straight. Now, it doesn’t.
anewpersonality 4y ago
Unfortunately, this will reveal itself to be a stunningly accurate prediction.
stuckinhell 4y ago
kmlx 4y ago
> Russia has been an extremely inefficient and corrupt state for the past 2 decades. not 2 decades. it’s been a corrupt inefficient machine since the bolsheviks. the lying and the corruption persisted throughout the ussr. the whole country and it’s precursor are just lies built one on top of the other and the westerners actually believed most of it.
- wrp 4y ago
  Longer than that. Europeans have remarked on the corruption and inefficiency of the Russian state throughout history.
ac130kz 4y ago
Don't worry, they appointed a similar budget thief, and the state is so corrupt it won't be able to recover once gas and oil money are gone

Wertigoyr 4y ago

Russia has plenty of things missing (chips etc.) This will take much more than just a few years.

lotusmars 4y ago
Sanctions will be lifted or eased long before tech embargo hits. Putin has too many points to cause pain for European politicians. For example grain shortage caused by his naval operations will cause hunger in North Africa. Revolts and refugee influx to Europe will follow. It’s enough for Europeans to put pressure on Ukraine to surrender. If it doesn’t they will spoon-feed it arms so it will surrender by fall.
- Wertigoyr 4y ago
  I also assume that they will have to surrender but the price will be much much higher than Putin though. This will not motivate Putin to push forward.
- JeremyNT 4y ago
  I feel like a protracted proxy war in Ukraine was never really on the table. What we've seen so far is the US and its allies forcing Russia to pay a "price" for its adventurism. The value of this is both to act as a deterrent against future actions and to strengthen Ukraine's negotiating power when it ultimately surrenders. I suspect that at a certain point everybody will be satisfied with the level of pain exacted, Ukraine surrenders, and Russia ends up with at least a large chunk of Ukraine.
  - lotusmars 4y ago
    Not a critically high price anyway. Gas prices cover everything and complicit German politicians don’t consider stopping paying. Looks like Putin’s gamble played well once again, he knows his European counterparts well.
  - qaq 4y ago
    Don't judge people by yourself Ukraine will not surrender.
    - Wertigoyr 4y ago
      It might be like this. It's already tremendous impressive how the Ukrainian people stood up to Putin. But bombing so many civilians means after a while a tremendous loss as well. It's just speculation and the hope would of course be Putin just getting out of Ukraine but Putin just has much less to loose besides his own death.
    - lotusmars 4y ago
      Europeans will force it to, unfortunately.
      - qaq 4y ago
        Russians already tried to force something, will not work. No Ukrainian president will ever sign because he/she will be overthrown the next day.

NicoJuicy 4y ago

We're not there by far. Russia is doing really really bad on the battlefront. But i do agree it could become dangerous if China gets stupid ideas too. But, they currently don't have the capacity to strike an amphibious assault + their military seems to be similar to the Russian one. So yes, it could become worrisome if it happens. But i don't think that China has much to gain with attacking Taiwan from my POV. Ukraine had found a gas supply in Crimea in 2008, that could replace all Russian gas imports in Europe. That's very different than a chip factory that is set to selfdestruct during an invasion and that needs machines that are literally made by ASML+ Imec ( Europe) Ps. I was more worried about that part at the start of the war than now.

dragonwriter 4y ago
> But i do agree it could become dangerous if China gets stupid ideas too. China has been backing Russia and it's anti-Western allies in the region (e.g., Serbia). Mostly, I think, for the value of keeping the West focussed on Russia in Europe to any “stupid ideas” they might try in their region.
- NicoJuicy 4y ago
  Well, china's growth comes from the west and not from Russia/Serbia.

inglor_cz 4y ago

As the Spartans famously said: "If". Ukraine gets massive support from the club of the richest countries on the Earth, and, unlike Germany or France, the Anglo-Saxon behemoths seem to be committed in full. So is Poland, the necessary logistics hub for supplies. Russia is alone, even Iran refused to sell their drones to them. The full impact of this economic and military imbalance cannot be seen yet. The Ukrainian army is in midst of switching their entire weaponry from the old Soviet models to the new Western ones. This is a grueling logistical task even in peace, much more so in war. But with each new type of equipment mastered (HIMARS, M-777, Panzerhaubitze 2000, in the future possibly Western tanks and jets), the total capability edge of the UAF over their Russian counterparts grows. You can already see how the Russian offensive momentum has evaporated. They only managed to take very modest pieces of land over the last month or so, and basically none in July.

qaq 4y ago
HIMARS is a very formidable addition to the arsenal, but in general quantities supplied are extremely modest to really turn the tide. Hopefully the deliveries will step up.
- lotusmars 4y ago
  They won’t. Europeans drag their feet on arming Ukraine and pressure it to surrender (“peace”). The reason is gas and fear of refugee influx to Europe from hunger in Africa. Plus Germans paying Russia billions for gas beats any arms supplies possible. And they will not stop doing it.
  - inglor_cz 4y ago
    "beats any arms supplies possible" Very observably not. Russia seems to be actually incapable of buying any modern weapons for the billions of euros it receives from Germany. Even China considers such cooperation too risky. The technical level of Russian equipment deployed in the battles in Ukraine has gone downhill since February. Now they are pulling really old stuff (designed or even manufactured in the 1950s-1960s) from storage. And some of their auxiliaries from the separatist republics literally use WWI and WWII small arms. Money matters in war, but it cannot substitute for a missing/inadequate supply chain. You can't bury the enemy in an avalanche of euros, you actually need to procure the necessary equipment.

dragonwriter 4y ago

> If Russia is pushed back into its borders, it will take a couple of years to ramp up weapons production and will retry Or the current regime will collapse. That often happens with large scale defeats, especially without a democratic outlet for internal change within the system.

lotusmars 4y ago
Why should Putin’s regime collapse? Ruble is strong, people got +20% instant raise because of sanctions. Germany pours billions into Russian economy. Save for Netflix not working anymore, life in Moscow is even better than pre-war.
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  > Why should Putin’s regime collapse? Historically—not universally, of course, but frequently enough to be noteworthy—people have been observed to be displeased with leadership that unproductively transforms large numbers of their youth into corpses.
  - lotusmars 4y ago
    Listen to recordings of calls to Russian soldiers’s mothers. The families fully support invasion. They are glued to TV and Telegram which explain that Ukrainians bomb themselves and Russian soldiers are brave liberators fighting against gay Nazi Americans. Besides that soldiers send a lot of stolen goods back home. There was an infamous video from the office of a transport company with dozens of soldiers sending loot like washing machines.
- deepsun 4y ago
  People in Russia can swallow poverty, injustice, corruption no problem. But they cannot swallow war defeat. This tsar is weak, need a better tsar who wins.
  - lotusmars 4y ago

JumpCrisscross 4y ago

> don't like where this is going I do. Worst case, we wind up with Russia under China’s thumb. Not ideal. But Pyongyang isn’t rolling tanks over its borders. Best case: a disassembly of the Russian empire. Why Moscow tells Siberians and Tatars what to do is an anachronism, start to finish. It sort of made sense when the Kremlin had its head screwed on straight. Now, it doesn’t.

anewpersonality 4y ago

Unfortunately, this will reveal itself to be a stunningly accurate prediction.

stuckinhell 4y ago

kmlx 4y ago

> Russia has been an extremely inefficient and corrupt state for the past 2 decades. not 2 decades. it’s been a corrupt inefficient machine since the bolsheviks. the lying and the corruption persisted throughout the ussr. the whole country and it’s precursor are just lies built one on top of the other and the westerners actually believed most of it.

wrp 4y ago
Longer than that. Europeans have remarked on the corruption and inefficiency of the Russian state throughout history.

ac130kz 4y ago

Don't worry, they appointed a similar budget thief, and the state is so corrupt it won't be able to recover once gas and oil money are gone