Quote:
Originally Posted by Azure
Pretty clear at this point that the sanctions are weak, and that Russia somehow has no issue funding the meat grinder.
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Neither of these are even a little bit true.
I think most people also don't understand that "the sanctions" have never been an on/off thing, but rather a continuing process.
The sanctions covering more high-tech equipment has really tightened this month, especially with Taiwan committing more strongly to it just 5 days ago.
Here's a timeline to underline this point.
https://www.spglobal.com/marketintel...eline-69602559
The EU and US both also have just recently put forth new lists of measures targeted specifically at sanction circumvention and various loopholes, and have started more aggressively sanctioning and punishing companies (like banks), individuals and even some countries (the smaller ones) caught assisting in sanction circumvention.
Sanctions are always circumvented to some extent, but they still create a lot of extra cost and difficulty for Russia.
It's also extremely obvious that Russia is seriously hurting. Just as a simple example, their airplane fleet for domestic flights is mostly grounded at this point due to a lack of spare parts. (Russia is a geographically huge country but their roads aren't generally great, so domestic flights are really important.)
In the war we've seen Russia use advanced missile types (just as an example) pretty sparingly, pointing to a lack of ability to manufacture them in quantity. Many of their troops still lack basic stuff like night vision.
As for the Russian economy, I think there might an element to this where people in North America and western Europe are just too distant to see the signs of serious pain, which really are quite obvious.
Living in Finland (for example, but any Eastern European country is probably kind of the same), we regularly get these somewhat mundane news out of Russia that as a whole paint a pretty clear picture of a seriously hurting economy.
As an example, you can read
this story about the Russian egg crisis. The Russian ruble has collapsed so much that the immigrant workers from Central Asia have increasingly left the country, which hurt among other things the poultry industry. This contributes to an already serious labor shortage issue, and makes the inflation worse as eggs are a pretty basic foodstuff. Another element contributing to this particular inflation are the sanctions that have increased the price of chicken-feed in Russia.
So to sum just those two things up: even though Russia has a significant labor shortage, their companies can't afford to pay salaries that are competitive enough to hold on to low-skill-level immigrant workers from (at least historically) much poorer neighboring countries.
The price-off-egg-crisis was significant enough for Putin to go on national TV a while back to announce a bunch of emergency measures to try bring the price of eggs down... and just a couple of weeks ago Putin publically apologized for the egg crisis in his traditional new years question-and-answer session saying that the measures put in place to tackle the situation where not sufficient. Something which probably isn't the truth, as more likely they just can't help it. So Putin has now taken personal responsibility for the inflation of basic foodstuff (to mitigate a situation where people are so angry about this that there was an amateur assassination attempt on at least one poultry corporation owner). This might help calm the situation in the short term but is extremely likely to come back to haunt him later as inflation keeps going and the sanctions keep hurting the Russian economy.
No part of the still ongoing Russian egg-crisis story is something that you hear from a normally functioning healthy economy, and it makes it extremely obvious that literally everyone in Russia including Putin himself is feeling the sanctions either directly or indirectly.
I should also probably try to collect another round of new Russian jokes. They joke about things like how North Korea now feels Russia is now so unpopular it's a bad look for North Korea to hang with them etc.
Oh, and online-ads for Russian brides are starting to pop up in a way that brings back memories from the nineties.
Putin might not care about the people dying in the Ukrainian meat grinder, but those people are still really dying, and their deaths do matter for Russia.