Russia invades Ukraine

[burn_this_city]

This stuff is nonsense, Russia has its own extremely well developed arms industries. They are skirting export controls by accessing critical components from corrupt third parties. The idea the Europeans were happy to pay inflated gas prices across their entire economy to fund a small portion of their tool and die and electronics industries is nuts.

[undercoverbrother]

Originally Posted by burn_this_city

This stuff is nonsense, Russia has its own extremely well developed arms industries. They are skirting export controls by accessing critical components from corrupt third parties. The idea the Europeans were happy to pay inflated gas prices across their entire economy to fund a small portion of their tool and die and electronics industries is nuts.

I blame the “men in suits”……

[Street Pharmacist]

Originally Posted by Azure

Please tell me people aren't actually surprised by this.

Government control of the media and how the war is reported has kept a lot of this from the news the past 3 years, but its starting to come out.

The west & EU has never been serious about stopping the conflict. It simply benefits their economies too much being able to support both sides.

The war has hurt Europe's economy waaaaay more than it has helped and increased gas prices tanked Biden's approval numbers which are more important to a president than just the economy. This is very strained analysis

[Snuffleupagus]

Revenge:

Ukrainian shelling kills 20 Russian civilians.

You kill my civilians I kill yours

[Itse]

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.

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.

[CliffFletcher]

The sanctions were always going to be leaky because most of the world isn’t onboard with them. The West doesn’t dominate global trade and foreign affairs the way it did 20 or 30 years ago. Two-thirds of the people in the world live in countries that are neutral or Russia-leaning, including China, India, Brazil, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and South Africa.

Sanctions are hurting Russia, and Russian people are feeling the pinch. But they haven’t crippled the country’s economy.

[Itse]

There's a very real chance that without the sanctions, Russia would have won the war already.

Sure their military has massive problems, but if they'd been able to throw piles of money at those problems, things might be very different today.

[Cheese]

https://twitter.com/user/status/1741736433293967399

https://twitter.com/user/status/1741836278927065587

https://twitter.com/user/status/1741785510119424360

https://twitter.com/user/status/1741613065114664977

https://twitter.com/user/status/1635443155150544898

https://twitter.com/user/status/1741838161259446590

[Cheese]

https://twitter.com/user/status/1742097067277787418

https://twitter.com/user/status/1742120517048410116

https://twitter.com/user/status/1742110860690989275

https://twitter.com/user/status/1742108261329809520

https://twitter.com/user/status/1742093214322970728

[burn_this_city]

https://twitter.com/user/status/1742219808567960054

https://twitter.com/user/status/1742217579303772338

[Cheese]

https://twitter.com/user/status/1742354683622994292

NSFW!

https://twitter.com/user/status/1742492162976076132

https://twitter.com/user/status/1742088896307925406

[Cheese]

https://twitter.com/user/status/1742909106921320567

https://twitter.com/user/status/1742841146919801273

https://twitter.com/user/status/1742450494394565103

[Leondros]

Crazy, by my count that's roughly 25 - 30 SU 34s lost out of a total of 150 they have.

[TKB]

How the heck do the Russians even have any equipment left? If those numbers are even remotely accurate they can’t have much more operational equipment.

[Cheese]

https://twitter.com/user/status/1742940305949880453

https://twitter.com/user/status/1742955951232028746

https://twitter.com/user/status/1742647265167028646

[Bill Bumface]

Originally Posted by Cheese

https://twitter.com/user/status/1742647265167028646

1. How does he sit down with balls that big?

2. I find Kazakh people such a fascinating blend of Slavic and Asian.

[FlamesAddiction]

Originally Posted by Cheese

https://twitter.com/user/status/1742647265167028646

When people talk about the Holodomor, it sometimes gets forgotten that Kazakhs were also huge victims in that genocide. Some people call it the Kazakh Famine, but there is a movement with some Kazakh and Ukrainian organizations to have them remembered and acknowledged under the same umbrella.

The total number of people killed and displaced in Kazakhstan was smaller than in Ukraine, but it actually had a larger impact on the demographics of the country as more than half of all ethnic Kazakhs died.

They are in a difficult situation though because of geography. Looking West is more difficult when you are wedged between Russia, China, and the Middle East. It's kind of forced them to accept an association with Russia.

[Huntingwhale]

Originally Posted by TKB

How the heck do the Russians even have any equipment left? If those numbers are even remotely accurate they can’t have much more operational equipment.

IMO it's just fuggin' disgusting to have that many weapons on hand with the sole purpose of causing physical destruction and death. That goes for the US too. Humanity doesn't need to be like this, but here we are. So gross that massive amounts of killing machines like this exist.

[undercoverbrother]

Originally Posted by Cheese

https://twitter.com/user/status/1742955951232028746

The smell of that, I can ####ing smell it.

We treated a woman that was “rescued” from a minefield.

She was covered in maggots and was walking around looking for a mine to die.

I will never forget that day or that woman.

[curves2000]

Originally Posted by TKB

How the heck do the Russians even have any equipment left? If those numbers are even remotely accurate they can’t have much more operational equipment.

Russia has made a profound switch to full on manufacturing as much military gear as possible and it seems to be working.

They may have mountains of equipment in storage and more but their ability to produce appears to be very strong considering. What they may lack, they are able to procure from other allied sources.

I am fully on Team Ukraine but it's become obvious to me that a lot of the experts who were predicting and discussing a lack of Russian equipment may be out of touch. We heard lot's of stories about WW2 caliber tanks, machine guns from the 50's, "Old Soviet crap" and more.

What frustrates me is that despite all the above, Ukraine is still in a very challenging fight. The West has trained a lot of troops, sent over billions and billions in high quality equipment, provided very high level intelligence and technical knowhow and a whole lot more.

It's frustrating that despite everything Ukraine isn't making the gains it needs to. Russia seems to have been able to mitigate enough western tech, military doctrine and tactics and more.

Sad but it still appears to be that Russia can still get stuff done on the battlefield despite losses that are mind blowing.