Quote (ofthevoid @ 30 Dec 2023 03:08)
If this war ends with Russia fully maintaining all of the captured territory while it's opponents crowd sourced hundreds of billions without dislodging them from those gains, silly to frame that as an embarrassment. I'm trying to think back in history where a country/empire captures this amount of territory and it's framed as an embarrassing loss, help me out?
Virtually all of the territory they gained was taken either during the first couple of days of this invasion, when Russia still kinda had the element of surprise, and when Ukraine did not have hundreds of billions worth of Western military equipment at its disposal yet. Or they were taken after the Russian artillery had bombed them into the absolute ground.
Holding ground against an enemy who does not have air dominance, after you've had half a year to fortify your positions (because your enemy's allies were too slow and reluctant to fuel his counteroffensive), is neither surprising nor something to write home about.
The "hundreds of billions of Western arms supplies for Ukraine"-talking point is peak silliness, considering that the Russians pumped at least the same amount of resources into this war. If we had sent the Ukrainians 80 F16 jets, thousands of top-notch cruise missiles and hundreds of cutting-edge tanks, and the Russians had held off the counteroffensive anyhow, then they would have a reason to celebrate.
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Outside the military sphere, we're 2 years since sanctions that would crush Russia were implemented.
As you might remember, I've (mostly) been against the economic sanctions since the get go.
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If they survive economically and lets say actually thrive once this is over, it will be viewed as a pretty strong blow to US led western hegemony.
Agreed, but that's a really big IF. I, for my part, highly doubt that Russia will thrive economically anytime soon.
Quote (ofthevoid @ 30 Dec 2023 14:13)
Their manufacturing is fine, and is adapting to making it work without outside components. This actually makes their domestic manufacturing stronger in the long run as it serves to repatriate and bootstrap key industries.
No. This makes their manufacturing more resilient and self-sustaining, but it doesn't necessarily make it stronger or more competitive. The reality is that Russian manufacturing (as well as other industries) will fall even further behind technologically than they already were to begin with. Their cars have regressed to the technological state that Western and Asian carmakers had during the 90s...
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The extreme controls you mentioned are a drop in the bucket compared to the financial house of cards and financial engineering we have here tbh. Russian debt/GDP is 15%, they have a lot of runway in the future if they ever needed to use financial levers.
Their GDP is almost entirely built on the extraction of oil and natural gas though. And their GDP per capita is far lower than that of Western countries. We can borrow $100k per capita and our debt to GDP ratio goes from 90% to 100% or so; if Russia does the same, their debt to GDP ratio skyrockets from 15% to 80%. (Numbers not exact, just for illustrative purposes.)
This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Dec 30 2023 12:42pm