Quote (Black XistenZ @ Dec 30 2023 01:40pm)
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.
As you might remember, I've (mostly) been against the economic sanctions since the get go. ;)
Agreed, but that's a really big IF. I, for my part, highly doubt that Russia will thrive economically anytime soon.
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...
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.)
Too much to respond to, so ill keep it to a few things.
1.They control most of the valuable parts of Ukraine, which is most of the Donbass (which has gas, oil and other minerals) and Crimea which has extremely high strategic importance to them. It doesn't matter since when they hold that territory, if they cared about just gobbling random land mass there's sparsely populated territory in north of Kharkov and Sumy that could be taken.
2.Our billions and their billions are not the same. They get way more bang for their buck because our industry is parasitic and profit maximizing in nature. The corpos basically get blank checks and charge the US government whatever they like. Thats how we end up running low on supplies of 155mm shells even though we far outspend them, to the tune of almost 10:1.
3. They largely specialize in a few industries. Things which they previously bought from outside like chips, sophisticated drugs, medical machinery, high end engineering, etc they can turn and have been turning to India and China. They never really had competitive advantages in those anyways so no great loss.
4.GDP is a dumb metric to use here and this has been fleshed out already. A lot of stupid people keep repeating that because their economy is the size of Italy then that somehow makes them small and weak. The reality is, GDP can be easily manipulated because it's predicated on dollar denominated wealth, which can easily be inflated by printing trillions. What they do have is an endless abundance of natural resources that will always be in demand, which IMO is not true of the various fiat currencies we have today i.e. dollar, euro, whatever that continue to be debased.