this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2024
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I think it's scary that the Russian Federation will probably "Balkanize" if Ukraine won't capitulate, and with how many nuclear weapons it has, that's terrifying to consider.
Then again, they probably don't work very well given what we've seen about the performance of the so-called "2nd/3rd most powerful army on Earth". But even a few potentially in the hands of an even more unhinged maniac than Putin is unsettling, to say the least.
We've seen missiles taking off and getting intact to all parts of Ukraine, then exploding.
Their precision was far worse than advertised by Russian state propaganda, but that's irrelevant.
A nuclear weapon doesn't have to be more precise than needed to hit an average county, in US terms.
Also the Russian economy has done nothing of the sort. Its good, nice things dependent on Western companies have died, say, cars production.
But even in their advertised form sanctions work on the span of decades, not years or months.
The performance of the Russian military was what you say in 2022, but now it is good enough for Russia to be making advances in Ukraine now. Ukraine is bleeding.
This is easily solvable by Western troops being sent to the grinder (one can do that unofficially - everyone does) on a bigger scale. For whatever reason this doesn't happen.
About performance of the Russian military ... I'm not sure you realize how much experience matters. Humans are soft, unreliable creatures. A learning structure created by most experienced, intelligent, honest humans will decay over time if it's not checked against reality, that being war. And war against a military close to its equal, not against someone much weaker.
Russian military in 2022 was very different from what it is now. So was Ukrainian military, but like I said, Ukraine is bleeding.
My point is that both militaries in experience (not talking about anything else) will be among the best in the world when this war ends.
Yes, I know how nuclear weapons work, and usually a MIRV delivers warheads to airburst over military bases and population centers.
I didn't make this claim that the Russian economy has evaporated. The person I responded to did.
What I actually think is that Putin is largely fucked if he can't convince Xi to create and enforce using an alternative to petro-dollars and SWIFT to BRICS.
Even if the North Koreans he's recently imported help him take Kyiv, he will need money to keep his proverbial boot heel on a guaranteed drawn out Ukrainian insurgency that will never let his army sleep.
Drawn out insurgency is something that won't happen the way you are talking about it, Chechens have already tried.
Admittedly, it was harder to feel compassion to them for the general population outside of Chechnya, because those "revered freedom fighters" even in the years of their "almost independence" would have people lynched on the streets, do kidnappings and slavery and what not. They were similar to ISIS.
Our world is, ahem, very complex. Propaganda may be clearly insincere, but match the general direction of what the population knows and how it feels.
Getting back to Ukraine - I feel that Putin's goal is not occupying whole of Ukraine, it's making it subservient.
About him being largely fucked - I remember people in 2008 saying that the whole of the Russian regime are dumb thieves and are largely fucked. I wouldn't such things about people holding such amounts of power for so many years.
well the fall of the udssr was a joy so i expect part 2 to be great aswell. from what i understand the russians also want to buy mcdonalds, iphone and porsche and not live gulag life. when hitler was dead all of a sudden my fellow germans werent into nazi shit much. once putin gets to eat bullets chances are good russians lose interest in killing their neighbours. stupid russians.
I wonder what the secret baltic/polish/sauce is that they improved so fast after the fall of the wall?
Why are moldova/ukraine/belarus struggling.
As you mention, the balkans haven't experienced the same rate of improvement after the fall of the ottomans.
Honest answer, fear of Russia. Baltic states and Poland know first hand that given a chance Russia would gobble them up so they focused on getting into NATO and EU while Russia was still weak.
Moldova, Ukraine and Belarus stuck with CIS (Russian sphere of influence) and it hasn't paid off for them. Ukraine got what Baltic states and Poland feared (which is why they're one of the biggest supporters of Ukraine) and Moldova went "oh fuck, Russia can't be trusted" as they decided to go down the path of leaving the CIS and joining EU and NATO.
The countries who decided to embrace the west got a better deal than the ones who decided to stick with Russia.