Someone said it well yesterday: whenever Ukraine begins badly losing ground on the battlefield, they launch into a new propaganda campaign seeking to deride some major aspect of Russia’s operation.
The FED would monitize a mere single $Trillion in a nanosecond and the markets wouldn't even blink. Saudi would have to demand payment in gold and silver for their oil to really shake the apple cart.
The shell scam production figures quoted by the EU’s are matched by the scam figures for the drone initiatives being presented
“”"Better not help"
High-ranking officers of the Ukrainian Armed Forces are so dissatisfied with the quality of drones from Latvia that they urge them not to be sent.
This is due to the fact that manufacturers do not care about the quality of their products. They will still be purchased for a lot of money by the Latvian Ministry of Defense and sent to Ukraine, reports Baltijas Balss, citing the local publication Pietiek.””
The UK ex Prime Minister in January and Grant Shapps ex Defence Minister in Febuary announced to a great deal of PR a new and famous Drone Production Initiative to invest £200M to supply great quantities of drones -‘thousands’ - to the Ukraine
If the PR was overdone, £200M is hardly going to make a scratch of difference, the drones were underdone, according to the same Ukie soldiers who had to reject the US drones as ‘very low quality and over expensive’, they had to reject the UKLatvia drones for the same reasons
All the more surprising that the Latvians, like the ynakees, insist on sending their no use already rejected drones to Ukraine – the explanation being that the arms manufacturers, having not succeeded in selling directly, hit upon a system of bribes to persuade the Brits and the Latvian Defence Ministers to buy their useless drones and force feed them to the angry Ukrainians, who now have to offload them on another sucker (Poland why not)
This rhymes with Rheinmetall and general EUUS MIC practices
‘When talking to representatives of the Ukrainian armed forces about the Latvian "drone coalition", the following information is received - we would like to receive drones from Latvia, but please just buy us the drones we need, and do not send us expensive local products to the front that are completely useless. Many Ukrainian military personnel openly wonder why the Latvian state is wasting taxpayers' money and buying useless drones at all costs.
Since I am well acquainted with the local military industry, I asked them these questions and, believe it or not, I received quite interesting answers and comments about the "drone coalition" led by Spruds. It turns out that many local drone manufacturers are not too worried about not being able to directly supply their drones to Ukraine anymore, because through state procurement they can now "sell" their drones for big money to the Latvian state, and the state will give these expensive and useless drones as a big gift to the Ukrainian armed forces. Isn't that a cool business?”
EUUK propaganda – headed up by the FT and the late Grant Shapps – so poor a liar that even the English had to reject him in their last election
Grant Shapps --“The UK continues to do all we can to give Ukraine what it needs – upping our aid to £2.5bn this year and committing £200m to manufacture drones, making us Ukraine’s largest drone supplier.
Today, we’re going even further. I’m proud to announce that the UK and Latvia will co-lead an international coalition to build Ukraine’s vital drone capabilities. Together, we will give Ukraine the capabilities it needs to defend itself and win this war, to ensure that Putin fails in his illegal and barbaric ambitions.”
The Foreign Affairs article is the typical up close and sentimental plucky underdog story the US ruling class loves to shovel at it’s workers – ‘they got the guts, the techs, the smarts, all they need is some more of your money’
The problem is that, unlike Russia, China could not survive sanctions as harsh as those placed on Russia. But the question would be whether anyone paid attention to them. At that point, it's pretty much WW3 and I doubt people are going to be joining the side of the West.
- while the (US) dominant class were presented by their hired hands- bureaucrats, pols, 'intelligence' agencies- with what appeared as an easy victory in a war launched against Russia, and a very useful training ground, watch out lesson, and pit of resources for the main event - war on China
-this turned out to be a dismal failure, the result of ignorance and illusion on the part of the neos
Moreover had as one notable negative result the Joint Declaration pact with China, which clearly offers solidarity and support right up to the live military
-hence quick renewed US pivot to China
China with JD foresee the same degree of autarchy in terms of raw materials, food and energy, as enjoyed previously by Russia only (Hi to you too Kim, I'm thinking of you)
-And count on a sufficient % of the RoW to buy their goods, provide cash flow and support industry, keep the masses well fed and in work
My impression is that the US dominants are not nearly as foolish as their servants in government, and have no illusions about the slim pickings at very best/ likely major military defeats to be had from any war
But intend to use neo con hysteria as propaganda to attempt enough intimidation – crikey! they’re outta control, look at Burning Joe!- to secure the best possible deal from the China dominants, the CCP
Should the dominants wait any longer the SCO/BRICS organisations would develope enough solidarity....etc
It's like boycotting only grocery store you have access to. Yes, shop owner will have to downsize, but you are going to die from hunger. Cutting off China from SWIFT alone will tits up US/Europe overnight
But it's more than that. it's also telling all their other customers if they buy from that grocery store, you will freeze all their cash that are in the banks you run. and if the distributors sell to the grocery store, they will not be able to sell to any of the stores you own etc...
I agree, however that the US/EU will come off far worse than China will. But it will definitely hurt China far more than it did Russia, who actually got stronger.
These long term shifts in capitalist practices (such as offshoring to China) are at first speculative and experimental, involve many strands, companies, banks, administrations, political and diplomatic, then grow gradual, and become coherent only at a certain mass, by which time it is impossible to ascribe particular decisions to specific people
Industry in general is effected, so that no distinction is observed between widgets made with RF imported metal in US, or identical China made widgets, nor between MIC specific screws and civil use screws
As you know no one has succeeded in any attempt ascribe responsibility to specific people or decisons within the US administration, military or corporate world - the system is designed to ensure that this is not possible
Take Boeing as an example of this resilient impenetrability, despite generations of multiple failure at every level, nobody knows nothing
You appear to think that a capitalist economy, and hence politics, is a command economy - with decisions made by a tiny number of people
This is not true - it's a free market economy - the command economy operates in China, and now, in Russia
As for Boeing the decline has been in evidence since the 1990's - one can blame the CEO's exclusively, the large scale shareholders, the banks, the engineers, the middle management, the factory floor supervisors, the inspectors the FAA, Congress, politicians......All are and have been complicit, the numbers of 'names' run into the tens of thousands over 25 years or more
What recently has emerged is the tip of the iceberg
No one, no one at all, was punished, even when the planes went down
If you want to know which administration's changed the laws to make this possible read up on Ronnie rayguns deregulation package, then take a look at the Clinton years. Those two are directly responsible for the current debacle.
1. The most dangerous enemy of the US is not foreign, it is domestic: lobbying firms and shadow-lobbying firms
—such as Antony Blinken's, Avril Haine's, Jen Psaki's, Julianne Smith's WestExec, Victoria Nuland's, Kurt Campbell's, and Victoria Rosenberg's Center for a New American Security (CNAS), and Jake Sullivan's and William Burns's Macro Advisory Partners (MAP))—
who work (externally or internally by having members become appointed to positions within the government administration) to fabricate enemy bogeymen (such as China) and to provoke wars (such as the Ukraine/Russia War) in order to reap profits for the military industrial complex (e.g., Boeing and Raytheon) and the US energy industry (e.g., Exxon).
2. America has failed to heed Eisenhower's warning to American citizens about the danger posed by the military-industrial complex. (Farewell Address to the Nation, 1961.01.17:
3. The Biden/Blinken administration does not want the Ukraine/Russia War to end. Why? Because the administration is infested with former "shadow lobbyists" from the firms WestExec, CNAS, and Albright Stonebridge Group. The clients of those firms include dominant weapons manufacturers and energy companies.
4. The Ukraine/Russia War is extremely good for business for those clients. The War: (a) increases profits for the military industrial complex; (b) increases profits for Exxon and other US companies in the energy industry; and (c) increases US hegemony over Europe, making it subservient to US (Biden/Blinken) interests, such as supporting Israel.
5. The entire script of the US foreign policy regarding Ukraine/Russia appears like it could have been ghostwritten by Exxon, given that Exxon has benefitted from all of the following:
(i) the US provoking Russia to invade Ukraine in order to cause Germany to red-light Nord Stream 2;
(ii) the subsequent sabotage of Nord Stream by Ukrainians;
(iii) the consequent increase in European dependency on the US, including LNG (liquified natural gas);
(iv) restrictive economic sanctions against Russia; and
(v) perpetuation of this geo-political situation by supplying weapons to Ukraine to ensure that the Ukraine/Russia War becomes a Forever War.
"“U.S. domestic production capacity is a shriveled shadow of its former self. Crucial categories of industry for U.S. national defense are no longer built in any of the 50 states. With just 25 well-constructed attacks, using any of a variety of means, an adversarial military planner could cripple much of America’s manufacturing apparatus for producing advanced weapons.”"
I can confirm DJI makes very good drones, there may be a high priced commercial manufacture in the US that makes something decent, but since I don't buy at that price point I do not know.
In fact most if not all consumer drones made in America have gone out of business or converted to commercial sales, where reports do not seem favorable.
Been using drones for photography for over 15 years now, DJI has gone steadily upwards in design and feature set, everything US has gone down.
I haven't seen anything come close to DJI, in fact it's a bit amusing to me that people that build their own and use flight controllers like BLITZ F722 and the others FC's that grew up around small free style drones still struggle to have the reliability of DJI's ancient Naza flight controller, like GPS rescue, a basic feature.
It’s why they say “war is a racket”: it’s all about profits, greed and the reckless waste of human life that they find no value in until it hits close to home…my father said that in Indonesia under Japanese occupation in WW2, the Japanese also used propaganda through radio announcements trying to convince the locals that they were winning when in fact they were losing; the locals heard the truth through word of mouth.
Propaganda is a given by any army at war, but I do wonder how war reports would make their way to the Dutch East Indies when the Japanese lost control of the Pacific ocean after the battle of Midway. Australian Z force troops in Nusa Tengara Timur had long been routed so the progress of hostilies couldn't come from the south either. Where then did the word of mouth come from that your father spoke of. Was he a Dutch POW or indigenous I wonder?
He was living in Indonesia at the time when the Japanese invaded; his family had to flee their plantation to live with relatives in another area; he worked in a rice distribution warehouse; I don’t know all the details but this is what he mentioned, that no one trusted the news because it was controlled at that time by the Japanese, somewhat like today when more people are not trusting the megaphone of the mainstream media’s propaganda anymore, lol. To further the agenda, controlling what the public hear in the news, whether through radio, tv or internet is key; today you can see it when several mainstream sources say exactly the same thing, using the exact same phrases. 🤔
That's true for now. But the EU usually follows US very quickly (just watch EV tariffs, that was hours, not even days) and an EU ban on DJI would be a big hit on Ukraine.
But how would anyone prevent the Uk from buying the drones? There would also to be a 'secret' waiver...etc..to save US face in light of failure to prevent imports
To do so would be more than usually hypocritical for the EUUS given that their own arms etc depend on China imports
UK would be implementing it as well (especially under Starmer).
The problem with Ukrainian drones (and drone parts) is that they are often donated from private initiatives or private sponsors, who would be cut from buying them. Perhaps even big majority of them comes from private initiatives.
If you cut them off the market and leave waivers for governments or big contractors, then the entire process becomes a lot more corrupt and inefficient.
In essence - the DJI ban is probably counterproductive wrt Ukraine, but on the other hand, it could be great propaganda. Which is all that really matters for them.
The U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks announced the Replicator Initiative, a new state-of-the-art line of drones "leveraging a treatable autonomous system in all domains," Hicks explained, mixing her military-ese w/ corporate-speak.
The Replicator program is meant to amass thousands of drones, specifically to counter China: "Replicators are scaled up to overcome the PRC's biggest advantage: mass & magnitude," Hicks said. "More ships, more missiles, more people. For us: more drones."
The crux of DOD initiatives like Replicator is to get AI to the point where it makes the decision to kill based on its algorithm: if p, then q; if x, then y
AI would autonomously choose which target to home in on & how to destroy the target: could be a person, could be equipment, could be a building. The mother-pod is where the drone operator posts up, safely from the kill-zone.
The result? It will be easier to wage war & faster without human beings able to see what's going on, or monitor the data & make decisions.
Initiatives like Replicator are in hype-phase right now. General Atomics Aeronautical has a contract, as does AeroVironment's Swithcblade 600. The AI app is vulnerable to cyber-attacks, so the contractors are trying to work out the bugs. Too, the training modules for these systems are not fine-tuned enough for real life: the modules are sims, but the AI isn't surgical enough to parse sims the way human intelligence can.
What's tough: the Pentagon finds itself on the wrong side of the cost curve when using $2mn boutique & bespoke, not to mention over-engineered, hardware to intercept $50,000 drones made w/ crowd-sourced off-the-shelf parts: the LIDS=Low, slow, unmanned aircraft Integrated Defeat Systems.
They would blame the DoD, and they are right to do so - the DoD can not get anything made
But an industry which can not compete with China made drones at any commercial level can hardly claim to be able to compete with the same China made commercial drones modified for military use
Especially if these are modified by guys actually at the LoC in the war and doing this work in order to save their own lives
At least this is what even the US MSM reports: the Ukie press amplifies reports from their frontline about the uselessness of all foreign made drones except Chinese, and Russian
It seems like the successful Ukie attack drones are mainly modifications of cheap China commercial drones, with say a hand grenade somewhere -
It would be impossible for any dedicated US drone manufacturer, let alone military, to compete anyway, even before DOD rules and regulations
This the point where commercial tech and tactics overcomes military - as the Ansar Allah overcome US warships and oust shipping - this is not terrorism, it's flooding the market wuth a superior product
"Production matters. Production is deterrence," Deputy DOD Minister Kathleen Hicks said to a group of arms manufacturers during OTAN's "Strengthening the Trans-Atlantic Bond" on 10 July in Washington, D.C.
She argued that Western countries can quickly build "arsenals of democracy" since their political systems foster innovation & transnational cooperation while autocracies like Russia & China can not.
But the conflict in Ukraine has revealed holes in industrial war-related production in the West, Senator Jim Risch of Idaho told Hicks @ the OTAN session: the arsenal is a myth.
The Czech president was part of this panel discussion, along w/ the Danish president & also Kaja "I eat Russians for breakfast" Kallas, the outgoing prime minister of Estonia but incoming EU Foreign Affairs Chief.
Kallas did not say, but might have, that the words "military" & "industrial" should never be used in the same sentence.
So, the U.S., that industrial giant (/s), is going to manufacture MORE drones than the SOURCE of most of its componentry, which source it chooses to identify as its enemy..
At manufacturing costs far above said sources costs...
Having a dementia patient as its putative leader is the LEAST of the U.S. idiocies.
"AI would autonomously choose which target to home in on & how to destroy the target:" Lancet is already doing that. It's just like hypersonics and other key technology: the US will finally get it, in an inferior version, about 20 years after Russia deploys it in combat.
Moving the goalposts extraordinaire: MediaZona switches statistical algorithms in mid-stream in order to generate a more tantalizing data stream w/ "flash estimates" that triple what had been MediaZona's figures & accounting in determining Russia's casualties.
When you can't beat them on the battlefield, kill them w/ analytics.
Not even Pythagoras would delight in *death by math*
Nobody has died or will die as a result of skeevy arithmetic
MediaZona's switcheroo, its revised analytics, is a variation on the Russia-Is-Running-Out-of_Missiles lie: Ukraine is winning the war because ! Russia-Is-Running-Out-of-Men !
Concern Trolls have pearls, very clutchable, @ the ready
And a switch in 'target population'. The earlier numbers by Mediazone and BBC-International were aimed at Russian audiences. They needed corroborated numbers, and not made up ones, as a prerequisite to even have a chance of gaining some traction with a Russian audience. Which is also why those numbers almost never appeared in western MSM.
This shift signifies that they have pretty much given up on using (verifiable} Russian casualties as a means of stirring up anti-Putin sentiments within Russia. I predict we're now going to see Mediazone and their estimates appear in western MSM far more often than ever before, as we (in the west) are now their 'target'.
These sort of propaganda efforts used to wrankle me quite a bit. But, at this point, I'm satisfied to listen to idiots spout what they heard on MSNBC, et. al. and the quiet voice in my head reminds me that soon enough it will all be clear (-ish) to them when Russia achieves its victory.
More information on the European shell production scam
The report originates in Ukraine, un surprisingly, as the Ukraine does have an interest in obtaining shells, or suprisingly given that most reports from the Ukraine are dismissed as propaganda
In this case, as in others, both the US and the Brit/Latvian drone scams for example, Ukraine reports look reliable
This shell report originates with these journalists
“The editors of Schem (a Ukrainian project of Radio Liberty), German Die Welt, Czech Investigace.CZ, Polish Vsquare and Frontstory.PL, Finnish Iltalehti, Slovak Ján Kuciak Investigative Center, Dutch The Investigative Desk and Estonian Delfi Estonia worked on this investigation. This international cooperation between newsrooms was supported by the Investigative Journalism for Europe (IJ4EU) foundation.”
At this publication-https://www.radiosvoboda.org/a/skhemy-snaryady-dlya-ukrayiny-yes-porushuye-obitsyanky/33025231.html
Meanwhile RF shell production increases, Bain & Co reports
--with the FT report on drones, which is entirely a bland of ‘it is planned it is hoped’, mixed in with chunky bits starring the plucky Ukie underdog underground basement folklore
They cost around 200-250 before the conflict and only got cheaper since then.
I know, those people don't understand how it actually works and probably believe that if Russians produce 5x the amount, it has to cost 5x per piece. Or something to that effect.
Seriously, almost nobody in the West has any idea how much Russian weapons actually cost and we see ridiculous claims of the kind like $6.5M per Kalibr and whatnot.
I saw on telegram rough estimates from people-in-the-know and they said that 152 is "biggest" part of this heap. If we suppose western analytics only count 152 caliber, then it's incredibly disingenuous, because Russia uses all of it.
And best bang for the buck is MLRS, not artillery, actually (again, from people-in-the-know). So they don't count it? Why? And how exactly they estimate their numbers? All of that is highly classified. They take Russian numbers and fudge it just like Mediazona? I don't trust western numbers at all
Recently I'm noticing that NAFO and Israeli bots on twitter and other places are saying they are willing to fight to the last russian, if you bring up fighting to the last ukrainian. That's fine by me since before they get to the last russian, we will get to the last european and the last american first. I'm also still waiting for them to test their hypothesis that russian nukes don't work.
Excellent work. But small question. Shouldn't your math (below) be calculated only based on an estimate of the adult male population for Zhitomir and all of Ukraine? I think the country has about 10 million males ages 18 to 64 out of a pre-2022 population of about 40 million (which I think is the figure minus the regions that rejoined Russia).
You wrote -- "Zhitomir has an official population of 262,000. Applying the ratio of 2400 dead out of Zhitomir’s 262k population to the entire population of Ukraine (40 million) yields about ~350,000 dead."
Well before 2019 I had read Ukraine has a population around 50 million, so the exodus started long ago. Once the gates were open, for instance, many women of marriage age were seeking mates so they could move on. A lot of Jewish Uke women went there first, but most ended up in the U.S. or Canada after that.
But there are so called vatniks that also exeggerate Ukrainian figures and diminish the Russian losses.
Look at the Poll. You cant put the Russian at 50-100k mark in the same time you think Ukraine lost 1 million. That is wishful thinking. Putin said 1:5. Period. 100 k dead Russian at the maximum and 500k Ukrainians.
They did the trick with Gaza also. First we have Hammas figures. Then a couple of months ago they said you should halve the casualties. Now all of the suDden we should tripple the Hamas figures…
He also said "these are the ones we can confirm." In other words, the disparity is larger but Ruskies don't have proof for any concrete larger number, so in order to win the long-term propaganda war, they're lowballing the figure. When the war ends, the number of Ukie KIA is going to jump even from the Russian estimate.
Wishful thinking. Prigoszin had right, 20+ k dead for Bakhmut/Artemovsk. And if anyone believe that 40% of Russian losses emerge from Artemovsk battle alone, they are beyond help. We also had Mariupol, Avdeevka, Robotyne, Vuledar…We had massacres at Hostomel and the Chechen battlegroup ambushed. Of course there are dead Russians - why do you think they resorted to defensive in 2022 and now only risk single groups in small advances supported by massive artillerybombardment and FAB:s/TOS?
I sincerely hope that neither Russia or Ukraine has those high casualties. They are all humans wasted for nothing. Sacrificed on the Altar of the NATO-God and the only true belief in the West: American exeptionalism.
I understand that Simplicius see the need for debunking Western propaganda but it is a waste of time instead of doing analyses of the situation at the front. Myself, very satisified, with Russia finally destroying some Headquarters. If not false, they wiped out the Air defense command post. But they havent dared to eradicate Western ISR and flying Commandposts over Black Sea. Letting NATO/US assets be ”untouchable” isma mistake.
And during that time, Uke forces have been massively depleted of trained soldiers and equipment. I remember that last year the issue of barrel replacements for Howitzers was an issue for Ukraine. After all, most of their western equipment is probably unserviceable for them. It's easy to imagine that a fraction of their artillery is actually accurate anymore, which sort of pushes the dial on artillery ratios further toward the Russian end of the scale.
the small group attack has een a feature since the start. in Bakhmut it may have been different but that ws wagner. Even in Artemosk the killed assault groups were not large, though they did consist on non Russian regulars, the dPR, and others. Just as Ukraine sends in Russian speakers to die first it does seem Russia does the same with its new recruits from Donas and Lughansk as well as Chechens and ex wagner.
Interesting chart on excess mortality comparing Ukraine and Russia. I went to Our World in Data and found something very similar. Yes, it looks like Ukraine stopped reporting on deaths starting January 31. 2022, while Russia continued on reporting. Ukraine stopped reporting deaths when the Russians attacked. They were too busy I guess. But on these charts we see that excess deaths for both nations fell right before (for Ukraine) and shortly after the attack (for Russia). COVID was not killing as many during this time. During the war period Russian excess deaths rose and fell to almost nothing, and then rose up again recently. But it's nowhere near the excess deaths both nations suffered during COVID. Right now Russia is 18% above what was projected. We don't have data for Ukraine, so nobody knows what their excess death is now. In November of '21 both nations were 85% above the expected death rate. Seems like COVID killed a lot more people every week than the war has.
Covid "kills" are nothing compared to the "COVID vax" kills. Lots of excess mortality work on that done by Edward Dowd (former wall st financial guy/insurance) and by " The Midwestern Doctor"-- Substack column
These sorts of "narrative games" between both sides as to who is suffering more casualties are a direct result of the actual frontline / military situation being - at this moment - somewhat static. While Ru is overruning village after village, the nature of the endless urban agglomerations in eastern Ukraine is such that even with minimal resistance it will be a long grind. Urban warfare through and through.
And there is no real shortcut to victory. I have been wanting/waiting for a Russian hammer blow to put them out of their misery, but in reality no such blow exists. If the Israeli's couldn't do it in a 40 square mile space, with total air superiority, totally surrounding Gaza, unlimited US support, total technological advantage with respect to armored vehicles, artillery, etc, AND their economy being sacrificed and falling off a cliff, AND Hamas having no external support, AND zero consideration for civilian casualties...
Numbers are fungible & therefore feed the "narrative games."
As w/ the Gaza deaths--at first 38,000 then as high as 186,000--the figures themselves are so staggering they paralyze rationality. Then everybody gets lost in the weeds, arguing numbers.
Blinken portrays the LOC as having "stabilized"--that is neither side is gaining. But Russia's Forces are dismantling what were the original Poroshenko lines in 2014/2015: the earliest of fortifications put in place & entrenched as if waiting for this day.
Village by village, it's incremental but significant
Which importantly minimising their own soldiers lives. Unlike Uk where elensky continues to insist on PR stunts for political optics for the NATO countries to think that progress is happening. Just look at Krinki, So many dead AFU just to that the scumbag could say to his western backers see we have crossed the river, just give me more money.
Yes, Blinken et. al. are framing the war as territorial for their benefit, when in fact it is attritional from the Russian side. Any "stable" or "static" comments anywhere including here are only coping.
Yeah, I've also figured out there will be no Big Push from Russians that makes Ukraine collapse in on itself. Maybe in 2026 Ukraine will finally collapse, when so many Ukrainians get killed they don't have anyone on the streets to prevent the murder of recruitment commisars. But there will be no Big Push because such a thing will make many Russians die, and Russia needs to save all the soldiers it can for the big war against NATO. Remember: NATO has more people that Russia. If united under a common government, and mobilized, after 10 years of preparation NATO could rip European Russia to shreads. *That* is the threat Russia needs to prepare itself for.
Why wait? What is 100k dead russian now when you can expect an even bigger War in 10 years time? West has no ammo and yesterday they promised Ukraine 5 more Patriots. They are low on Tanks and IFV:s. They have no clue how to fight a modern battle with FPV:s and drones. They have soldiers celebrating a Rainbow flag and no critical thinking.
There aren't enough Russians in this world to make wanton war on EU. There may or may not be enough EUropeans to make wanton war on Russia. So militarily, a defensive war is favoured.
Furthermore, non-militarily, a sit-and-wait strategy is favored since EU is falling apart. Why attack your enemy when you can simply wait and get the same result? For NATO to be able to credibly attack Russia, it needs to get united. It needs to mobilize. It needs 10 years to prepare. Which of these three do you think has the greatest chance of coming true?
You write against your own comment where you thought Russia must prepare itself…cant discuss with people where discussion leads to ”whack-a-mole” arguments popping up as it fits.
> *That* is the threat Russia needs to prepare itself for.
I'm not writing against it. Russia needs to prepare to kick out EU once it invades. Russia doesn't have enough people to proactively invade EU. Do you want me to quote numbers?
Russia is not so dumb so they invade western europe. You and others are as much warmongers as the Pentagrams in US. And then you must mistrust Putins word.
Because, if things are this bad in Western Military NOW, imagine how much worse they will be 10 years from now??
The only reason NATO Political leaders are muttering about doing this again in 10 years is because THEY will be gone by then, and it's someone else's problem to solve.
Russia can see that far ahead and they KNOW the only thing that will force the West to ACTUALLY DO THE HARD YARDS (Politically and Economically) to set up a war machine, is for Russia to rapidly smash its way to the Polish border, NOW.
True: Russia has to husband its troops right now & economize by grinding slowly forward, thinking toward a clash w/ OTAN.
The OTAN countries have more people than Russia does & presumably boots to put on-the-ground, should it come to that--but Russia has friendly neighbors who would more than likely help even things out if OTAN moved in to mulch Russia.
Peskov has said, and Lavrov too, that a war w/ OTAN would be nuclear, so the math of battlefield troops, the numbers we're contemplating, would be immaterial
NATO countries got close to very little 'boots' together with the arms armour and logistics
See the German Commissioner's report quoted-
Intervention is the domain of NATO Very High Readiness Joint Task Force, claimed elsewhere by NATO to be 40,000 strong, but criticised by the German Commissioner for Armed Forces, responsible for 33% of this force, to be unprepared and un armed
As soon as a plane load of body bags came back after one day of combat in this brutal conflict the public outcry would be immediate. It would not be Afghanistan with 5 or 6 with their country flag covering during the solemn “ramp ceremony.” It would change to 200 plus bags instantaneously bringing home the true reality & horrors of what war is and no number of cheap words about democracy would cover or justify it. All while the next plane was being loaded. And the leaders know it, well I hope.
It has been severely damaged by DEI & wokeism. However, this is also true for all Western armies. A recent female British army officer has been promoted right up the chain of command and is saying that there is to much of a hierarchy in the British Army command system. I think she's yearning for a group hug-a-thon and a collective kumbaya in a super-duper safe space, where everyone can bask in the warm glow of universal love and acceptance. No one's feelings will be left behind, and we'll all frolic together in a field of diversity and inclusion, hand-in-hand, as we march towards a utopia free of any dissent or differing opinions." Follow me, and no misgendering, waving the LGBT flag.
Interesting that the general consensus of the German men in the survey who had similar responses of "why should I fight for this country when the government shows only contempt for me." I know the same feeling are very similar in the UK for young white indigenous men. As an ex-military man myself I certainly would not. For me the enemy is already here.
Yes, if enough people realize that only the ruling class want war because they’re fighting over power and resources , and if they refuse to go overseas, perhaps then another needless world war can be averted. Of course, there is always the chance of a false flag like what happened in Germany in WW2 with the Bundestag in order to stoke enough tension for locals to want to fight. But fighting should only be to defend against invasion of your own country and not go overseas to fight for a foreign leader’s imperial ambitions there, no? Doesn’t it boil down to the military and if they refuse to be used as pawns to be cannon fodder for their “leader” who has an agenda of his own and not actually for the people he is supposed to protect?
It is good to speculate on NATO's numbers based on population size but putting a civilian in a uniform and giving him a gun doesn't make him a soldier. Where exactly are the NATO armies coming from? If you take out Turkiye, which may be a plasible possibility and consider the US military does need to cross the Atlantic crawling with Russian submarines. Where is NATO's great army? Germany, France and UK are in serious economic decline and they are the big three left in NATO. Also adding to that NATO lacks a unified command structure then their are the matters of different equipment, munition and even language.
The difference between the IDF and Russian military is that the Russian military doctrine is based on Red army experience fighting the same type of war during WW2 have done it before against an initially superior German military. The Israeli's doctrine is based off US military experience of bombing civilians with the hope they will inflict enough suffering on the civilian population, so they would turn on the leadership. The huge difference as has been made clear is that the Russians are destroying the Ukrainian military with some collateral damage. While the Israelis are slaughtering a defenceless civilian population while inflicting some Alqasam Brigade and Islamic jihad casualties. The expectations of quick victory in either situation neglects the factor of time. Also no one bothers to ask if the Russian military really wants a quick conclusion to the conflict. Who actually knows the political outcome the Russians want to achieve? The initial Russian objective was to fight a smaller conflict now to prevent a larger war tomorrow. Considering the Red army lost between 7-9 million during the great patriotic war. Who can gage the extent of Russian resolve?
War is a continuation of politics by other means. So I don't actually know the full calculus of the Russian plan, and neither does anyone outside of the general staff and putin. But, I agree, nobody should bet against the Russians.
The reason why in the 60s and 70s western attitude towards the then USSR was sane was because the memory of how the Russians beat the nazis was still part of the collective psyche, that love them or hate them whatever you do, don't go to war with then (russians). The current generation of western leaders unfortunately were forged during the late 80s and 90s where Russia was in a bad state. This kind of general narrative is surprisingly hard to shake. I am guilty of it too: I was as surprised as anyone to see how effectively Hamas are fighting for example, my narrative was forged during the generation of incompetence of Arab armies during the 70s/80s/90s
Hamas is an idea, that grew out of the oppression of the Palestinian people, us believing it or not does not matter, the Palestinians believe they are oppressed. Ideas cannot be destroyed with bombs and bullets, they can only be replaced by other ideas. The Israeli approach was doomed to fail as it left no choice, for even those who were vehemently opposed to Hamas, but to defend themselves and family from the IDF that were killing indiscriminately. The Soviet peoples, along with the rest of the world were always allured by the western lifestyle. The Hollywood marketing sold the world the perfect life, but like the phrase "the grass is always greener on the other side" you realize you only need to get their to realize the grass is greener on the other side. The conflict in Ukraine is much greater than just what is happening on the ground, it is basically a battle ideology between one group wanting to maintain control of the majority and the majority unwilling to be subjugated.
And the definitive erasure of the memory about WW2, specifically about how it was USSR that won it, also plays a role in what you said. There's a famous graph with polls in France in 1945, late XX century and today, where figures for "Who contributed the most?" are shockingly telling.
The Russians have (or had) a fairly sizeable professional army which has grown considerably since 2022. The Israeli army by comparison is quite small, relying on mobilization of the civilians population s during wartime. This is one of the biggest differences IMHO. Given the population differential the Russians can sustain a conflict far longer than the Israelis. The Resistance understand this well and were set up to ensure a sustained conflict over an extended period, knowing the Israeli Achilles heel.
The entire idea of conscription is to have a reserve army in case you need to mobilize.
It's this reserve army which is going to win the war.
Any professional army you have is going to be at least somewhat top-heavy (too many officers and generals) and while it can be elite, it won't have enough numbers.
The quality of your low-quality forces (meaning - the mobilized forces) is going to be the deciding factor in a big conflict. And that's something you can massively improve by conscription.
In theory, Israel does indeed have a very good system. The quality of conscripts the system produces, seems to be another question. Probably related to the low quality of their professional forces.
Bash - Russia's objective is for a functioning, smaller Ukraine Region to remain and do its own thing without nazis/nato/annoying the bear by talking about Crimea etc.
By nibbling, Russian can reduce Ukraine to precisely the point where they surrender on Russia's terms.
The longer Russia draws it out, the more their army is seasoned & their tech cutting edge.
Every attack opens a window for a counter, and Russia is building cauldrons here, not kiosks
"These sorts of "narrative games" between both sides" Not exactly. US society is so totally dependent on telling the big lie in everything, as the essential aspect of communications, that they believe every other society is also a post-truth society. They just don't get it that Russia isn't like that.
The key difference is that Russians endured over 70 years of total lies under the Communists, a time when the entire society was based on lies and if you didn't chip in and also lie during the more repressive times you'd get shot or sent to the gulag. It's very hard to find anybody in Russia who does not have a relative in their family tree who wasn't repressed in some way.
As a result, Russians are total cynics about government and what government says. The current administration knows that, and they know that the moment they tell any lies to the people they lose them forever. They deal with that in a simple way: they either don't say anything, or they tell the truth. I live in Russia and we don't have the constant saturation of 24/7 propaganda for morons that you get in the US.
Russia doesn't play any narrative games about casualties. It doesn't officially publish casualty figures, so there's absolutely no lies like Zelensky spouted about only 31,000 killed in action. When Russia comments on nazi casualties, it's usually part of military briefings that are extremely careful to report only verified (as in bodies collected or clearly counted on surveillance imagery) casualties, or in the case of estimates, "up to x number" figures that are always conservative estimates.
On rare occasions, high administrative figures give estimates of enemy casualties but those are always in my experience undercounts. Putin, for example, always seems to cite estimates that are at the very low range of consensus estimates among credible military analysts in Russia.
There is a Russian hammer blow that exists, by the way, but the reason Russia does not use it is that it works against Russia's bigger goals. Far more important than Ukraine to Russia is the continuing development of Russia's economy and positioning Russia for a win in the larger war against the US. Russia can easily maintain the current pace in Ukraine while still growing the Russian economy faster than the US's and faster than any US ally.
Russia also does not want to increase the intensity of the war because that would end up killing ethnic Russians in Ukraine. A slower tempo gives civilians time to escape their role as human shields.
Finally, Kiev is sustained 100% by Western arms and money. A "hammer blow" that would destroy the Kiev regime in weeks would be to strike NATO assets supporting Kiev. Some of that may happen anyway, like downing AWACS aircraft, but obviously taking such steps leads to general war that would impede Russia's economic development as Russia would like.
In the meantime, a slower tempo works fine for Russia: it gives the country time to systematically build a highly experienced army that are the world experts at destroying US and NATO arms and tactics, and time to build military production and logistics chains that will allow Russia to tear the guts out of NATO countries in a conventional war. It also provides plenty of time for Russia to destroy the weapons that the US and NATO send into Ukraine, depleting their inventories, so when it comes time for Russia to tear the guts out of NATO countries they'll find themselves very short on arms.
By the way, I don't agree that Israel has failed in Gaza. On the contrary, they've made very good progress at their obvious goal of destroying Palestinian society, taking territory from Palestinians in the West Bank and throughout the region, and starting the process of removing Palestinians entirely from the land Israel intends to take in the Gaza Strip. The creeps who run Israel are taking a long term view of the matter.
Interesting remarks and thanks re: Russia etc. I think the biggest weakness of the country is demographic; population too low and birth rate too low, and frontline casualties aren't helping
As for Israel & Gaza, respectfully, if you told me a year ago that 1) after 9 months of total war, Hamas would still be intact and 2) That Iran, in a highly telegraphed and limited strike was able to penetrate Israel's vaunted missile defenses with ease and 3) Hezbollah has been able to turn northern Israel into an uninhabitable no mans land... I would have asked you what you were smoking.
"I think the biggest weakness of the country is demographic; population too low and birth rate too low, and frontline casualties aren't helping"
Respectfully disagree. Russia's population at a nominal 150 million (it's actually more) is more than enough for critical mass to be self-sufficient, especially considering the makeup of that society as well as the makeup of the economy.
Russia is not a welfare state so a far higher percentage of the population than in the West is productive and contributing to a stronger economy. In the US, a rough rule of thumb is that about half of the population are takers, not producers, with a big percentage of people who in some key ways are living on the dole, such as welfare. There's no welfare in Russia, and even the elderly living on pensions in Russia are often "working pensioners" who continue to work well into their 70's. Russia has fewer people than the US, but a much greater percentage of them are productive so the net difference between productive people, the ones that count in conflicts, is less than the raw population numbers would indicate.
Russia's economy is a production economy far more than it is a service economy. The US economy, as with many EU economies, is no longer based primarily on industry but instead based more on services, with the prime driver of wealth creation being financialization. Although Russia's economy is smaller than the US's, the higher proportion of it which is involved in actual production, which counts in conflicts, means the economy has more heft to it in a war than the raw GDP PPP might indicate.
Russia also has the advantage of being the world's energy, food, and resources superpower. It needs absolutely nothing from the US or the EU, while EU states have crippling dependencies on imported energy and resources.
A further contrast is that Russia's economy is more agile than the US's. Russia is a more free market country than the US (hence my handle, and why I moved here) so it can scale production, including military production, faster and with greater flexibility than can the US. A good example is Lancet, which is a private company funded by venture capital without a single ruble of government money in it. It came out of nowhere in just a few months with literally game-changing drone technology.
Population, by the way, in Russia has dramatically increased since the war started in 2014, and especially since 2022. Millions of Ukrainians immigrated to Russia from 2014 to 2022. Ukraine was always majority Russian speaking, so when the nazi regime started persecuting people for speaking Russian many of the smarter ones pulled up and moved to Russia. Since 2022 millions of people have joined Russia as a result of the referenda in Kherson, Zaporozhiye, Donetsk and Lugansk provinces. Russia is also a big immigration destination for people from the Central Asian countries, like the various 'stans on or near Russia's border.
Front line casualties are too low to make any difference, but considering the millions of Ukrainian immigrants alone the net balance between immigration and casualties is strongly in favor of population growth. That population growth is from ethnically Russian people who speak Russian, have exactly the same culture, watch the same TV shows and listen to the same music, go to the same churches, and buy the same brands. For ethnic Russians moving from Kiev to Ekaterinburg there's literally no more difference in culture or lifestyle than some Russian person moving from Vladimir or Moscow to Ekaterinburg, except that the Russian from Kiev gets the relief of finally being free of repression from a nationalist nazi Ukrainian speaking minority.
That touches on another point where the raw population numbers don't tell the tale: social unity and support for the nation counts for a lot in conflicts, and despite the incredible variety in ethnicities and religions the people of the Russian Federation (RF) have astonishing unity coupled with fanatic support for Russia. The world last saw that in action in war on a big scale in WW2, and people who actually go to the front can see it in action today in war: the unity of RF troops despite the very wide range of ethnicities is astonishing, and the commitment, which you can see from the 1000+ volunteers per day, is also astonishing. Given general war there will be millions of people from all over Russia which will volunteer and be ready to fight to the death to ensure Russia wins.
There is obviously no such commitment, not remotely so, in Ukraine. The hard core nazis who powered the coup in 2014 have been mostly killed. From 2014 to 2022/23 there were enough of them to dominate the Russian speaking majority, and there are still enough of them to control a disarmed citizenry, but as casualties mount they'll have a harder time imposing their will on the majority. Nobody wants to fight so the nazi elite can continue looting Western donations to buy yet more villas in Italy.
Considering Europe overall, I see no willingness in the EU for people to volunteer by the millions to get slaughtered in local re-enactments of the killing of 500,000+ Ukrainian men. The great majority just want peace and would prefer to get back to a life of exploiting Russian tourists by selling them shoddy, overpriced products and package tours.
In Israel, I think the government's stated objective of wiping out Hamas is mostly air cover for their real objective, which is wiping out the Palestinians. If they can reduce the Palestinian population in Gaza from two million to just one million while achieving the greatest expansion into formerly Palestinian lands since the 1940's, well I think they would consider that a win. That's especially so because Israel has gotten away with genocide without anybody but the Houthis in Yemen doing anything about it. Their war on Palestinians hasn't gone as smoothly as they would like, but overall they're getting their way: making life impossible for Palestinians in Israel.
They know by destroying the infrastructure of any possible Palestinian state in Gaza they've set a very solid foundation for further reduction of the Palestinian population, making life so impossible within Israel that, sooner or later, the Palestinians will leave, or failing that, die. The racist government of Israel doesn't really care about Hamas. All it cares about is ethnically cleansing Israel of everybody who is not like them.
I defer to your local knowledge of the country. You know it better, so I accept your statements.
Regarding GDP and economic figures, I often have this argument with people who go on about how Western GDP is so much greater than Russia's, to which I respond with this parable: If one country is full of car manufacturers, and another is full of car dealerships, the country of car dealerships will post a higher GDP than the country of manufacturers, but which is the more productive nation? Foxconn may be monetarily less valuable than Apple, but if a war broke out between China and the US, Apple will be making exactly 0 hardware for the war effort.
Back in 2006 or so I remember attending lots of seminars about the Russian entrepreneurial / VC boom, lots of incredible stories. Now am at a stage of life where I put a lot of money into ventures from pre-seed all the way to series C or D, would love to be able to tap into Ru ecosystem. Maybe one day.
Russia's gone through several different cycles of VC investment, but for most of the past 25+ years Russian VC money was invested in the West. A year or two before 2022 I remember reading an article claiming that something like 30% of the VC money on Sand Hill Road in Palo Alto was Russian, including even the Russian government's sovereign wealth fund.
That's all changed since Russia invaded in Ukraine as Russian investors have been forced out of Western VC funds, with most of that Russian money being repatriated to Russia. Extreme Russophobia in the West also has caused many Russian investors to repatriate funds. They're not interested in investing in countries which seize their yachts, their mansions, their bank accounts, and their shares.
Things are moving so fast it's hard to get other than anecdotal evidence, but it seems clear that one result of a couple of hundred billion dollars being repatriated to Russia is the boom in industrial development and entrepreneurial activity that's been going on the last two years. That's also been fueled by the withdrawal of hundreds of Western companies, which have left huge market niches in which well-funded new ventures (or expansions of older ventures) can grab market share.
But I have to say that if you're interested in investing the local competition is fierce. I've been to a few conferences in Moscow just to see what was going on in various industries and I found the sophistication, wealth, and sheer power of the local investing community off the charts. But if you speak Russian (or have a very good translator with you all the time) there are lots of opportunities even if you're not going to get into one of the big plays. But I think you have to commit to spending a lot of time here, even living here for several months or a year or so, to get into the swing of it.
There's also the significant problem of sooner or later cashing out of your investment and moving your money out of Russia back into the West. The biggest obstacles there I think will be a crazed West, which is going to be looking for reasons to confiscate whatever you've earned on some pretext or other. After all, you've helped their enemy.
That's quite well-put, dare I say. Indeed, it feels very close to how I see it, except for the final take. Investing in Russia from the West, I reckon, is a way to diversify and reserve, for there might come a day when all your other assets turn to smoke and dust. If withdrawing and reinvesting are your top priorities, then you probably shouldn't, because you'll put yourself at risk more than you yield. If you're willing to create a reserve airfield, to pack your toothbrush and leave for it on the next Black Thursday when people will be jumping out the windows of their offices, now that's a reason. Tasty and That's It, ex-McDonalds, reported eightfold rise in profits compared to when Americans were running the food chain. That's crazy. It shows how deep the top soil actually is. But its greatest quality is that it's compartmentalized from the Western economy, however globalization allows for it. Therefore it's not your typical "colonial" kind of investment, when you put funds someplace across the planet but then inevitably withdraw them to metropoly. It's kind of a reserve asset that can run independently in a completely isolated environment and provide you with support should your main system fail utterly in 1929-esque style. Which isn't as unviable as it seemed just a while ago.
So true on your last point, and frankly it has limited my interest accordingly. I have a lot of Russian friends though who travel in and out of the city I live in, and i hear a lot. Its certainly more interesting than the endless stream of SaaS / Fintech / ESG startups that flood my inbox... so boring really. I was supposed to visit last October but changed plans last minute. Maybe will try again. Thanks for your comments & all the best
Hey, you can finance my dream enterprise of doormat manufacturing from expired tires in Moscow Oblast, haha!
On a serious note, the boom is back on in several fields, particularly drone tech and components. But given how sensitive they are for the war effort, I wonder if there is a way for much of venturing investment. Still, I heard of a norm regarding how much foreign capital should be here or there for the company's to be considered this or that, so at least some legal framework must be in place. Never really looked into it though so can't tell anything definitive, but it's certainly there.
You caught the scrap tire bug eh? Back in 2009 I went down that rabbithole of trying to extract fuel from them; and use the rest as building materials. Save yourself Andy, for here there are only monsters. Jokes aside - best of luck!
You still take a decidely economics view of the TFR rate, whereas it is obvious that population decline is a serious problem from all points of view and not merely an economic
The various RF programs have arrested this decline, and even very slightly reversed it, but the rate is , I believe, around 1.82, still way below the 2.1 necessary
Temporary Immigration Palliatives---The immigration from Ukraine, yes - but I understand there are various initiatives set to reduce immigration from Central Asia, on the grounds that too much such destabilises
Any palliative like immigration much lauded by Joe Biden as America First needs to be explained for the temporary only solution it is
"As a result, Russians are total cynics about government and what government says. The current administration knows that, and they know that the moment they tell any lies to the people they lose them forever. "
A hard lesson but one that was well learned. Hopefuly the NewSA will absorb this.
Not so sure maintaining the narrative has to be about Ukraine "winning" the war. I think the sales pitch to the West to keep the money & weapons flowing only needs to be that Ukr is inflicting damage on Russia, whether by terrorism, depleting the military, really any sort of loss or harm is enough.
From the nytimes on 9 July: "Russian forces are inflicting pain, but NATO leaders gathering in Washington can say their efforts to strengthen Ukraine are working."
The FED would monitize a mere single $Trillion in a nanosecond and the markets wouldn't even blink. Saudi would have to demand payment in gold and silver for their oil to really shake the apple cart.
The shell scam production figures quoted by the EU’s are matched by the scam figures for the drone initiatives being presented
“”"Better not help"
High-ranking officers of the Ukrainian Armed Forces are so dissatisfied with the quality of drones from Latvia that they urge them not to be sent.
This is due to the fact that manufacturers do not care about the quality of their products. They will still be purchased for a lot of money by the Latvian Ministry of Defense and sent to Ukraine, reports Baltijas Balss, citing the local publication Pietiek.””
The UK ex Prime Minister in January and Grant Shapps ex Defence Minister in Febuary announced to a great deal of PR a new and famous Drone Production Initiative to invest £200M to supply great quantities of drones -‘thousands’ - to the Ukraine
If the PR was overdone, £200M is hardly going to make a scratch of difference, the drones were underdone, according to the same Ukie soldiers who had to reject the US drones as ‘very low quality and over expensive’, they had to reject the UKLatvia drones for the same reasons
All the more surprising that the Latvians, like the ynakees, insist on sending their no use already rejected drones to Ukraine – the explanation being that the arms manufacturers, having not succeeded in selling directly, hit upon a system of bribes to persuade the Brits and the Latvian Defence Ministers to buy their useless drones and force feed them to the angry Ukrainians, who now have to offload them on another sucker (Poland why not)
This rhymes with Rheinmetall and general EUUS MIC practices
Annexe Links and Quotes
The orginal post – with thanks to S
https://nitter.poast.org/Zlatti_71?cursor=DAABCgABGRzyi4j__30KAAIZG7ZxBlbwyAgAAwAAAAIAAA
US Drone failures
https://www.wsj.com/world/how-american-drones-failed-to-turn-the-tide-in-ukraine-b0ebbac3
https://www.wsj.com/video/series/shelby-holliday/how-the-us-is-racing-to-build-a-drone-fleet-to-compete-with-china/1FEACA70-E0D1-4CE8-BC6F-A4BBC93CBFAE
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/04/11/drones-china-us-manufacturing/
US reaction to this is to ban the import of Chinese drones
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/dji-drone-ban-passes-in-us-house-countering-ccp-drones-act-would-ban-all-dji-sales-in-us-if-passed-in-senate
A Latvian realist
https://bb.lv/statja/politika/2024/07/03/pietiek-ukraincy-prosyat-ne-prisylat-im-latviyskie-drony-oni-bespolezny#google_vignette
‘When talking to representatives of the Ukrainian armed forces about the Latvian "drone coalition", the following information is received - we would like to receive drones from Latvia, but please just buy us the drones we need, and do not send us expensive local products to the front that are completely useless. Many Ukrainian military personnel openly wonder why the Latvian state is wasting taxpayers' money and buying useless drones at all costs.
Since I am well acquainted with the local military industry, I asked them these questions and, believe it or not, I received quite interesting answers and comments about the "drone coalition" led by Spruds. It turns out that many local drone manufacturers are not too worried about not being able to directly supply their drones to Ukraine anymore, because through state procurement they can now "sell" their drones for big money to the Latvian state, and the state will give these expensive and useless drones as a big gift to the Ukrainian armed forces. Isn't that a cool business?”
EUUK propaganda – headed up by the FT and the late Grant Shapps – so poor a liar that even the English had to reject him in their last election
https://www.ft.com/content/cf6ded0f-f595-4359-b8f7-273799f1149c
https://defense.info/highlight-of-the-week/uk-and-latvia-lead-internationl-drone-capability-coalition-for-ukraine/
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/uk-to-supply-thousands-of-drones-as-co-leader-of-major-international-capability-coalition-for-ukraine
Grant Shapps --“The UK continues to do all we can to give Ukraine what it needs – upping our aid to £2.5bn this year and committing £200m to manufacture drones, making us Ukraine’s largest drone supplier.
Today, we’re going even further. I’m proud to announce that the UK and Latvia will co-lead an international coalition to build Ukraine’s vital drone capabilities. Together, we will give Ukraine the capabilities it needs to defend itself and win this war, to ensure that Putin fails in his illegal and barbaric ambitions.”
https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/07/06/ukraine-drone-industry-russia-war-regulation/
The Foreign Affairs article is the typical up close and sentimental plucky underdog story the US ruling class loves to shovel at it’s workers – ‘they got the guts, the techs, the smarts, all they need is some more of your money’
America’s entire military industrial complex is dependent on… CHINA.
Raytheon, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman etc. depend on thousands on Chinese suppliers for everything — software & hardware.
How is the US or NATO gonna fight China? https://nitter.poast.org/Kanthan2030/status/1810930520873914692#m
America’s Carriers Rely on Chinese Chips, Our Depleted Munitions Too
https://www.forbes.com/sites/erictegler/2024/01/09/americas-carriers-rely-on-chinese-chips-our-depleted-munitions-too/
Not only MIC is China dependent, the economy is China dependent
Not to forget US dependence on RF for essential materials
What is "RF"?
Russian Federation
Thank you.
Right.
The problem is that, unlike Russia, China could not survive sanctions as harsh as those placed on Russia. But the question would be whether anyone paid attention to them. At that point, it's pretty much WW3 and I doubt people are going to be joining the side of the West.
The argument should run as follows
- while the (US) dominant class were presented by their hired hands- bureaucrats, pols, 'intelligence' agencies- with what appeared as an easy victory in a war launched against Russia, and a very useful training ground, watch out lesson, and pit of resources for the main event - war on China
-this turned out to be a dismal failure, the result of ignorance and illusion on the part of the neos
Moreover had as one notable negative result the Joint Declaration pact with China, which clearly offers solidarity and support right up to the live military
-hence quick renewed US pivot to China
China with JD foresee the same degree of autarchy in terms of raw materials, food and energy, as enjoyed previously by Russia only (Hi to you too Kim, I'm thinking of you)
-And count on a sufficient % of the RoW to buy their goods, provide cash flow and support industry, keep the masses well fed and in work
My impression is that the US dominants are not nearly as foolish as their servants in government, and have no illusions about the slim pickings at very best/ likely major military defeats to be had from any war
But intend to use neo con hysteria as propaganda to attempt enough intimidation – crikey! they’re outta control, look at Burning Joe!- to secure the best possible deal from the China dominants, the CCP
Should the dominants wait any longer the SCO/BRICS organisations would develope enough solidarity....etc
It's like boycotting only grocery store you have access to. Yes, shop owner will have to downsize, but you are going to die from hunger. Cutting off China from SWIFT alone will tits up US/Europe overnight
But it's more than that. it's also telling all their other customers if they buy from that grocery store, you will freeze all their cash that are in the banks you run. and if the distributors sell to the grocery store, they will not be able to sell to any of the stores you own etc...
I agree, however that the US/EU will come off far worse than China will. But it will definitely hurt China far more than it did Russia, who actually got stronger.
Yes, and this is scary because it means we can't fight a war with China, or with a Chinese ally (Russia?)
I would love to know the names of the people that made these decisions.
Not some nameless group like "military acquisition" but the actual names of those involved in this decision.
These long term shifts in capitalist practices (such as offshoring to China) are at first speculative and experimental, involve many strands, companies, banks, administrations, political and diplomatic, then grow gradual, and become coherent only at a certain mass, by which time it is impossible to ascribe particular decisions to specific people
Industry in general is effected, so that no distinction is observed between widgets made with RF imported metal in US, or identical China made widgets, nor between MIC specific screws and civil use screws
As you know no one has succeeded in any attempt ascribe responsibility to specific people or decisons within the US administration, military or corporate world - the system is designed to ensure that this is not possible
Take Boeing as an example of this resilient impenetrability, despite generations of multiple failure at every level, nobody knows nothing
Well..... except the workers or the soldiers
It's not impossible to know who, in order for the US to shift supply chains to a foreign country only one or a few names would be involved.
As far as Boeing is concerned the people that did know the names and came forward seem to be having "accidents".
This is what I see and despise, "too many names involved" or some nameless group attributed to the problem.
Names, always should be names, so that we can clearly see who is doing what.
To be clear I don't despise you Gerrard, just the lack of names, and I see this in all media and comments.
You appear to think that a capitalist economy, and hence politics, is a command economy - with decisions made by a tiny number of people
This is not true - it's a free market economy - the command economy operates in China, and now, in Russia
As for Boeing the decline has been in evidence since the 1990's - one can blame the CEO's exclusively, the large scale shareholders, the banks, the engineers, the middle management, the factory floor supervisors, the inspectors the FAA, Congress, politicians......All are and have been complicit, the numbers of 'names' run into the tens of thousands over 25 years or more
What recently has emerged is the tip of the iceberg
No one, no one at all, was punished, even when the planes went down
If you want to know which administration's changed the laws to make this possible read up on Ronnie rayguns deregulation package, then take a look at the Clinton years. Those two are directly responsible for the current debacle.
Is it scary that you can’t wage war against China or Russia?
From a defensive perspective yes, from an offensive perspective no.
1. The most dangerous enemy of the US is not foreign, it is domestic: lobbying firms and shadow-lobbying firms
—such as Antony Blinken's, Avril Haine's, Jen Psaki's, Julianne Smith's WestExec, Victoria Nuland's, Kurt Campbell's, and Victoria Rosenberg's Center for a New American Security (CNAS), and Jake Sullivan's and William Burns's Macro Advisory Partners (MAP))—
who work (externally or internally by having members become appointed to positions within the government administration) to fabricate enemy bogeymen (such as China) and to provoke wars (such as the Ukraine/Russia War) in order to reap profits for the military industrial complex (e.g., Boeing and Raytheon) and the US energy industry (e.g., Exxon).
2. America has failed to heed Eisenhower's warning to American citizens about the danger posed by the military-industrial complex. (Farewell Address to the Nation, 1961.01.17:
invidious.poast.org/watch?v=Gg-jvHyn………)
3. The Biden/Blinken administration does not want the Ukraine/Russia War to end. Why? Because the administration is infested with former "shadow lobbyists" from the firms WestExec, CNAS, and Albright Stonebridge Group. The clients of those firms include dominant weapons manufacturers and energy companies.
4. The Ukraine/Russia War is extremely good for business for those clients. The War: (a) increases profits for the military industrial complex; (b) increases profits for Exxon and other US companies in the energy industry; and (c) increases US hegemony over Europe, making it subservient to US (Biden/Blinken) interests, such as supporting Israel.
5. The entire script of the US foreign policy regarding Ukraine/Russia appears like it could have been ghostwritten by Exxon, given that Exxon has benefitted from all of the following:
(i) the US provoking Russia to invade Ukraine in order to cause Germany to red-light Nord Stream 2;
(ii) the subsequent sabotage of Nord Stream by Ukrainians;
(iii) the consequent increase in European dependency on the US, including LNG (liquified natural gas);
(iv) restrictive economic sanctions against Russia; and
(v) perpetuation of this geo-political situation by supplying weapons to Ukraine to ensure that the Ukraine/Russia War becomes a Forever War.
https://nitter.poast.org/YodysseusX/status/1811047344336457897#m
Yikes... The US is a sitting duck.
"“U.S. domestic production capacity is a shriveled shadow of its former self. Crucial categories of industry for U.S. national defense are no longer built in any of the 50 states. With just 25 well-constructed attacks, using any of a variety of means, an adversarial military planner could cripple much of America’s manufacturing apparatus for producing advanced weapons.”"
I can confirm DJI makes very good drones, there may be a high priced commercial manufacture in the US that makes something decent, but since I don't buy at that price point I do not know.
In fact most if not all consumer drones made in America have gone out of business or converted to commercial sales, where reports do not seem favorable.
Been using drones for photography for over 15 years now, DJI has gone steadily upwards in design and feature set, everything US has gone down.
Are you sure the non-DJI drones aren't re-branded for US companies to sell? Then DJI sends them their "B" models or rejects?
There is a rebranded drone, but it's the higher end "enterprise" drones from DJI.
They are green in color, "Anzu" allegedly made in Malaysia with coding done in the US with Aloft.
https://www.anzurobotics.com/
I haven't seen anything come close to DJI, in fact it's a bit amusing to me that people that build their own and use flight controllers like BLITZ F722 and the others FC's that grew up around small free style drones still struggle to have the reliability of DJI's ancient Naza flight controller, like GPS rescue, a basic feature.
It’s why they say “war is a racket”: it’s all about profits, greed and the reckless waste of human life that they find no value in until it hits close to home…my father said that in Indonesia under Japanese occupation in WW2, the Japanese also used propaganda through radio announcements trying to convince the locals that they were winning when in fact they were losing; the locals heard the truth through word of mouth.
Propaganda is a given by any army at war, but I do wonder how war reports would make their way to the Dutch East Indies when the Japanese lost control of the Pacific ocean after the battle of Midway. Australian Z force troops in Nusa Tengara Timur had long been routed so the progress of hostilies couldn't come from the south either. Where then did the word of mouth come from that your father spoke of. Was he a Dutch POW or indigenous I wonder?
He was living in Indonesia at the time when the Japanese invaded; his family had to flee their plantation to live with relatives in another area; he worked in a rice distribution warehouse; I don’t know all the details but this is what he mentioned, that no one trusted the news because it was controlled at that time by the Japanese, somewhat like today when more people are not trusting the megaphone of the mainstream media’s propaganda anymore, lol. To further the agenda, controlling what the public hear in the news, whether through radio, tv or internet is key; today you can see it when several mainstream sources say exactly the same thing, using the exact same phrases. 🤔
Is it so that the Ukrainians buy drones from China?
They buy from anywhere & make them themselves - just as the Russians do - anywhere but from the EU and the US
I wonder how will the US DJI ban affect this
This is US internal only, so far, and fiercely opposed by police depts complaining that US drones are unwieldy expensive and far from effective
Given the state of Uk dissatisfaction it would be hard to proclaim let alone to enforce a ban on Ukraine
That's true for now. But the EU usually follows US very quickly (just watch EV tariffs, that was hours, not even days) and an EU ban on DJI would be a big hit on Ukraine.
But how would anyone prevent the Uk from buying the drones? There would also to be a 'secret' waiver...etc..to save US face in light of failure to prevent imports
To do so would be more than usually hypocritical for the EUUS given that their own arms etc depend on China imports
This stupid is simply defeat
UK would be implementing it as well (especially under Starmer).
The problem with Ukrainian drones (and drone parts) is that they are often donated from private initiatives or private sponsors, who would be cut from buying them. Perhaps even big majority of them comes from private initiatives.
If you cut them off the market and leave waivers for governments or big contractors, then the entire process becomes a lot more corrupt and inefficient.
In essence - the DJI ban is probably counterproductive wrt Ukraine, but on the other hand, it could be great propaganda. Which is all that really matters for them.
I can confirm this for my area, my neighbor is LEO and uses DJI Mavic 3 for their aerial reconnaissance.
The U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks announced the Replicator Initiative, a new state-of-the-art line of drones "leveraging a treatable autonomous system in all domains," Hicks explained, mixing her military-ese w/ corporate-speak.
The Replicator program is meant to amass thousands of drones, specifically to counter China: "Replicators are scaled up to overcome the PRC's biggest advantage: mass & magnitude," Hicks said. "More ships, more missiles, more people. For us: more drones."
The crux of DOD initiatives like Replicator is to get AI to the point where it makes the decision to kill based on its algorithm: if p, then q; if x, then y
AI would autonomously choose which target to home in on & how to destroy the target: could be a person, could be equipment, could be a building. The mother-pod is where the drone operator posts up, safely from the kill-zone.
The result? It will be easier to wage war & faster without human beings able to see what's going on, or monitor the data & make decisions.
Initiatives like Replicator are in hype-phase right now. General Atomics Aeronautical has a contract, as does AeroVironment's Swithcblade 600. The AI app is vulnerable to cyber-attacks, so the contractors are trying to work out the bugs. Too, the training modules for these systems are not fine-tuned enough for real life: the modules are sims, but the AI isn't surgical enough to parse sims the way human intelligence can.
What's tough: the Pentagon finds itself on the wrong side of the cost curve when using $2mn boutique & bespoke, not to mention over-engineered, hardware to intercept $50,000 drones made w/ crowd-sourced off-the-shelf parts: the LIDS=Low, slow, unmanned aircraft Integrated Defeat Systems.
The US government is not short of drones. Just not the sort that goes bang in a military context.
The GAO reports on the various start up and particularly drone start up failures
It looks like this kind of drone warfare, conduct and production, is best done live testing, as per the RF and the Uk
In any case the US MIC can do nothing right, even the traditional stuff, so it's un surprising they can not do drones
I’ve spoken to U.S. drone makers.
The problem is 100% the DoD bureaucracy.
They would blame the DoD, and they are right to do so - the DoD can not get anything made
But an industry which can not compete with China made drones at any commercial level can hardly claim to be able to compete with the same China made commercial drones modified for military use
Especially if these are modified by guys actually at the LoC in the war and doing this work in order to save their own lives
At least this is what even the US MSM reports: the Ukie press amplifies reports from their frontline about the uselessness of all foreign made drones except Chinese, and Russian
The guys I’ve spoken to design purpose-built drones, not just mods of commercial drones.
Still, it’s a massive struggle to find ESCs and motors that aren’t built in China.
It seems like the successful Ukie attack drones are mainly modifications of cheap China commercial drones, with say a hand grenade somewhere -
It would be impossible for any dedicated US drone manufacturer, let alone military, to compete anyway, even before DOD rules and regulations
This the point where commercial tech and tactics overcomes military - as the Ansar Allah overcome US warships and oust shipping - this is not terrorism, it's flooding the market wuth a superior product
The issue here is that purpose-built drones are far more expensive than mods of commercial drones built in large quantities.
Yes, they are more capable, but that doesn't mean they're better. Because they aren't.
Better is the enemy of good enough. And history teaches us, that this good enough is good enough to beat the better.
"Production matters. Production is deterrence," Deputy DOD Minister Kathleen Hicks said to a group of arms manufacturers during OTAN's "Strengthening the Trans-Atlantic Bond" on 10 July in Washington, D.C.
She argued that Western countries can quickly build "arsenals of democracy" since their political systems foster innovation & transnational cooperation while autocracies like Russia & China can not.
But the conflict in Ukraine has revealed holes in industrial war-related production in the West, Senator Jim Risch of Idaho told Hicks @ the OTAN session: the arsenal is a myth.
The Czech president was part of this panel discussion, along w/ the Danish president & also Kaja "I eat Russians for breakfast" Kallas, the outgoing prime minister of Estonia but incoming EU Foreign Affairs Chief.
Kallas did not say, but might have, that the words "military" & "industrial" should never be used in the same sentence.
So, the U.S., that industrial giant (/s), is going to manufacture MORE drones than the SOURCE of most of its componentry, which source it chooses to identify as its enemy..
At manufacturing costs far above said sources costs...
Having a dementia patient as its putative leader is the LEAST of the U.S. idiocies.
There are many such ironic anomalies, from 2023 https://www.ft.com/content/d0b94966-d6fa-4042-a918-37e71eb7282e
Scifi author Peter Watts has a great short story about a smart UAV and what happens when the human factor is removed from the kill decision (PDF link) - https://rifters.com/real/shorts/PeterWatts_Malak.pdf
Overall an excellent hard sci-fi author, most of his work is directly available on his site under a Creative Commons license to legally download.
"AI would autonomously choose which target to home in on & how to destroy the target:" Lancet is already doing that. It's just like hypersonics and other key technology: the US will finally get it, in an inferior version, about 20 years after Russia deploys it in combat.
Great analysis as always - thanks for keeping us updated.
Typo, you have the numerator and denominator reversed:
262,000/2400 = x/39,000,000
x = 359,000
Should read
2,400/262,000 = x/39,000,000
x = 359,000
many, many more.
Moving the goalposts extraordinaire: MediaZona switches statistical algorithms in mid-stream in order to generate a more tantalizing data stream w/ "flash estimates" that triple what had been MediaZona's figures & accounting in determining Russia's casualties.
When you can't beat them on the battlefield, kill them w/ analytics.
Not even Pythagoras would delight in *death by math*
Nobody has died or will die as a result of skeevy arithmetic
Lol they switched it because they were defeating western propaganda by doing so
MediaZona's switcheroo, its revised analytics, is a variation on the Russia-Is-Running-Out-of_Missiles lie: Ukraine is winning the war because ! Russia-Is-Running-Out-of-Men !
Concern Trolls have pearls, very clutchable, @ the ready
And a switch in 'target population'. The earlier numbers by Mediazone and BBC-International were aimed at Russian audiences. They needed corroborated numbers, and not made up ones, as a prerequisite to even have a chance of gaining some traction with a Russian audience. Which is also why those numbers almost never appeared in western MSM.
This shift signifies that they have pretty much given up on using (verifiable} Russian casualties as a means of stirring up anti-Putin sentiments within Russia. I predict we're now going to see Mediazone and their estimates appear in western MSM far more often than ever before, as we (in the west) are now their 'target'.
Makes perfect sense. When the data doesn’t support the narrative, change the methodology. By all means, meet those de-population goals.
These sort of propaganda efforts used to wrankle me quite a bit. But, at this point, I'm satisfied to listen to idiots spout what they heard on MSNBC, et. al. and the quiet voice in my head reminds me that soon enough it will all be clear (-ish) to them when Russia achieves its victory.
More information on the European shell production scam
The report originates in Ukraine, un surprisingly, as the Ukraine does have an interest in obtaining shells, or suprisingly given that most reports from the Ukraine are dismissed as propaganda
In this case, as in others, both the US and the Brit/Latvian drone scams for example, Ukraine reports look reliable
This shell report originates with these journalists
“The editors of Schem (a Ukrainian project of Radio Liberty), German Die Welt, Czech Investigace.CZ, Polish Vsquare and Frontstory.PL, Finnish Iltalehti, Slovak Ján Kuciak Investigative Center, Dutch The Investigative Desk and Estonian Delfi Estonia worked on this investigation. This international cooperation between newsrooms was supported by the Investigative Journalism for Europe (IJ4EU) foundation.”
At this publication-https://www.radiosvoboda.org/a/skhemy-snaryady-dlya-ukrayiny-yes-porushuye-obitsyanky/33025231.html
Meanwhile RF shell production increases, Bain & Co reports
https://bulgarianmilitary.com/2024/05/26/every-day-russia-produces-12320-artillery-shells-at-1k-each/#google_vignette
4.5M per year, average cost $1,000 -higher than the (NYT) previously reported $600
EU average costs vary from $5,000 to $8,000 for the clean tech variants
https://kyivindependent.com/rfe-investigation-finds-eu-shells-capacity-below/
For a reality test compare this report above-as well this report: https://bb.lv/statja/politika/2024/07/03/pietiek-ukraincy-prosyat-ne-prisylat-im-latviyskie-drony-oni-bespolezny#google_vignette
--with the FT report on drones, which is entirely a bland of ‘it is planned it is hoped’, mixed in with chunky bits starring the plucky Ukie underdog underground basement folklore
https://www.ft.com/content/cf6ded0f-f595-4359-b8f7-273799f1149c
US Claims for arms deliveries to Ukraine, July 3 , 2024
https://www.state.gov/u-s-security-cooperation-with-ukraine/
There's no way Russian shells cost 1k.
They cost around 200-250 before the conflict and only got cheaper since then.
I know, those people don't understand how it actually works and probably believe that if Russians produce 5x the amount, it has to cost 5x per piece. Or something to that effect.
Seriously, almost nobody in the West has any idea how much Russian weapons actually cost and we see ridiculous claims of the kind like $6.5M per Kalibr and whatnot.
They're not living in this universe.
In 2023 Russia produced more than 20m ammunition. This includes all calibers and MLRS.
https://ria.ru/20231226/boepripasy-1918309612.html
I saw on telegram rough estimates from people-in-the-know and they said that 152 is "biggest" part of this heap. If we suppose western analytics only count 152 caliber, then it's incredibly disingenuous, because Russia uses all of it.
And best bang for the buck is MLRS, not artillery, actually (again, from people-in-the-know). So they don't count it? Why? And how exactly they estimate their numbers? All of that is highly classified. They take Russian numbers and fudge it just like Mediazona? I don't trust western numbers at all
Thanks for the information - and the link
I was tripped up by the western habit of very biased speculation about carve ups of reported information
As is cost estimated to RF much overexagerated
As is RF 'war economy' etc etc
Oh ye of little faith.
Zelensky is killing off zillions of Russians with the overwhelming power of his obnoxious personality.
FJB got hit indirectly and by accident.
Recently I'm noticing that NAFO and Israeli bots on twitter and other places are saying they are willing to fight to the last russian, if you bring up fighting to the last ukrainian. That's fine by me since before they get to the last russian, we will get to the last european and the last american first. I'm also still waiting for them to test their hypothesis that russian nukes don't work.
Excellent work. But small question. Shouldn't your math (below) be calculated only based on an estimate of the adult male population for Zhitomir and all of Ukraine? I think the country has about 10 million males ages 18 to 64 out of a pre-2022 population of about 40 million (which I think is the figure minus the regions that rejoined Russia).
You wrote -- "Zhitomir has an official population of 262,000. Applying the ratio of 2400 dead out of Zhitomir’s 262k population to the entire population of Ukraine (40 million) yields about ~350,000 dead."
It would give a similar result. If say 1/4 of the population were males of fighting age, the formula would be,
2,400/(0.25*262,000) = x/(0.25*39,000,000)
which still gives x = 357,000. If the total population of UA was less than 39 million it would make a difference.
If the total population of UA were less than 39 million, then the total population of Zhitomir were less than 262,000 too
I looked it up, and in 2019, UA had a population of 37.3 million excluding Crimea and parts of Donbass.
Well before 2019 I had read Ukraine has a population around 50 million, so the exodus started long ago. Once the gates were open, for instance, many women of marriage age were seeking mates so they could move on. A lot of Jewish Uke women went there first, but most ended up in the U.S. or Canada after that.
All western media lies to ”help” Ukraine.
But there are so called vatniks that also exeggerate Ukrainian figures and diminish the Russian losses.
Look at the Poll. You cant put the Russian at 50-100k mark in the same time you think Ukraine lost 1 million. That is wishful thinking. Putin said 1:5. Period. 100 k dead Russian at the maximum and 500k Ukrainians.
They did the trick with Gaza also. First we have Hammas figures. Then a couple of months ago they said you should halve the casualties. Now all of the suDden we should tripple the Hamas figures…
> Putin said 1:5.
He also said "these are the ones we can confirm." In other words, the disparity is larger but Ruskies don't have proof for any concrete larger number, so in order to win the long-term propaganda war, they're lowballing the figure. When the war ends, the number of Ukie KIA is going to jump even from the Russian estimate.
Wishful thinking. Prigoszin had right, 20+ k dead for Bakhmut/Artemovsk. And if anyone believe that 40% of Russian losses emerge from Artemovsk battle alone, they are beyond help. We also had Mariupol, Avdeevka, Robotyne, Vuledar…We had massacres at Hostomel and the Chechen battlegroup ambushed. Of course there are dead Russians - why do you think they resorted to defensive in 2022 and now only risk single groups in small advances supported by massive artillerybombardment and FAB:s/TOS?
I sincerely hope that neither Russia or Ukraine has those high casualties. They are all humans wasted for nothing. Sacrificed on the Altar of the NATO-God and the only true belief in the West: American exeptionalism.
I understand that Simplicius see the need for debunking Western propaganda but it is a waste of time instead of doing analyses of the situation at the front. Myself, very satisified, with Russia finally destroying some Headquarters. If not false, they wiped out the Air defense command post. But they havent dared to eradicate Western ISR and flying Commandposts over Black Sea. Letting NATO/US assets be ”untouchable” isma mistake.
Nice acting and trying to blend in with the quasi-Russian-patriot crowd.
Last time I checked, the Russians were advancing since early 2023. Over a year of advancements. Not that it matters in attritional warfare. :)
And during that time, Uke forces have been massively depleted of trained soldiers and equipment. I remember that last year the issue of barrel replacements for Howitzers was an issue for Ukraine. After all, most of their western equipment is probably unserviceable for them. It's easy to imagine that a fraction of their artillery is actually accurate anymore, which sort of pushes the dial on artillery ratios further toward the Russian end of the scale.
the small group attack has een a feature since the start. in Bakhmut it may have been different but that ws wagner. Even in Artemosk the killed assault groups were not large, though they did consist on non Russian regulars, the dPR, and others. Just as Ukraine sends in Russian speakers to die first it does seem Russia does the same with its new recruits from Donas and Lughansk as well as Chechens and ex wagner.
I was down with 1:7 last year, but the amount of Ukie UAVs seems to shift it towards 1:5 indeed. But that's as far as it goes.
Interesting chart on excess mortality comparing Ukraine and Russia. I went to Our World in Data and found something very similar. Yes, it looks like Ukraine stopped reporting on deaths starting January 31. 2022, while Russia continued on reporting. Ukraine stopped reporting deaths when the Russians attacked. They were too busy I guess. But on these charts we see that excess deaths for both nations fell right before (for Ukraine) and shortly after the attack (for Russia). COVID was not killing as many during this time. During the war period Russian excess deaths rose and fell to almost nothing, and then rose up again recently. But it's nowhere near the excess deaths both nations suffered during COVID. Right now Russia is 18% above what was projected. We don't have data for Ukraine, so nobody knows what their excess death is now. In November of '21 both nations were 85% above the expected death rate. Seems like COVID killed a lot more people every week than the war has.
Covid killed old or very old people with very often existing comorbidities.
Covid "kills" are nothing compared to the "COVID vax" kills. Lots of excess mortality work on that done by Edward Dowd (former wall st financial guy/insurance) and by " The Midwestern Doctor"-- Substack column
These sorts of "narrative games" between both sides as to who is suffering more casualties are a direct result of the actual frontline / military situation being - at this moment - somewhat static. While Ru is overruning village after village, the nature of the endless urban agglomerations in eastern Ukraine is such that even with minimal resistance it will be a long grind. Urban warfare through and through.
And there is no real shortcut to victory. I have been wanting/waiting for a Russian hammer blow to put them out of their misery, but in reality no such blow exists. If the Israeli's couldn't do it in a 40 square mile space, with total air superiority, totally surrounding Gaza, unlimited US support, total technological advantage with respect to armored vehicles, artillery, etc, AND their economy being sacrificed and falling off a cliff, AND Hamas having no external support, AND zero consideration for civilian casualties...
Numbers are fungible & therefore feed the "narrative games."
As w/ the Gaza deaths--at first 38,000 then as high as 186,000--the figures themselves are so staggering they paralyze rationality. Then everybody gets lost in the weeds, arguing numbers.
Blinken portrays the LOC as having "stabilized"--that is neither side is gaining. But Russia's Forces are dismantling what were the original Poroshenko lines in 2014/2015: the earliest of fortifications put in place & entrenched as if waiting for this day.
Village by village, it's incremental but significant
Which importantly minimising their own soldiers lives. Unlike Uk where elensky continues to insist on PR stunts for political optics for the NATO countries to think that progress is happening. Just look at Krinki, So many dead AFU just to that the scumbag could say to his western backers see we have crossed the river, just give me more money.
https://t.me/the_Right_People/28404
Yes, Blinken et. al. are framing the war as territorial for their benefit, when in fact it is attritional from the Russian side. Any "stable" or "static" comments anywhere including here are only coping.
Yeah, I've also figured out there will be no Big Push from Russians that makes Ukraine collapse in on itself. Maybe in 2026 Ukraine will finally collapse, when so many Ukrainians get killed they don't have anyone on the streets to prevent the murder of recruitment commisars. But there will be no Big Push because such a thing will make many Russians die, and Russia needs to save all the soldiers it can for the big war against NATO. Remember: NATO has more people that Russia. If united under a common government, and mobilized, after 10 years of preparation NATO could rip European Russia to shreads. *That* is the threat Russia needs to prepare itself for.
Why wait? What is 100k dead russian now when you can expect an even bigger War in 10 years time? West has no ammo and yesterday they promised Ukraine 5 more Patriots. They are low on Tanks and IFV:s. They have no clue how to fight a modern battle with FPV:s and drones. They have soldiers celebrating a Rainbow flag and no critical thinking.
Why not push and get over it once and for all?
Because all those Rainbow-flag celebrating "leftists" aren't actually pushovers. https://d.newsweek.com/en/full/1082058/antifa-portland.jpg
There aren't enough Russians in this world to make wanton war on EU. There may or may not be enough EUropeans to make wanton war on Russia. So militarily, a defensive war is favoured.
Furthermore, non-militarily, a sit-and-wait strategy is favored since EU is falling apart. Why attack your enemy when you can simply wait and get the same result? For NATO to be able to credibly attack Russia, it needs to get united. It needs to mobilize. It needs 10 years to prepare. Which of these three do you think has the greatest chance of coming true?
You write against your own comment where you thought Russia must prepare itself…cant discuss with people where discussion leads to ”whack-a-mole” arguments popping up as it fits.
Don't remember the comment. If you would quote it, I'd be happy to review my behavior.
Oh! You mean this comment:
> *That* is the threat Russia needs to prepare itself for.
I'm not writing against it. Russia needs to prepare to kick out EU once it invades. Russia doesn't have enough people to proactively invade EU. Do you want me to quote numbers?
Russia is not so dumb so they invade western europe. You and others are as much warmongers as the Pentagrams in US. And then you must mistrust Putins word.
Because, if things are this bad in Western Military NOW, imagine how much worse they will be 10 years from now??
The only reason NATO Political leaders are muttering about doing this again in 10 years is because THEY will be gone by then, and it's someone else's problem to solve.
Russia can see that far ahead and they KNOW the only thing that will force the West to ACTUALLY DO THE HARD YARDS (Politically and Economically) to set up a war machine, is for Russia to rapidly smash its way to the Polish border, NOW.
Smart thinking is what Russia is actually doing.
'De-militarization' by artillery and FAB attrition...
5 patriots have been destroyed only this week.
Source? And Santa Claus emerged over Kiev yesterday.
True: Russia has to husband its troops right now & economize by grinding slowly forward, thinking toward a clash w/ OTAN.
The OTAN countries have more people than Russia does & presumably boots to put on-the-ground, should it come to that--but Russia has friendly neighbors who would more than likely help even things out if OTAN moved in to mulch Russia.
Peskov has said, and Lavrov too, that a war w/ OTAN would be nuclear, so the math of battlefield troops, the numbers we're contemplating, would be immaterial
NATO countries got close to very little 'boots' together with the arms armour and logistics
See the German Commissioner's report quoted-
Intervention is the domain of NATO Very High Readiness Joint Task Force, claimed elsewhere by NATO to be 40,000 strong, but criticised by the German Commissioner for Armed Forces, responsible for 33% of this force, to be unprepared and un armed
https://www.focus.de/politik/deutschland/irre-zustaende-bei-deutscher-armee-fallschirme-aus-50er-jahren-campingstuehle-im-flugzeug-so-kaputt-ist-die-bundeswehr_id_259783254.html
https://www.focus.de/politik/deutschland/mehr-als-2800-leser-kommentare-mit-der-waffe-in-der-hand-fuer-deutschland-kaempfen-nein-und-noch-mal-nein_id_259775864.html
NATO claims that 'NATO' has 500,000 fully ready troops -
"We have 500,000 troops at high readiness, and we have doubled the number of battle groups in the eastern part of the Alliance. "
https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/opinions_226794.htm
bs they don't even have 100k.
They do not have even 40,000 as per the Germans
As soon as a plane load of body bags came back after one day of combat in this brutal conflict the public outcry would be immediate. It would not be Afghanistan with 5 or 6 with their country flag covering during the solemn “ramp ceremony.” It would change to 200 plus bags instantaneously bringing home the true reality & horrors of what war is and no number of cheap words about democracy would cover or justify it. All while the next plane was being loaded. And the leaders know it, well I hope.
https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Journals/Military-Review/English-Edition-Archives/July-August-2024/Who-in-NATO-Is-Ready-for-War/
Not many it seems, and I very much doubt their assessment of the UK military.
It has been severely damaged by DEI & wokeism. However, this is also true for all Western armies. A recent female British army officer has been promoted right up the chain of command and is saying that there is to much of a hierarchy in the British Army command system. I think she's yearning for a group hug-a-thon and a collective kumbaya in a super-duper safe space, where everyone can bask in the warm glow of universal love and acceptance. No one's feelings will be left behind, and we'll all frolic together in a field of diversity and inclusion, hand-in-hand, as we march towards a utopia free of any dissent or differing opinions." Follow me, and no misgendering, waving the LGBT flag.
Interesting that the general consensus of the German men in the survey who had similar responses of "why should I fight for this country when the government shows only contempt for me." I know the same feeling are very similar in the UK for young white indigenous men. As an ex-military man myself I certainly would not. For me the enemy is already here.
Yes, if enough people realize that only the ruling class want war because they’re fighting over power and resources , and if they refuse to go overseas, perhaps then another needless world war can be averted. Of course, there is always the chance of a false flag like what happened in Germany in WW2 with the Bundestag in order to stoke enough tension for locals to want to fight. But fighting should only be to defend against invasion of your own country and not go overseas to fight for a foreign leader’s imperial ambitions there, no? Doesn’t it boil down to the military and if they refuse to be used as pawns to be cannon fodder for their “leader” who has an agenda of his own and not actually for the people he is supposed to protect?
It is good to speculate on NATO's numbers based on population size but putting a civilian in a uniform and giving him a gun doesn't make him a soldier. Where exactly are the NATO armies coming from? If you take out Turkiye, which may be a plasible possibility and consider the US military does need to cross the Atlantic crawling with Russian submarines. Where is NATO's great army? Germany, France and UK are in serious economic decline and they are the big three left in NATO. Also adding to that NATO lacks a unified command structure then their are the matters of different equipment, munition and even language.
The difference between the IDF and Russian military is that the Russian military doctrine is based on Red army experience fighting the same type of war during WW2 have done it before against an initially superior German military. The Israeli's doctrine is based off US military experience of bombing civilians with the hope they will inflict enough suffering on the civilian population, so they would turn on the leadership. The huge difference as has been made clear is that the Russians are destroying the Ukrainian military with some collateral damage. While the Israelis are slaughtering a defenceless civilian population while inflicting some Alqasam Brigade and Islamic jihad casualties. The expectations of quick victory in either situation neglects the factor of time. Also no one bothers to ask if the Russian military really wants a quick conclusion to the conflict. Who actually knows the political outcome the Russians want to achieve? The initial Russian objective was to fight a smaller conflict now to prevent a larger war tomorrow. Considering the Red army lost between 7-9 million during the great patriotic war. Who can gage the extent of Russian resolve?
War is a continuation of politics by other means. So I don't actually know the full calculus of the Russian plan, and neither does anyone outside of the general staff and putin. But, I agree, nobody should bet against the Russians.
The reason why in the 60s and 70s western attitude towards the then USSR was sane was because the memory of how the Russians beat the nazis was still part of the collective psyche, that love them or hate them whatever you do, don't go to war with then (russians). The current generation of western leaders unfortunately were forged during the late 80s and 90s where Russia was in a bad state. This kind of general narrative is surprisingly hard to shake. I am guilty of it too: I was as surprised as anyone to see how effectively Hamas are fighting for example, my narrative was forged during the generation of incompetence of Arab armies during the 70s/80s/90s
Hamas is an idea, that grew out of the oppression of the Palestinian people, us believing it or not does not matter, the Palestinians believe they are oppressed. Ideas cannot be destroyed with bombs and bullets, they can only be replaced by other ideas. The Israeli approach was doomed to fail as it left no choice, for even those who were vehemently opposed to Hamas, but to defend themselves and family from the IDF that were killing indiscriminately. The Soviet peoples, along with the rest of the world were always allured by the western lifestyle. The Hollywood marketing sold the world the perfect life, but like the phrase "the grass is always greener on the other side" you realize you only need to get their to realize the grass is greener on the other side. The conflict in Ukraine is much greater than just what is happening on the ground, it is basically a battle ideology between one group wanting to maintain control of the majority and the majority unwilling to be subjugated.
And the definitive erasure of the memory about WW2, specifically about how it was USSR that won it, also plays a role in what you said. There's a famous graph with polls in France in 1945, late XX century and today, where figures for "Who contributed the most?" are shockingly telling.
Well now the narrative is "OH YA BUT THEY ONLY DID IT BECAUSE OF US ASSISTANCE", like a bunch of Sherman tanks is what held the Nazis off
Were they that incompetent? Hezbollah had some victories.
The Russians have (or had) a fairly sizeable professional army which has grown considerably since 2022. The Israeli army by comparison is quite small, relying on mobilization of the civilians population s during wartime. This is one of the biggest differences IMHO. Given the population differential the Russians can sustain a conflict far longer than the Israelis. The Resistance understand this well and were set up to ensure a sustained conflict over an extended period, knowing the Israeli Achilles heel.
The entire idea of conscription is to have a reserve army in case you need to mobilize.
It's this reserve army which is going to win the war.
Any professional army you have is going to be at least somewhat top-heavy (too many officers and generals) and while it can be elite, it won't have enough numbers.
The quality of your low-quality forces (meaning - the mobilized forces) is going to be the deciding factor in a big conflict. And that's something you can massively improve by conscription.
In theory, Israel does indeed have a very good system. The quality of conscripts the system produces, seems to be another question. Probably related to the low quality of their professional forces.
But at the first glance, they're doing it right.
You make some very good points especially with regard to Russian resolve.
Bash - Russia's objective is for a functioning, smaller Ukraine Region to remain and do its own thing without nazis/nato/annoying the bear by talking about Crimea etc.
By nibbling, Russian can reduce Ukraine to precisely the point where they surrender on Russia's terms.
The longer Russia draws it out, the more their army is seasoned & their tech cutting edge.
Every attack opens a window for a counter, and Russia is building cauldrons here, not kiosks
In the case of Israel's assault on Gaza, civilian casualties are the point.
"These sorts of "narrative games" between both sides" Not exactly. US society is so totally dependent on telling the big lie in everything, as the essential aspect of communications, that they believe every other society is also a post-truth society. They just don't get it that Russia isn't like that.
The key difference is that Russians endured over 70 years of total lies under the Communists, a time when the entire society was based on lies and if you didn't chip in and also lie during the more repressive times you'd get shot or sent to the gulag. It's very hard to find anybody in Russia who does not have a relative in their family tree who wasn't repressed in some way.
As a result, Russians are total cynics about government and what government says. The current administration knows that, and they know that the moment they tell any lies to the people they lose them forever. They deal with that in a simple way: they either don't say anything, or they tell the truth. I live in Russia and we don't have the constant saturation of 24/7 propaganda for morons that you get in the US.
Russia doesn't play any narrative games about casualties. It doesn't officially publish casualty figures, so there's absolutely no lies like Zelensky spouted about only 31,000 killed in action. When Russia comments on nazi casualties, it's usually part of military briefings that are extremely careful to report only verified (as in bodies collected or clearly counted on surveillance imagery) casualties, or in the case of estimates, "up to x number" figures that are always conservative estimates.
On rare occasions, high administrative figures give estimates of enemy casualties but those are always in my experience undercounts. Putin, for example, always seems to cite estimates that are at the very low range of consensus estimates among credible military analysts in Russia.
There is a Russian hammer blow that exists, by the way, but the reason Russia does not use it is that it works against Russia's bigger goals. Far more important than Ukraine to Russia is the continuing development of Russia's economy and positioning Russia for a win in the larger war against the US. Russia can easily maintain the current pace in Ukraine while still growing the Russian economy faster than the US's and faster than any US ally.
Russia also does not want to increase the intensity of the war because that would end up killing ethnic Russians in Ukraine. A slower tempo gives civilians time to escape their role as human shields.
Finally, Kiev is sustained 100% by Western arms and money. A "hammer blow" that would destroy the Kiev regime in weeks would be to strike NATO assets supporting Kiev. Some of that may happen anyway, like downing AWACS aircraft, but obviously taking such steps leads to general war that would impede Russia's economic development as Russia would like.
In the meantime, a slower tempo works fine for Russia: it gives the country time to systematically build a highly experienced army that are the world experts at destroying US and NATO arms and tactics, and time to build military production and logistics chains that will allow Russia to tear the guts out of NATO countries in a conventional war. It also provides plenty of time for Russia to destroy the weapons that the US and NATO send into Ukraine, depleting their inventories, so when it comes time for Russia to tear the guts out of NATO countries they'll find themselves very short on arms.
By the way, I don't agree that Israel has failed in Gaza. On the contrary, they've made very good progress at their obvious goal of destroying Palestinian society, taking territory from Palestinians in the West Bank and throughout the region, and starting the process of removing Palestinians entirely from the land Israel intends to take in the Gaza Strip. The creeps who run Israel are taking a long term view of the matter.
Interesting remarks and thanks re: Russia etc. I think the biggest weakness of the country is demographic; population too low and birth rate too low, and frontline casualties aren't helping
As for Israel & Gaza, respectfully, if you told me a year ago that 1) after 9 months of total war, Hamas would still be intact and 2) That Iran, in a highly telegraphed and limited strike was able to penetrate Israel's vaunted missile defenses with ease and 3) Hezbollah has been able to turn northern Israel into an uninhabitable no mans land... I would have asked you what you were smoking.
"I think the biggest weakness of the country is demographic; population too low and birth rate too low, and frontline casualties aren't helping"
Respectfully disagree. Russia's population at a nominal 150 million (it's actually more) is more than enough for critical mass to be self-sufficient, especially considering the makeup of that society as well as the makeup of the economy.
Russia is not a welfare state so a far higher percentage of the population than in the West is productive and contributing to a stronger economy. In the US, a rough rule of thumb is that about half of the population are takers, not producers, with a big percentage of people who in some key ways are living on the dole, such as welfare. There's no welfare in Russia, and even the elderly living on pensions in Russia are often "working pensioners" who continue to work well into their 70's. Russia has fewer people than the US, but a much greater percentage of them are productive so the net difference between productive people, the ones that count in conflicts, is less than the raw population numbers would indicate.
Russia's economy is a production economy far more than it is a service economy. The US economy, as with many EU economies, is no longer based primarily on industry but instead based more on services, with the prime driver of wealth creation being financialization. Although Russia's economy is smaller than the US's, the higher proportion of it which is involved in actual production, which counts in conflicts, means the economy has more heft to it in a war than the raw GDP PPP might indicate.
Russia also has the advantage of being the world's energy, food, and resources superpower. It needs absolutely nothing from the US or the EU, while EU states have crippling dependencies on imported energy and resources.
A further contrast is that Russia's economy is more agile than the US's. Russia is a more free market country than the US (hence my handle, and why I moved here) so it can scale production, including military production, faster and with greater flexibility than can the US. A good example is Lancet, which is a private company funded by venture capital without a single ruble of government money in it. It came out of nowhere in just a few months with literally game-changing drone technology.
Population, by the way, in Russia has dramatically increased since the war started in 2014, and especially since 2022. Millions of Ukrainians immigrated to Russia from 2014 to 2022. Ukraine was always majority Russian speaking, so when the nazi regime started persecuting people for speaking Russian many of the smarter ones pulled up and moved to Russia. Since 2022 millions of people have joined Russia as a result of the referenda in Kherson, Zaporozhiye, Donetsk and Lugansk provinces. Russia is also a big immigration destination for people from the Central Asian countries, like the various 'stans on or near Russia's border.
Front line casualties are too low to make any difference, but considering the millions of Ukrainian immigrants alone the net balance between immigration and casualties is strongly in favor of population growth. That population growth is from ethnically Russian people who speak Russian, have exactly the same culture, watch the same TV shows and listen to the same music, go to the same churches, and buy the same brands. For ethnic Russians moving from Kiev to Ekaterinburg there's literally no more difference in culture or lifestyle than some Russian person moving from Vladimir or Moscow to Ekaterinburg, except that the Russian from Kiev gets the relief of finally being free of repression from a nationalist nazi Ukrainian speaking minority.
That touches on another point where the raw population numbers don't tell the tale: social unity and support for the nation counts for a lot in conflicts, and despite the incredible variety in ethnicities and religions the people of the Russian Federation (RF) have astonishing unity coupled with fanatic support for Russia. The world last saw that in action in war on a big scale in WW2, and people who actually go to the front can see it in action today in war: the unity of RF troops despite the very wide range of ethnicities is astonishing, and the commitment, which you can see from the 1000+ volunteers per day, is also astonishing. Given general war there will be millions of people from all over Russia which will volunteer and be ready to fight to the death to ensure Russia wins.
There is obviously no such commitment, not remotely so, in Ukraine. The hard core nazis who powered the coup in 2014 have been mostly killed. From 2014 to 2022/23 there were enough of them to dominate the Russian speaking majority, and there are still enough of them to control a disarmed citizenry, but as casualties mount they'll have a harder time imposing their will on the majority. Nobody wants to fight so the nazi elite can continue looting Western donations to buy yet more villas in Italy.
Considering Europe overall, I see no willingness in the EU for people to volunteer by the millions to get slaughtered in local re-enactments of the killing of 500,000+ Ukrainian men. The great majority just want peace and would prefer to get back to a life of exploiting Russian tourists by selling them shoddy, overpriced products and package tours.
In Israel, I think the government's stated objective of wiping out Hamas is mostly air cover for their real objective, which is wiping out the Palestinians. If they can reduce the Palestinian population in Gaza from two million to just one million while achieving the greatest expansion into formerly Palestinian lands since the 1940's, well I think they would consider that a win. That's especially so because Israel has gotten away with genocide without anybody but the Houthis in Yemen doing anything about it. Their war on Palestinians hasn't gone as smoothly as they would like, but overall they're getting their way: making life impossible for Palestinians in Israel.
They know by destroying the infrastructure of any possible Palestinian state in Gaza they've set a very solid foundation for further reduction of the Palestinian population, making life so impossible within Israel that, sooner or later, the Palestinians will leave, or failing that, die. The racist government of Israel doesn't really care about Hamas. All it cares about is ethnically cleansing Israel of everybody who is not like them.
I defer to your local knowledge of the country. You know it better, so I accept your statements.
Regarding GDP and economic figures, I often have this argument with people who go on about how Western GDP is so much greater than Russia's, to which I respond with this parable: If one country is full of car manufacturers, and another is full of car dealerships, the country of car dealerships will post a higher GDP than the country of manufacturers, but which is the more productive nation? Foxconn may be monetarily less valuable than Apple, but if a war broke out between China and the US, Apple will be making exactly 0 hardware for the war effort.
Back in 2006 or so I remember attending lots of seminars about the Russian entrepreneurial / VC boom, lots of incredible stories. Now am at a stage of life where I put a lot of money into ventures from pre-seed all the way to series C or D, would love to be able to tap into Ru ecosystem. Maybe one day.
That's a great parable! I'll make sure to use it.
Russia's gone through several different cycles of VC investment, but for most of the past 25+ years Russian VC money was invested in the West. A year or two before 2022 I remember reading an article claiming that something like 30% of the VC money on Sand Hill Road in Palo Alto was Russian, including even the Russian government's sovereign wealth fund.
That's all changed since Russia invaded in Ukraine as Russian investors have been forced out of Western VC funds, with most of that Russian money being repatriated to Russia. Extreme Russophobia in the West also has caused many Russian investors to repatriate funds. They're not interested in investing in countries which seize their yachts, their mansions, their bank accounts, and their shares.
Things are moving so fast it's hard to get other than anecdotal evidence, but it seems clear that one result of a couple of hundred billion dollars being repatriated to Russia is the boom in industrial development and entrepreneurial activity that's been going on the last two years. That's also been fueled by the withdrawal of hundreds of Western companies, which have left huge market niches in which well-funded new ventures (or expansions of older ventures) can grab market share.
But I have to say that if you're interested in investing the local competition is fierce. I've been to a few conferences in Moscow just to see what was going on in various industries and I found the sophistication, wealth, and sheer power of the local investing community off the charts. But if you speak Russian (or have a very good translator with you all the time) there are lots of opportunities even if you're not going to get into one of the big plays. But I think you have to commit to spending a lot of time here, even living here for several months or a year or so, to get into the swing of it.
There's also the significant problem of sooner or later cashing out of your investment and moving your money out of Russia back into the West. The biggest obstacles there I think will be a crazed West, which is going to be looking for reasons to confiscate whatever you've earned on some pretext or other. After all, you've helped their enemy.
That's quite well-put, dare I say. Indeed, it feels very close to how I see it, except for the final take. Investing in Russia from the West, I reckon, is a way to diversify and reserve, for there might come a day when all your other assets turn to smoke and dust. If withdrawing and reinvesting are your top priorities, then you probably shouldn't, because you'll put yourself at risk more than you yield. If you're willing to create a reserve airfield, to pack your toothbrush and leave for it on the next Black Thursday when people will be jumping out the windows of their offices, now that's a reason. Tasty and That's It, ex-McDonalds, reported eightfold rise in profits compared to when Americans were running the food chain. That's crazy. It shows how deep the top soil actually is. But its greatest quality is that it's compartmentalized from the Western economy, however globalization allows for it. Therefore it's not your typical "colonial" kind of investment, when you put funds someplace across the planet but then inevitably withdraw them to metropoly. It's kind of a reserve asset that can run independently in a completely isolated environment and provide you with support should your main system fail utterly in 1929-esque style. Which isn't as unviable as it seemed just a while ago.
So true on your last point, and frankly it has limited my interest accordingly. I have a lot of Russian friends though who travel in and out of the city I live in, and i hear a lot. Its certainly more interesting than the endless stream of SaaS / Fintech / ESG startups that flood my inbox... so boring really. I was supposed to visit last October but changed plans last minute. Maybe will try again. Thanks for your comments & all the best
Hey, you can finance my dream enterprise of doormat manufacturing from expired tires in Moscow Oblast, haha!
On a serious note, the boom is back on in several fields, particularly drone tech and components. But given how sensitive they are for the war effort, I wonder if there is a way for much of venturing investment. Still, I heard of a norm regarding how much foreign capital should be here or there for the company's to be considered this or that, so at least some legal framework must be in place. Never really looked into it though so can't tell anything definitive, but it's certainly there.
You caught the scrap tire bug eh? Back in 2009 I went down that rabbithole of trying to extract fuel from them; and use the rest as building materials. Save yourself Andy, for here there are only monsters. Jokes aside - best of luck!
You still take a decidely economics view of the TFR rate, whereas it is obvious that population decline is a serious problem from all points of view and not merely an economic
The various RF programs have arrested this decline, and even very slightly reversed it, but the rate is , I believe, around 1.82, still way below the 2.1 necessary
Temporary Immigration Palliatives---The immigration from Ukraine, yes - but I understand there are various initiatives set to reduce immigration from Central Asia, on the grounds that too much such destabilises
Any palliative like immigration much lauded by Joe Biden as America First needs to be explained for the temporary only solution it is
"As a result, Russians are total cynics about government and what government says. The current administration knows that, and they know that the moment they tell any lies to the people they lose them forever. "
A hard lesson but one that was well learned. Hopefuly the NewSA will absorb this.
Not so sure maintaining the narrative has to be about Ukraine "winning" the war. I think the sales pitch to the West to keep the money & weapons flowing only needs to be that Ukr is inflicting damage on Russia, whether by terrorism, depleting the military, really any sort of loss or harm is enough.
From the nytimes on 9 July: "Russian forces are inflicting pain, but NATO leaders gathering in Washington can say their efforts to strengthen Ukraine are working."
Cope goeth before a fall
Whatever those numbers are — it is horrible.
> 262,000/2400 = x/39,000,000
Obviously, this is a typo. Should be
262,000/2400 = 39,000,000/x
BlackRock has shelled out the big buck$ for a massive necropolis