Good. Fuck russia. And fuck the republican traitor filth. Send them to the russian front, where they belong.
The people are victims too. Even if they’re mislead and sent into the meat grinder, they’re not the ones who benefit from the hate and anger.
That’s why fuck Russia and not fuck Russians
I think saying “good” about the death of so many Russian soldiers has a hint of “fuck Russians” in it. That loss of life is senseless and tragic, not good.
Agreed. I want Ukraine to win, but I’m still sad for the parents, partners, and children of those were used to fight. It’s horrible to celebrate the deaths of so many
I understand that in a life or death situation it’s kill or be killed, so I don’t have anything against the fighters themselves. But to be a person on the outside saying “good” is just ick
This is why we need continued/more support for Ukraine. I want this to be over for them as soon as possible, but the US/NATO should see the strategic advantage of russia continuing to exhaust their resources and military/prison population being thrown into the meat grinder in Ukraine. The longer russia wages war with Ukraine, the more definitively impossible it becomes for them to invade any NATO nations.
I mean, let’s be real… it’s already an impossibility for russia to wage war with the US or European NATO countries alone… But it doesn’t make any strategic sense to stop supporting Ukraine in a fight against our greatest enemy, who continues to threaten their neighbors with invasion. Let them further erode their military, munitions, and resources. Then maybe they won’t be able to commit/assist in genocides like they have in Syria.
The Republicans fighting aid bills for Ukraine are just traitors. It’s in the world’s best interest to support Ukraine.
Massive is right. And Russia has still never recovered the population losses from WWI (at least 1.7 million), WWII (27,000,000), Stalin’s purges, believed to be 20-30,000,000) the living exodus from Soviet break up, or the 4,585,000 covid deaths, and now has less than half this place’s population, which limits is status as any kind of global power.
Russia ought to be begging for emigration, right now. But, they are a pariah.
Don’t forget the brain drain once they officially declared war (special military operation) against Ukraine. There was a mass exodus of scholars and intellectuals not wanting to be trapped in russia.
And it’s not only the population, but its GDP is tiny. Back when Russia first invaded Ukraine, I wondered how big Russia would be if it were a US state. I compared the GDP per Capita of all US states to Russia’s.
Mississippi’s GDP per Capita was almost 4 times larger than Russia’s. Mississippi! I finally went into the US territories to find one that Russia could top (American Samoa).
And, in case you’re thinking “well, that’s GDP per Capita, they’d dwarf all US states in GDP,” they’d be the third largest state behind California and Texas and just ahead of New York. The US as a whole has a GDP over 10 times larger than Russia.
Your comparison is biased because the economy of Russia is quite insular — you’re basically saying that if they were to export all they produce and buy all they need from the US, they would reach the wealth of 1/4 Mississippi. But the Russians make a lot of stuff themselves, they just have trouble buying from abroad.
What you want is to compare GDP adjusted for purchasing power parity. Then Russia’s economy becomes comparable with California’s or Germany’s.
However this must be taken with a grain of salt, because GDP-PPP is hard to measure in the first place (because purchasing power is hard to measure), and Russia is undergoing sanctions and running a war economy, and the Russian government is probably fudging the numbers anyway.
If I trade you a car for your truck, congratulations, we’ve just raised the GDP. Kind of a shit metric just sayin.
peria
“Pariah” might be the word you’re looking for.
Indeed, changed
Edited to add. I was in Spanish, in which that spelling is the same word.
Emigration is to leave, I think you mean immigration.
Russia lost the ability to do soft power. All it can do is bluster and threaten and attack (with variable likelihood of success). It has no economic opportunities that would attract venturesome migrants, as everything of value happening in Russia belongs to oligarchs who understand that they owe their lives to the Czar, and anybody who gets any ideas about disrupting the incumbents and getting rich is unlikely to live very long. Other than from the poorer ex-SSRs (colloquially known as “the ‘Stans”), very few people were inclined to immigrate to Russia even before the war, and now with foreigners being press-ganged into the frontlines, that isn’t improving.
Another article has an estimate of 315,000 Russia casualties since the beginning of the war.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/12/us/politics/russia-intelligence-assessment.html
The Russian/Afghanistan war estimates (1979-1989) are: 15,000 Soviet soldiers killed, and about 53,000 wounded source
Oh my god, they were there 10 years? Jesus Christ , and under 100k casualties too. Wow.Tripled that in two years.
I love Biden’s work on declassifying Russia Intel all along, here. Really he’s done a good job at building an international coalition and undermining Putin. Every time. Putin says something, it seems like Biden’s got the documents showing it’s a lie.
That’s a good one and very interesting. Normally, you wouldn’t release intel and assessments to the general public to protect sources. But, this time is different from the very start. Why? Are the sources indestructible? In any case, Putin must be constantly looking over his shoulder and wondering where it’s coming from. The release of some of this information has stopped planned Russian efforts.
Sources and methods are never compromised in these releases.
Second, one of the things they teach you in intelligence analysis is to not only read the facts that are being reported (and try to measure their accuracy), but to ask why they’re being reported. Not as in “Why is the NYT making this a headline” - that’s not what matters unless you’re doing media studies or sociology. I mean “Why is the government/organization putting this out there?”
In this case, it’s obvious. There’s a current narrative around the Russian war on Ukraine, and it’s being pushed by some American politicians and news agencies as well as foreign actors, and it’s being used for political effect. There’s perfectly justified reasons for skepticism from numbers published by both Ukraine and Russia for both fog of war and propaganda reasons.
The Biden administration has an active interest in maintaining US and international support for the war, and that’s in danger because of a perception of a lack of success. They need to counter that narrative.
I don’t have any reason to believe that these numbers are wrong - I very much suspect they’re largely right - but the political angle is why they’re being reported, while US intelligence estimates of other conflicts currently going on around the world are not.
I’m obviously not talking about this assessment, which is a product of DOD battlefield analysis.
I’m talking about the hand full of times early on when the US released stories to the press stories about Russian plans. Russia plans a false flag event for provocation, etc. Those events didn’t happen because the world knew what they intended. That Intel came from somewhere.
Battlefield analysis in this context would notionally be a product of signals intelligence, photo reconnaissance, and information sharing with allied forces. It’s still sources and methods stuff, and the people doing it are part of the US intelligence community. That includes the branch intelligence services, DIA, CIA, and other three letter agencies.
For something like Putin’s plan on invading on a certain date, those are more going to lean on CIA drawing on resources in the Russian government and military. They will also involve signals and imagery, which often belong to other agencies. In these cases it is still a multi source intelligence product that cannot (in theory) be reverse engineered to leak sources and methods.
Things do leak, of course. I remember a photo published in the congressional record (which made it into Aviation Week iirc) that showed a US Keyhole photo in which you could read the tail numbers on a parked plane. That leaked the resolution of that generation of satellite, which is among the most highly classified subjects.
You are right, though. Sometimes the US will publish otherwise highly classified info, such as was used to document the engineering of WMDs in Iraq. That didn’t work out too well in the end but the general idea was that making a conclusive argument for war justified the potential exposure of that information (and Curveball was I believe already in the US at that time, but it’s been awhile).
