It starts to look like they will even win in the long run.
Ukraine: motoring on with stacks for the whole year already secured.
Russia: throwing the last everything into the battle to look like they can continue indefinitely.
“102 Russian casualties per square kilometer” I doubt Russia can keep this up, even with help from north Korea
Ukraine will be the worlds largest producer of sunflower seeds for decades.
Russia enjoys more resources than Ukraine, but supplies are not infinite, and neither is the endurance of the Russian people.
Are the Russian people really suffering? If they were, wouldn’t there be protests or attempts on Putin’s life?
A Russian pension is only slightly below $200 USD. So people on a Pension in Russia, that don’t have anybody to help them are definitely suffering now, because of the high inflation.
The Russian economy is showing cracks all over the place. Declining Ruble, high inflation, locked bank accounts, frozen housing market. Officially the economy grew about 4% in 2004. But the military industrial complex and public spending on the war was way more than that, public military spending alone increased to about 30% of the federal budget, about 8% of the total economy, this alone is about equivalent to the 4% growth. But on top of that, deficits in the military industrial complex has been covered by the banks, so the actual costs are estimated to be about twice what the budget shows.
Those numbers alone indicate a 4% decrease in the civil economy for 2024. That may not sound like much, but it’s really really bad for a country to have such a huge decline in the total real economy.
All projections I’ve heard or seen expect 2025 to be worse. With possibility of real estate and financial markets cashing. If that happens in an already bad economy, it will be a serious crash of the total Russian economy, that will take more than a decade to recover from.
Russians are said to have high capacity for suffering, because they have hundreds of years of practice. So the current situation might not be considered that bad, but I doubt that most people will feel the same by the end of the year, and in 5 and 10 years.
If the people dare to get uppity, the shadier parts of government blow up an apartment complex, blame it on the protesters and use that as an excuse to hunt them down.
They don’t even need an excuse. They’ve already passed laws that make it illegal to criticise the current government or even call the war in Ukraine a war
I think suffering is relative: has there been a time in recent history of Russia that wasn’t associated with some degree of struggle for the average inhabitant? And there also wasn’t ever a timeframe long enough where any form of healthy opposition could be institutionalized to endure over longer durations.
Also I’d say that by Western standards even the pre-war living conditions of many Russians would qualify as poor. So their scale is vastly different to ours.
I think it’s a bubble fueled by the war economy and increasing wages that will burst at some point, the sooner the better
