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The Battle for Bakhmut
The battle for Bakhmut has lasted for about nine months. It is the bloodiest and most intense fight in Europe since WWII. Advances and retreats are measured in two to six kilometers increments.
Thousands of Russian and Ukrainian forces have been killed in this battle as Russian forces try to encircle the city, and Ukrainian forces try to prevent the taking of the city.
Once again, the following video shows the grunts in the field. I’m not interested in the policy wonk views in the West, nor the Kremlin’s perpetual aggrievement of losing the old Soviet Empire. This fight has become like WWI trench warfare with newer and more deadly weapons.
My opinion is that this war is not going to end anytime soon. Regardless of the past history between Russia and Ukraine, it should be obvious that Ukrainians are fighting for hearth and home.
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Published in Military
Still doesn’t seem wise to make that dependent on electricity supply and charging facilities.
The “Rus” was not Russian ….it was based in Kyiv (not Moscow). That has no bearing on the situation. It is like Romania claiming title to Italy, b/c its name sounds like Rome & it was once part of the same empire.
I suggest that you get really busy stocking up on whatever Cognitive Dissonance Minimization products might be available out there, ’cause …
12 months from now, Russia will STILL be a main geopolitical player.
Sucks to be a has been. You can have ‘Rus’ if you can keep ‘Rus’.
Sort of like Israel/Palestine, I guess, if you think about it….
Which unelected international body has decided we can’t sanction who we want, and how would you like the wishes of some unelected international body enforced on this country in the future?
You mean the pipeline story? If we did it, I don’t particularly care. If in the future the EU gets its gas from the US and Israel, all the better. The less money flowing to Russia, the better.
As opposed to the measured, calm, patient, meticulous care exemplified by Putin, and his exquisite concern for the mobiks sent into the grinder with a soup-pot for a helmet.
And Putin fell for it! What a maroon!
It wasn’t Russian, but it wasn’t Ukrainian, either….it was the civilizational source for three related, but distinct nationalities, from a time before any of them had solidified as the modern cultural and linguistic groups. There was a very long period of time in which they all could have coalesced into a more or less cohesive identity as with France or most of the Germanic tribes, but it was not to be. Of course, they also could have fragmented into several smaller groups, and Moscow ultimately deserves most of both the credit and the blame for preventing either scenario.
The Prince of Moscow, Peter “the Great” decided to borrow a version of the old name for his growing empire, a few years before his death in 1725.
The name, Russia, has been causing confusion ever since; so the Ukrainians are proposing to go back to using Muscovy as the name of their sinister neighbor to the north.
The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth? That doesn’t make sense to me…
2nd rate economy- destroyed army- corrupt and evil government. Their international supporters are juggernauts like North Korea, Nicaragua, Cuba, Bolivia & Zimbabwe, Syria, Eritrea, Mali (the nations a recent president would call s***holes). The majority of Russian tech talent has fled and the economic sanctions will not end with the war. Russian will not only face an enlarged NATO it will have a hostile Ukraine on its border that is integrated into Europe. I would expect a strong Ukrainian & Polish military collaboration.
Russia faces a massive rebuilding project and unfortunately given the current regime it will more likely follow the North Korean route. It needs to get out of the dream of being a “major geopolitical player” and try to build a vibrant economy with a dynamic civil society that isn’t dominated by the government- but that historically hasn’t been the Russian model.
https://www.hoover.org/research/historian-future-five-more-questions-stephen-kotkin
Tell me how this is not a quagmire for us, and I’ll appreciate your snark more.
It is a complicated history that is certainly distinct from Moscow’s history with Afghanistan. Which is the original point. Afghanistan is not a good analogy for Ukraine, because of history and location.
This seems like a quagmire for Putin, not the United States.
6th in the world, just about 10% smaller than Germany’s. Oil and gas exports are back to pre-war levels, in volume terms. Still the world’s largest wheat exporter (a record 45 million tons during the ’22/’23 season, about 30% more than the EU as a whole). Etc.
In your wet dreams.
Plus China (#1 world economy), India (#3 world economy), Brazil (#8 world economy), etc., etc., etc., etc., with whom Russia has been busy establishing closer economic ties (including non-dollar transaction systems) over the past year.
Not even close. Estimates hover around no more than a fifth. And a notable portion of those left just after the war started, because the Western companies they worked for made their emigration a condition of continued employment (due to sanctions).
Its rebuilding project in the bits of Ukraine that will be under its control at the end of the war is going to be much more manageable than Ukraine’s will turn out to be. Reconstruction is already underway in some parts, btw, such as in … Mariupol.
I highly suspect that Russia will somehow manage to resist the temptation to succumb to such “helpful” advice.
Right. Every time I shop for a new car, I notice all those great Russian cars on the market. Every time I shop for a new cell phone I notice all those Russian cell phones.
I mean, everywhere you look you see evidence of Russian productivity.
/sarcasm.
Russia ranks 11th in GDP, lower than Italy’s GDP 8th ranking.
The car you own, I’m guessing, has a catalytic converter in it. One of the necessary elements in a catalytic converter: palladium. The circuitry in your cell phone requires palladium as well. As do a multitude of parts in the plane you’ll be taking on your next vacation/business trip. Etc.
The world’s largest supplier of palladium: Russia, with about 40% of global production.
Aren’t you glad you learned something new today?
Not in PPP terms, which is the correct method for international comparisons. In PPP terms, Italy is #12 (behind Turkey).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)#Table
PPP is the same system that rated the USSR the #1 economy in the world in 1985(in fact the Soviet per capita consumption was < 1/3 of the USA in the 1980s)-when it was more like a 3rd world nation (as even Gorbachev admitted). Too many assumptions & fudge factors when dealing with countries that typically lie about their economy-like Russia & China . With much of the economy of modern nations in the service sector it is hard to gauge the actual cost & quality (and Soviet service workers were legendary for being terrible). Many Soviet products were virtually worthless in the world market- and with sanctions much is the same in Russia.
No one thinks Russia is a better place to live than Italy.
for a scholarly article addressing some of the problems in PPP adjustment in the uSSR:
https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdf/10.1257/jep.5.4.29
and if you like adjustments-why not use PPP-GDP per capita? Probably b/c then Russia is #56 in the world (below the Maldives, that world power). But the good news is b/c of the war & sanctions, Russia will fall in ranking to the 70s or lower-but that is better than their corruption rankings-which are #137 (with the larger number being more corrupt-they are the most corrupt in Europe-and with the war corruption will only increase since it is the regime that is the main source of corruption).
This could very well be true. I’ll treat “quagmire” as a synonym for “stalemate”. I think Russia is OK with a stalemate, since they think they can outlast NATO support for Ukraine.
Without getting into rhetorically inflating/diminishing Russia or the West’s influence – there has to be more to it that this figure.
The West could not have been stuck in a decades long Cold War with a nuclear armed power with a meaningful per capita GDP smaller than Italy’s. Could it?
The problem with applying PPP adjustments to the USSR economy was not with PPP itself, but with the difficulty of adjusting for the quality difference between the average basket of goods consumed by Soviet citizens and those consumed by Western citizens. Those differences have all but disappeared by now. Russians wear the same kind of clothes and shoes as we do. The dishwashers, washer/dryers, refrigerators, ovens, microwaves, etc., they use in their daily lives are just as good as in the West. Their grocery stores are just as well stocked as ours. Etc., etc., etc..
Because, when discussing whether a country’s economy qualifies it as a major world player, PPP-GDP Per Capita is a silly measure to use. By that measure, here are world’s top 10:
Ireland, Luxembourg, Lichtenstein, Singapore, Qatar, Monaco, Macau, UAE, Bermuda, and Switzerland.
See what I mean by silly?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita#Table
See my reply to Doug in #112, and subsequent commentary.
actually the important number is between the GDP & the per capita GDP (with or without PPP adjustment) otherwise India would have ruled Great Britain for many centuries & not the other way around. India & China had the biggest economies in the world for centuries, but were over shadowed by the Dutch & the Portuguese for centuries. You need both a large economy & a significant surplus of per capita GDP to wield power-can’t extract much wealth from a large number of subsistence farmers. Russia’s problem is that its per capita surplus & productivity is relatively low & has been for centuries. Therefore, its grandiose plans for being a world power are continually frustrated. Unfortunately, that frustration leads its people to accept authoritarians who promise they will acquire for them world such greatness-but the dictators only get them misery. See Stephen Kotkin.
Russia’s economy is about 10 percent of the European Union economy.
The Soviet Union was really good at making television sets that exploded. They cornered the market on those.