Summary
Regardless of Putin’s decision regarding the war in Ukraine, Russia’s economy is facing a crisis due to factors such as sanctions, a shrinking sovereign wealth fund, and a labor shortage. The war has boosted growth, but Russia cannot sustain it without significant economic consequences.
I’m not an economist or even especially well informed, but… Isn’t war kind of… You know. Expensive?
Yeah I know it could pay off in the long term if you just swept up a country’s worth of innocents, genocided them and grabbed their land (Hi Israel), but… Fuck up the war badly enough, and there’s not going to BE a long term, just because the economy collapses. Right?
War being expensive is especially ruinous with modern (ie anytime past the 18th century AD) countries being deeply interconnected through market systems. All that money just pissed away trying to grab someone else’s land? Every other country in the world was investing that money in material or human capital incentives. When peacetime returns, unless you have a massive waiting market for your war economy production (like the US after WW1 and WW2), you will be at a massive disadvantage in the world market - causing a large number of domestic industries to suffer as they’re undercut by products of either superior pricing/availability, quality, or both.
At this point, you can swing towards protectionism - but that will reduce the standard of living and efficiency of domestic industry as well, and potentially lead to backlash from other countries imposing protectionist policies in kind, damaging your exports and leaving your nation even poorer. So at the end of the day, no matter what you do, you’ve fucked over your own industries and budget for years at minimum, requiring significant political capital and competence in government just to make up the difference and catch up to the rest of the world - and that’s not even getting into damage done to diplomatic reputations, actual loss of materiel, and the sheer human cost of throwing people into the meat grinder.
War requiring a war economy is a no-win scenario in the vast majority of cases.
yeah but for instance, Putin (having more than 200 billions $$$) and all his oligarchs friends, don’t give a shit, they can live in super mansion with 23 bathrooms, high ends cars and all the refine food/wine from around the world
Yes, but in this case most of the Russian economy was safely being invested in British banks and real estate.
So for Russian leaders it was a no-lose scenario, until Britain had the balls to actually join the sanctions because they started assassinating people in London.
They did what?!
Assuming that was a clipboard fail:
https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/uk-sanctions-on-russia#:~:text=This sanctions regime is aimed,on the UK sanctions list.
They’re largely cut off from British banks and money transfers, and British banks are loaning money to Ukraine backed by Russian deposits and interest.
Yeah I have no idea what happened up there. Lemme just…
They did what?!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Litvinenko?wprov=sfla1
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_of_Sergei_and_Yulia_Skripal?wprov=sfla1
They don’t care, they’re Russian, it doesn’t matter to them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Gareth_Williams too, probably
Dude found in his own gym bag, right? That was fucked up.
Putin and his Russian Mafia oligarchs don’t mind the destruction of countless opportunities for their subjects. It’s a sacrifice that they are willing to make.
Bold of you to assume China will just let russia collapse. Ideally, China economically subjugates Russia and makes it essentially a satellite state
The plan is to split Russia, the west bit (with the people) goes to Europe to deal with, the east bit (with the land and more resources than God) goes to China.
And that gives us all 50-100 years of peace while both sides slowly digest what they have to deal with.
Yes, Europe gets the shitty half of this deal, but they also get security, and the only person to ever successfully charge from China, across the whole Russian steppe to attack Europe was Genghis Khan, doubt that’s happening again.
Genghis didn’t have access to thousands of poorly assembled Humvee knockoffs and millions of poorly trained mechanics to make them somewhat functional. I’m sure some of them could survive the drive.
The only drivable thing that would survive that is a Toyota pickup because they are unkillable
I think it was his heir Ogedei Kahn
Yeah, my bad.
All China wants is the mineral and petroleum reserves in Siberia. They don’t give a fuck about the population centers in western Russia.
And water…Beijing needs water and lake Baikal is around the corner.
I’m sure they can be re-educated as well as any other minority… (/s but not really)
Really. There’s nothing in Russia that can’t be had easier just by buying it. And all the Russians worth a damn have gotten the hell out of Russia.
Remember that China is having a bit of an economic crisis at the moment
You’d think they’d have learned from the cold war, but I guess not.
Well, many parts of them have. Eastern Europe, formerly under Soviet conrol, is now firmly in market economies. Armenia has left the CSTO (Russia’s wish.com NATO), and Ukraine famously kicked out its Russia puppet leader. All of these were part of the Soviet Union or under their control before.
fuckwits don’t learn from history. putin has a vast wealth of real-world failure from which to draw lessons, such as the soviet occupation of afghanistan. but, no. he needed to stroke his pencil dick over some old maps of the Blyat Empire. and now russians have to join in the suffering they brought on their cousins.
Hard to learn when your baby formula is basically vodka.