Russia’s war in Ukraine is already in its 17th month. In that time, President Vladimir Putin has clearly demonstrated that he is not bothered by losses — whether they be financial, material, or human. His war will go on as long as he needs. And, judging by how the authorities have woven the so-called “special military operation” into Russian life, that will be a long time.
So they’re raiding their welfare fund to sustain the war. Thing is, according to the newsletter, the fund will go from 6.8 to 2.5 trillion rubles in 1 year. And this is to be an eternal war? What do they do once everyone’s pensions are wiped out?
no one is counting on pensions here. even if you have worked all your life in 2 companies at the same time with salary near 4000$ at mounth, you will receive pension only $160 per month.
Are these the real Russian pensions? I am confused as you used dollars and not rubles.
No one would understand what the amount in rubles means here. I suspect that even in dollars it is difficult to understand.
For example, is it possible to survive in Russia on $ 160 a month? The answer is - if you have a living space in a property or a country house, then yes, although this will make you save a lot on food, and in some cases you will starve a little.
In general, if you are interested in delving into the topic, there are a lot of social benefits for pensioners in Russia. For example, you can not pay land tax if you live outside the city, do not pay tax for a car, do not pay for public transport and in some cases for train tickets. Medical care is also free, although queues usually line up for several weeks in advance. But almost all of these benefits are provided not by the pension fund, but by other.
I can’t speak for everyone, but many of my friends pensioners who have suburban plots are engaged in gardening to save on food. In any case, in the western part of Russia, where the climate allows.
In any case, in numbers, the situation is still exactly like this. My father has not worked officially for half his life and receives a pension of 13,000 rubles. 143$. My mother worked almost all her life at two jobs with a high salary and receives 18,000 rubles. 197$. Almost all pensioners rely on children to provide money or work to death.
And proof for you:
Thx for the explanation. So pensions in Russia suck. Sad
Russia is so weak and pathetic. I’d call them a joke but their war crimes aren’t funny.
Same with US/NATO.
If Russia didn’t want more of their neighbors to be NATO allies, maybe they should stop giving their neighbors reason to join.
NATO exists to solve the problems created by NATO’s existence. The reasons for joining NATO are to funnel money to America’s military contractors Nothing else.
Don’t forget to have a place to put nazis after ww2
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What does this have to do with the Ukraine war? It was the U.S. that did that.
Nah, NATO is definitely not weak. Russia showed the world they are weak. So much for Russian military might.
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So far Russia’s strategy has been terrible. And you just said if Russia and China or India join forces. So you admit Russia is failing? NATO is far more powerful than Russia. Hell, individual countries in NATO are far more powerful than Russia. The only thing Russia has going for it is the threat of nukes. You are also jumping to some weird as theories. NATO is not going to drop any nukes first. Regardless whether you think cluster bombs are somehow similar to nukes. You’re just talking out of your ass with moronic metaphors.
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You just said they really don’t have a chance without some weird conglomeration of the other countries. So yeah you did. Also Russia is the invader. You call it a proxy war and at this point it has turned into one. But it’s 100% on Russia. Russia is weak. Everyone thought Russia was the big guy on the field and it turns out they’re not. China may be although they haven’t fought a war in a long time so who knows what they can actually do. But it’s very evident now that Russia was not nearly as strong as everyone thought they were.
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Tankie cringe
How to say you’re a NAFO shill without saying you’re a NATO shill.
Correct. I’ll happily shill for the defensive alliance formed to ward off (the currently on display) Russian aggression. NATO would not exist if Russia weren’t so nakedly attempting to rebuild the Soviet Union by force, an alliance that had already been litigated and abandoned by the smaller nations Russia pillaged for resources, this time without even pretending to be for the workers.
Edit: no amount of tankie brigading will convince me that Russia isn’t the aggressor in the region. Imagine the brainrot required to think that the military that invaded Ukraine and is still currently there is the good team.
If you truly think this is a display of Russian aggression I genuinely doubt that you have any historic view on the geopolitics of the region. The conflict did not appear out of thin air in 2022. The situation is more complex than “Russian aggression”; in fact that’s not even a part of the picture. Russia is responding to requests for assistance after Ukraine began bombing its own people in 2014. Many of these people voted to join Russia after this disgusting display by Ukraine. Before 2022 most of the combatants against Ukraine were regular people fighting for their homes and families. These people realize that Ukraine wants to bomb their homes and Russia is offering to fight alongside them. On the weekend before the SMO began, there were 2000 ceasefire violations in the Donbass. Between 2014 and 2022, 1 million Ukrainians immigrated to Russia because of the abuse by the Ukrainian government. And since the operation began in 2022, another 1.3 million immigrated. The people in these territories that Ukraine has zero regard for view the support they are receiving from Russia positively: they invited Russia in to assist them, and they are somewhat reliant on Russia to protect them from Ukraine.
I know life is a lot easier when you don’t muddy things with context. I know that it’s a lot easier to be righteous in your condemnation of a world power because they’re “evil” and an “aggressor” than it is to acknowledge that the situation is more complex. I know that it’s a lot easier to go along with what Western media says than to be informed and hold your own opinions. I know it feels nice to rally with everyone against a perceived enemy. I know it feels nice to feel that your country (and military) is finally doing something good for once. But you can’t let wanting to feel good stand in the way of reality. The Western media has done a hell of a job propagandizing this war, attempting to remove any historical and geopolitical context, in order to gather and maintain support. Think honestly: how much historical and geopolitical context have you seen, especially from popular media sources? How much more effort is spent on raging about current “evil deeds” than understanding the desires of the people in the actual territories that have asked Russia for help?
Please read, and inform yourself. Life is less black-and-white than “Russia evil”.
Gee, i wonder what happened in 2014 to make Ukrainians start shelling parts of the donbas?
Could it be a land invasion by a neighboring country?
No, they must be Nazis, the extremely trustworthy people in the Kremlin say so…
I will copy paste this comment from Hexbear that explains how we reached that situation, because I believe it will be useful here for context:
The following three parts are absolutely crucial toward understanding the ongoing war in Ukraine from a materialist and historical standpoint:
One, the Maidan Coup happened in 2013 because the former president Yanukovych wanted to postpone signing the EU association trade agreement, which was an economic warfare against both Ukraine and Russia. First, it required that Ukraine take on IMF loans that required them to cut social spending and education. Second, it would allow European goods to flood Russian market due to the existing tariff-free agreement between Ukraine and Russia, without allowing Russia to do so in reverse. Putin did NOT oppose to Ukraine signing the deal, he offered a tripartite meeting to discuss this tariff issue, but the EU refused. Yanukovych did not want to lose the trade revenue with Russia, so he said he needed more time to talk this out with Russia - but it was already too late, merely postponing was enough to trigger the ultranationalists/fascists to launch a coup.
Second, the Donbass separatists rebelled because immediately after the coup, one of the first things the coup regime did was to initiate a ban on Russian language to lash out against ethnic Russians. Russia was forced into the conflict, because there would have been a massacre if the civil war was to allow the military to crush the resistance in Donbass.
Third, the Minsk agreements showed that Russia was absolutely willing to return Donbass (but not Crimea for obvious reasons) to Ukraine, although Ukraine has to give the Donbass local governments more autonomy to protect their local cultures (so that someone from Kyiv can’t just simply impose a national ban on language or culture without considering the local populations). They waited 8 years for Ukraine to start implementing the protocol, but instead what they saw was NATO openly arming Ukraine for 8 years - this showed that Ukraine wanted to take back Donbass and Crimea by military force, and the only reason for that is quite simply that they wanted to ethnically cleanse the Russian culture without having to adhere to the Minsk agreements. Both Merkel and Hollande, guarantors of Minsk II, have admitted publicly in 2022 that Minsk was simply to buy time for Ukraine to militarize, proving Russia’s intuition correct.
The war in Ukraine was inevitable. Russia still did the last ditch effort in 2021 to call for a security meeting with NATO, but to no avail. Under the new Biden presidency, Zelensky had been emboldened to talk about Ukraine joining NATO and rearming with nuclear weapons, prompting the invasion from Russia in February 2022. The rest is history.
You’re in a thread that’s showed you that NATO was a place to give jobs to high ranking Nazis. It’s the world’s most aggressive military alliance that Russia is defending itself from.
Lmfao “defending itself.” Where’s the Russian military right now pal? I, too, defend my home by attacking my neighbors.
Are your neighbours putting a nuclear missile in their yard and pointing it at your house, and you’re doing nothing?
Libya
I see the Russia shills and trolls have finally started to move on from reddit now lol. LarkinDePark, Yogthos. RIP.
Bud those “Russian shills” have been here much longer than you
How does that change what they are?
We haven’t come to a mutually agreed definition and it doesn’t seem to be worth my time to do so with you.
I am simply pointing out that you’re trying to claim that you were here first, when this website was created by a leftist and populated by leftists, and you only came over here when reddit being a shithole started to effect you personally.
In other words, you don’t have an answer, you’re defending shitty pro-Russia astroturfing and propaganda smearing.
Why do the admins tolerate this?
Bud you need to look up the definition of astroturfing.
You need to grow up
I’m not the one who believes the paid Russian posters are in the room with us right now, on this niche leftist community that you’ve graced with your redditor presence.
The admins are probably also what you would consider “Russian shills”. They explicitly announced they wouldn’t ban people with different ideologies which is why you’re allowed to spout your western propaganda here
🤔 And yet they’re federated with ours. Welp, we’ll fix that in a hot minute
Oh no, please don’t isolate yourself further and prevent us and everyone else in the fediverse looking at this instance from being exposed to your opinions, that would really own us.
You’ll note how this communist designed open source fediverse structure is less coercive than capitalist reddit while still applying incentives to discourage reactionary behavior. If you entirely isolate yourselves, you’ve just recreated the structure of reddit.
🦀
You joined one month ago
Yogthos’ account is 4 years old.
At least this indicates that he is a human with an opinion that he stated on a highly nieche community and not a paid actor that only joins and starts to influence consensus after a community grows.
You on the other hand…
Jk, but think before you misrepresent a community and people as being shills.
For sake of completeness: account dates can be manipulated by the owner of the instance the account is registered on
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The Russian economy is set to completely reverse last year’s slump – something Putin has recently highlighted. Manufacturing and construction lead the way, alongside retail. In a broad sense, all three sectors are beneficiaries of the war. The defense sector, working in three shifts, is boosting production: in June, for example, the biggest increases were in finished metal products (+45.8% year-on-year); computers, electronics and optics (+71.6% year-on-year), radar equipment (+75.4% year-on-year) and electrical equipment (+32.1% year-on-year). Production capacities are running at their maximum.
something Putin has recently highlighted
so, we now know it gonna do the opposite nice
So whats the plan? How can this end?
He can wait to see if Trump becomes president, because we all know how it will end with his BFF in charge.
Any Republican, really. Just listen to Fox or the Republicans in Congress.
This is the long game, because if Trump wins, he can get the US out of NATO and that’s a constitutional crisis at home, and a serious flashpoint to drive Europe back into squabbling.
Not with this supreme court.
America is far from the only country providing support to Ukraine.
No, but it is definitely the singlemost important contributor by far.
Once US turns off the tap this war ends immediately. It’s really that simple.
No, it really isn’t. The rest of eastern Europe’s countries remember what it was like to live under the Russian thumb and they have plenty of modern weapons and well-trained soldiers salivating to ensure Russia is going to be a crippled husk for the next few generations. Western Europe is none to fond of Russia either. And if America stops helping because an obvious Russian puppet president has taken power, that’s only going to make it worse.
America may be the sole “superpower”, but bear in mind that that means Russia is not a “superpower”. They’re a peer to the various countries of Europe at best, and by this point I would not even call them that. Ukraine has more tanks than Russia does now. America’s already done a lot of the heavy lifting in breaking Russia, if they bowed out now it’s not like everything resets to the way it was in 2021. Russia is still on the ropes.
The rest of eastern Europe’s countries remember what it was like to live under the Russian thumb
Surveys conducted in 2013.
Gee, I wonder if anything might have happened from 2014 to present that would have changed those numbers a bit.
Also, to dig up an old favourite, you forgot Poland. And a bunch of others. More countries were “living under the Russian thumb” than just literal members of the USSR. Here’s 14 former Soviet republics that joined NATO, whose primary purpose is to defend against Russian attack.
Would be interesting to see what the current opinion would be. I guess it wouldn’t be easy to conduct a similar poll now.
True, but if America decides to provide support to Russia, the rest of NATO will stand down.
There’s a vast difference between America ceasing to support Ukraine and America supporting Russia. Simply never going to happen, that’s a loonie scenario.
NATO is not officially supporting Ukraine. It just so happens that all the various NATO member countries are all individually deciding that it’s in their interests to support Ukraine. If America drops out that’s not going to change whether it’s in the interests of those countries to continue supporting Ukraine. Indeed, it becomes all the more important for many of them to make sure Russia’s strength is broken if they don’t feel they can rely on America to support them.
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You must know by now that Russiagate was a hoax?
Doesn’t matter. Trump wants Russia to win.
The plan is to profit from war, and that’s the thing, it never ends.
Sort of like the war in Afghanistan. It’ll go on for a very long time
Russia’s committing way more resources into this conflict than they ever did for previous similar operations though. Ukraine is claiming they killed/wounded over 200000 Russian soldiers. That’s not anywhere near comparable to previous post WWII conflicts.
Ukraine claims a lot of things, it’s called war propaganda. We won’t know what the actual losses are on each side until the war is over. It’s certainly absurd to take Ukrainian numbers uncritically. In fact, it doesn’t even match up with Ukraine having done multiple mobilizations now while Russia has only done one. If Russia was losing anywhere close to manpower Ukraine claims, then they would’ve had to do multiple mobilizations by now as well. Also, as many military experts have pointed out, this is primarily an artillery war and Russia has a huge artillery advantage over Ukraine. That’s where vast majority of casualties comes from.
Russia never really stopped mobilizing men. They started the mobilization back in autumn, then passed several reforms to allow them to keep mobilizing men in a less conspicuous way, like making the delivery of the mobilization letter electronic and without receipt, adding restrictions to those who don’t go the conscription office and other laws. All these were done in the winter and thousands of reports of electronic mobilization letters surfaced during these months on the internet. It’s a steady stream conscripts rather than big batches, but the result it’s the same.
Yup, that sure sounds like a credible report to me.
Human resources yeah, but financial? I’m not sure. The Iraq war cost 3 trillion dollars.
And mind you, you’re talking about the victors (mostly) the Korean war cost the lives of 2 million people. As did the Vietnam war.
Don’t you mean generated trillions of dollars (for private war profiteers)?
The thing about corruption is that it’s very inefficient. Spending a trillion dollars on weapons translates to only a couple of billions in the pockets of profiteers, the rest is used to actually make the weapons, move them in place, and to pay the people using them.
So with a useless war, you waste far more than you would if you just have the money to the profiteers.
The money would be wasted on things like super yachts anyways. At least a good chunk of this waste goes to things like feeding and housing soldiers and contractors and paying those people and all the people who make the food, supplies, etc. Seems less wasteful than just giving it to billionaires. Granted, the weapons, when they actually function at all, can be used to cause harm to many people…
Rule of Acquisition number 34: War is good for business.
A lot of western oligarchs are making very good profits off this war. Here’s an undercover interview with a Blackrock recruiter who openly says Blackrock is making money and they want the war to keep going https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOhAgYonAY4
Anybody who thinks that the west is there to protect Ukraine and defend democracy is brain damaged.
that is, 0.6% of the total number of people who can be drafted into the army.
The current political regime is not particularly concerned about military losses. even if we take into account the 2 million Russians who left, 200,000 people still make up about 1% of the number of conscripts. Even if we assume that half of them will somehow manage to escape from the Ministry of Defense, 15 million people can still be called up into the army.
You can’t really send every man able to hold a gun directly to the front without your economy completely collapsing. Even 1% of your abled men being suddenly dead is very serious in terms of the economy. Plus all the injured coming home from the war now suddenly being a burden rather than a productive asset to your economy.
Definitely not good for either country
Well, that’s right. But already now the business is starting to hire women more willingly than men who can conscripted. And just recently, a law was passed that those who could refuse the draft after entering the institute would still serve after the institute. Government introduced new much stricter laws against draft evasion. Look like preparation for the beginning of mobilization.
You can call a lot of people, but the reality is that the Russian army gradually shifts from trained soldiers with tanks and artillery to Igor with a gun.
Their losses will skyrocket the moment they can’t provide sufficient counter-battery fire and air defence for their troops anymore.
the Russian army has never been well trained. Almost the entire composition of the army below the officers are forcibly conscripted civilians. the number of contractors is ridiculously small.
the Russian army has never been contracted. And a year of training of a forcibly conscripted person always gives approximately the same result.
UPD: if we lived in the world of starcraft, Russia would undoubtedly be Zerg. In general, the command and tactics are applied accordingly - a swarm of Zerg. I am generally surprised that conscripts are at least given weapons.
when I served in the army on universal conscription for 2.5 years of compulsory conscription many, years ago, I fired from a machine gun about 2 times. This is the average level of training of a Russian soldier.
This number takes into account every men from the age bracket 15 to to 55, according to rosstat numbers. https://rosstat.gov.ru/storage/mediabank/Bul_chislen_nasel-pv_01-01-2022.pdf
This assumes a lot given that realistically there is no real way to know how many people are really living there. This is absolutely not the number of people who are eligible to be conscripted.By the contract, a person of any age can now be called up until the rifle falls out of his hands. So it’s even less than it could theoretically be required. https://www.rbc.ru/politics/28/05/2022/6291e8e79a7947008579486b
In the Russian Federation, the same resolution on conscripts can be issued one day at any time.
True, technically the Russian government proclaims that everyone who can stand straight for a moment is a potential recruit. But if the previous mogilisation attempts showed us something, that even the most loyal putin’s dogs would prefer making war efforts from the comfort of their own homes.
I don’t have anything other than gut feelings after extensive reading of telegram channels to base this on, but my personal estimation that they could probably get another half of a million of meatbags or so, but after that the whole shit will just collapse in on itself.
This is one of the things I pointed out in the post on the permanent war. Russia since the beginning dumped into the war old and outdated equipment. They sent to the front those who they considered the less valuable soldiers at the same time initially they avoided to send recruits from the draft to minimise the political backlash within Russia.
Since the beginning they handled it as a long term attrition war.
That’s not true. They lost most of their so-called “elite” units at the beginning of the war, thinking it would be a very short war and that these units would just walk into Kyiv. Units which they are incapable of replacing in any meaningful way.
The mobilisation only came months after their initiation of the war, when they realised it would not be a short term affair.
That’s also been the view of actual military people in NATO, but you’ll never hear about this in the mainstream media
https://www.russiamatters.org/analysis/whats-ahead-war-ukraine
Yup, and the US military-industrial-complex has been frothing at the mouth for another long-term war they can profit off of, and they’ve got their wish.
Yeah, NATO will now force all the European countries to up their military spending and do austerity. The oligarchs running the war industry are going to be swimming in cash while people are gonna starve. Now that they have a credible enemy to scare people with, it’s going to be an unlimited tap.
It’s great to have a new perspective on this conflict and I personally welcome your work and effort here. Thank you!
But I thought that the Slavic brainpan couldn’t produce ball bearings?! /s
