Research: ‘Ukraine war costs Russian military €20B per day’
consultancy.eu
consultancy.eu
Russia's 2019 military spend was 65 billion USD, or 58.6 billion EUR. Clearly they are not blowing through an entire year's defense budget in three days (that would be over 100x the usual rate of spend!).
Or another sanity-check figure: Russia's entire 2020 GDP would pay for only 67 days of war at this run-rate. In other words, the country is using over 500% of its productive output on the war (a neat trick without any imports!)
For reference, in 1940 the United States spent 1.64% of its GDP on defense. In 1945 it spent 37.19%.
I'm as hopeful as anyone for Ukraine to survive this awful war with her sovereignty intact, but we must be realistic.
"Firstly, Russian ordnance is generally less sophisticated and cheaper than US kit. Secondly, Russian military vehicles do not use petroleum, but diesel – a fuel that is cheaper and offers a better range.
He also estimated the cost of equipment losses in the first four days of fighting. Ten aircraft, at an average price tag of $30 million per airframe, would cost $300 million. One hundred armored fighting vehicles – troop carriers, infantry fighting vehicles, mobile artillery and tanks – which cost an average of $5 million each, would hit the Russian taxpayer with a $500 million bill.
The source then estimated the daily cost of keeping a Russian soldier – a cheaper fighting man than his US counterpart – in the field to be approximately $1,000. He multiplied that by the upper estimate of Russia’s force level in Ukraine – 200,000 troops.
For one day, that would be $200 million. Over four days, troop maintenance costs would total $800 million.
So the total cost for four days of combat operations in Ukraine would be in the region of $1.6 billion – the source added it could rise to $2 billion. But even that upper range would put daily costs to the Kremlin of its invasion at about $500 million."
https://asiatimes.com/2022/03/russias-low-cost-war-can-endur...
Although when there is no other trading partner but China left, I bet China's conditions on the deal beats Germany's wildest dreams.
The biggest winner out of this diplomacy mess of the last decades seems to be China. Just like with the 10 year lease China got in Afghanistan from the Taliban.
That is a good question with no concrete or simple answer. Apart from they are allies. May be China wants to gain control of Russia as some have stated ( I find that highly unlikely ), or Xi wanted a test and see how Taiwan could be handled.
1) $20B is not the cost right now but expected to be: "the daily cost of war for Russia is “likely to exceed $20 billion” as the invasion scales.
2) Article mentions also lost of $2.7B from GDP because those killed russian soldier won't be veteran in the future and won't work in private sector etc and won't bring any money to russia economy in the future.
3) Article also mentions other supplies: ammunition, fuel, etc. - they are using a lot of rockets and those are not cheap to build and in comparison to tanks rockets are just 'disposable' products.
* lost equipment costs basically 0 - they are mostly old hand-me-downs, the factories are not producing them anymore, so all the costs are already sunk; also the supply is plenty, so abandoning them is nothing; but let's be generous and say $100k / piece of equipment lost
* airplanes are more expensive, but again, this is old stock, there is plenty of them, and not incurring costs of producing more - let's say 10M per craft
* $1000 / day / soldier - this is absurd. They left the poor blokes in the cold with no fuel, military rations that expired in 1997 for food, and they rob the houses and stores they encounter for necessities; I'd say max $20 / day / soldier, and this is a country that average salary is $500 / month, so paying your soldiers $600/month is above average !
So in total this gets you 14M / day. Let's double that for the upkeep and then round up to 50M / day and you'll get a closer look at what the costs truly are like for Russia.
Basically the military in this invasion costs them spare change. The really costly bit is sanctions - in this context the lost at least 300B so far, with no end in sight. No wonder Putin is pissed.
Sure, for some legacy capital items, the production costs are sunk. But the cost of not having the equipment isn't. You can pay replacement cost or you can pay the permanent reduction in military capacity cost, but you are paying the cost either way if you lose the equipment.
Unless you are saying the operational value of the equipment is zero, in which case, sure, the loss is zero but then why did you even bring it to war in the first place?
> airplanes are more expensive, but again, this is old stock, there is plenty of them, and not incurring costs of producing more - let's say 10M per craft
If you aren't calculating it at the cost of replacing the capacity provided, you are underestimating the real cost.
The big question that we want answered is will be Russian forces insolvent? And they can be both financially and operationally insolvent. In the former they don't have cash to pay soldiers and suppliers and thus will have to depreciate their currency even further. In the latter they just don't have enough production capability and stock to cover the war needs for fuel, ammo and rations. Giving the know corruption on the military and government I think the latter is possible at least for a few critical items like MLRS ammo and cruise missiles.
nothing was usual for the russian army in the first week. now that they're starting to reorganize, it might go back down, but that's assuming logistics will be functioning. this is not a given since the army seems to be corrupt in and out.
The figure in the article includes losses; indeed, it speaks of costs, not spending.
Of course losses can obliterate many years of budget, if you're losing permanent assets that took literal decades to build up! Armies don't get rebuilt from scratch every year.
https://www.businessinsider.com/ukraine-revealed-secret-batt...
Furthermore, the losses they've suffered are significant, and most of that equipment is decades old, acquired under Soviet "budgets".
I am willing to bet 90% of people will believe that number when it is printed by the press or shared on social media.
It is so sad we live in a world where 99.9% of news are either factually incorrect or completely taken out of context.
The foreign reserves that were frozen (which I know is different from “seized”) were 2-4 months GDP depending on which estimate I use for how much was frozen.
I’ve not seen any estimate for the economic impact from reduction in trade.
But it isn't particularly hard to imagine a higher spend rate during a large scale active conflict than during peace times.
Hence the title such as "Direct losses from military action". Of course these numbers are very different compared to when stuff doesn't get blown up. Not to mention the stuff that is intended to be blown up.
As for running costs, although less obviously different, as you mention, are not a surprise to be orders of magnitude larger during war. Logistics is expensive. War is expensive.
Think of consultancy more of a wellness program instead of substantial help.
Perhaps I'm wrong, but I don't see the ukranians giving in any time soon, they seem determined to fight for every inch. The cost of occupying them is going to be astronomical and tie up their military fighting a guerilla war.
I assume the expectation was that they would invade, the ukranian government would run away and they could impose a puppet government, but that just doesn't look likely now.
I may be very wrong, but I just don't see what the endgame is for Russia that doesnt bleed their economy dry in the process.
That was absolutely the expectation. Russian state media recently accidentally published an article written before the invasion that was supposed to be an account of their swift victory and Ukraine’s reintegration in to Russia.
https://briefs.fourthestate.org/2022/03/01/russian-state-new...
What the end game is now is anyones guess.
And, unfortunately, that just may be what happens. A lot of countries are too lazy with investing in renewables or nuclear and they're in for some very hard times if they need to rely on gas to be shipped in or piped around Ukraine/Russia, so I can imagine sanctions being loosened in under a year for many countries. At least France was smart enough to go for nuclear and can probably hold a moral high ground as long as they want and the US has shown they'll hold grudges for decades (see Cuba and Iran).
The telegraph had an article a few days ago about how if all fracking was restarted, OPEC was persuaded to flood the market, and consumers took some restrictions (90km/h temporary speed limit in europe for example), we could be off Russian energy by the end of the year.
Question is, is there enough political will to do it.
As an aside, I wonder if EU/US realized that they are not leaving themselves any options except to maintain the sanctions forever in the event they are not a viable aggression deterrent, which paves the way for Russia to head nowhere else but to become Xi's puppet. Putting tinfoil hat on, I wonder whether any politicians of dubious associations had the time to lobby for this (I recall MI6 discovered a CCP-paid agent in UK lawmaking system just last year).
To answer your question, if Putin is acting in accord with Xi, then there may be some winning conditions for Putin that we do not know about. (As a Russian, I have little doubt that a Venn diagram of winning conditions for Putin and winning conditions for the country as a whole would be two circles.)
1) russian denuclearification (due to using the threat of nuclear weapons as an umbrella over a conventional war)
2) agree to remove themselves from UN Security Council as a permanent member (due to invading another sovereign state with basically complete worldwide condemnation, one can try to equate it to US moves, but none of them have been as universally condenmed, so yes, quantity matters in this regard).
3) complete pullback from Ukraine
4) reparations paid to Ukraine.
5) I've even argue to having to give up their european enclave.
if they refuse, they will cease to be effectively an independent state and will simple become a chinese vassal state.
so the Q is, what matters more to Russian pride. being an independent state that can mostly chart one's own destiny, but being a pale remnant of what they once were. Or having fake power but really simply being under the total control of china.
A million years of sanctions isn't going to be sufficient to accomplish that, especially when China is still available as a trading partner.
It might result in civil unrest, and (incredibly unlikely, but sure, pigs could fly) a coup, but you won't be able to pry the nuclear football out of the fingers of whomever inherits the rubble of the Kremlin. The United States is more likely to give up its nuclear arsenal than Russia is.
You're confusing what you want with what can happen. That's not how geopolitics, negotiations, or questions of power work.
RU sanctions are being compared to Iranian sanctions because they're very comparable, with similar evasion routes - turning east.
> Europe somewhat ignored
And prior to Trump/JCPOA they didn't. Iran experienced several shocks of ramping sanctions for around a decade including by EU that was extremely comprehensive. As in SWIFT tier in practice. RU at least has strategic partner in PRC interested in propping it long term. There's also lots of other large neutral markets that hasn't signalled willingness to ditch RU resources and potentially UKR resources under RU. And again, this is assuming RU sanctions will last during negotiations to end the war, not to mention RU hasn't retaliated meaningfully - it's conceivable RU economy the size of Spain gets crushed to size of Turkey (half) but RU can afflict disproportionate damage in other way, i.e. cyber disruptions that cause economic disruptions which will cause the EU/US to loose in aggregate more than RU.
Also continuing sanctions will probably require softening the stance over other places like Iran. If they themselves are savvy enough to catch this windfall history might chart quite an interesting different coarse.
I'd argue that the russian's overt use of the nuke threat is going to make countries more hardline in the near future on Iran's nuke ambitions.
Member Germany after WW1?
If they agreed to those points, their destiny will be determined by "the West", which may look pure and good compared to Putin, but let's not pretend the US and EU are corruption-free, the rich and corporations also have outsized influence here.
I don't think your wrong, the "official" military will be gone away soon, but then the real struggle begins for russia.
Just look at Afghanistan in 1979, if the west continues to support the guerillas/mudschahidin/freedom-fighters etc.
If Ukrainians don't start to fight each others (like in Chechnya) this is going to be a nightmare for Russia.
Bit more info:
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2022/02/24/c...
(Naturally, the West also has an 'entrenched elite'; it's always greener, yadda yadda. Yet average western life is objectively much better than current Russian)
1) Ukraine fails to (independently) develop its recently discovered Black Sea oil/gas reserves, and fails in general to prosper as a democratic nation
2) Europe continues to buy oil/gas from Russia.
Therefore:
The military win condition is "make a mess". The diplomatic win condition is "get as many sanctions lifted as possible".
Russia will absorb Ukraine, and since there is nothing stopping them at the moment probably Moldova and Georgia as well. Lukashenko will give Belarus to Russia.
Once all of these places have been assimilated, they are now all Russia. You can no longer support the citizens of these areas because they will all be Russians.
Russia will continue to isolate themselves and attempt to turn everyone within their borders against the west.
They already practiced cutting themselves off from the entire internet last year, so they likely know how bad things will get.
Russia can sustain itself if it wants because it is so large, so it appears they are attempting to build some sort of enclave at any cost.
Likely, though not like they are not dependant from outside world, i.e. they can become soviet union 2.0 with iron curtain 2.0.
Their commercial aviation is dependant on boeing and airbus - no parts for foreseeable future. Big portion of shipping containers will stop coming, banks are restricted and foreign money is pulling out (moscow exchange is closed for the 4th day), etc.
Good writeup here: https://twitter.com/dmitryopines/status/1499157917399977987?...
They maybe take Ukraine, but russian economy is on borderline collapse I think.
There is evidence that this is already in the works, for example the article that was published prematurely suggesting Russia has already absorbed Belarus
https://www.newsweek.com/state-run-russian-news-site-acciden...
also
https://mobile.twitter.com/VoicesBelarus/status/149896950184...
Warfare is 'the continuation of politics by other means' - it is politics. It ends when there is a political solution that sufficiently reduces the incentive to fight - people are sufficiently satisfied and/or too scared. Political leaders regularly forget this essential - the US went into Iraq, rapidly defeated the Iraqi military, but lacking a political solution they remained for over a decade. The same thing happened in Afghanistan - you can see what happened when the US finally left, almost immediately, sans a political solution. Note that, when political solutions seem unavailable, many invaders tend to persist regardless.
What political solution would eliminate the incentive for Ukrainians to fight? Lots of egocentric attackers think, 'the people will welcome us!' - which is kind of like going into your neighbors house with a gun, taking over, and feeling sure that they will welcome you. But wrapped up in their insulated egos, they still think it: Putin seemed to have thought it about Ukraine.
That fantasy has been dispelled with a vengence; right now it's very hard to imagine the Ukrainians accepting any Russian-backed goverment. Putin's only option might be a fear-based government. If you think that's too difficult, remember that the Soviet Union ruled Ukraine (and other places) in that manner for generations - and that was after taking their food and starving to death a large portion of the population in the 1930s. However, it would permanently brand Russia as brutal dictators. Another alternative is Ukraine's leadership surrenders to reduce civilian suffering - Zelensky is very popular, afaik; would enough Ukrainians follow his lead?
My hope is:
Putin doesn't want lose face, so he pumps more money into it than his supporters are okay with and their patience runs out befor Ukraine loses.
His end game would be Ukraine getting leveled, the west being angry and remilitarizing, and he can sell a new cold war for the next decades to keep support.
But we need to thread carefully here. The other side looks that it might involve non-rational actors. Hopefully they're also incompetent and not very united amongst themselves.
I'm pretty confident that when Russia would be a real democracy, it would have grown closer to EU. I know some Russians (the same as I know some Ukrainians), and I'm sure they would prefer our countries doing more collaboration.
But now we are all stuck with this KGB-er that still thinks he's living in Soviet days.
It's become very clear by now that the west shouldn't do business with non-democratic countries. We made the mistake with Russia and with China, and our money only makes them stronger. It doesn't push them towards democracy at all.
If you use e.g. the democracy index, you leave most of Africa (which, remember, is bigger than it may look on a typical map projection) and Middle East, which fare as bad or worse than Russia, to China. Try suggesting that to US corporations or foreign policy lawmakers.
Once more than half of the world gathers behind China due to sanctions, give it time to snowball and soon EU/US/AU may just become unable to compete with Chinese offers, meaning any remaining country will have no economic reason to continue dealing with the Western bloc (except if you threaten them, bribe top officials personally, or do a coup).
Edited to clarify implications.
But I think we've been a bit too free with sending our money to those kind of states.
The people of Russia and the EU would 100% love this if you were to take away all the propaganda. But this view doesn't seem to be shared by the ruling elites and the US doesn't seem want to want to allow that profits made from "Marshall money" fuel in any way the development of Russia.
And there's also some mindset incompatibility that would need to be resolved first:
Western European countries have actually accelerated their development through fierce competition and even war amongst them... I think this is what in the end lead to the enlightenment and then the industrial revolution. But war was kept in check in a way, it was "war by the rules" sort of with conditions to limit destruction of intellectual and material capital. People died, a lot, but knowledge, tradition and core assets too, were preserved. And "being able to play The Game right" is still a fundamental condition for "joining The West(ern Europe)".
Russia doesn't seem to get how to "be corrupt, but not THAT corrupt" (eg. there's corruption in France and Germany too, but it does NOT undermine the foundations of society - there are soft subtle limits that people learn how to thread around). (+HINT: you can't remove corruption and nepotism 100% without, paradoxically, getting back to 100% corruption and nepotism because you'd need to centralize authoritarian power to fully/absolutely solve corruption. "All or nothing" thinking doesn't work. It's always "pink" or "gray", never red&white or black&white. It's subtleties and mental gymnastics like this that make Western Europe what it is and give its power, this "the hidden soul of Europe" in a way, "discretely weaponizing subtlety and paradox for the purpose of furthering the development of humanity, science and knowledge". And it's stuff you'll not find in any book. It's stuff that people need to figure out by themselves and also let other figure it out by themselves.) Or that "you can only get into a real hot war AFTER you've won at least say ~50% of the `war for peoples' harts`, so that in the event of a victory you can maintain power without having to `break people into submission` by physical or mental violence". Or that there's an unwritten rule between "proportionality of assets and power - you can't hold immense political or military power in your hands if you're not backed by the people holding most assets, and you can't hold assets without having them taken or severely taxed-away if you don't also assume political responsibility and power, even indirectly". And so on and so on and so on...
Russia just doesn't seem to grok the underlying unwritten rules of western civilization...
Neither does eg. China, but they're not expected to either. Russia keeps wanting to "come and play" with Europe, but they just can't get rules of the game / the dance steps. And sure, the rules are in slow but continuous evolution, but that's the thing, figuring them out and then figuring out how to keep figuring them out and keep playing "the good game".
To conclude: you'd need to solve both (1) US opposition and (2) mindset incompatibility, and I think this is REALLY hard (not impossible though), in order to get Russia and Europe together in any meaningful way!
But like you say, these things need to evolve, and with older generations dying, a part of their mindset dies along with that. You see young people getting more into the mindset of the west.
I think this is more like incompatibility between the "central-continental European cultural area" (+ some "balkanic-European c.e." elements for Hungary) and "west-atlantic-postcolonialist-European c.e." and this is very mild and will go away when current politicians trade seats. Hungarian, Polish, Bulgarian, Romanian etc. people can cooperate well amongst themselves and with eg. Germans or Austrians, if nobody is deliberately stirring hate.
Maybe Poland and Hungary could serve as bridge to Russia to solve the worst incompatibility, that between the mindsets of west-atlantic-postcolonialist-europeans and mindsets of russian-europeans. But I would not have much hopes, these two groups are very incompatible... each would probably find it easier to get along with the Chinese or the Americans that with the other. And there's also eastern European countries like eg. Romania that have better closeness / similarity / affinity to west-atlantic-Europe and the US than to the central-European ones and would rather burn themselves than serve as a bridge to Russia... Europe is complicated...
German (continental) European de-facto-leadership + eastern Europe to be the bridge could work in theory though...
China may provide them some, but that is end of Russia as world power (if that didn't happen already as we can all see).
I'm just saying that this might be a last hope for Putin to keep things going.
Doubt that is Putin's desired end-game. His entire justification for the invasion was to re-unite what was formerly Great Russia... blasting Ukraine to the stone age runs completely counter to that. He's not Xi Jinping and the Ukrainians are not Tibetans or Uyghurs.
Unfortunately it may be what the future brings as an end-game - justified by "the Nazis of Ukraine forced me to do it" or similar bollocks.
> change the order of things, so China is the new capital of the world
Don't be daft. China has long figured out that it's easier to subjugate the West through economical power than military power. Russia has been trying to do both and NK has been stuck with the latter due to its isolationism and pariah status.
China already strongly hinted that they don't have Russia's back in this conflict and they have demonstrated that they view NK more like an underage sibling they have to rein in from time to time.
There's no point in starting WW3 for China because China is already winning. The real rivalry will likely be something most Americans aren't even thinking of: India. For all the posturing, the US heavily depends on China far more than the EU ever depended on Russia.
Superpower 2020 meme aside, the geopolitical implications of a risen India is profound. Within striking range of every significant SLOC for Europe, MENA, east Africa and Asia until arctic shipping becomes viable. Perhaps the biggest strategic blunder in recent human history was carving out antagonistic Pakistan, combined with PRC influenced Myanmar which prevents land access to most of Euroasia. That said, India is reaching terminal demographics as well, and far from getting rich before getting old. And apart from all the QUAD / potential for west alignment, I think any strategic thinker outside of India with half a brain cell will want to keep India down for as long as possible if not bulkanize her.
And yet they are the world's largest army by headcount and the second largest by budget. They are absolutely going to make use of that power, the question is just when.
> China already strongly hinted that they don't have Russia's back in this conflict
Outwards? Yes. Everything else would be madness.
Inwards? I'd guess that they aren't too unhappy. The US had already begun under Obama to shift their focus away from the Middle East and Europe to focus on China and their expansionism - now with the Ukraine crisis that one way or the other will take many years to resolve, the US will have to split attention and forces between China and whatever Russia is doing.
Of course. What's the point of amassing capital if you don't have the firepower to defend its interests? What do you think the US military exists for? Bringing freedom and democracy via drone strikes? Strong militaries are how you subjugate the weak and isolated, strong economies are how you subjugate the powerful and globally connected. But a strong military (or in lieu of that, a nuclear arsenal) also prevents other strong militaries from coming in and taking away your toys.
> US will have to split attention and forces between China and whatever Russia is doing
More importantly, Russia will come out extremely weakened from this war and with the entire West having committed to economic sanctions China will have an unbeatable upper hand as a trading partner. If Russia engages in direct conflict with the West, even better as long as things don't get out of hand.
You might enjoy this story then, if you haven't read it already ("2034: A Novel of the Next World War", co-authored by James Stavridis, a former supreme NATO commander):
His desired end game would have been to do his "special operation" thing and puppeting Ukraine, but I guess that ship sailed, if it ever even existed outside of Putin's mind...
We might be wrong! Even if Putin fails his successor might be even worse, and there's a weird quasi-religion thing jumping from mind to mind across Russia and not only: https://youtu.be/IAVZ3XsqIL4 (the source is biased but can't think of a better one now).
We might be talking to something closer to a cult, and we are generally bad at dealing with these by applying western negotiation and de-escalation techniques (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waco_siege). We don't want the nuclear equivalent of the Waco massacre! (Also, historically, the last "nation level cult" we've dealt with resulted in a world war, so there's a grim track record here.
Something is weird here and both sides are playing mind-games - captured Russian soldiers look like they're on acid or something, military tactics seem weird and maybe they're targeted to induce reactions that can drive behaviors more than to secure military objectives... s's not right here, this feels like neither Kosovo nor Iraq nor Syria.
We shouldn't try to out-cult a cult, that's how you get WW3. We need to figure out how to DE-BRAINWASH people and get them to negotiate constructively and FAST!*
Sounds unlikely to me, Russia is an oligrarchy, even Putin said so.
The elite isn't that dumb to risk their wealth for some cult.
Damn, we're in a weird timeline here... where russian oligarchs are actually the hope for a better solution :)
As far as demilitarization goes, it seems the Ukrainian fleet, air defenses and bases have been mostly destroyed by stand-off weapons, and an encirclement maneuver is appearing (North and South prongs).
As for "denazification", it would appear most of what Putin calls nazis are concentrated on the border with the Donetsk and Lougansk sectors, in deep positions but with a no man's land behind them (flat and vulnerable to artillery).
The West is winning the media war, but Ukraine is definitely NOT winning the war for now (they mostly cannot counter-attack)
But many former civilians were recruited and armed, some airbases are still operational, and drones are wrecking havoc on Russian logistics. The encirclement has been appearing since day one, and has only advanced from the south..
Ukraine cannot win in traditional terms ( counterattack and push back), but they can surely win by crippling enemy morale, dealing devastating and unsustainable losses, and in general making the war too expensive to continue ( let alone a possible occupation). And that's going splendidly!
People in the north will be much more strongly motivated to drive Russians out of the north than to attack holdings in the south, down to the Black Sea.
Only taking the fight into Russian cities would give Putin anything to worry about.
As for the point of the thread: denazification and demilitarization are stated objectives, not win conditions. The US achieved their stated objectives in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq #2, but failed to achieve the win conditions in Vietnam and Afghanistan. The jury is still out on Iraq #2 but sources say unlikely.
For Russia, there are no win conditions.
Before the invasion? The West is lazy and does nothing. (see Chechnya, Georgia, Ukraine 2014) Now? Unicorns and fairy dust.
Russia is relevant on the world stage for a few reasons:
1. They have a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. 2. They're big bad bullies who give people offers they can't refuse. 3. They're a significant producer of crude oil and natural gas. (they do not have significant capacity to refine crude oil)
They've overplayed their hand regarding #2. Lots of countries are falling over themselves to join NATO and/or the EU. It's been shown that as a world power that their military ... well it sucks. They have a locally significant military, not a global one.
Their best customer for crude oil and natural gas is the EU. The EU is now all-in on relieving themselves of the need to buy any sort of fossil fuels, and especially not from Russia. They can sell crude oil and natural gas to China still, but China doesn't really need those things. They need refined gasoline; but China is as fit to develop those capabilities as Russia is.
They could absolutely crush and subjugate Ukraine by conscripting 200,000 or so more troops, and just lay waste to Ukraine. Carpet bomb and heavy artillery barrages of all population centers. This would accomplish #2, but would completely negate #3.
They could simply say, "oops, our bad," and withdraw all forces and keep #3. It's possible but not particularly likely that the Finnish and Georgian requests to join NATO and the EU respectively would stall and fizzle out.
Perhaps most importantly... there's no outcome that doesn't make Putin look like a fool. He looks like an idiot in every conceivable outcome. The only situation in which Putin does not look like an absolute dunce is if they do Holodomor 2.0 and and scorch the earth of Ukraine, completely alienate themselves from almost the entire Earth, and simply submit themselves to being a ring bearer to China. Putin still looks like a fool in the history books, but until he dies 5-20 years from now he can continue to pretend to be a strongman. Maybe that's good enough for him, I dunno.
They keep the seat on the security council though.
Because if we can — for the sake of the argument — assume that, their winning condition is achieved. Ukraine, being in the middle of a military conflict, won't be admitted to Nato.
https://www.rferl.org/a/1099020.html search for "territorial disputes".
Also, your interpretation means Russians would have to rely on Nato interpreting their own criterias in a certain way. This may be a reasonable thing for you or me — but I don't think it's a reasonable thing for the Russians, considering all the bad blood between Russia and Nato for the last 70 years.
The only reason a club has membership rules is to be able to selectively apply them and keep applicants out. Stated slightly differently: a club's membership rules are really just "rejection rules".
If big name members of a club want someone to have membership, then there's all sorts of flexibility that can be found within the scope of the rules, ranging from a narrow relaxed interpretation to creative accounting to outright one-off exceptions.
THe best example that I can think of currently is Greece's membership to the EU, where the EU conveniently just looked the other way despite pretty stark evidence that Greece had cooked their books.
They do seem to specify at some point that this is about direct war expenses. Now keep in mind, the total russian military budget is only 60 billion $ per year (!!). At that rate, Russia would be not only be spending their yearly war budget every 3 days, but would also spend more money in a year than the USA did in 20 years in the notoriously expensive war in Afghanistan. Russia hasn't even deployed all of the forces it committed to the invasion, and those weren't a majority of it's armed forces to begin with. Yet they will be spending 5 years of military budget by the second week of war?
It just makes absolutely no sense even if we were to take all the ukrainian figures at face value (regardless of how extremely unreliable they have been, for example we don't have any proof for any of the 27 claimed downed russian aircrafts while we do have footage for pretty much everything else in the war). It's okay to trust the ukrainian side a lot more, but you still have to keep in mind that war propaganda is probably not a good source for a report. Nevermind that even the absolute best case scenario where all ukrainian claims end up being true still do not come even close to being enough to back up the article's claims
The report is so vague, the figures so outlandish and the sources are either terrible or absent that it's hard to even believe that actual researchers have ended up with these conclusions.
So, who knows.
Maybe it costs $20B/day overall including sanctions, but military spend only should come out at around $2B.
What the hell are they meant to do, roll over and die? The problem starts and ends at Russia.
Romans did not build roads, they made others build roads for them. Crusaders did not build castles, Palestinians and Turks were made to build castles for them.
Conquerors find ways to extract value.
Has the world gone insane? People in the west are cheering on war escalations as if it's some fun weekend recreational activity. People on HN are posting suggestions to join the ukrainian forces, because I guess all those weapons they bought at walmart need to be put to use somehow.
The West thinks that China isn't on Russias side because they didn't Veto the UN resolution as well, but they're just smart enough to take note of everything that is happening to make sure that they have contingencies of everything that is happening. You'll probably see them further removing reserves from foreign countries, further pushing CIPS across the global south, etc.
Japan has joined the west in sanctioning Belarus. The EU has passed a resolution to ban Russian media outlets(and encryption, not in the same go). Apple Wallet kicked out russian banks, UK is freezing Russian assets, rating agencies have downgraded russia to junk status, all without UN mandate. All the semblance of international law has been thrown out the window. I can't help but ask, if this is what the West is willing to do for Ukraine without joining the EU or NATO what would have happened if it had joined either?
Best case, everyone in the global south will pull out of the wests financial systems over the next couple of the decades further embolstering China and we'll see more non google/apple choice in the smartphone/tech market and governments outside of the west returning to a more cash based society and this will blow over with some collateral damage. Worst case this doesn't just blow over and Russia is backed in such a corner that is in fact no option but full scale war with the west.
I think you guys(especially the europeans) ought to ask your grandparents(if they're still alive) how fun the last world war was, since asking Lybians is out of the question(they're stuck on boats). Iraq which was basically a massacre and destruction of Iraq left thousands in the west traumatized and millions decimated over there. And that's a country that has nowhere near the support nor the military capability russia had.
[1] https://asiatimes.com/2022/03/russias-low-cost-war-can-endur...
Most people don't seem to know the difference between what we are seeing in Ukraine and a real Total War (mass bombardments on cities, every night).
We bombed Serbia back to the stone age (infrastructures and civilians alike), so it must be hard to reconcile that with the current "limited" onslaught in Ukraine.
> yup, seems the dominant voice on this on HN thinks the West has a moral advantage (it doesn't, Yemen Libya Guatemala, etc
I'm sick of this whataboutism. There's a problem, today, and your response is "fuck 'em, there were other problems before dome by those guys trying to help this time"? Fuck you. Yes, the "west" has the moral high ground here. It didn't when it turned a blind eye to Yemen, and it didn't when it incited chaos in Libya.
You seem to indicate that just because Russia is threatening Total War, they have the right to conquer Ukraine. They don't! The quicker the world steps up to stop an aggressor like Putin, the less people will die.
But American century of carbon guzzling hedonistic excess is effectively a war of aggression on the climate that we Americans choose to engage in daily.
Bottom line: Nothing the U.S. or did can justify what Russia is doing to Ukraine.
There are no winners here. This is a major setback for the west and Russia regardless of the outcome and who fired the first bullet.
I can't see how that makes it gray all the way through. There are nuances that we can't ignore, but it seems the people of Ukraine don't want to be under Russian control. Seems clear to me the attack was not .. gray.
None of these countries were any threat to Russia. The whole Putin narrative that the West is at fault for this war by encroaching on a Russian sphere of influence is just incoherent bullshit.
I also reject your 'both sides' argument. At least from a German perspective I know that European didn't do things 'against' Russia for the last 15 years that weren't clearly as a response to Russian wrong-doing (East Ukraine, Crimean, Syria). Heck, just one month ago Germany wanted to open another Gas pipeline with Russia.
This information was hidden from the public at the time.
Just these last recent Olympics the Russians couldn't compete under their own flag as punishment for various serious transgressions. But the greatest scandal in the history of Olympic sports by a mile is the American Nassar child abuse scandal. Were we Americans punished and banned from having our flag flown at the Olympics? So maybe next time we don't look the other way on decades of abuse? Nah, Michigan and it's insurers are on the hook for a up to a cool billion and life moves on for us none the wiser.
Edit: we have to show people (non-westerners) there is a better way and not assume it is self-evident! If they are exposed constantly to propaganda on [true] western hypocrisies it makes it so much more difficult for them to believe that the west's liberal order, though imperfect, is not as rotten as the alternatives. So that's why I advocate for Americans to look inward
That being said, anytime anything anywhere bad happens a line of people forms to say “What about America,” as if that somehow absolves others.
Also, the Olympics have been a joke for decades. I don't even understand why countries still waste the time and energy supporting it.
For example, everyone complains about healthcare, housing, climate, or war and little is accomplished
Plenty of smart kids could be doctors but we have an inefficient, exclusionary training system that lasts 11 years minimum post-secondary. Some inroads are made to improve but way too slowly. At age 18, go to school 36 weeks a year? Kindergarten kids who can barely wipe their butts get more instruction than our adult university students who will be treating our cancers? WTF!
You go to the pharmacy to get a medicine that has been around 80 years and costs $3 in India due to having 20 [legit] suppliers (like tylenol) and there are 1-3 suppliers in the USA and it costs $80. Because FDA is now very Soviet and creates onerous, stonewalling barriers in the name of crony profit.
The FDA did this with the initial COVID testing -- stonewalling on the approval of foreign developed tests -- and it certainly had some element of domestic (crony?) profit motives involved. How many people died? How many?
I mean WTF? I go to WalMart once a week and it seems like every week the TVs are better and cheaper. I can buy gigabytes of RAM from state of the art factories but 80 year-old drugs are as expensive as ever. WTF!
Everyone wants housing to be cheaper except many are either NIMBYs or asset holding boomers who won't make a sacrifice in the name of long-term economic development or equity.
American young men (and women) who could be pridefully building or renovating housing and learning trades are sitting uneducated in their parents basements, obese and depressed at very very high rates.
Same with climate. Many want clean energy as long as it's over-subsidized solar and EVs rather than a community investment in solar, wind, or nuclear that is efficient and fair. Not enough want to foot the bill for some upfront investment that will pay off in the long-run. It's all me me me.
The US dropped 27k missiles on 7 countries in 2016 alone.[2]
But that isn't really the point of my post. While Russia did in fact declare war on Ukraine and for whatever reasons or whatever your opinion on that is, the West has effectively declared global war on Russia and it will take a lot of restraint from Russia not respond in kind. And since they can't respond in the same way economically the only option would be actual real war.
This is what happens when you leave diplomacy to a bunch of lawyer bros from Oxford and Harvard who have never had to deal with someone saying no to them.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-germany-libya-idUSTRE75Q5...
[2] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/u-s-bombed-iraq-syria-pak...
There's also the fact that there are a lot of Law professors in Germany that are famous for taking advantage of girls during their studies, because if you don't get a good grade in the law system you're effectively out and because they have lifetime tenure they have nothing to fear.
But I do agree that on the grand scheme of themes Germany is WAY better than the other countries, especially considering the fact that they actually have a lot more parties in their parliament and sometimes actually have diverse opinions on things.
either way Putin doesn't seem to be treated as a rational actor anymore. he might still think straight, but he seems to believe in his own propaganda.