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Comment by kyriakos | Hacker News Reader

They say every crisis is an opportunity. This could be a great opportunity for Russian owned brands to establish themselves and thrive later when the crisis is hopefully resolved.

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Provided they are vertically integrated and own the entire supply chain.

Otherwise they will find that planes not flying in/out and container ships not delivering will make it hard to import anything at scale. Not that they could pay for goods anyway.

Also I suspect China may use its new found leverage to flood the Russian market with their goods.

That's a smart take I have not fully thought through.

Beyond just economically, perhaps potential big gains politically by using money & leverage to become the controlling mother that Russia is to Belarus, making russia the dependent & ruled child.

I feel this is the real selling point of democracy and free media, its hard for a foreign nation to buy an entire electorate.

Several nations seem to be setting themselves up for irrelevence by undermining democracy, usually at the behest of powerful groups within the country, but to do so they basically need to pay a bunch of people to tell lies. They've then created a network that external corporations and government actors can take advantage of. If the Russian news suddenly started telling the truth mixed with 30% Chinese propaganda, then to the average Russian that would be noticeably more true than what they are getting now.

Would the presenters tell blatant Chinese lies to decieve their people? Well apart from the chinese bit they obviously do, so you basically hope they're all actually insane true-believers, because if theyre just ordinary Russians spreading obvious BS in return for a decent paycheck then thats an obvious weak point for the nation.

And Russia knows this is viable, as they do it to other nations.

> its hard for a foreign nation to buy an entire electorate

You sure? According to the US government, a few hundred thousand dollars on Facebook ads was enough to buy a US President (c.f Trump, Donald J).

The US was one of the countries I was talking about that intentionally undermined their own democracy.

Did Trump win the popular vote? Would he have had any chance in a proportional voting system? Or if you had to vote? (He himself says no Republican could be elected if people could easily vote). Who made that possible and why?

No. No. No. The constitution, state, and county voting laws.

This would make Russia the second child after North Korea.

there are plenty of planes flying in and out, container ships delivering, and cross border payments happening, right now.

Not for long potentially. I don't have the link right now, but someone posted an interesting thread on Twitter how to fly planes you need a lot of international support. Down to things like supply of replacement parts and access to repair manuals. Their estimate (not sure if accurate) is that in 3 weeks, domestic aviation in Russia will become very hard to run.

(Boing and Airbus already suspended providing replacement parts)

I haven't heard anything about impact on container ships yet, so curious what's the situation there...

Might come as a surprise, but Boing and Airbus are not the only civil airplane manufacturers in the world.

Do you expect them to fly Cessnas now?

They're certainly not, but they're the biggest and the Russian airlines already own or lease a lot of Boeing and Airbus planes. Aeroflot is nearly all Airbus[0] and Rossiya[1] (largest operator of Russian-made Sukhoi planes) is around half Airbus, half Sukhoi. They could indeed just scrap these and buy a shiny new fleet of, say, Embraer jets but that would involve retraining pilots and support staff, not to mention actually paying for them and waiting for them to be built + delivered (I don't imagine Embraer have a big showroom full of planes ready to be taken home!).

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeroflot_fleet

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rossiya_Airlines

Just like Embraer would have a ton of trouble delivering a 500 plane replacement, think about what would it take to return 500 leased planes (and for the leasing companies to lease them to someone else to avoid going bankrupt, and for Boeing to deal with a deluge of cheap second-hand planes, etc etc).

Even if all 500 planes are instantly returned at the end of March (how?), there will be reduced traffic to Europe due to the current European bans, and the rest of the traffic will be handled by the remaining fleet. I'm not even talking about Comac or other options.

I think the point being made originally was not that the leased planes will be returned (many articles suggest they won't), it was that these planes need ongoing maintenance and parts which the airlines won't have access to. The original tweet thread viraptor is referring to suggested that this is something that will hit the airlines much sooner than we laypersons might have imagined.

We'll see in the coming weeks, but the scenario you describe where a catastrophic decline in Russian flights such that there are enough non-Airbus/Boeing planes that can manage them is effectively a collapse in Russian civil aviation sector which is kinda what the thread was implying.

The thread in question https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1498723248183382020.html

That was the exact thread I was looking for. Thank you.

Fortunately for civilian Russian aviation, there are currently plenty of foreign-owned planes that just happen to be sitting on Russian airfields, that can't go anywhere, and are chock-full of spare parts.

It might get them out of a tight spot in the short term, but I'm not sure if cannibalising abandoned planes is a particularly viable long-term strategy

Practically they are the only ones. While Chinese and Russian make some of their own they are still dependent on West for engine and other critical components.

Engines: MC-21 flew with a locally built PD-14 engine in 2020 (wikipedia). Work is underway on SSJ-New with a local PD-8 or a PD-14. There was a snag with composites, which were sanctioned by US a few years ago because of some other random bullshit, but now they are built locally as well.

> other critical components

Like what? This sounds a bit hand-wavy, what are those critical components, if you don't mind me asking?

On the front page is a post about yandex where yandex says that they have equipment for a year on hand but there is a legitimate concern that as their equipment naturally breaks they will not be able to source replacements. There's no garuntee on what will be available for any up and coming company

Container shipping is about to be reduced, Maersk just announced that they would only ship food to Russia going forward. Aviation in Russia might come mostly to a halt. About 500 airplanes are leased and have to be returned within a month to the leasing companies, the rest is running out of spare parts quickly.

So now we are all of a sudden in the "might come to a halt" hypothetical. Ok. First of all, at least 40% of the planes are home-built, so aviation in Russia most certainly will not come to a halt.

Then, how do you picture 500 planes getting returned and leasing companies instantly re-leasing them to other customers to keep their own business afloat? Even if that does happen, worst case, that will reduce Russian air traffic to something like Covid days-level. There are a lot of hypotheticals in this thread, facts on the ground right now are, the planes are flying, cargo ships are delivering and all but 7 banks are moving the money across the borders just fine.

> First of all, at least 40% of the planes are home-built, so aviation in Russia most certainly will not come to a halt.

Home-build - maybe, but not without parts from the US\EU, not to mention most of the production equipment is not Russian too and you have to maintain it or replace it at somepoint.

Oh and to build something you need materials - some are local, some will have to be replaced if possible.

This will be a huge problem, especially in a country with strong corruption tradition.

Ok, at some point, sure, maybe.

Or salvage parts and engines from the leased Boeings if they are comparable.

That would assume they are willing to break their contract and not returning the machines. Which they can do, but then they will never be able to lease a machine again. At best, this buys them a couple of months of operations.

You underestimate the shortsightedness and short memories of businessmen when shown a pile of cash, especially at companies like Boeing and other defense manufacturers.

The businessmen might think of their wallets first, but as long as the sanctions last, they cannot send spare parts to Russia. Also, the defense manufacturers are currently quite happy with the increased defense spendings.

Whatever the US role in the events in Ukraine was, for sure they won't let Russia off the hook easily after this invasion.

Home-built doesn’t mean “all parts produced in Russia”. And it just takes a handful of parts to be included in sanctions – especially with just-in-time manufacturing – for an entire production line to grind to a halt.

There are about half a dozen SSJs and MC-21s produced every month, let's check back in a couple of months from now, and see if those lines ground to a halt or doubled their production. I'm curious myself!

And how many of them are using home built engines and not engines bought in the west?

> About 500 airplanes are leased and have to be returned within a month to the leasing companies,

Putin will make a law that returning airplanes to abroad is illegal. Foreigners have not been allowed to sell Russian shares already nearly a week. So nothing new there.

They cannot fly to most countries anyway, so the risk of getting them confiscated while landed somewhere is small.

Well, yes, they can keep and operate them illegally. Short term: problem solved. Long term: its even worse.

Exactly. It'll be a slow and steady decline in terms of safety, pilot training and so on.

It might be immoral, but surely keeping they planes will be legal by some means, executive fiat or whatever.

Is there international treaties covering such things?

Mind, I'm from the UK our government just ignore international law when they like and only to please their own ends, not even in times of crisis, so can't see something as simple as breaking a treaty will cause any change here.

Would Russia have an advantage in timber/forestry? Russia has almost 4x the forest area, but not sure about felling and organised industry around it. Almost 50% of Russia is forested to China's 23%, though I also found articles about China aggressively reforesting.

It can easily changed as since ancient time china can claim S belong to C via monolgolian empire. When Russia is so dependent on china for everything, do you think chinese empire would just sit and let Russia grab so many lands of theirs from not so ancient unfair treaty.

Mafia families are not rely upon …

Even Finland, the densest forest in Europe imports 80% of its wood pellets from Russia. Russia's got plenty of trees being felled.

What I can't comment on however is the quality of lumber for construction purposes. Making pellets is trivial. Furniture, less so.

This whole thing makes me question the western/NATO motives of not pursuing de-escalation. Wouldn’t agreeing to Putin’s NATO non expansion terms be better than letting your economic competitor to basically establish monopoly on the entire Russian economic atmosphere?

That would imply that sovereign states don't get to decide who they're aligned with. As seen with Ukraine that in turn would make them first targets for an invasion.

Such a decision would be anything but de-escalation.

The reality is that Sovereignty is relative to how close a country is to the border of super power nations. Do you think Mexico or Canada can ally with any nation or join any military alliance they wish?

I don't know about Mexico or Canada, but Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland are all both Russia's neighbours and NATO members.

Either Russia is not a superpower or it's not that relevant.

Or Russia does not find those countries to be enough of a threat either due to size, military force, existing relationships, geographical boundaries, or a multitude of other factors. Or maybe Russia has begrudgingly accepted those countries joining NATO, but the last straw was a huge neighbor like Ukraine joining that is strategically important to them.

Supplication to a tyrant worked only to incite unprovoked invasion and war crimes. The west believed that integrating Russia through economy and trade would bring us together. It only revealed Russia is not yet ready and still believes everybody is out to get them like some traumatised recluse. Enough is enough, the west has awoken to the sad reality that Russia has not changed.

Also the Baltic sovereign nations remember very very very well what it was like under Russian oppression. They are not going back to that.

Finnish people remember burning their homes ahead of the advancing tank armies. We remember both wars and many of us have the memories in our blood.

You do realize that Russia has more nukes than any country in the world, right? Whether you like it or not, cornering Russia in this way and not offering a way out of this mess without some dignity is an invitation for Putin to do something catastrophic and desperate. Big talk like this is foolish and could end up with a nuclear nightmare regardless of which side is right.

Maybe nuclear war is better than letting Russia win.

Putin isn't some madman sitting on a launch button. No matter how desperate he gets, he needs military command to follow through on an order to start world war 3.

Considering how superbly Russia is fucking up a simple ground invasion, I'd say any threat of nuclear escalation is empty at worst.

Putin says roll tanks into Ukraine? Yeah fine, military commanders oblige. They won't lose much over it. Putin says nuke the world? Well, about that... Even military commanders still want to survive.

I know enough about human nature and what people (and especially a group of generals) are willing to do when cornered that pushing Russia too far could be one of the worst strategic mistakes in recent world history.

Putin's 'non-expansion' terms actually mean rolling NATO back. Sure, it'd probably 'work' in the sense that he'd be able to restore the Russian Empire as a result. I guess he might be happy with just that.

https://www.mordorintelligence.com/industry-reports/russia-h...

By the way, the elimination of Western influence at all levels has been the goal for at least 15 years. It happend much earlier higher up.

We're back in 1961.

“We cannot negotiate with people who say what's mine is mine and what's yours is negotiable."

And frankly said, if the performance of the Russian furniture industry is similar to that of the Russian military, I wouldn' buy a doorstop from them.

> And frankly said, if the performance of the Russian furniture industry is similar to that of the Russian military, I wouldn' buy a doorstop from them.

Russian military doorstops are a dime a dozen right now in Ukraine.

Oh, my God, that 40 miles convoy. A crawling duck, but sadly no Warthogs in sight. It's a shame.

Yes, NATO donating some training and a couple of A-10s would be an interesting move. Obviously it is never going to be that simple.

The Russians showed the 'tactical nuke' card. So NATO won't get involved with more than a few AT Weapons here and there at max.

Lavrov said, they didn't threaten with nukes.That means they did. That creature was bred and selected over decades for such jobs.

Actually I just indulge in fantasies of burning bastards.

You are not alone in that I think there are quite a few people that would like a little bit of quiet quality time with a certain dictator.

If it were just a certain dictator, the Ides of March are just around the corner. But, as you mentioned, it's not that simple.

Russians are in favor of Putin. And of course, the apparatus has been driving up approval ratings for him for months before this stunt. And now most Russian don't know anything from independent sources, some probably didn't even heard about that Ukraine Peace Operation. A lot of them just believe the whole narrative, because, well, it's the decadent West that says otherwise and 'they want to hold us down. They always do.'

So even if there is a fraction in the apparatus at all that would or could act, there alway looms the danger of a civil war for them.

Civil war in Russia is pretty much a given at some point. This can't go on forever. Though, it has gone on long enough that maybe that is based on a faulty assumption: that in the longer term the world trends to improvement. That might not be the case, we may be able to reach some local maximum and then fall back again.

Civil war? Majority supports the invasion, the rest is indifferent, and 0.1% are protesting (soon to be jailed).

Note the 'at some point': Russia can't go on like this, regardless of whatever popular support Putin has at this point in time. It's about as meaningful as the support for Kim in NK.

It's not the problem what we think they can get away with. The problem is what they think they can can get away with. And in what time frame. They obviously operate in a different frame of reference. Their military doctrine is also different from ours, apart from the obvious shortcomings at the moment. But it doesn't matter militaryly, they don't fight us, they fight the Ukraine. Because of their bloody nukes. A shame Patton was right in his motivation to stop the Soviets. That would have been before they get nukes themselves.

They have set the anchor in these negotiations between us and them. They want status quo ante 1997. They will at least get Ukraine. Perhaps Moldavia.

And they created chaos. Which always also bears opportunity.

And China will wait.

> They want status quo ante 1997

They can want whatever they want, doesn't mean they are going to get it.

> They don't fight us, they fight the Ukraine.

They don't fight us, they fight Poland!

This sort of thing doesn't really work.

Poland is NATO, other ballpark.

>> They can want whatever they want, doesn't mean they are going to get it.

They won't.

>> This sort of thing doesn't really work.

They somehow missed that.

They will pay.

I think you missed the reference.

Looks like.

Fog of War.

Watched a YouTube video and one of the people simply couldn't believe that Putin would attack Ukraine, even when shown pictures of the attacks, their line was "but they're Russian speakers like us, he wouldn't do that".

One of about 8 people seemed to genuinely support Putin (something like "he knows what he's doing, this is necessary").

Obviously just a vox pop but in general it seemed few supported the aggression and most were just afraid to talk about it.

True. But I'm afraid there are several issues and training is not a 2 day affair even if the other issues didn't exist

https://breakingdefense.com/2022/03/no-the-us-air-force-isnt...

No, obviously. It's daydreaming at best.

This. Absolutely this. And especially for the Warthog.

But, hey, there are flight simulators out there, aren't there?

Huh? Don’t we have some servicemen on vacation in Ukraine right now? They’re just there on holiday, sightseeing in their A10.

PUTIN: These guys were on a holiday there

THE WORLD: gasps

UK: These guys were on a holiday there

THE WORLD: claps

Or as the saying goes "Rules for thee and not for me".

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30488680

Absolutely right you are, sir.

We all have to thank the Russians to have shown the world in 2014 how to do it. And before that. And also to give us a great opportunity for Whataboutism.

Sigh, I probably still have those Bezmenov brochures from the early eighties lying around somewhere.

It is always funny how people can legitimize anything if it is used against the people they don't like.

"Bombing civilians" is unacceptable if they are from "Europe" like Ukraine.

"Bombing civilians" is fine if they are savages from Middle East, Africa or "not-Europe", like Russia.

Wow, an early deployment of the Racism card. Bold move, congratulation.

But then again, do you really think anybody is still reading this deep in the thread? They're already bored, no shiny tech, just endless babble.

But okay, your next move, Godwin’s law.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%E2%80%99s_law

Game over.

> still reading this deep in the thread

Yet here you are.

> your next move

But.. you invoked it yourself.

"Game over"

Ah, good that you re-posted it; your [0] is too old to respond to. Here, let me fix that for you:

   PUTIN: These guys were on a holiday there (but actually conducting a war of aggression).

   THE WORLD: Gasps in righteous indignation.

   UK: These guys were on a holiday there (but actually defending against a war of aggression).

   THE WORLD: Claps at the brave defenders.

Or as the saying goes, "Don't sell me a turd in a bun as a hot dog, I ain't buying it".

There, fixed that for you.

(OK, except for the "saying"; I just made that up. But, something along those lines. As is, it seems to fit both Putler's blatant immoral lies, the West's equally blatant but morally defensible ones, and your whataboutish equivalizing of the two.)

Yes, it's a terrible shame that NATO is not engaging in a full on fight with a nuclear adversary.

Since I've already addressed this point further down the thread, which can't have escaped your notice, it's rather pointless trying to pin me down on this position. I was in your back before you arrived.

But you tried nonetheless, I give you that. Brave but dead.

I talked with friends in Moscow at the beginning of 2020. They said there were simply no good alternatives to IKEA. There were reasonable furniture from Belarus if one looked for things made from whole wood, but then one still may need to hire somebody to fix/adjust it due to quality control issues. Plus there were small Russian companies, but their stuff while good was expensive. Things that were produced by bigger Russian companies that were supposed to give alternative to IKEA, were really of low quality.

To be honest this sounds like a fairytale to me. IKEA has\had good things like lamps and tabletops. But the furniture has terrible quality. I'm still kind of angry at myself for buying their Stockholm cabinet. You _have_ to fix it agains the wall to stop the wiggling (that's what the manual AND their support tells me).

Unfortunately we really don't have anything that is mass-production and of good quality at the same time, but IKEA is hardly a ray of light in my opinion.

It is not а fairytale. It just tells the state of Russian furniture industry if they cannot match even IKEA despite cheap labor and raw materials.

At least real wood furniture can be repaired. Try repairing the cheap sawdust board that Ikea furniture is manufactured out of.

How would they do that though? Russian interest rates are through the roof, so even if you could borrow money to start a business you likely couldn’t make it profitable. If you had assets to begin with they better not have been in the stock market, because that has been closed since the invasion began and basically everything you own is now rated 0. If your assets were in savings, then they too have lost basically all value along with the rubbles.

Even if you somehow overcome the need for capital, how do you setup the supply chain necessary in a world where you can’t readily trade with anyone but China? Which you may not be able or doing in a month if things turn sour and China also start sanctioning.

Sure Russia has a lot of wood, but Russia doesn’t have the industrial material to transform it into furniture, and right now, Russia doesn’t have access to the high tech commodities required to build an efficient lumber industry, let alone factories to process it.

You’re right of course, this will open up for opportunities in the very long run, but it’ll be very localised opportunities that can’t take advantage of the global supply chain in a country that had an economy which was around the size of the economy of Italy before this began.

If you look at history, then you can’t really build empires in isolation. Even the current “American empire” saw a lot of its economic rise throught things like the Marshall plan, which as an example, lifted my country (Denmark) from what was basically medieval farming methods with lots and lots of manual labour to the average farmer owning tractors in less than a decade. Unless the oligarchs of Russia plan on investing basically all their national profits into building the country’s industry, then I would personally wager that these images are the last chance that a lot of Russian have to but IKEA things for a good while. It won’t stop there either, after a few years of isolation the average Russian won’t be able to buy things like coffee if the sanctions get worse.

War is hell.

Anta is doing exactly this. With major labels refusing to use Xinjiang cotton, Anta has said they have no problem with it and are building an empire based on forced labor.

Unfortunately (and I mean it) there is barely any precedent for a regime like this turning around and the economy improving. In terms of economy, it's probably going to be downhill from here, companies will enter survival mode and innovation will be minimized. I really hope I'm wrong though :(

examples: Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, ...

Putins regime was a massive economic improvement from Yeltsins regime though, which is one reason why he is (was? hard to gauge) so popular.

Also counter examples of more authoritarian regimes having economic resurgences - south korea, taiwan, to lesser extents china and vietnam... I'm sure there's more.

no. it's not. It just happened during the rise in the global oil prices

Right, I guess there's a lot of debate on why things improved so much economically around that time. But still people will tend to associate it with the administration it happened under - we do it in western countries as well.

It could be but they need to be primed for it already.

How did the US not selling drones to Turkey made Turkey a drone superpower? Well, Turkey already had a large engineering talent pool and related industries, therefore US not selling drones to Turkey was an opportunity.

Does Russia already have a talent base or flourishing industries for all the stuff they are being denied? I find it unlikely, it's a common problem with natural resource blessed countries destroying high skill sectors because a very few things are as profitable and risk free as digging stuff from the ground, sell them and live off from than money. Norway is being smart about it, countries like Dubai and UAE are also trying to be smart about it but AFAIK Russia is not very smart. They used to have huge talent pool of all kinds during the Soviet times but that is no longer the case. They monetised the remains of the Soviets and used the money to buy yachts, palaces and luxury estate abroad.

What is the last innovation, art or product that came out of Russia and change the world? Probably there are some but not many. They used to be the ones competing with the west neck to neck, bringing in their flavour and coming up with something ingenious.

It's very sad actually, considering what the Russian people have archived in the past.

>What is the last innovation, art or product that came out of Russia and change the world?

Maybe Telegram? It has 500 million monthly active users.

Sure, they also have Yandex and VK and some other stuff but even if they are successful almost none of it is groundbreaking or leading whole industries ahead. If TikTok was Russian, I would have said that they significantly improved content discovery and content consumption maybe.

However, this does show that if all Meta and Google is banned, they will be fine. Is it going to be the same for other stuff though? Like the IKEA stuff? Like civil aviation?

nginx was pretty Russian IIRC

Not so long ago, Russians used to have a population for being extraordinary programmers. Doesn't that still apply?

You can't program a Färgrik or the machinary that spits Färgrik into existence.

I was responding to the question:

> Does Russia already have a talent base or flourishing industries for all the stuff they are being denied? (...) They used to have huge talent pool of all kinds during the Soviet times but that is no longer the case.

That's why I brought up programming. If the legendary Russian skills are still extant in that industry, then that's one example of a pool of talent that remained intact. Sure it won't help with a furniture crisis, but programming and IT skills are the core of a modern economy, so they will help with other things.

Sure, there are great programmers in Russia. How is that relevant though?

Because programmers are smart generally and many of them are engineers. They can certainly figure out how to make furniture and repair or build simple woodworking machines and tools amongst many other endeavors.

>Because programmers are smart generally and many of them are engineers. They can certainly figure out how to make furniture and repair or build simple woodworking machines and tools amongst many other endeavors.

I'm speechless.

Actually, the most profound examples of stupidity I'm seeng lately comes from programmers and technologist who think they understand everything just because they can read high-level simplified explanation of a concept in wikipedia or some blog post.

This arrogance is deeply concerning for me, it usually comes from people with no depth in anything other than programming. Dunning–Kruger effect? Maybe.

Elon Musk is a good example for high profile version of this. Without knowledge of caves he adventured to build robot to get kids out of a flooding cave, then proceeded to attack the person who actually knew his stuff and saved the kids. Another one is again him, predicting the end of Covid in the US. Another gold from Musk is him insulting medical professionals for not pumping a drug that cures Covid, that later turned out not to cure Covid.

This is Musk but Musk-alikes dominate the programming culture. It's horrible.

I don’t disagree that there are poor outcomes from much of the technocratic class. Also, you are correct that the ability to build basic crud apps and websites does not make you a genius or all-knowing seer of the cosmos. However, we are talking about making furniture here and repairing/building machines that have existed for over a century. Hillbilly mechanics and basic carpenters can accomplish these tasks.

Elon Musk takes risks beyond what most are willing to take and that is what separates him from the average technocrats. You don’t like that personality type, but some of us wish technocrats would reach farther than copycat social media and advertising ventures even if they fail sometimes.

Sure…but more than likely Russia is about to become thunderdome.

I don't like getting into politics, but I believe the current situation is temporary, either will end up with a major political change in Russia or with a new cold war. Whichever the case for the local economy its like hitting the reset button.

> either will end up with a major political change in Russia or with a new cold war.

Agree for the former, but not with the latter. Though scientific and military advancements by Russia were possible during the cold war, in its current state and with the new sanctions, I don't think Russia will be able to cope with the rest of the world.

IMHO it's more like there will be either a regime change or a new North Korea.

Putin is 69 in a country where average age at death is 73.

So the most likely scenario is that the status quo remains until he passes away. At which point there would be an opportunity for a clean reset in relations.

I was born in aoviet union and live in baltics. Believe me - there is whole kgb system. Once putin is dead - there will be someone similar.

Gorbachev is 91 and still alive.

Yeah I think it's a false statistics lens people look through.

Because a lot of death occurs young, brining the average down. But if you survive into adult hood you have good shot at living longer.

Plus he has way more resources than the average Russian.

Jimmy Carter is 97. Kissinger is 98. All three won Nobel Peace Prizes. Is that the key to longevity? Because Putin will not be joining that club.

That doesn't mean he has a 50% chance of dying in 4 years.

That avg expectancy of 73 includes all the people that die young, etc.

"Actuarial tables" is the term you're looking for, if you're curious how long a particular person at a particular age might live.

https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html

In the US a person who is currently 69 years old will live, on average, for another 17.53 years.

In Russia the average expectancy is a little shorter, but also Putin is not an average person. By all accounts he seems pretty healthy, and obviously he has unlimited access to the best healthcare money can buy.

He is a man so it is 15.x years from 69 not 17.x years. But he is a short man which in some studies tends to make up a lot of the difference. Short people live longer.

> At which point there would be an opportunity for a clean reset in relations.

No. All major industries are breaking up contracts with the Russians. SWIFT took a century to build. None of that is coming back. Russia can never trust Europe again, and no country can trust Cloud products anymore, seeing how many Russian people are getting HTTP 410 from Cloud products.

Putin can never trust Europe again. A new democratic government could.

Putin is 69 in a country where average age at death is 73.

Having a team of private doctors, access to the best hospitals, access to Western medicine, even being able to leave Russia for medical care will probably mean he lives longer than average.

I don’t believe the situation is temporary. All major industries are cutting ties with Russia. SWIFT took 100 years to create, even if we allow it back, Russia won’t trust us, ever.

It looks to me like our European leaders are escalating in a specific way that ensures we are locked in a feud with Russia for decades to come, in such a way that we can’t renew relationships even if Putin dies and if they pay war damages (which they won’t be able to pay because of their damaged economy - Ow, sweet irony of 1928…).

I wonder whether we, European people, have an interest into making a 50-years war with Russia, like our leaders are deciding.

Or, in other words, where can I emigrate, from France.

European leaders are largely acting out of public opinion being against Russia

I think you're in the minority if you're against sanctions

Russia poked and prodded NATO for years (Chechnya, Georgia, Crimea) and watched the European powers stand idly by with maybe some words and small sanctions

This caused them to miscalculate and push too far. But the escalation is Russia's fault, nobody made them invade anybody

Go find some thriving furniture brands in North Korea. Nobody will care about the good furniture while the biggest problem is how to buy food.

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