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Comment by dylan604 | Hacker News Reader

Russia will be the new Cuba with phone tech 50 years old instead of cars.

Or, they'll just keep supplying from China and not really notice

That assumes that the situation will last 50 years. Cuba has been embargoed by the US for so long because its oligarchs all moved to Florida and Texas and took their money with them and have bought themselves some American democracy with it. My cynical side thinks that the worst case scenario (short of nukes or full-scale WWIII) where Russia essentially annexes Ukraine like China did Tibet will eventually lead to roughly the same consequences for Russia that the Chinese annexation of Tibet did for China.

Except Ukraine has 10x the population of Tibet and a land border with EU countries...

When industrial partnerships are broken, there is no incentive to go back. No trust either, neither from the two sides, neither from companies to government not to shut down the transaction again at the first whim.

My bet is that once Russia is on a black list for everything China is going to keep Russia on a leash. Buy enough from them in yuan to keep them alive, sell to them to get those yuans back, don't make them so rich to be able to rebuild a really worrisome army. And who'll be in the Cremlin will still rule over all of Russia and be rich and happy.

I'd like to hear from someone in Russia to understand if this is a credible endgame.

Russian here. IMO that's the most probable outcome in the short term, and this process started long before recent events.

To be fair, the annexation of Tibet happened at a time where China was irrelevant on the world stage having come out of WW2 and a civil war almost completely ruined. Tibet wasn't recognised internationally as a country at the time because of the KMT claims to it. That's not to say that the CCP's invasion, annexation and suppression should have happened or was moral in any way, but Ukraine today has much more political clout and meaning than Tibet had 70 years ago, because attitudes and the capabilities of the countries involved today were different then than they are now.

Reasonably point. I don't think (or at the very least I hope) that my worst-case non-Armageddon scenario will happen, but I suspect that the only thing that will end the Russian occupation of Ukraine will be the fall of Putin from power. But then I'm just some schmuck who doesn't know much more than anyone else.

The way the escalation might go on, it probably won't matter how long it would last.

Cuba has survived for 50 year by leaching off from other countries, USSR until its fall, then Venezuela with two puppet regimes and when that also failed, Obama threw them Oxygen by opening up.

They have the advantage that the embargo is unilateral by the US. They're cut off from their closest and largest potential trading partner, but there are still relations with the rest of the world. If anything, the embargo strengthened the regime by creating a convenient scapegoat for all of its failures.

Or maybe the Russians might invent something of their own?

They did have those space programs which were a big deal at the time.

If we count China out, the all-Russian phone would be in a suitcase form-factor. The best tech process for chip making in Russia is 110nm, even though 90nm was bought a decade ago.

> the all-Russian phone would be in a suitcase form-factor

You don't know that.

If China didn't make phones, wouldn't you have said "all Chinese phones would be shaped like a pyramid"?

China invests huge amounts of money in their own chip making and it didn't start yesterday.

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