Comment by jiggawatts | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jiggawatts | Hacker News Reader

Russia has 37 million males aged 15-54, which are the extreme ends of what would be considered for mobilisation. Its total workforce is 75 million.

Combined with the ~100K Russian casualties, ~200K combatants, if Putin adds another 150K then this will impact just 1.2% of its combat-age male population. The reduction in workforce is just 0.6%, but it is actually less than that, because most of the initially deployed soldiers were professional soldiers already, and weren't technically part of the workforce when the war started. So just considering the new conscripts, this is more like a 0.2% reduction in the total workforce.

I'm putting this here because I see a lot of discussions where people think that this will somehow "decimate" Russia's population, undermine their economy, strip the workforce bare, or whatever.

For comparison, their ageing demographics and low birth rate means that their population is shrinking by 86K people per month anyway. See: https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2022/07/29/russias-population...

Realistically, the effect of the sanctions is 100x greater than the additional mobilisation.

As a Russian, who (unfortunately) currently resides in Russia, I can say that so far sanctions had approximately zero effect on everyday lives. No food shortages, no good shortages, no medicine shortages. Planes are still flying (within borders).

So it appears that the economy is more robust than I have originally thought - in February I was expecting a near collapse by now, but there are no signs of it yet.

Yes. You can buy any car you want, the prices didnt budge, stock market is strong, and mcdonalds never ran out of something as basic as fries.

Inflation for Russians is just Tuesday, and the importance of buying new cars is somewhat overinflated for everyday lives.

Since you appear to be commenting my every comment, I have to tell you this. You seem to be wishfully dreaming that sanctions are more effective than they really are. So far, their impact was very light. As a Russian, I'd love them to have a way more severe impact, as I would happily endure great hardships if this would weaken Putin's fascist regime. However, so far, I don't see any evidence of a significant impact of sanctions.

I'm also very unhappy with EU countries imposing an extremely counter-productive measures like visa bans, and seeing how rabid and hateful crowd cheers for them is even sadder, because these people's actions benefit Putin, and do not hurt him at all.

> As a Russian, I'd love them to have a way more severe impact, as I would happily endure great hardships if this would weaken Putin's fascist regime.

As a Russian, I remember being trolled by the following joke, very popular among pseudo-liberals and other russophobic lot:

"When lords will demand that every Russian must have a boot their asses by saturday, they will form a line in Friday to get this over with faster."

I can't stop laughing over how ironic this whole thing turned out.

I understand McDonald's ran out of McDonald's.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonald%27s_in_Russia

> Yes. You can buy any car you want,

No.

In the US, if you want, you can buy and legally own a tank or other military vehicle.

But in Russia you still can't, despite all the mobilizations :(

to be perfectly fair to Russia; there was practically nothing left the West could use to threaten them with regarding sanctions; which is probably why Putin said "Fuck it"; especially since the population is declining.

The impact of harsh sanctions is self-sufficiency. Ironically Germany and the EU is suffering moderately due to the Russian gas shortages.

Well, there is this $300 Billion frozen assets in western banking sector.

Which Putin uses as a yet another example of west's lack of credibility in his rhetoric, which even seems to have some response in Africa and central and eastern Eurasia (basically everywhere non-west)

Plus it's easy internal propaganda, like, "Look, THEY stole YOUR money".

And since Russia's budget is currently profitable, it doesn't really pose an immediate economic threat.

You have outdated information. Turns out sanctions do work https://edition.cnn.com/2022/09/15/economy/russia-economy-bu... If there was no economic threat there would be no 10% public sector cut.

From what I understand, it’s a bit like those kids’ cartoons where the character runs over a cliff and keeps running into mid air. They look down and only then start falling.

Sanctions have little effect on everyday life initially. People can just keep coasting just like the character that ran past the edge of the cliff.

For example why does the average person care if car manufacturing has halted? They have a car already! Chances are that the car they ordered months ago was completed anyway with parts in stock.

It’s when the Kuka robots and Siemens machinery starts breaking down in factories that things start heading downwards.

Still… a downwards trajectory isn’t the same as an instant change! It takes years for the impact to really bite.

Smuggling will help cover some shortages, but at a cost.

Real exchange rates will get increasingly bad.

Russians will simply skip their holidays next year, hold on to their phones and computers a bit longer and live life like normal…

… until they realise they can’t legally enter half the countries in the world, flights are unaffordable and take a route via China, and replacing their dead laptop costs a year’s wages.

Just like the good old communist days Putin longs for.

> and replacing their dead laptop costs a year’s wages

You don't really realise what you're talking about, or did you confuse Russia with Australia?

Would anyone decent enough to actually respond instead of silent minusing, tell me how dead laptop replacement can start costing year's wages, when it's assembled right near the border?

Cuz it really looks like people either have no idea where exactly Russia is (and where the global production centers are) or somehow imply closed borders.

Because at some point the manufacturers will need to choose whether to comply with sanctions, or get cut of the Western markets. Russian market is relatively worthless, so it's not a hard choice, and we're already seeing Chinese vendors leaving Russia.

Vendors are greedy and sanctions are relatively easy to dodge, especially if the customs are told not to interfere too thoroughly. If anything, Apple hardware in Russia now costs ~20% less than it did in January. iPhone 14 is already available, too. Maybe the situation will change in the future, but no sooner than when EU will stop buying oil and gas from Putin.

Vendors being greedy doesn't explain why they would risk losing access to a very profitable markets for a worthless one.

Sanctions are slow. Kazakhstan, for example, only blocked truck transit from EU to Russia a couple days ago.

Vendors do not risk anything. They offload the shipment to a real buyer who then transports goods without vendor officially knowing anything. This buyer can very well be a company established for this one shipment, so no ends are ever found.

And regarding Kazakhstan and transit problems - it has nothing to do with sanctions. See this article with more or less coherent explanation of an issue [0] (it's in Russian but Google translate should help)

[0]: https://iz.ru/1397573/anastasiia-lvova-elnar-bainazarov/gruz...

Regarding jets, it seems the Russia only has the flying stock to keep the current fleet alive until 2025. And only doing so by using current jets as parts for the others. After that, and the flying stock dwindles until other sources are found; a safety nightmare.

https://jalopnik.com/russia-turns-to-cannibalizing-aircraft-...

One effect (as was seen in February) will be an exodus of young, educated citizens. Having discussed the matter with (now ex-) colleagues earlier in the year, mobilization was a big concern for them.

That will have a bigger impact on companies as technology has infiltrated every sector. Of course, it could be months or years before that impact is truly felt.

Well they better get moving quickly, because it is widely expected that from next week you will need to have a paper from the local draft/military office stating that you are exempt from mobilization in order to board a plane or a train, and it is obviously expected that this paper will be very hard for most people to obtain.

> it is widely expected

By whom?

I'd expect the disruption caused by workplaces suddenly losing conscripted workers to exceed the mere "workforce reduction" by a large factor.

You are right that the effect on workforce won't be as bad. But the political effects will likely be huge: for now Russians can pretend there's no war, because it's not them who's dying, it's "some ethnic minorities".

One can't avoid drawing parallels between what's happening now and what happened after Russia's defeat in WW1.

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