In all fairness, the Russian people had
* a chance to stop the KGB in 2000, possibly in 2004
* at least fifteen years to get another passport in a great environment before 2014
* an opportunity to oppose the war in 2014 when that didn't mean getting fired and likely jailed
* another 5 years under more challenging but still workable circumstances to run away
* half of 2022 for really desperate actions
At this point those still in the country have nobody else to blame for their situation unfortunately.
The scale of the tragedy for the Eastern Slavs is reaching truly historical proportions. The 21st century was not supposed to be like that and I don't really want to know what's next.
Getting another passport is really difficult and expensive.
My family emigrated 16 years ago and I still can't get one. In my entire family only one of us succeesed.
I know quite a few Russians here, who wanted to get passport has it, its just about strong enough will and consistency. But that's something very few have, ie consistently take language courses for a year or two, learn culture, history, actually integrate into local society and not just stick around the people from same speaking country all the time.
If you have no good expertise, work hard on getting one, god damn there are countless programmes in both EU and Switzerland to become an expert in something basically for free. It may not be a CEO position but it will be a well paid honest job. Sorry but every single time I've met people complaining about this, they really, really slacked on above and just kept dreaming about superb chances for free, which obviously never came.
This may not be true about other continents, no experience there. But commenter you respond to is 100% correct for Europe.
For example in UK your passport application will be rejected if you were not in the country 5 years ago from the exact date the application is recieved by the Home Office. You could pay all fees, taxes, pass all tests, live in country for 20 years, but if you left for one day on Sept 1 2015 and post delivered your application on Sept 1 2020, your application will be denied.
If you spend 4.9 years on a dependand visa, but then your partner gets a permanent residency, you have to switch to a family visa, and your period of 5 years starts all over again.
Student visas don't count to the 5 year period, being outside the country for too long resets the period, for example if you had to help out aging parent after surgery.
The rules change all the time and there isn't an 'immigrant newletter - what will fuck you up at the next step'. Its usually when you try and apply for the next step, you find out you've wasted 5 years.
Also the amount of money I've spent on various immigration and lawyer fees is probably about 40 grand.
There was some bad luck and one poor decisions made, but the bottomn line is, it's easy to fall through the cracks and end up with nothing no matter how resourcefull you are.
I'm extremely privileged that my experience with naturalisation in Sweden was very smooth. At the same time I lived 5 years with some anxiety due to numerous cases of mishaps with immigration processes from personal contacts.
It includes high-skilled immigrants being deported due to a past employer not paying worker insurance, something that as a worker you're never aware of in your payslip, contract, etc. Includes couples being separated for years, waits of weeks to months for getting a permission to leave the country to care for ill relatives without affecting their process. All of it just for the sake of applying rules, not empowering immigration case agents to take decisions pending further reviews, or a justice system that is rigid on the application of rules (as was the case of the missing worker insurance, which affected a few other people).
Living with those reports from others close to me always kept me on the edge of what could happen to me, and this is a great country as an immigrant, including in terms of bureaucracy.
I can't imagine other places with much more confusing and contradictory immigration systems...
UK rules often seem arbitrary or deliberately trying to trap people.
> The rules change all the time and there isn't an 'immigrant newletter - what will fuck you up at the next step'.
That surprises me: I would imagine there are online forums, maybe a subreddit, for such a purpose.
Given how much of a shitshow shock-therapy economics were in the 90s, I think the results of those elections were completely expected.
People have spilled a lot of ink in 2016 about how MAGA rode a wave of people being disillusioned by the status quo - well, imagine that, but ten times worse, and you'll get a picture of Russia in the 90s. It leaned westwards, got burnt hard, was ready for a change, any change, and look, here comes a Russia-first strongman to make the country 'great' 'again'.
It had as much of a chance to stop Putin in 2000 and 2004 as Kentucky has to not re-elect Mitch McConnel.
IIRC, Russia was a different kind of trainwreck in 2000, so it's not really fair to fault them for not proactively dealing with $CURRENT_THING, when it could have only been distant speculation.
Relevant articles: https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2022/07/20/russia-sends-army-...
https://twitter.com/MarkHertling/status/1572571676524838915?...
“It won’t be pretty, it won’t be efficient, but they’re going to be able to find the people. I think the more relevant issue is: How capable and ready are they going to be — not very. How much training are they willing to give them before they send them out to the front lines. Right now, the indications are — the way they’ve pumped units into Ukraine — is not a lot and certainly not enough.”
This is a classic Russian style of warfare. Throw conscripts into battle. The survivors will become good soldiers or die.
Usually countries do this when they're being invaded, desperate, and fighting on their own territory with the support of the locals. It's rare to see it for a country that's the attacker and is operating in hostile territory. That takes a lot more training, organization, and support.
This can go on for a long time. Russia does not have enough power to conquer Ukraine, and Ukraine does not have enough power to conquer Russia. But they can fight for years.
This can go on until Putin dies.
[1] https://taskandpurpose.com/news/russia-mobilization-reserve-...
Ukraine is not trying to conquer Russia. It’s only trying to free its occupied territories. And it has the power to do so. HIMARS and stuf …
I understand their argument, but I dispute it. The way things are going, the war is not going to last for years. Russia's military is collapsing. They have low morale, little training, bad leadership, little to no will to fight, deprecated weapons, no strategy, no allies. Ukraine's military has great motivation and morale, phenomenal public image, good training (and getting better every day), good troop rotation, great intelligence, numerous allies. And now they have the silver bullet too, in the from of HIMARS.
We are not watching a slog. We are watching a lopsided fight.
Russia's strategy seems taken straight out of Zapp Brannigan's Art of War, where they are banking on Ukraine's arms supplies to eventually run out after spending them all wiping out wave after wave of Russia's "badly trained, led, equipped and supplied troops" until there's no resistance left.
Starting from day 1, Russia has been sending unwitting and unequiped conscripts through the Ukraine frontlines until they draw contact.
Why do you think so much hardware was captured by Ukrainians? Because there just wasn't enough people to drive it all back when they retreated.
Russian tactics suffers because they are sending tanks without infantry. The tanks are meant to support troops to achieve results, not be standalone solution.
Now, the reason I think the mobilisation will not help is actually different. I think somebody summed it up pretty well: "$50M piece of artillery driven by an 18yo". There is already not enough experienced soldiers and now they will be diluted with even more that have no idea what they are doing.
It will also put a clock on whatever Putin is trying to do. Now that this is done, he will absolutely have to show results or public opinion will start deteriorating very quickly.
That's not exactly true. Russia has problems supplying themselves, but thanks to the astronomical casualty rate they've progressively getting fewer bodies on the few gear they have.
Their units are chronically underequiped to the point whole units barely have boots or bullet proof vests to equip their grunts.
Russia has been rushing their ancient 50 year old tanks to the front lines even without maintenance or any type of update.
Russia is now in such a state of despair that Russia, once one of the world's to arms exporter, are resorting to buying gear from Iran, of all places.
IIRC, Iran has a pretty impressive domestic arms industry. The thing they should probably be more embarrassed about is buying arms from North Korea.
Those vehicles had crews, that's how they got to the battlefield in the first place. The vehicles are being abandoned because they don't have the fuel to make it back to friendly lines because their logistics is a joke. So crews are abandoning vehicles rather than sitting in a Javelin magnet waiting for a fuel truck that will never arrive.
In a professional army if a vehicle managed to run out of fuel or was damaged but serviceable its unit would detach some soldiers to watch over it while an engineering vehicle (an armored tow truck essentially) was dispatched to retrieve it.
I agree with dilution of skills, with modern equipment number of troops alone mean almost nothing, high motivation and morale can be easily 10x multiplier etc...
But equipment left in Ukraine - that's often part of that low morale. There are countless videos of russian soldiers ignoring their fellow soldiers lying on the ground bleeding and concerning about themselves only. Whole tank crew coming to police station to 'ask for direction', effectively giving up. Imagine US soldiers doing that anywhere... That's something that won't get fixed in 10 years even if they started in right direction now, and they aren't and won't.
These are fragilities of dictatorships, where ass kissing and corruption trumps competence every time. This is one of the cores of what russia is as a state now. I say good for us, since they will never reach even fraction of potential their numbers and equipment gives them.
There is a difference between understanding what is happening and caring about it.
I believe Russians do understand what is happening, for the most part. But I believe most Russians just don't care enough to do something about it. That might change when their sons, fathers, husbands are on the hook to go to a bloody war.
It is kinda like eating meat. You know it comes from an animal that most likely had to live in poor conditions and then be killed. Most people do understand that this is what is happening, and yet they do not act on it because it is easier to not do anything.
I agree. The Russian regime is based on corruption and cynicism. This breeds an attitude of everyone for himself. It is not fertile soil to grow a competent army in.
> These are fragilities of dictatorships, where ass kissing and corruption trumps competence every time.
There have been plenty of autocracies that have had good armies. E.g. Alexander, the Roman Empire, the Rashidun Caliphate, Nazi Germany.
Just as a caveat, note that the provisions of the current partial mobilization explicitly exclude students and conscripts and is for 300K “reservists who have previously served in the Russian army and have combat experience or specialised military skills”. So, I don’t think the mental image of fresh recruits who have no idea what they are doing is necessarily accurate.
The only real war Russian army fougt ended 22 years ago, and it was a civil war against poorly equipped guerilla.
You have to roll back 20 more years to find a full-fleged invasion of a neighbouring country by the Soviet Union.
Yeah, I read somewhere that their units are so undermanned that they've been sending APCs into action with just the drivers, which apparently is both ineffective and also makes them really vulnerable to the kinds of anti-tank missiles that Ukraine has been getting by the truckload.
Also Russian soldiers didn't care whether it was captured or not. They just care about saving their own lives. This does not make for an effective army, but it's all Russia can do.
That said, there's already a huge migration for many Chinese citizens, especially those from Shanghai, to Singapore and Malaysia this year, since now it's super hard to emigrate to US or Australia or Canada. The rich do see the writing on the wall. or rather, the many buses to the covid concentration camps.
Wait, why does the Chinese government hate a free Taiwan ? US gov was pretty on point with the Russian invasion of Ukraine
Shouldn’t we be suspicious about a government that “hates” a free neighbor ?
The answer to that is the most important subject barely taught at schools: history.
Well: history, and humans being.
See also the CCP's crackdown on democracy in Hong Kong. Hong Kong was another place where Chinese people lived with independent courts, a free press, and multiple parties and the CCP was not satisfied.
Interestingly, CCP wanted to help Taiwan, Mongolia, Korea and many other provinces to independent. It is KMT (nationalist government) who advocate unifying all Chinese. I guess the nationalist government won the propaganda war, now CCP go KMT's way.
The Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force is much more impressive than the Brits and the French though. (And Japan has major strategic reasons to keep the Chinese on the far side of the Taiwan Strait, most relevant being that that's the easiest place to stop an island hopping campaign towards the home islands)
Sure, might be challenging to project that power to the straight of Taiwan, but by no means impossible as part of a coalition force. And especially the French have some vested interesst in the Pacific with their overseas territories.
I'm not sure the Italian carriers are relevant for operations in Southeast Asia. Maybe once they get F35Bs, but their Harriers would not fare well against much of anything, and that's assuming they have the ability to operate at such a distance from the Mediterranean in the first place. (Incidentally, what most of the world calls a carrier is not what the USN calls a carrier. STOVL carriers are not really in the same class as CATOBAR carriers!)
True so that US carriers, and vessels like the De Gaulle and the British carrier (Elizabeth-class if memory serves well) are different beast than the Italian ones. And the US has quite a few of those.
China will be hindered by not having any real allies, other than short term allies of convenience (Iran, Eritrea, for example).
Unstoppable hypersonic missiles could destroy the semiconductor production infrastructure in minutes.
what does this mean?
What do you mean? Sure it has a large population, but it's also a nation of only children.
And because any conflict its likely to fight will not be one across a two-thousand kilometer front that physically requires millions of people sitting in trenches. It's not 1943 or 1917 anymore.
>> What do you mean? Sure it has a large population, but it's also a nation of only children.
> For the same reason that China did not need conscription when it fought the Korean war.
Your kind of ignoring the point. During the Korean War, China didn't have the one-child policy and families were big. The US never had such a policy.
There are more people between the ages of 15 and 35 in China than there are people alive in the United States.
There are more 20 year-olds in China than there are men in Taiwan.
You don't need conscription to fight a naval war when you have almost a billion and a half people. Your demographics support finding enough volunteers.
Also, the one-child policy put China's fertility rate at 1.70 children per woman. You know what the US fertility rate is?
1.70 children per woman.
Taiwan's fertility rate? 1.2 children per woman.
I won't say you shouldn't be feeling for the Russians, but maybe at least feel as much for the Ukrainian victims?
You are talking about mobster who understands only strength and rule of stronger, any concept of morality, fairness, rule of law etc. is meaningless. At this point, he considers large parts or whole Europe should be under his dictatorship, and so does parts of middle east. Well we Europeans say NO (and much more). Waving nuclear threat won't change our stance since what goes around comes around, if he goes in others go in and all was for much less than nothing. Fighting for greater Russia will lose any meaning since there won't be any to talk about anymore.
Russia has so much more to lose, it hasn't even begun losing properly.
The west did exactly what you said the last two times Russia took a bite out of Ukraine, and now we're in this mess, with millions involved and nuclear war on the table. I fear to think where we'd be with another round or two of passing the buck.
Western Europe already did that in 2014 when Russia invaded Ukraine and annexed Crimea.
How did that danegeld went?
Every time you give in to Russian threats and aggression, you get more Russian threats and aggression.
The West should tell Russia, firmly and directly, that any use of nukes by Russia will result in the same on Russia, and advise the Russian armed forces not to obey any order that would amount to national suicide.
Beyond the reality of instant and powerful retalation, dropping nuclear weapons on Berlin or Kyiv or Warsaw is a tad suicidal from that POV alone.
And even the use of a small scale "tactical" nuke inside Ukrainian territory would essentially force NATO into committing its own forces inside Ukraine. It would be too far beyond the pale.
I don't think Putin will take this gamble. The whole world would lose, but Russia would lose even more.
I totally think Putin is insane enough by now to order a tactical nuclear strike. I also think, for now, the Russian military will act by then and "remove" him from power. Or not, because who knows how those things play out in real life.
Hence Lavrov constantly crowing about the hypocrisy of "the west." It's not that they think what the US empire has done is immoral. It's that they (and by they I don't mean the Russian people, but instead a select cadre at the top) want the same thing for themselves.
The irony is there was no singular unified west until Russia invaded Ukraine. Out of that conflict, they have inadvertently forged a much more united western opposition to them.
I hated the whole concept of NATO until Russia invaded Ukraine.
So yes, I agree, think Putin overplayed his hand in a clumsy way. But he may have had no other choice.
The parallels to WWI are strong.
Yes. What Lavrov doesn't understand is that the West isn't an empire, it's a series of states with similar cultures and political and economic systems, that voluntarily choose to work together. But Russia doesn't seem to realise that there are other ways of getting people to do what you want than brutality and threats.
> What Lavrov doesn't understand is that the West isn't an empire series of states with similar cultures and political and economic systems, that voluntarily choose to work together. But Russia doesn't seem to realise that there are other ways of getting people to do what you want than brutality and threats. > brutality and threats
Brutality and threats is what U.S. sanctions and U.S. national security strategy are.
True but irrelevant -- my whole point was the USA (alongside most nations) has other tools to getting what it wants.
Russia is a country whose only tool is a hammer, and all problems look to it like nails.