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Comment by kranke155 | Hacker News Reader

The fact that such documents even exist is incredible.

Did the Soviet Union keep any such records? Im assuming this is an important leak.

What's frightened me the other day was to look at the BRICS bloc vs NATO in GDP adjusted PPP. BRICS is now the bigger bloc. China holds enormous manufacturing power, Russia is a petro state with a giant military complex being built for Ukraine (and presumably will be used elsewhere if they prevail there). Brasil is pretending to be non aligned but under Lula increasingly China friendly. Our luck is that India is unaligned. But it's impressive to go to GDP PPP and see what BRICS are now some of the biggest economies in the World. Russia is at the size of Germany.

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>Russia is at the size of Germany

You cannot trust any numbers coming out of Russia. They stopped publishing a bunch of them, and those they give out are clearly doctored.

Russia is facing:

* 20% interest rates

* 9% inflation

* dropping demand for oil

* increased supply from Saudi from oil to drop the price

* increasing difficulty accessing any foreign currency including a big inflection point at oct 12

* a large labor shortage

* accelerating military costs

* about 50% of their reserve funds spent (there’s some accounting magic going on here; the book value is inflated by shares of state owned companies; the 50% here refers to actual cash and liquid assets)

* No apparent will or capacity to exit this war which is now its economic lifeblood

Imo we could see hyper inflation here within the decade

I would make a soft prediction that if the Ukraine war ends, Russia will be welcomed into the fold and a lot of the sanctions will be slowly taken away in exchange for energy.

So although Russia’s current situation isn’t great, I’m not sure this will hold up in 5 years.

Would you care to elaborate as to under what sort of agreement (specifically in terms of territorial arrangements, but also any other key concessions that come to mind) you see the war "ending" in the near term?

And will Russia need to pay any sort of financial compensation to Ukraine, or will it simply be "welcomed into the fold"?

If Trump wins, it seems like Russia will get all occupied territories, Ukraine will be offered a fig leaf of weak security guarantees.

Russia will then likely be eased back into the intl. community with very little punishment by the Trump admin.

This one of the Trump team's most consistent positions - that the Ukraine war is a nothingburguer that needs to "end" through concessions by Ukraine.

They already showed they are the single nation of the XXI century that is going to war with its neighbors and is sending nuclear threats everywhere. Once their mask fell off, who in their right mind would want to do anything to make them stronger? A whole generational attitude would have to change.

I’m dubious that Europe (or the US, but it’s mostly Europe's fault) could be fooled into falling for this con a second time.

This style of rhetoric around BRICS is just scaremongering.

If BRICS is on track to be a major global bloc, then so is the QUAD and I2U2.

In action, it's as detoothed as APEC because of mutual blunting by China and India.

> Lula increasingly China friendly

What tangible policy can you show for this? Not rhetoric - actual legislation.

Rhetoric doesn't matter in hyperfederalized democracies like Brazil and India.

> GDP adjusted PPP

I've brought this up a number of times before, but GDP PPP in isolation is a bad metric, along with other GDP metrics.

Fundamentally, the assumption that goods can be substituted might work for commodities, but in reality alll consumers do differentiate between products and value.

Furthermore, PPP calculations are fundamentally flawed and a LOT of behinds the scenes politicking happens as countries try to change WB and IMF's PPP metrics to show their countries in a better light [0]

[0] - https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2024/06/06/w...

> What tangible policy can you show for this? Not rhetoric - actual legislation.

Does this qualify? “China and Brazil to launch 'Friends of Peace' platform to resolve 'Ukraine conflict'” https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/china-and-brazil-to-lau...

Not really, becuase that's not legislation.

Furthermore, NATO+ Members like Switzerland joined that initiative and praised it as well [0].

I lean hawkish on China (as several on HN know), but Ukraine is a bad litmus test for validating nation's sentiments about China.

The brutal honest truth is Ukraine has fought well, but they need to negotiate on terms that the international community provides, because everyone has a higher priority great power struggle to deal with. For most of the world, Ukraine is not their problem.

Even Ukrainian leadership recognizes this and are leveraging China and India (companies owned by conglomerates from both countries are the largest employers in Ukraine) to try and find a middle ground with Russia [1]

Countries line Brazil are regional powers, and they are negotiating on their terms - not in favor of one nation or the other.

[0] - https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/switzerland-praises-chi...

[1] - https://www.politico.eu/article/ukraine-india-russia-narendr...

Ukraine did negotiate from 2014 to 2022 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minsk_agreements, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normandy_Format). Everyone knows what it lead to. It is now clear that, unless backed by strong security guarantees like NATO membership or non-NATO allied status, these so-called “peace initiatives” would amount to national suicide for Ukraine. This is why Ukrainians reject them. China and Brazil do not stand for peace. They are just on the other side.

The brutally honest truth is no one in the global south cares about Ukraine. They are using these peace initiatives to cement their own claims at great power status.

You are right regarding China being a considerable opponent due to its manufacturing power but you are wrong about Russia. First it is a petrostate but one that is dependent on western equipment for continued extraction. Especially with natural gas it had to scale back a lot of projects due to sanctions. Second its military complex is only good at dumb ammunitions and outdated equipment fit for human wave attacks. Those may be working in Ukraine thanks to population advantage but they are not fit for a fight against NATO. And Russia is already experiencing worker shortage in manufacturing. I wonder how that "giant military complex" will fare after another mobilization drive.

>Second its military complex is only good at dumb ammunitions and outdated equipment fit for human wave attacks.

This comment is not based on material facts. Russia has a lot of SotA military equipment. Including AD, EW, smart bombs, glide bombs, hypersonics and so on. These so called "human wave" attacks never happened and is a complete debunked meme.

If an only if you have the stomach for it, first hand accounts with vids of meat wave style attacks and more are available on Reddit, at ukraineconflict. So as they say: knock yourself out! :-)

I have been following the conflict since the beginning in 2014. I've probably seen more combat footage than you ever will. Most of the real footage is on telegram btw.

The human waves did appear to be real, even if they were convicts being used ? Pretty sure the videos are out there…

Russian weapons are nowhere near state of the art. More like hopelessly outdated Cold War designs which makes sense because the USSR unlike Russia was actually capable of innovation though often narrow in scope.

And just like every other Russian industry its MIC is heavily reliant on western components. Even dumb Shahed drones are assembled with American FPGAs and microcontrollers. https://hackaday.com/2024/06/08/how-many-western-ics-are-the...

> hypersonics

If you are talking about Kinzhal then it is hypersonic in the same way ATACMS is hypersonic. It is not maneuverable at hypersonic speeds and can be intercepted by modern air defense systems as proven by Ukraine.

> These so called "human wave" attacks never happened

How ironic to read this just a few weeks after the "Goodwin" and "Ernest" scandal. What does your metodichka say about them?

> Even dumb Shahed drones are assembled with American FPGAs and other microcontrollers.

Imagine not using cheap commodity chips that are easily available.

>If you are talking about Kinzhal then it is hypersonic in the same way ATACMS is hypersonic.

Look up Zircon and Avangard.

>How ironic to read this just a few weeks after the "Goodwin" and "Ernest" scandal. What does your metodichka say about them?

How many Ukrainian scandals should I mention? No one is saying that the Russian military is perfect, but taking this example as a way to show that Russia is utilizing human wave attacks is stupid at best.

It's hard to understand what you're arguing about - Russian troops and chain of command showed utter incompetence at the beginning of the war, with a giant convoy being stuck and gradually destroyed at will by Ukrainians.

More precisely, I wouldn't use term "human wave". It's just Russian command don't care that much about their own casualties as they are used to thinking they have a lot of human material. And while it's true, it's a terrible way to manage a state.

Are they capable of producing these en masse?

They are producing them en masse. Just look at how many ballistic missiles and drones they are using.

Yeah I mean people who underestimate Russia, they seem to talking their cues from the disastrous opening stages of the invasion in 2022. Russia has learnt and adapted a lot. I recommend the RUSI reports on the conflict for anyone who wants to catch up - Russian EW is perfectly capable of countering HIMARS at this stage, from the reports I’ve read.

Their lancet loitering ammunition drones are really effective and so are their observation drones which they produced in large quantities and keep watch over the entire frontline.

It’s a sophisticated effort.

Russia, particularly its MIC, seems at least the third best in the world at this point, after US and China.

They produce enormous amounts of material and are now building enough to hold a war of attrition against a large neighbouring country (that’s now armed with some NATO equipment).

They’re also developing combat knowledge that virtually no other country has gained in the same way in a war against a well armed near peer competitor.

Doesn't China have quite some economical problems on their own already?

I would take GDP numbers of BRICS countries with a giant mountain of salt.

I remember there were research articles that claimed China's metrics were inflated every year that compounded to unrealistic/fake number. One such research did this by measuring power/electricity growth, I think via visible light during night-time from satellite images. Would be nice if someone could find the original article.

Either way, when you inflate GDP metrics by few points it will compound over years and will create large gap between real and fake economy health.

https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2017/september/est...

https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.102.2.994

Actually, a lot of economists think that Chinese GDP is severely under-counted. https://asiatimes.com/2024/06/whats-the-real-size-of-chinas-...

NATO is a military organization, BRICS is not. There is zero reason why India (or Brazil for that matter), not to mention South Africa would want to engage in any war with the USA or Europe. These countries have their own problems. The only country that is engaged in military warfare now is Russia because their leader lives in another epoch. As for China starting a war over Taiwan, I believe they learned a lot from Russia's mistakes and for now they are doing a lot to influence the Taiwanese using peaceful measures.

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