Russia's businesses under strain from Ukraine's attacks on Wildberries
bbc.com
bbc.com
> Overall then, the promise of strategic airpower, that it could win wars entirely or primarily from the skies, turns out so far to have been largely a mirage
> Instead, efforts to use strategic bombing to coerce surrender have repeatedly shown that being bombed hardens civilian resolve to continue resisting. By contrast, bombing can have some effect on industrial production, but only in wars where that production matters and is available to be bombed
> Crucially, the coercive effect of these bombing efforts is not only limited, but it is also not delivered via popular will but rather through the political calculus of the leadership
https://acoup.blog/2022/10/21/collections-strategic-airpower...
The russian oil refineries that have been very successfully attacked seem to meet the definition of this. One obviously useful thing for the Ukrainians to do is to cut off the supply of refined diesel and petrol to the Russian army's vehicles.
If this also has the effect of causing significant pain to the russian domestic economy (lack of fuel for general civilian vehicle uses of all types), it has the additional benefit of being a very real and public pain point causing dissatisfaction with the average russian civilian.
And yet we must never forget that there is no such thing as a wunder waffe and reducing German cities to rubble did not break the civilian resolve.
Throughout the Russian invasion of Ukraine I saw a common pattern: one side gains a technological or doctrinal advantage, may or may not make progress, the other side adapts and the situation levels out again.
0 - https://xcancel.com/Gerashchenko_en/status/20733425637973812...
Let's say theoretically that Ukraine successfully takes 90% of Russia's oil refineries out of action and this crashes the domestic petrol/diesel supply so thoroughly that plowing, seeding and harvesting with mechanized agriculture equipment also crashes in Russia. Or there is a breakdown of cold chain transport warehousing/trucking and grocery supply due to lack of diesel fuel for all of the trucking. Could it result in a collapse of the russian state and civil war? Very possibly.
perhaps not, but exhaustion did lead to the Russian Revolution, and toppling the Tsar is what the AFU is explicitly hoping for...
In Vietnam when the NVA attacked a chain of US military bases simultaneously they lost every single battle, by a huge margin. It wasn't even close, the USA suffered about a quarter as many casualties, yet it broke the back of US commitment to the war. That's because the NVA could take 110k casualties and maintain their commitment, but for the USA about 25k casualties was intolerable.
On the battlefield Russia is losing masses of troops, but as Vlad Vexler points out, because these are mostly essentially paid mercenaries this is seen by the Russian population as a transactional risk they are taking.
Direct pain for the general civilian population is another matter. Most Russians seem oblivious to the fact they are actually in a war with a neighbouring country. They seem utterly bewildered by the fact Ukraine is even attacking Russia at all, it doesn't seem to make any sense to them. This is why the government has done everything they can to avoid resorting to a wave of conscription, they want the whole thing to seem very distant and abstract.
I think the pain tolerance of the Russian population over this is minimal, bringing it home to them is really important. The only thing is they have no accessible ways to translate that into political action, but if they are ever going to wake up, prods like this play an important role IMHO.
And yet, the lower bound of Russian deaths (not casualties) is 230k [0], a speculated upper bound 500k. In comparison, the US counts 250k military deaths in the European theatre of WW2 and the UK 383k. [1] If true, those are staggering losses for Russia, even when controlling for population sizes. I am not convinced that Russia will buckle anytime soon, even under crippling long-term costs.
I wish for a swift and decisive victory for Ukraine.
> They seem utterly bewildered by the fact Ukraine is even attacking Russia at all, it doesn't seem to make any sense to them.
They have been propagandized to such extent that they just cannot accept the reality even when it becomes completely undeniable. Ukraine blows up something near them in Russia, and they go completely off the rails explaining how this has nothing to do with Russia nor Ukraine, but is some IMF-Blackrock-NWO scheme against Slavs, with references to the 1999 staged terrorist attacks in Russia that solidified Putin's rise to power. The war isn't real and a "third party" is in charge of both militaries and using them to play mind games on Russians to coerce them into accepting "globalist plans".
It's utterly fascinating to observe the breakdown of sense of reality in real time as lifelong propaganda narratives (like the might of the Russian army) turn out to be lies and the world they thought they lived in turns out to be a mirage. And it's remarkable that these conspiracy theories are not coming from central figures, such as a small circle of social media grifters (vaccine-autism, chemtrails, flat earth, etc), but appear from the grassroots, which is why there are so many variations. Many millions of people are still trying to make sense of these events within a propagandized worldview that they cannot let go of.
a busy person doesn't have the time to evaluate all of these and ultimately slips into intellectual shot-cuts, which is usually defaulting to a curator or aggregator they trust (which is also easy to control), or just rationalizing whatever stream of BS they feel most comfortable with
similar methods were every effective in the US' Iraq/Afghanistan efforts, where the busy population was too distracted by mustache memes and Imagine Dragons and Fox News to mount any serious intellectual discussion; it was a volunteer-only war, and unless you have some skin-in-the-game already you didn't think about it. Why get upset about Korignal Valley when the new season of The Walking Dead is on?
Not convinced that "winning" is the same as "stop the attacker from attacking"
> shown that being bombed hardens civilian resolve to continue resisting
Resist against what exactly in this case? Russian population is well aware they are the attackers and that Putin tries to invade Ukraine.
And Avito in this case would be your first target if only Avito was not a craigslist "alternative".
The real reason for attacking WB is that it has deeper connection to Putins pals and has larger logistic centers with lots of goods. WB won't be able to compensate this for the sellers and this will hurt a lot.
It won't metter much for military oprations (if you are a soldier you ca just order from Avito or Ali) but this can disrupt internal logistics and hurt the economy greatly.
Even after 4 years of war, when the conflict directly affects them, Russian civilians seem genuinely bewildered. They have difficulty comprehending why this is happening to them. They've hardly felt they've been in a war at all, for them it's mainly been an economic downturn.
I'm really rooting for Ukraine here, and it looks like they are well on their way to succeeding pushing Russia out.
But the corruption issue ... for this particular problem, old habits unfortunately die really, really hard.
When corruption has become interwoven into the fabric of a society the way it has in Ukraine, and for such a long time, rooting it out will be very, very hard.
This kind of stuff typically requires two generations to die out and a super strong, long-term political will.
I hope they'll pull it off, but it won't be easy.
Not perfect, but doing pretty well, and the effects can be seen.
In my view what really did them in was Poland's EU accession later on. It gave young men alternatives to joining organised crime as foot soldiers.
Of course many criminals emigrated as well, but on foreign turf they weren't nearly as successful.
Right now it's demographics, with the average age of a felon going from ~20 to ~34 between 2000 and now. These people focus on e-commerce scams.
Government spending is how the Brussels economy works (there's technically 11 and in practice about 7 different governments, all of whom have similar needs), and you get government spending assigned to you by "knowing" government deciders ...
I thought I was clear? I mean the western corruption isn't in any shape or form comparable to Russian corruption, and how it pervaded all the Eastern Bloc. It does take long time to root it out, as it affects and degrades the whole society. You really, really can't compare it to what we have in the west, and everybody is better off when they get to escape it.
Is this good or bad? Is Russian corruption much worse or much better in the Epstein scale of corruption?
Corruption is also much more normalized in Russia. Bureaucrats will casually take money to work your case faster (or at all). I know that from old friends as they had to bribe people to get their case processed a few years ago (before Russia started the war).
The system there is entirely hierarchical. Think organized Mafia as seen in movies, but but much wider both vertically and horizontally.
In that system, as an individual, you have only two path in life: poverty no matter your educational level and talent, or having a patron within the corrupt hierarchy.
If you get a patron, your life is going to be good as long as you remain in his good graces, and he remains on the good grades of his patron, and so on, all the way up to Putin. If any link in the chain above you breaks, you're back to poverty. So you now have a whole set of duties toward your entire "clan", starting with your patron and going all the way up.
There's no justice or fairness anywhere in this system, only loyalty, and the ocasional disloyalty disputes as the upper layers fight for domination.
And there's no private property either. All property is Putin's, who grants access to slices of it to his immediate underlings, who in turn grant access to theirs, and so on, until you too get yours. That grant can be revoked at any time, for any reason whatsoever.
Compared to that, corruption in normal countries is extremely simple, generally having one layer or two, not being so comprehensive that it encompasses the whole of society, and not structured in such a way that your life depends on it, to the point that in most countries you can rise and prosper in society without taking part in corruption, even if it's harder to do so.
In Russia and its satellites this simply isn't the case.
It's all a matter of degrees of course, but Singapore and Switzerland spring to mind.
I'm not claiming either is corruption-free (there is no such thing unfortunately), but in terms of comparables, it's night and day between these nations and many other countries.
It is part of every society, but Ukrainians and the west perceive it as a problem for Ukraine while, say, Danes do not, although Denmark [1] is utterly corrupt in its own ways.
Corruption is problem only for states that underwent recent political transitions and where class struggle has not been a thing for various reasons. Ukraine improves quickly, but signs of improvement are not in the corruption perception indices but in people manifesting their opinions on the streets, like in the recent ousting, then re-hiring of the Defense Minister.
I agree with the general sentiment though!
Dugan is unambiguously hard right and has intellectual ties to other openly fascist types. His ideology is explicitly ethno-centric and has a strong resemblance to classical Fascism (in the Ur-Fascism sense), and a looser one to German-style National-Socialist thought, esp. as it relates to Russian ethnic domination of Europe