When the war started it was seizure-this and sanction-that. I’ve read that $350B in Russian assets were seized and held, while major companies exited the Russian market, the ruble crashed, and inflation rocketed.
Meanwhile the cost of the Russian war must be astronomical to maintain, imports/exports have halted with Europe, there’s no financial aid to Russia (that I’m aware of) and multi-billion dollar resource supplies were cancelled.
All this, and Russia seems to still be having a good old time. Russians are on holidays en mass, the country is buying up arms and fossil fuels like its church Sunday, and their war machine still powers away and is prepared to keep fighting for a decade if it has to.
How? How does a country take that much of a financial beating and still be thriving? Where is the point of being broke and not being able to fund a war anymore?
Not only that but I remember reading a lot of articles about how Russia was going to economically collapse as a result…almost two years ago.
Also a lot of articles about how weak Russia was militarily, how they lost all their troops and equipment already, how morale in their military was so poor the army was just going to run away at any moment, how one major asset after another was destroyed by the Ukrainians…for almost two years now.
Yet here they are still, not collapsed, not defeated. It probably is a good idea to take the media with a grain of salt and realize just because they’re the so-called free press doesn’t make them necessarily the truthful press.
Yeah, for people listening to good analysts we knew all that stuff about Russia collapsing was mostly wishful thinking. Perun is a good example, early on he talked about how russia will likely be able to maintain their economy and military production, albeit at wartime levels. But I can see how a layperson only reading sensationalized news headlines pushed by mainstrean media and social media could’ve of thought there was a real possibility.
Russia is like 7x the size of Ukraine and has been losing for over a year.
The media is complete fucking bullshit. On both sides of the poltical spectrum. And private forums/platforms, even such as this one, are unfortunately also full of bullshit. It is very very very very difficult to obtain accurate information and analytics these days. Hence all the issues with misinformation all over the place. Then throw in AI to make it exponentially worse… it’s not great. Unfortunately at this point I jjust assume that literally no one has any fucking clue what they’re talking about and everyone is lying. Fun times we live in :-/.
I’m not sure this is a new development.
Hello fellow ex-Redditor
It’s not, but it has gotten worse over the past like 7 years. Now it’s even more accelerated with AI. Not sure most people realize how absolutely fucked the Internet is with AI. Like just check Google search results for anything. It’s dogshit. Thx AI! It will only get worse. A lot of news articles now are also written by AI and it’s blatantly obvious. The quality is worse.
To be fair the russian army has lost experienced leaders in all areas and it will have long term negative effects. Morale has been particularly low, maybe it didn’t cause a collapse but it sure caused an increase in russian POWs, abandoned vehicles, and a lack of initiative. Supply problems have also slowed down artillery and operations.