There are some people saying that people were saying that "sanction will bring Russia to their knees", that "the Russian economy is collapsing" and than laughing out loud, saying the opposite is true.
Nope. I have spent countless hours reading and listening about this war, I never heard or read anybody serious telling such a thing.
Most everyone (analysts/politicians) and their moms predicted the collapse of the Russian economy, just like most predicted that Russia was going to overrun Ukraine within weeks. Biden did and so did many other politicians. Not sure if you consider them serious. Most of the analysts did the same: collapse of the banking sector, collapse of the stock market, collapse of the economy (Biden, for example, used 15% drop in GDP in 2022 alone and further decline after as an indicator, if I recall correctly), collapse of the resource sector and oil and gas in particular, and so on. One example from March 1, 2022:
Never before has an economy with the global importance of Russia's been targeted with sanctions at this level, according to analysts, who say there is now a high risk that Russia will face a financial crisis that pushes its largest banks to the brink of collapse.[…]
"We will provoke the collapse of the Russian economy," French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire told a local news channel on Tuesday.
The West has responded to Russia's invasion of Ukraine with round after round of punishing sanctions. The latest salvo is designed to spark a banking crisis, overwhelm Moscow's financial defenses and tip the Russian economy into a deep recession.
amp.cnn.com
There are still weekly/monthly articles about the Russian economy collapsing soon or next year, which began right after people realized that it wasn’t going to happen in 2022 (which was kind of obvious, to be honest). The difference is that it is mostly “jokers” who talk about a collapse nowadays. Reasonable people see the issues and talk about potential consequences and most reasonable talk about the long-term provided certain conditions. In reality, I am fairly certain that there aren’t many among those who understand the complexity of the world market and consequences to follow really want a (real) collapse of the Russian economy. At the same time, not many really want to completely stop the flow of the Russian hydrocarbons either because the consequences would be dire for the western economies and Europe in particular. Especially the politicians during the election cycle and there is someone somewhere being elected more often than not; heck, election cycle doesn’t seem to ever stop in some places.
If I recall correctly, both Ananda and me have talked about it plenty in this and the General Russia thread, including the Russian economy, hydrocarbon exports, effects on Europe, etc. And that was long time ago now, back when some imminent apocalyptic scenarios for Russia were still discussed.
Yes, it's hard to admit that Russia is winning or could be winning. Especially when you live in Eastern Europe. You want positive news and you want to believe things will be all right. If we lose our optimism, we lose the war.
I do not believe that is reasonable. People can believe whatever they want and wish for good news all they want too, but having (at least) a good glimpse of reality would always come on top. Feelings will always be trashed by reason. There is no escaping that as such is life, where realism is king.
As for winning, Russia isn’t winning. Sure, they are advancing, taking more and more land that they will probably get to keep (one would have to be quite naive to think they will be returning any of it, unless the collapse and other nonsense will come true in the near future). But for them this is probably the best way forward in the current circumstances. What is to happen is yet to be seen.
Ukraine isn’t winning and is not going to, regardless of what happens. They can’t win here as they already lost. And they will lose more and more the longer this continues. But we already talked about it many times before.
Europe is far from winning too. Regardless of the outcome. See, the reality is that not many in the world are winning here, not at all. Most would be better off if this war didn’t happen to begin with. Most would be better off if this didn’t last long if it did happen. And so on. I will repeat again what I said previously: it is really hard to understand why common ground was not found and it was allowed to escalate to this level. It’s nuts, but here we are.
By the way, Canada cannot win here either. But that is because of the clown we have running the circus. We could have been rolling the bank now, alas…
These F16's are coming very slowly, one year later than initially promised and in very small numbers.
F-16 were not really delayed and definitely not by a year. They were promised last August for spring-summer 2024 at the earliest. Then Blinken said that Ukrainian pilots will be flying in F-16s over Ukraine in the summer, which they did, briefly. The issue was clearly training. Reznikov (then the minister of defense) said himself last August that he didn’t expect any combat missions until next (2024) spring at the earliest and even that was an overly optimistic forecast on his part.
As for coming slowly, doesn’t Ukraine (reportedly) now has 5-10 times more of these aircraft than the pilots that can fly them? I believe this is the case, at least according to the various reports that were also discussed here previously.
The same thing will likely be happening with Mirage jets as well.
@rsemmes, the “order” from Johnson is, of course, nonsense. Here is what may have happened or one version in very simplified terms. Ukraine was reviewing the documents - that is, the “deal” - and probably didn’t quite like it (who would?), but they also knew that their options were quite limited. At that point, they approached the “allies”, who were ready to completely abandon Ukraine just a few short months prior, and said “Look, here is the thing”. Not that the allies lacked participation until that then, but that was a breaking moment. By that point, it was obvious that Russia wasn’t nearly prepared for what it envisioned, they didn’t have enough personnel to begin with, plenty of equipment was already lost, and so on. It was also obvious to Russians. And I am not talking about preparedness for a full out war and definitely not “overrunning” Ukraine because Russians likely thought that they have enough to squeeze out the agreement that was deliberated at the time. I have little doubt that Russia would have acted differently have they even allowed for the western support. Note that I am not saying resistance, because I believe they had accounted for that (perhaps to a smaller extent), but the western support they didn’t. I believe there is plenty of evidence suggesting that this was the case.
Anyway, there came that moment when Ukrainians said “Here is the thing”. And the thing was that they probably said, while they didn’t like what they were offered, they didn’t believe they could get a better deal with the resources they had at their disposal and the leverage they had at that time (they were still holding and tens of thousands of volunteers were ready to sign up to fight, while Russia was losing personnel and equipment way beyond their comfort level, lightly said). The allies said “Don’t sign it. Your General Staff has ideas and so do we. We will provide you with the resources to defeat the Russians.” This is what Boris probably said and so did Americans. Basically, everyone at that point felt weakness and bet on the fact that Russians were incompetent and would retreat. Some further planning (if there was any) likely bet on Russia not mobilizing and even if they were to do so, they would not do so in time, lack equipment, including small arms and ammunition, and, hence, they would not be able to resist the Ukrainian counteroffensive. The expectation likely was that it would happen rather quickly as it actually did in Kharkiv. Kherson offensive should have been a strong indicator of things to come if this was to continue, but it was disregarded because hey… I also talked about it all here back then and later several times. 2023 summer counteroffensive should have been another reality check, but hey x2…
Back to the “order”. Here is what Victoria Nuland had to say on the subject (not a word-to-word transcript) a month ago: “Ukrainians came to us late at the end of the negotiations to ask for advice, where this thing was going. Then it became clear to us, the British, everyone else, that the devil of Putin’s offer is in the details. While there were restrictions on arms for Ukraine, there were none for Russia. In other words, Ukraine would become weakened as a military force. Russia would not have to retreat, create buffer zone on its territory, restrict weapons at the border with Ukraine, while Ukraine would be facing these constraints. Thus, the Ukrainians started asking whether that was a good deal. It was at that moment when the deal fell apart. However, I am suspecting that many people, including Zelensky, realized that Ukraine was about to fall into a trap. And if Putin was to get that castrated, demilitarized Ukraine for nothing, why wouldn’t he take it?”
I will only provide the source for where I watched the segment of the interview without looking for the whole thing:
x.com
Here is the post in Ukrainian along with the translation:
I am not going to expand further on the subject at the moment as I am probably out of space in this post anyway. Also, everyone is capable of processing it in their own way anyway.
Here is some irony: the video in the tweet above was recorded in English, dubbed in Russian, and subtitled in Ukrainian.
t.me
vk.com
