I had someone try to use that to attempt to convince me that Russia totally had some big ace up its sleeve. Russia appeared weak, so obviously it must actually be strong!
we all know Russia is weak, after years of fighting and losing many thousands of people in Ukraine. losing tons of equipment.. and then there are sanctions aswell on top of that.
those wisdoms are nice and all.. but what if Nato just steamroll Russia so hard if it came down to that, and thenRussia will use the doomsday button, you know.. out of pride, that they wont be able to accept defeat so they go full on scorched earth. can we prevent that?
It's a dumb quote, just appear strong all the time so you don't invite war to your doorstep. The reason Putin felt emboldened to invade Ukraine was because he thought they and the wider west were weak. He was only half-right
They're very good at exploiting the West's collective muscle memory of dealing with the actual great power that the Soviet Union was.
And even then, the Soviet Union was more of a very big developing country with an outsized industrial base and a colossal military element than it was an actual rival to the USA in any real sense.
And even the powerful Soviet Union punched way above its height when it tried to keep up with arms race, eventually leading to its collapse.
So that is why we should take any assessment on how superior Russia is compared to Ukraine with a pinch of salt, I don’t think they are in such a good shape as they will have us believe.
Soviet Union while being just another attempt at russian imperialism, still had an ideological foundation which appealed a lot of people outside their realm. And still does. Russia has nothing like that and is only a hollow imitation of what USSR was, which is why they’re destined to fail.
As a lot of experts like Mark Galeotti have stated, Russia is now Putin, so it’s now Putinism and that revolves around one clear agreement with the people: don’t mess in politics and the goverment will provide for you. This agreement has now clearly been violated by the regime.
don’t mess in politics and the goverment will provide for you. This agreement has now clearly been violated by the regime.
Western perspective on Russian power dynamics imo. Trying to inject some humanitarian sense into the abject cruelty there. The entire concept of a social contract in this case seems to imply Russians are letting Putin stay in power in exchange for not having a democracy, something I find wholly absurd.
Russians are more interested in concepts of violent grandeur than self representation.
The notion that the Soviet Union collapsed because they couldn't keep up with Reagan's defence spending is not really true at all. Yes, the Soviet economy had massive issues. But you have to remember that it was essentially a war economy at its core. A large driving force behind it precisely was its military expenditure. And since the USSR was a command economy, increasing arms production didn't really cost the government anything. They simply had to reallocate some production capacity from consumer products to military ones. And the Soviet people were no strangers to lack of products.
While your average Soviet citizen may have been poor and had little access to consumer goods common in the west, the government itself had access to practically just as many resources as Western ones. Perhaps if the USSR was alive today its primarily heavy industry economy could be strained by a large demand of highly advanced military products. Not so in the early 90s.
The fall of the Soviet Union was not really due to its economical problems, not directly anyway. Of course, a large reason Gorbachev pushed for the reforms that would eventually cause the nation's collapse was due to a stagnant economy. But the fall itself was more so due to political decisions than any economic factors.
And even the powerful Soviet Union punched way above its height when it tried to keep up with arms race, eventually leading to its collapse.
No... it is far more complicated than that. By far and large the collapse came from within. It takes 100 pages to explain it and we do need to go as far back as Golden Horde when the foundations and principles of Russian nation were forged. Incompetence, ideological purity trumping merit (heh), internal power struggles, incompetence again... USA did not outspend it militarily to a point where USSR fell but it was a big factor, that is true. But Soviets military spending also can be explained by... incompetence, ideological purity etc. It was suffering from the same systemic problems. A FUCKTON of money and resources were wasted. Like them copying B-29 to the tiniest detail, meaning that their B-29s were using US Customary units and had to change all the manufacturing to fit the US standards. From threads to the size of metal sheets. Everything custom when literally in some cases 0.04 millimeter change to the drawings would've meant incredible savings and months of unnecessary work was not needed to be done at great costs, both resources and human lives, and not just any lives but highly trained and educated engineers and designers who accidentally used common sense..
A good example is Russian proto-internet. They developed the idea during the 1960s and it was doable. De-centralized network of computers that can talk to each other, enabling just-in-time production model and access to information that should be transparent... like.. how much stuff do they actually produce and how much of it ends up in the government markets... So, that is the first red flag for the Soviets: freedom of information. It also was suppose to have a sort of what we now know as social media, people being able to talk to each other.
And so ALL RESEARCH to such networks was stopped. It was seen as existential threat. So, when USA and Europe got into the early networks, Russia was massively behind. They could not even attack the early, very poorly secured systems of their enemies... It has been estimated that such a network and the improvements in efficiency would've been HUGE, maybe even doubling or tripling production in some areas but... nope. Letting information flow freely, even information that should be benign was existential threat. West did it completely opposite, freedom of information was the reason and what we got were the great improvements in efficiency. Internet was a side effect from increasing access to information in academia. Free speech, free to talk and connect was the PURPOSE and for USSR that spelled doom.
Russia and computers is perfect example why Soviets fell. It is incredibly stupid and full of "this guy is the party favorite, he is a pure zealot, perfect for the job. And this professor with dozens of papers noted internationally is against our socialist ideals of how things are all actually socialist, banish him to siberia". USSR fell behind because of politics and never caught up. They ended up copying everything, each process taking years so.. 5 years to copy a system meant you were 10 years late when you actually produced it and you learned almost nothing on how to improve the manufacturing. Chips produced in the Soviet Bloc left the chip making expertise in those countries.
Well they are most extremely good at Kompromat and Disinformation…
Shouldn't come as any surprise. Their entire nation state is built on lies upon lies since centuries back. You know what the western cold war counter-propaganda consisted of? Just telling the truth.
The dark arts. It seems to me while the West broadly speaking went the science route where things have to work, Russia went all in on corruption where you coerce and pressure people to pretend things work.
Tsarist Russia "innovated" having a giant police state to crack down on dissidents and published the most notorious disonformation of all time: Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
The Soviet Union - which in many ways was the Russian Empire with a red coat of paint - went much further with that stuff. And Putins Russia is the latest iteration
This is Russia's main contribution to world culture in the last 200 years. A disgusting shithole
Communism is pretty much just an evolution of feudalism. Aristocracy is replaced by the Party, the Church (“opium for the masses”) is replaced by “journalism” i.e. propaganda.
Stagnation is portrayed as “stability,” and any change or reform is anathema, which is also why there can’t be any elections or non-government organizations or free speech or freedom of assembly, nor anything even remotely resembling the free market.
It’s an attempt to freeze society in time. And it kind of works, for a while, because the feudalism it evolved from didn’t have any notion of time at all.
In feudalism your social class is set at birth and unchangeable until death, you are expected to have the same life all your ancestors had, and you are told that everything that ever was had been exactly the same as it is today.
(Hence no need for schooling, no notion of career paths, no mobility, no science, no innovation, no literacy.)
Feudalism collapsed in Western Europe because of the labor shortages caused by the Black Death. In Eastern Europe it survived for many more centuries, when it jumped straight into communism.
Unlike Marx predicted, developed industrialized nations did not end up in communism, and it remains to be seen whether a society that does have notion of time is even capable of becoming communist (or fascist).
We are seeing today how American fascism requires systematic destruction of time in order to thrive. Journalism, science, careers, all these notions are going out the window because feudalist/fascist systems sell themselves as benevolent temporal freezes.
Russia is similar, in that their neo-feudalism has nothing to destroy - they have been feudalist all along and have never developed non-feudal systems in the first place.
They were always a feudal crime-ridden corrupt kingdom, and they will continue to be that. Putin is nostalgic about the Soviet Union not because he mourns its communism but because he sees the Party rule as just one in a series of Russian dynasties.
So yes, time itself did not move in the Soviet Union. And Russians are nostalgic about that time. Most serfs simply do not want to stop being serfs because serfdom guarantees their place in society - “freedom” guarantees nothing.
> Stagnation is portrayed as “stability,” and any change or reform is anathema
Which doesn't track at all with the early years of the USSR. Whether you want to admit it or not, industrialising the country was a massive change in economy and culture, and it was executed in a very short time frame. The stagnation set in decades after the revolution, not *at* the revolution. The Lenin years were not at all a time of cultural stagnation, quite the opposite.
This is contrasted with fascism, which seeks to return a nation culturally to a former time, or to lock it in place.
Was it? The country barely managed to survive an invasion by Germany when it was fighting a two-front war led by a drug-addicted Nazi, and that with lots of material help from the US. It managed to carve up Poland when that country was also facing a two-front war, and occupied Eastern Europe when they had been beaten by the Nazis.
It seems to me that Soviet Union basically just lucked into an empire it ultimately couldn't keep and went bankrupt trying, but in hindsight was it ever a Great Power beyond appearances?
No, they are very good at posturing as a big powerful nation with unlimited manpower and funds.
Russia is sure portraying itself stronger then it actually is, with that said, they do have state of the art propaganda machinery that is far superior to anything else.
With their limited resources they are successfully punching above their weight, dictating political discussion in most of western world
You forget about the most important things: a people that accepts suffer, and the willingness to burn it all down and out until nothing is left or to go for all or nothing.
Without the help of North Korea, Iran and China, they wouldn't even be able to continue the war.
People need to keep remembering this: Russia has to go down on its knees, like a weak and little bitch, for countries like North Korea and Iran, if it wants to keep waging this war.
Some analyst once called Russia “a third world country with nukes” and i think that is a pretty accurate assessment. Without nukes it really wouldn’t even be considered a world power.
tbh they have unlimited manpower: they've kidnapped literally hundreds of thousands of citizens from other countries to send them to the battlefield, and there's still roughly 7.8 billion more people in the world they can potentially deceive to send to the meat grinder.
It's the good thing about having no morals whatsoever: killing 5,000 people to be able to pay for a sandwich becomes a possibility.
They don't have unlimited manpower. 7.8 billion potential recruits, lolwut? Signing bonusses are shrinking and death benefits are not being paid out to relatives etc. The russian people, however depraved they are, will put up with a lot of things, but a weak regime is not one of them.
But who'll be making those investments? The US government itself? I don't know how keen American companies are to again invest in russia if they know all their investments could be gone in an instant if the local dictator so wishes
The same companies salivated at the idea of an American dictator. Proving every bit as reliable as the Russki one, outright demanding bribes and stakes.
Still enjoys support by the conglomerates. The russian investment sounds far less like a gamble and more like business as usual, for their frame of reference.
Those companies wanted Trump and supported him because they expected to get something in return, that's the difference between Trump and Putin for American companies.
Putin already demonstrated that he's willing to plunder all foreign investments and there is no guarantee he won't do it again if he feels like it. The trust isn't really there anymore.
That's the thing about corruption: people from the out group don't trust you with their money, as they know you'll just try to steal it.
In fact, it's why all of MAGA's delusions of strong arming everyone else into doing whatever they want are stupid. Investors will stop putting their money in the US if they feel they'll then be forced to give it up.
Even if the rest of the world could... who's gonna do it?
Russia is a Nigerian prince, they are not giving the money back. Canada and the EU will not fund the country that openly says it wants to destroy them. The rest of the West is extremely skeptical of the US, too. China will not fund its enemy and the rest of the world needs money, they don't have any to throw around. The Venn diagram between countries that can give the US money and countries that would want to give the US money only intercepts at Israel.
Remember "28 points peace agreetment"? In there you would get Russia aid the minute they signed it. But worry not, Trump will send them aid package eventually, even without any peace negatiotions framework
You mean another aid package? The oversight free 1.2 trillion in PPP loans during his first term gave Russia hundreds of billions. I am sure his crypto scams and watch and phone bullshit profits are going to Russia.
But it doesn't matter. The Russian people are so backboneless that they wouldn't do anything about the situation even if they turned into North Korea. Putin and his mafia can continue reaping everything else just to feed their war machine.
Agreed. It sucks to use Ukraine for proxywar however, but I guess the scale of destruction for the entire Europe would be much larger if we attacked Russia directly. For now, Ukraine with the help is slowly ripping Russia apart. Hope the pedo in the white house doesn't make everything more difficult.
Russian people are so backboneless that they wouldn't do anything about the situation even if they turned into North Korea
They wouldn't "magically turn" into North Korea. It is done by them, by russians.
Putin and his mafia
There is no one million putins in Ukraine, putin is not shooting rockets and drones daily at Ukraine - all of that is done by russians. Let's call things for what they are.
To all people saying that the media predicted imminent collapse in the last three years.
It did. But Russia engaged countermeasures to delay and push back. The war economy is one of them, forcefully controlling the ruble value also. They are burning through their foreign reserves and if China/Iran did not prop them up it would be worse.
But those countermeasures are temporary, and cannibalise the real economy. If left alone they won't be enough. Germany had lost economically and could not win WW2 by 1940. It took 4 years for the crack to be severe enough to trigger rapid collapse.
Russia has been good at preventing the Moscow and At Petersburg citizen and lifestyle to collapse. The remaining oblast? Not so much. But they are much less visible.
They're a petrostate and they're spending ~7% of GDP on the military. They can't keep it up for 40 years but they're fine for the short and medium term.
Russia is very good at making themselves look scarier and more powerful than they really are. However, it is also true that one of the few actually competent parts of the Putin regime are the people managing their economy, and for now, they have mostly managed to keep things running.
But Russia is not magical. You cannot just remove their main sources of revenue (e.g. fossil fuel sales to Europe), and remove young men from the workforce, and pay huge bonuses to recruits, and pour billions and billions into tanks that do nothing except get driven into Ukraine to be exploded, and expect it all to work out and keep the economy going for years and years.
Anyone who believes that Russia can do such things and suffer no massive consequences ought to ask themselves why all countries don't immediately go to war with each other if it is so economically productive.
Russia will deteriorate gradually, and then suddenly. It is hard to know when the suddenly part comes unless you're one of the insider people with actual knowledge about their economy, and not the propaganda numbers either. But to believe that Russia isn't going to have to face the music eventually is to believe that Russia is a magical country with infinite free money, and one ought to remember what happened to the USSR, which was far more powerful than modern Russia has ever been.
Many respected experts on The Economist and elsewhere said Russia would be able to fund the war for a few years, but would run into trouble as Europe weens ourselves off Russian oil and gas, and sanctions start having the desired effect. It's clearly happening as Russia recently started selling gold, which is a sign of a truly distressed nation.
Well, for Canada the decision was moving their cash into other (in their opinion better) asset classes. Gold costs money to store, it's only a hedge against inflation as it doesn't bring any returns beyond its own value.
Russia is selling gold and other foreign reserves to keep the Ruble propped up.
I agree that we should wait and see. Let's give it a couple of years, support Ukraine and re-establish diplomacy with Russia in 2028. There is no sense in talking to hem now.
This. Russia has been “on the verge of collapse” for 3 years. Articles like these stoke false hope instead of revealing the full truth and discussing decisive plans of attacking the Russian economy
Verge of collapse is not a correct term, and you should get rid of the news using it.
What's important are the actual economic news coming out of the country. A country whose car production is slashed by half, and where car employees get their working hours per weeks reduced by 30% is not doing well. But it doesn't mean it's not capable of continuing the war.
On the other side, it's also a country where things are worsening with each months.
They are on the verge of collapse. But Russia is a large country with a lot of stuff to stave it off with, and a population that would rather march into ukranian machine guns that russian ones.
The good news is that they cant stave it off forever, and barring some extreme moves, they actually are running out of options. Even if they won the war, a slump of epic proportions is inevitable at this point. The bad news is, its gonna take a while even with that, so Ukraine can hardly breathe easy.
No, here’s the real question: how long is Russia’s collapse actually going to take, and who’s going to keep supporting Ukraine the whole time? Feels like nobody wants to answer that honestly—they’d rather just downvote me.
Collapse, once it's started, happens fast. How far away Russia is away from collapse is anyone's guess and probably somewhere between where hopeful Western commentators say it is and where Russians are saying it is.
That is all these articles are: page filler saying we don't know but we see signs X, Y, Z. We have been reading these articles for four years now. All we know is that Russia's current trajectory is not sustainable. The only thing we can hope is that it is less sustainable than Ukraine's trajectory.
Agreed. Another obvious problem with these predictions is that Russia can easily scale their spending down by stopping the offensive and freezing the conflict. That is a path they have available, and they can choose it when the economic situation will really call for it. Right now, they are still comfortable with running practically nonstop offensive operations. That is also a signal for observers.
While those articles have come out, the Economist is a far more reputable source than any of the tabloids who wrote that. And they are not the only reputable sources who claim that 2026 can form significant strains in the Russian economy.
The Ukrainian government also expects the Russian economy to stall mid 2026. As do multiple realworld economic institutions, based on research. It is already declining, while the real interest rates are 25-30%, though the official interest rates are around 8%. These are no longer the blabbermouths or the optimists from the start of the war.
Some tabloid press and clickbait news might have claimed that Russia was on the verge of collapse for all that time, but no serious news sources have done so.
I've been following actual military and economic analysts, and even back in 2022, they claimed that Russia would start having significant economic problems in 2024-2025, and that by 2026 or maybe 2027 those problems would grow big enough to really hinder their war effort and potentially start causing political unrest. But an actual collapse would likely take even longer.
So far, those predictions have been spot on. Nearly 40 % of Russians are struggling to make ends meet, and it's still getting worse.
Where are you reading that? All that is coming out of the US is that Ukraine needs to sign whatever Russia tells them to right now because they are about to win.
The decline is aparent, there's no question about that. And without any prospects of improvement, the decline will continue. The decline will lead to a crash, eventually.
No expert predicted a quick crash, the wording was mire like "they cannot keep it like this for a long period". And most gave them 3-4 years. We are on track with that.
I agree that Russia is weaker than it wants us to be, but it is really great I terms of sabotage and subversion. Putin studied judo, and the whole point of judo is to use your opponent's weight against them. Russia und Putin does this very well at minimal cost, abusing the West's tolerance of free speech for instance. When it comes to warfare, to end the Ukraine war, there will need to be regime change, and a regime backed into a corner is a dangerous thing.
They turned the US, supposedly the most powerful country in the world, into a vassal state over a period of about 10-15 years. Without firing a single shot. That’s pretty effective, imo.
Putin studied judo, and the whole point of judo is to use your opponent's weight against them.
Putins hobby is irrelevant to this, and throwaway lines like this mythologies a guy whos a dangerous but rather ordinary ex KGB guy. Soviet and KGB nationalism, paranoia, hatred of the west, and disregard for democracy are relevant to what guides Russian policy, not Judo
a regime backed into a corner is a dangerous thing.
Again, you're recycling dangerous myths about Russia, how it must not be backed into a corner. This regime needs maximum pressure on them and maybe eventually the pressure will cause Vlad to fall from one of Moscows notorious windows and someone more reasonable to take over
This is something that should moved on from. They haven’t collapsed yet.
The focus should solely be on supply. Get Ukraine what they need. Let them make more counter attacks.
Cutting the US out little by little should also be a goal.
"The Hellenic civilization passed them by. The Roman civilization passed them by. The Gothic civilization passed them by. The Renaissance passed them by. The Enlightenment passed them by. The concept of open society passed them by. The concept of democratic government passed them by. The concept of rule of law passed them by. The concepts of human rights passed them by. The modern information society passed them by.
What’s wrong with the Russians is that they have no education: neither a secular ethical education, nor a religious moral education. They glorify violence. They fetishize the criminal class. They applaud deception. They accept lying as a completely normal state of affairs. They appear to have no regard for human suffering: neither their own, nor that of anyone else. Their social vocabulary (outside the family) includes only two concepts: coercion and nihilism.
As far as anyone can tell, they remain a hastily industrialized post-Mongol empire, fundamentally accepting an autocratic czar, his boyars, and a population of passive serfs. It’s essentially the Mongol Empire with crappy tanks and a lot of nukes."
This argument collapses as soon as facts enter the picture. This belongs on r/badhistory. But this is r/europe so people will upvote the cringe posts lol.
That's just plain wrong. The US system is (despite claims of self-bootstrapping) more or less identical to the European systems. Separation of powers, two houses of representatives, an executiive and a judiciary.
The thing is, it doesn't really matter. We tend to project something like "bad economy — people revolt" which doesn't really work in Russia. Historically, people in Russia are a downtrodden, spineless, kneeling before the tsar, submissive mass and the economy is always bad there so who cares. Perversely, for them it's like proof that they did everything right and they need to toughen up against the collective west.
Russia is absolutely on the ropes, which is why they've started blatantly using their oval office asset to create as much disunity and distrust amongst western nations as possible.
The peace plan? Written by Russia.
The US national security document that openly states that destroying the EU & advocating for regime change in key European states? Written by Russia.
Nothing in the article states that. Rather that Russia's three day special military operation, now entering its fourth year, is becoming increasingly unpopular and that the economic damage continues to mount.
Russia’s economy is not buckling, but it is starting to show strains. Next year will be the hardest since Russia’s full-scale invasion. Over the past year oil and gas revenues have fallen by 22%.
The economic momentum from a vast increase in military spending has stalled. The budget deficit is nearing 3% of gdp. That is modest by European standards, but Russia receives little foreign investment and cannot borrow on international markets, says Alexandra Prokopenko of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Centre, a Berlin-based think-tank. To finance Mr Putin’s war the government is forced to borrow at home, which can be inflationary, and to raise taxes.
The Kremlin spends half its budget on the armed forces, the military-industrial complex, domestic security and debt service. War makes the economy busier but poorer, Ms Prokopenko argues. It sustains jobs and industrial activity, but produces few lasting assets or productivity gains.
Higher taxes further burden the civilian economy, already suffering from double-digit interest rates and labour shortages. Tank factories are working overtime while car producers cut shifts. The industrial and military sectors have plateaued. The government has resorted to extracting money from its own population, which breaks the political deal that Mr Putin implicitly offered the Russian people.
The Chinese reason for keeping the war going has always been that it takes away US attention from East Asia. They clearly stated this publicly. With Trump unilaterally withdrawing from the conflict and Europe anyways, while simultaneously trying to build an alliance with Putin's Russia, the calculation for Beijing should also change.
I can see China dropping support for Russia and increasing pressure on Putin if Europe makes an enticing offer to Beijing, like credible assurances that the EU will not join US technology sanctions and trade wars against China.
Yes but how long still? Because we've been reading the "Russia is not resilient/cannot replace their military/is in economic crisis" articles forthwith last 2-3 years and yet here we are with Russia still fighting.
If Russia is not as resists we think and can only continue this war for another 5 years, then what are we saying?
Doesn't really matter if they're weak or strong when either way they've killed hundreds of thousands of people at least, and have the potential to kill millions more. Mediocre weapons in the hands of poorly-trained conscripts still kill people. Shitty Iranian drones still kill people. North Korean artillery shells might only work one time in three, but they still kill people. War is a game of barely scraping by, and that's what Russia is good at. They aren't losing in Ukraine and they aren't going to break or stop or have a revolution. We should all stop crowing about how weak they look and take this deadly seriously.
If the big one starts, Russia would probably lose. In losing, though, they'd still kill millions of people and cause a cataclysm not seen since the world wars.
Perhaps we should just proceed as though they're strong and prepare for that possibility.
There’s been the 3-day special operation from the Russian side and then the “Russian economy will be toast in x days” from our side most days since it started.
Starting to think military commanders aren’t very good at this war stuff, and economists don’t know how Russia’s economy works.
They're absolutely not. They are the same as they've always been a murderous thug regime rotten to its core. and we've someone in the White House throwing them a lifeline, A complicit fool. I never thought I would see this.
And how strong does Russia "want us to think?" I look at their large military, decent balance of payment data, their resilient nationalist-authoritarian regime and their relative domestic stability and I presume they are a solid, above-average military power that is seriously underdeveloped and has systemic problems that make development uneven, slow and difficult. What I don't see is a paper tiger on the cusp of strategic battlefield defeats, economic collapse, national bankruptcy or domestic rioting and coups.
I look at their domestic propaganda and it is run-of-the-mill nationalism. I look at their international propaganda, and it is not exactly menacing tough guy stuff, it's weaselly, sometimes even tongue-in-cheek parody of Western international propaganda, and aggrieved.
They may be not, but they are strong enough in persuading most of my country men (Slovakia) that they are winning and sanctions dont work (on the contrary , they making EU weaker and Russia stronger) - thats how PPL in my country see it. And the current Prime minister, Fico, is spreading this narrative...
Some people in the comments point out that China and Iran (among others, I guess) are definitely helping Putin a LOT to keep Russia's economy "afloat enough". I wonder how long they'll be able to do that.
Yet... they are still at it, i just want the war to end, but it doesn't seem to be going that way...i want Ukraine to win and hit Russia hard...but how much more time will it take?!
it's kinda both according to some, they're crumbling slowly, but the crash is absorbed by all the weird side/black markets and data was fudged so we can't estimate clearly
Sigh... Another headline claiming Russia is collapsing. Wake me up when it is actually happening and they finally rebel and revolt over there. They need another october 1917
I have argued the point about Russia's economic weaknesses many times in past comments. Even on this sub it sometimes find hard traction. But since 2023 there have been many financial indicators pointing to the fact Russia's economic and social fabric is under duress and getting worse. Putin has used every trick in the book to gloss, cover and manipulate the information flow so that the duress has been hidden. But the tricks are running out.
Appear weak when you are strong and, strong when you're weak. Sun Tzu
"In the midst of incompetence, there is also opportunity."
-- Live, Love, Blyat
I had someone try to use that to attempt to convince me that Russia totally had some big ace up its sleeve. Russia appeared weak, so obviously it must actually be strong!
ah yes, the good old "just wait until they send their real army to Ukraine!!!!"
Show how strong (weak and afraid) you are by threatening to use nukes very 5 seconds.
The threat is good enough that when you ask why all those sanctioning countries don’t put boots on the ground you get no answers.
we all know Russia is weak, after years of fighting and losing many thousands of people in Ukraine. losing tons of equipment.. and then there are sanctions aswell on top of that.
those wisdoms are nice and all.. but what if Nato just steamroll Russia so hard if it came down to that, and thenRussia will use the doomsday button, you know.. out of pride, that they wont be able to accept defeat so they go full on scorched earth. can we prevent that?
It's a dumb quote, just appear strong all the time so you don't invite war to your doorstep. The reason Putin felt emboldened to invade Ukraine was because he thought they and the wider west were weak. He was only half-right
No, they are very good at posturing as a big powerful nation with unlimited manpower and funds.
They're very good at exploiting the West's collective muscle memory of dealing with the actual great power that the Soviet Union was.
And even then, the Soviet Union was more of a very big developing country with an outsized industrial base and a colossal military element than it was an actual rival to the USA in any real sense.
And even the powerful Soviet Union punched way above its height when it tried to keep up with arms race, eventually leading to its collapse.
So that is why we should take any assessment on how superior Russia is compared to Ukraine with a pinch of salt, I don’t think they are in such a good shape as they will have us believe.
If Russia was in such a good position as they lead us to believe they would have conquered Ukraine already.
They’re just a few days behind schedule, right?
Time just works differently in Russia /s
In Soviet Russia Ukraine conquers you.
they really only had one chance at Zelenskyy and they fucked even that up in the first week.
its as Trump is the common "american" view of what a strongman should be
Putin is undoubtably devious and intelligent, but he's what a competent Trump would be, full of bluster yet making incremental gains
The USSR was about as bloated and inefficient as it gets, and that’s exactly why it fell apart.
And Russia is not much better. But with less satellites to exploit.
And vastly more corruption
The Russian federation was quite literally founded on corruption.
Russia is actually worse, and far more corrupt.
We pretend to work so they pretend to pay us.
Joke doesn't work that way, it's ' we'll continue to pretend to work as long as they pretend to pay us'
It's always the other way round
Soviet Union while being just another attempt at russian imperialism, still had an ideological foundation which appealed a lot of people outside their realm. And still does. Russia has nothing like that and is only a hollow imitation of what USSR was, which is why they’re destined to fail.
As a lot of experts like Mark Galeotti have stated, Russia is now Putin, so it’s now Putinism and that revolves around one clear agreement with the people: don’t mess in politics and the goverment will provide for you. This agreement has now clearly been violated by the regime.
Western perspective on Russian power dynamics imo. Trying to inject some humanitarian sense into the abject cruelty there. The entire concept of a social contract in this case seems to imply Russians are letting Putin stay in power in exchange for not having a democracy, something I find wholly absurd.
Russians are more interested in concepts of violent grandeur than self representation.
The notion that the Soviet Union collapsed because they couldn't keep up with Reagan's defence spending is not really true at all. Yes, the Soviet economy had massive issues. But you have to remember that it was essentially a war economy at its core. A large driving force behind it precisely was its military expenditure. And since the USSR was a command economy, increasing arms production didn't really cost the government anything. They simply had to reallocate some production capacity from consumer products to military ones. And the Soviet people were no strangers to lack of products.
While your average Soviet citizen may have been poor and had little access to consumer goods common in the west, the government itself had access to practically just as many resources as Western ones. Perhaps if the USSR was alive today its primarily heavy industry economy could be strained by a large demand of highly advanced military products. Not so in the early 90s.
The fall of the Soviet Union was not really due to its economical problems, not directly anyway. Of course, a large reason Gorbachev pushed for the reforms that would eventually cause the nation's collapse was due to a stagnant economy. But the fall itself was more so due to political decisions than any economic factors.
And even the powerful Soviet Union punched way above its height when it tried to keep up with arms race, eventually leading to its collapse.
No... it is far more complicated than that. By far and large the collapse came from within. It takes 100 pages to explain it and we do need to go as far back as Golden Horde when the foundations and principles of Russian nation were forged. Incompetence, ideological purity trumping merit (heh), internal power struggles, incompetence again... USA did not outspend it militarily to a point where USSR fell but it was a big factor, that is true. But Soviets military spending also can be explained by... incompetence, ideological purity etc. It was suffering from the same systemic problems. A FUCKTON of money and resources were wasted. Like them copying B-29 to the tiniest detail, meaning that their B-29s were using US Customary units and had to change all the manufacturing to fit the US standards. From threads to the size of metal sheets. Everything custom when literally in some cases 0.04 millimeter change to the drawings would've meant incredible savings and months of unnecessary work was not needed to be done at great costs, both resources and human lives, and not just any lives but highly trained and educated engineers and designers who accidentally used common sense..
A good example is Russian proto-internet. They developed the idea during the 1960s and it was doable. De-centralized network of computers that can talk to each other, enabling just-in-time production model and access to information that should be transparent... like.. how much stuff do they actually produce and how much of it ends up in the government markets... So, that is the first red flag for the Soviets: freedom of information. It also was suppose to have a sort of what we now know as social media, people being able to talk to each other.
And so ALL RESEARCH to such networks was stopped. It was seen as existential threat. So, when USA and Europe got into the early networks, Russia was massively behind. They could not even attack the early, very poorly secured systems of their enemies... It has been estimated that such a network and the improvements in efficiency would've been HUGE, maybe even doubling or tripling production in some areas but... nope. Letting information flow freely, even information that should be benign was existential threat. West did it completely opposite, freedom of information was the reason and what we got were the great improvements in efficiency. Internet was a side effect from increasing access to information in academia. Free speech, free to talk and connect was the PURPOSE and for USSR that spelled doom.
Russia and computers is perfect example why Soviets fell. It is incredibly stupid and full of "this guy is the party favorite, he is a pure zealot, perfect for the job. And this professor with dozens of papers noted internationally is against our socialist ideals of how things are all actually socialist, banish him to siberia". USSR fell behind because of politics and never caught up. They ended up copying everything, each process taking years so.. 5 years to copy a system meant you were 10 years late when you actually produced it and you learned almost nothing on how to improve the manufacturing. Chips produced in the Soviet Bloc left the chip making expertise in those countries.
"Muscle memory" is a good way of putting it.
When speaking of Russia we are often relating to the pre-1990 status.
You'll never guess where the Potemkin village was invented...
Well they are mostly extremely good at Kompromat and Disinformation…
Shouldn't come as any surprise. Their entire nation state is built on lies upon lies since centuries back. You know what the western cold war counter-propaganda consisted of? Just telling the truth.
The dark arts. It seems to me while the West broadly speaking went the science route where things have to work, Russia went all in on corruption where you coerce and pressure people to pretend things work.
Tsarist Russia "innovated" having a giant police state to crack down on dissidents and published the most notorious disonformation of all time: Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
The Soviet Union - which in many ways was the Russian Empire with a red coat of paint - went much further with that stuff. And Putins Russia is the latest iteration
This is Russia's main contribution to world culture in the last 200 years. A disgusting shithole
As the German chancellor said in the 80s, the Soviet Union was just Upper Volta with ICBMs.
The collapse came sudden and hard, but until then, people lived like time itself did not move in the USSR.
Communism is pretty much just an evolution of feudalism. Aristocracy is replaced by the Party, the Church (“opium for the masses”) is replaced by “journalism” i.e. propaganda.
Stagnation is portrayed as “stability,” and any change or reform is anathema, which is also why there can’t be any elections or non-government organizations or free speech or freedom of assembly, nor anything even remotely resembling the free market.
It’s an attempt to freeze society in time. And it kind of works, for a while, because the feudalism it evolved from didn’t have any notion of time at all.
In feudalism your social class is set at birth and unchangeable until death, you are expected to have the same life all your ancestors had, and you are told that everything that ever was had been exactly the same as it is today.
(Hence no need for schooling, no notion of career paths, no mobility, no science, no innovation, no literacy.)
Feudalism collapsed in Western Europe because of the labor shortages caused by the Black Death. In Eastern Europe it survived for many more centuries, when it jumped straight into communism.
Unlike Marx predicted, developed industrialized nations did not end up in communism, and it remains to be seen whether a society that does have notion of time is even capable of becoming communist (or fascist).
We are seeing today how American fascism requires systematic destruction of time in order to thrive. Journalism, science, careers, all these notions are going out the window because feudalist/fascist systems sell themselves as benevolent temporal freezes.
Russia is similar, in that their neo-feudalism has nothing to destroy - they have been feudalist all along and have never developed non-feudal systems in the first place.
They were always a feudal crime-ridden corrupt kingdom, and they will continue to be that. Putin is nostalgic about the Soviet Union not because he mourns its communism but because he sees the Party rule as just one in a series of Russian dynasties.
So yes, time itself did not move in the Soviet Union. And Russians are nostalgic about that time. Most serfs simply do not want to stop being serfs because serfdom guarantees their place in society - “freedom” guarantees nothing.
> Stagnation is portrayed as “stability,” and any change or reform is anathema
Which doesn't track at all with the early years of the USSR. Whether you want to admit it or not, industrialising the country was a massive change in economy and culture, and it was executed in a very short time frame. The stagnation set in decades after the revolution, not *at* the revolution. The Lenin years were not at all a time of cultural stagnation, quite the opposite.
This is contrasted with fascism, which seeks to return a nation culturally to a former time, or to lock it in place.
Yep, Russia has a smaller GDP than Italy. It's not the Soviet Union anymore and lost large portions of its industrial base in the divorce.
West Germany alone is likely to have had a larger GDP than the Soviet Union for pretty much the whole cold war.
The Soviet Union was as good in bluffing and pretending as Russia is now.
The Foxbat vs Eagle saga showed that the USSR could beat its chest but failed when the rubber hit the road. It was all show, no go for the Soviets.
And convincing that russia losing is a much worse outcome than russia winning.
It wasn't a rival really, and it definitely wasn't sustainable.
Was it? The country barely managed to survive an invasion by Germany when it was fighting a two-front war led by a drug-addicted Nazi, and that with lots of material help from the US. It managed to carve up Poland when that country was also facing a two-front war, and occupied Eastern Europe when they had been beaten by the Nazis.
It seems to me that Soviet Union basically just lucked into an empire it ultimately couldn't keep and went bankrupt trying, but in hindsight was it ever a Great Power beyond appearances?
Russia is sure portraying itself stronger then it actually is, with that said, they do have state of the art propaganda machinery that is far superior to anything else.
With their limited resources they are successfully punching above their weight, dictating political discussion in most of western world
yep, most people don't know that Russia's economy is much smaller than Italy's, for instance;
and it's essentially about export of raw materials
Its basically the same size as Australia's, but with 5 times the population and the same economy (raw resource extraction).
They have three big assets. Nukes, petroleum and Trump.
You forget about the most important things: a people that accepts suffer, and the willingness to burn it all down and out until nothing is left or to go for all or nothing.
Without the help of North Korea, Iran and China, they wouldn't even be able to continue the war.
People need to keep remembering this: Russia has to go down on its knees, like a weak and little bitch, for countries like North Korea and Iran, if it wants to keep waging this war.
Trump himself said, russia is a paper tiger
"We have a lot of nuclear weapons and we WILL use them."
Some analyst once called Russia “a third world country with nukes” and i think that is a pretty accurate assessment. Without nukes it really wouldn’t even be considered a world power.
tbh they have unlimited manpower: they've kidnapped literally hundreds of thousands of citizens from other countries to send them to the battlefield, and there's still roughly 7.8 billion more people in the world they can potentially deceive to send to the meat grinder.
It's the good thing about having no morals whatsoever: killing 5,000 people to be able to pay for a sandwich becomes a possibility.
They don't have unlimited manpower. 7.8 billion potential recruits, lolwut? Signing bonusses are shrinking and death benefits are not being paid out to relatives etc. The russian people, however depraved they are, will put up with a lot of things, but a weak regime is not one of them.
Isn't their economy smaller than Italy
Russia is not as anything as it wants you to think. And no sources needed for that.
Never been.
How long before Trump sends Russia an aid package??
He announced “major investments” in Russia a couple of days ago. So there it is.
I wonder if that will involve crude oil in some way?...
We're calling it "Venezuela Juice" now.
Sweet sweet Venezuelan oil 🪔
But who'll be making those investments? The US government itself? I don't know how keen American companies are to again invest in russia if they know all their investments could be gone in an instant if the local dictator so wishes
The same companies salivated at the idea of an American dictator. Proving every bit as reliable as the Russki one, outright demanding bribes and stakes.
Still enjoys support by the conglomerates. The russian investment sounds far less like a gamble and more like business as usual, for their frame of reference.
Those companies wanted Trump and supported him because they expected to get something in return, that's the difference between Trump and Putin for American companies. Putin already demonstrated that he's willing to plunder all foreign investments and there is no guarantee he won't do it again if he feels like it. The trust isn't really there anymore.
That's the thing about corruption: people from the out group don't trust you with their money, as they know you'll just try to steal it.
In fact, it's why all of MAGA's delusions of strong arming everyone else into doing whatever they want are stupid. Investors will stop putting their money in the US if they feel they'll then be forced to give it up.
They’ve already temporarily paused sanctions against Lukoil. What the hell was that about?
And are planning to lift sanctions against Belarus
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/us-lifts-sanctions-belarusian-potash-state-media-cite-trump-envoy-saying-2025-12-13/
How long before US will need a bigger aid package?
From who? The pending AI implosion is going to take everyone down with it, sadly.
Even if the rest of the world could... who's gonna do it?
Russia is a Nigerian prince, they are not giving the money back. Canada and the EU will not fund the country that openly says it wants to destroy them. The rest of the West is extremely skeptical of the US, too. China will not fund its enemy and the rest of the world needs money, they don't have any to throw around. The Venn diagram between countries that can give the US money and countries that would want to give the US money only intercepts at Israel.
Remember "28 points peace agreetment"? In there you would get Russia aid the minute they signed it. But worry not, Trump will send them aid package eventually, even without any peace negatiotions framework
Isn’t that what bitcoin is?
Europe has been sending Russia an actual aid package for years via huge purchases of Russian gas. It won’t fully be phased out until 2027, allegedly.
Do you think he will go to Russia and throw paper towels?
He'll send Haliburton or something for petro-development.
You mean another aid package? The oversight free 1.2 trillion in PPP loans during his first term gave Russia hundreds of billions. I am sure his crypto scams and watch and phone bullshit profits are going to Russia.
But it doesn't matter. The Russian people are so backboneless that they wouldn't do anything about the situation even if they turned into North Korea. Putin and his mafia can continue reaping everything else just to feed their war machine.
Which is why we need to help Ukraine, they are doing the actual good work here, specifically in reducing the Russian problem one meatcube at a time.
Agreed. It sucks to use Ukraine for proxywar however, but I guess the scale of destruction for the entire Europe would be much larger if we attacked Russia directly. For now, Ukraine with the help is slowly ripping Russia apart. Hope the pedo in the white house doesn't make everything more difficult.
Same as US, different end of the spectrum though, but same backbone rigidity index.
They wouldn't "magically turn" into North Korea. It is done by them, by russians.
There is no one million putins in Ukraine, putin is not shooting rockets and drones daily at Ukraine - all of that is done by russians. Let's call things for what they are.
russia is never as stong as you think, but also not as weak as you hope
The Russian trolls will lie about that too.
https://meduza.io/en/feature/2025/11/17/as-russia-s-wage-debt-crisis-spreads-more-workers-are-going-months-without-pay
https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2025/12/12/russias-shift-workers-face-mounting-wage-payment-delays-a91428
To all people saying that the media predicted imminent collapse in the last three years.
It did. But Russia engaged countermeasures to delay and push back. The war economy is one of them, forcefully controlling the ruble value also. They are burning through their foreign reserves and if China/Iran did not prop them up it would be worse.
But those countermeasures are temporary, and cannibalise the real economy. If left alone they won't be enough. Germany had lost economically and could not win WW2 by 1940. It took 4 years for the crack to be severe enough to trigger rapid collapse.
Russia has been good at preventing the Moscow and At Petersburg citizen and lifestyle to collapse. The remaining oblast? Not so much. But they are much less visible.
And 20+ million soviet soldiers
They're a petrostate and they're spending ~7% of GDP on the military. They can't keep it up for 40 years but they're fine for the short and medium term.
Problem: we aren't in the short or medium term anymore.
Russia is very good at making themselves look scarier and more powerful than they really are. However, it is also true that one of the few actually competent parts of the Putin regime are the people managing their economy, and for now, they have mostly managed to keep things running.
But Russia is not magical. You cannot just remove their main sources of revenue (e.g. fossil fuel sales to Europe), and remove young men from the workforce, and pay huge bonuses to recruits, and pour billions and billions into tanks that do nothing except get driven into Ukraine to be exploded, and expect it all to work out and keep the economy going for years and years.
Anyone who believes that Russia can do such things and suffer no massive consequences ought to ask themselves why all countries don't immediately go to war with each other if it is so economically productive.
Russia will deteriorate gradually, and then suddenly. It is hard to know when the suddenly part comes unless you're one of the insider people with actual knowledge about their economy, and not the propaganda numbers either. But to believe that Russia isn't going to have to face the music eventually is to believe that Russia is a magical country with infinite free money, and one ought to remember what happened to the USSR, which was far more powerful than modern Russia has ever been.
Ah the old phrase stays true to this day. Russia is never as strong as it wants to appear, and never as weak as it actually appears.
That's also why Trump & Putin are in such a rush right now.
I'll wait for the 2026 forecast to prove itself true.
Since 2023, I've seen too many predictions from so-called "respected experts" (as journalists wrote) to trust forecasts anymore.
Many respected experts on The Economist and elsewhere said Russia would be able to fund the war for a few years, but would run into trouble as Europe weens ourselves off Russian oil and gas, and sanctions start having the desired effect. It's clearly happening as Russia recently started selling gold, which is a sign of a truly distressed nation.
Well I guess that explains why Canada is in such rough shape we sold the last of our reserves in 2016
Well, for Canada the decision was moving their cash into other (in their opinion better) asset classes. Gold costs money to store, it's only a hedge against inflation as it doesn't bring any returns beyond its own value.
Russia is selling gold and other foreign reserves to keep the Ruble propped up.
The difference is, Russia is selling gold because this is the only asset they own that has value to the eyes of the world.
I agree that we should wait and see. Let's give it a couple of years, support Ukraine and re-establish diplomacy with Russia in 2028. There is no sense in talking to hem now.
This. Russia has been “on the verge of collapse” for 3 years. Articles like these stoke false hope instead of revealing the full truth and discussing decisive plans of attacking the Russian economy
Verge of collapse is not a correct term, and you should get rid of the news using it.
What's important are the actual economic news coming out of the country. A country whose car production is slashed by half, and where car employees get their working hours per weeks reduced by 30% is not doing well. But it doesn't mean it's not capable of continuing the war.
On the other side, it's also a country where things are worsening with each months.
They are on the verge of collapse. But Russia is a large country with a lot of stuff to stave it off with, and a population that would rather march into ukranian machine guns that russian ones.
The good news is that they cant stave it off forever, and barring some extreme moves, they actually are running out of options. Even if they won the war, a slump of epic proportions is inevitable at this point. The bad news is, its gonna take a while even with that, so Ukraine can hardly breathe easy.
How fast do you think collapses of countries happen? Lol
No, here’s the real question: how long is Russia’s collapse actually going to take, and who’s going to keep supporting Ukraine the whole time? Feels like nobody wants to answer that honestly—they’d rather just downvote me.
Collapse, once it's started, happens fast. How far away Russia is away from collapse is anyone's guess and probably somewhere between where hopeful Western commentators say it is and where Russians are saying it is.
That is all these articles are: page filler saying we don't know but we see signs X, Y, Z. We have been reading these articles for four years now. All we know is that Russia's current trajectory is not sustainable. The only thing we can hope is that it is less sustainable than Ukraine's trajectory.
Agreed. Another obvious problem with these predictions is that Russia can easily scale their spending down by stopping the offensive and freezing the conflict. That is a path they have available, and they can choose it when the economic situation will really call for it. Right now, they are still comfortable with running practically nonstop offensive operations. That is also a signal for observers.
Holding the occupied territory is free?
Those articles made it sound like Russia would collapse within the year. It's still going strong. Our governments are not doing enough.
One week ! Or even within a day. One day they have money and the next, pfffff
While those articles have come out, the Economist is a far more reputable source than any of the tabloids who wrote that. And they are not the only reputable sources who claim that 2026 can form significant strains in the Russian economy.
The Ukrainian government also expects the Russian economy to stall mid 2026. As do multiple realworld economic institutions, based on research. It is already declining, while the real interest rates are 25-30%, though the official interest rates are around 8%. These are no longer the blabbermouths or the optimists from the start of the war.
Some tabloid press and clickbait news might have claimed that Russia was on the verge of collapse for all that time, but no serious news sources have done so.
I've been following actual military and economic analysts, and even back in 2022, they claimed that Russia would start having significant economic problems in 2024-2025, and that by 2026 or maybe 2027 those problems would grow big enough to really hinder their war effort and potentially start causing political unrest. But an actual collapse would likely take even longer.
So far, those predictions have been spot on. Nearly 40 % of Russians are struggling to make ends meet, and it's still getting worse.
certainly not: the money Putin pumped in the economy created a sentiment of wealth among Russians
it has also created inflation, of course, and inflation is dangerous for any regime
Russia claims inflation dropped. Emphasis on claims. But it's still an indicator that not enough is being done to punish Russia.
Where are you reading that? All that is coming out of the US is that Ukraine needs to sign whatever Russia tells them to right now because they are about to win.
Right now, yes, because the media is licking Moscow Donnie's toes. During the Biden administration, the media was friendlier towards Ukraine.
That's harsh on Mr Trump, he's a president of a nation after all. The preferred moniker is "Agent Krasnov."
The decline is aparent, there's no question about that. And without any prospects of improvement, the decline will continue. The decline will lead to a crash, eventually.
No expert predicted a quick crash, the wording was mire like "they cannot keep it like this for a long period". And most gave them 3-4 years. We are on track with that.
As long as China supports Russia in exchange of resources, and Putin keeps orcs support, war can be decades long.
I agree that Russia is weaker than it wants us to be, but it is really great I terms of sabotage and subversion. Putin studied judo, and the whole point of judo is to use your opponent's weight against them. Russia und Putin does this very well at minimal cost, abusing the West's tolerance of free speech for instance. When it comes to warfare, to end the Ukraine war, there will need to be regime change, and a regime backed into a corner is a dangerous thing.
They turned the US, supposedly the most powerful country in the world, into a vassal state over a period of about 10-15 years. Without firing a single shot. That’s pretty effective, imo.
Putins hobby is irrelevant to this, and throwaway lines like this mythologies a guy whos a dangerous but rather ordinary ex KGB guy. Soviet and KGB nationalism, paranoia, hatred of the west, and disregard for democracy are relevant to what guides Russian policy, not Judo
Again, you're recycling dangerous myths about Russia, how it must not be backed into a corner. This regime needs maximum pressure on them and maybe eventually the pressure will cause Vlad to fall from one of Moscows notorious windows and someone more reasonable to take over
This is something that should moved on from. They haven’t collapsed yet. The focus should solely be on supply. Get Ukraine what they need. Let them make more counter attacks.
Cutting the US out little by little should also be a goal.
Of course not. In fact I’d bet it’s dire for them. Not a coincidence I heard Trump wants to lift oil and gas sanctions. It must be pretty bad.
"The Hellenic civilization passed them by. The Roman civilization passed them by. The Gothic civilization passed them by. The Renaissance passed them by. The Enlightenment passed them by. The concept of open society passed them by. The concept of democratic government passed them by. The concept of rule of law passed them by. The concepts of human rights passed them by. The modern information society passed them by.
What’s wrong with the Russians is that they have no education: neither a secular ethical education, nor a religious moral education. They glorify violence. They fetishize the criminal class. They applaud deception. They accept lying as a completely normal state of affairs. They appear to have no regard for human suffering: neither their own, nor that of anyone else. Their social vocabulary (outside the family) includes only two concepts: coercion and nihilism.
As far as anyone can tell, they remain a hastily industrialized post-Mongol empire, fundamentally accepting an autocratic czar, his boyars, and a population of passive serfs. It’s essentially the Mongol Empire with crappy tanks and a lot of nukes."
Original Source Unknown
This argument collapses as soon as facts enter the picture. This belongs on r/badhistory. But this is r/europe so people will upvote the cringe posts lol.
One text box of course can't make for good history, but what's the argument, at all?
Tf do you mean original source unknown?
That was a peculiar and interesting read. 🤔 Like u/ChemicalOpen8115, I sure would like to know its provenance!
"Muh Asiatic Mongol hordes"
You should get the callipers out and measure some skulls.
Explain how did a "post-Mongol empire with no education" get its hands on nuclear weapons in the first place, then.
Sounds like what some high-nosed European could have written about the US.
And at least it is getting ... less wrong.
That's just plain wrong. The US system is (despite claims of self-bootstrapping) more or less identical to the European systems. Separation of powers, two houses of representatives, an executiive and a judiciary.
The thing is, it doesn't really matter. We tend to project something like "bad economy — people revolt" which doesn't really work in Russia. Historically, people in Russia are a downtrodden, spineless, kneeling before the tsar, submissive mass and the economy is always bad there so who cares. Perversely, for them it's like proof that they did everything right and they need to toughen up against the collective west.
Who could have guessed after years of Ukraine war.
Hope they crash out very soon & are forced to end the war & destroy their nukes.
Russia is not as anything as they want you to think
r/noshitsherlock
I thought everyone knows that Russia is master of disguise and manipulation.
I was around in 1991. Can confirm.
"Appear weak when you are strong, and strong when you are weak." Sun Tzu, The Art of War.
I think they just read the fucking book
Nobody thinks Russia is resilient.
Anyone with half a brain and a modicum of critical thinking skills knows this
Of course they arent. They arent even a superpower anymore
“We all thought Russia had the second most powerful military in the world.
Now it looks like they have the second most powerful military in Russia.”
Lmao
Of course no dictatorship is ever going to tell you that everything is going to shit, not even when everything went to shit already 👀
Russia is absolutely on the ropes, which is why they've started blatantly using their oval office asset to create as much disunity and distrust amongst western nations as possible.
The peace plan? Written by Russia.
The US national security document that openly states that destroying the EU & advocating for regime change in key European states? Written by Russia.
Europe needs to take Russia a lot more seriously and up their defensive capabilities asap.
Not since 1917 anyways...lol...lol...raised eyebrows...lol...
"Here is your daily opinion article talking about how Russia is just about to collapse. Trust me, bro, just a few months more, that's it"
Nothing in the article states that. Rather that Russia's three day special military operation, now entering its fourth year, is becoming increasingly unpopular and that the economic damage continues to mount.
How much is China bankrolling it under the table tho?
No shit.
Its economy is collapsing. They have no equipment left that works. No fuel. (Might have more now) Moral is GONE. Rotten ammo.
Its a circus of failure and all the putin kid has left is his media, so they will continue to bark and lie. But thats is it.
Even Hitler did that almost to the end.
If the Russian economy looks like collapse, won’t the Chinese, who have openly declared they can’t see Ukraine win, prop it up?
If by propping up you mean "siphon off more power and resources at criminal rates because they have Russia by the ball" then yes.
I wouldn't say "prop up" as much as "pounce on".
The Chinese did not say that 😂
They did say they cannot afford Russia to lose.
The Chinese reason for keeping the war going has always been that it takes away US attention from East Asia. They clearly stated this publicly. With Trump unilaterally withdrawing from the conflict and Europe anyways, while simultaneously trying to build an alliance with Putin's Russia, the calculation for Beijing should also change.
I can see China dropping support for Russia and increasing pressure on Putin if Europe makes an enticing offer to Beijing, like credible assurances that the EU will not join US technology sanctions and trade wars against China.
That is the only reason why they are pushing for a treaty
r/collapseofrussia
They are a leaking sieve in reality. So much crazy crap is going wrong over there that we don't hear about.
Ruzzia is teetering on the brink of collapse.
I remember 1991 when they were strong and everyone said they were strong until very suddenly and without warning it was over.
This will be no different except it will be very swift, brutal and bloody as scores are settled and the regime erases itself from humanity.
Yes but how long still? Because we've been reading the "Russia is not resilient/cannot replace their military/is in economic crisis" articles forthwith last 2-3 years and yet here we are with Russia still fighting.
If Russia is not as resists we think and can only continue this war for another 5 years, then what are we saying?
Ukraine should hit their datacenters. Probably easier said than done thogh. But that could send them back years
Linky no worky
No shit
We know, it’s just few bar Ukraine have the balls to test that resilience.
As if any nation were.
Definition of no shit Sherlock. The only ones concerned are the War machine oligarchs. It’s their only industry.
D’uh
Doesn't really matter if they're weak or strong when either way they've killed hundreds of thousands of people at least, and have the potential to kill millions more. Mediocre weapons in the hands of poorly-trained conscripts still kill people. Shitty Iranian drones still kill people. North Korean artillery shells might only work one time in three, but they still kill people. War is a game of barely scraping by, and that's what Russia is good at. They aren't losing in Ukraine and they aren't going to break or stop or have a revolution. We should all stop crowing about how weak they look and take this deadly seriously.
If the big one starts, Russia would probably lose. In losing, though, they'd still kill millions of people and cause a cataclysm not seen since the world wars.
Perhaps we should just proceed as though they're strong and prepare for that possibility.
There’s been the 3-day special operation from the Russian side and then the “Russian economy will be toast in x days” from our side most days since it started.
Starting to think military commanders aren’t very good at this war stuff, and economists don’t know how Russia’s economy works.
Water is wet.
They're absolutely not. They are the same as they've always been a murderous thug regime rotten to its core. and we've someone in the White House throwing them a lifeline, A complicit fool. I never thought I would see this.
This video also talks about it, often citing The Economist as a source:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1_NaPU0BME
The US will bail out Russia rather than let it suffer any real damage, then laugh at the EU about it.
Honestly, they don’t dare be honest. Bluster works well for them.
I don’t understand how they carry on.
I wouldn't be surprised if the current victory posture turns out to be a desperate bluff.
And how strong does Russia "want us to think?" I look at their large military, decent balance of payment data, their resilient nationalist-authoritarian regime and their relative domestic stability and I presume they are a solid, above-average military power that is seriously underdeveloped and has systemic problems that make development uneven, slow and difficult. What I don't see is a paper tiger on the cusp of strategic battlefield defeats, economic collapse, national bankruptcy or domestic rioting and coups.
I look at their domestic propaganda and it is run-of-the-mill nationalism. I look at their international propaganda, and it is not exactly menacing tough guy stuff, it's weaselly, sometimes even tongue-in-cheek parody of Western international propaganda, and aggrieved.
Do people really see Russia's current economy as resilient?
They may be not, but they are strong enough in persuading most of my country men (Slovakia) that they are winning and sanctions dont work (on the contrary , they making EU weaker and Russia stronger) - thats how PPL in my country see it. And the current Prime minister, Fico, is spreading this narrative...
Propaganda is Russia's strongest weapon...
Some people in the comments point out that China and Iran (among others, I guess) are definitely helping Putin a LOT to keep Russia's economy "afloat enough". I wonder how long they'll be able to do that.
Well no shit lol
Yet... they are still at it, i just want the war to end, but it doesn't seem to be going that way...i want Ukraine to win and hit Russia hard...but how much more time will it take?!
it's kinda both according to some, they're crumbling slowly, but the crash is absorbed by all the weird side/black markets and data was fudged so we can't estimate clearly
That’s what Charles XII, Napoleon and Hitler thought as well - but hey, this time it’s different, right?
Russia is a failed state already. No oil and gas, no food, no heating, no infrastructure, no military, no export revenue.
People wilmdie
Sigh... Another headline claiming Russia is collapsing. Wake me up when it is actually happening and they finally rebel and revolt over there. They need another october 1917
I have argued the point about Russia's economic weaknesses many times in past comments. Even on this sub it sometimes find hard traction. But since 2023 there have been many financial indicators pointing to the fact Russia's economic and social fabric is under duress and getting worse. Putin has used every trick in the book to gloss, cover and manipulate the information flow so that the duress has been hidden. But the tricks are running out.
I keep seeing articles about how Russia economy is just about to collapse for two years now and nothing has happened. What am I missing?
Yeah, but what if China or US (I'm not joking) steps up and helps them?
Is it intrernational understatement day on reddit or somthing?