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Russia (like the rest of Europe) is slowly dying. That's fine, everything eventually comes to an end. However it made an inadvisable move to lash out one last time before the inevitable, one final death throe before the end, but this too has backfired on it and made things even worse for the country as a whole. You can't blame them for trying something, but you can blame them for picking a particularly bad thing to try. In the modern world we have reached an equilibrium where military power means less and less compared to economic and cultural staying power and many of these events are just (painful) lessons to those who weren't able or willing to follow the winds of change. Experience is the best (and most painful) teacher as they say.
Sure, it sucks for current Russians (and Europeans) but this is just the wheel of fortune, nothing more and nothing less. There are times when you're climbing up, and times when you're being kicked down. It's just what it is. Given that it's very hard to compete with the current hegemonic American culture if Russia really wanted to be successful in spreading its ideas in the modern world it would defund its military and spend the money on boosting Russian fertility to create lots of people who believe in Russian ideology instead.
The military will always be relevant. The only reason it’s not at present is that there’s a pretty strong military hegemony in NATO and America. When there’s a military power that can bomb most countries to rubble in a matter of a day or two, the idea that a country can invade another and not be stopped is silly.
Those days are coming to an end. Americans are having fewer kids, and they’re less interested in joining the military. Politically, I think a lot of people are less interested in policing the world as well. If you lose the American military, wars come back and having a strong military becomes important again.
That's a smug illusion, which is being dispelled by the inability of the entirety of NATO to give Ukraine enough weapons to defeat a militarily inept country with the nominal GDP of Italy.
Russians are being barely competent and are not even trying that hard when it comes to war-economy measures.
I see you‘ve now embraced the pro-ukrainian side‘s italian gdp comparison argument your friends so derisively dismissed in the beginning, preferring a more flattering and delusional comparison to the US. I hope you guys adjust your claims regarding russia‘s rightful place in the world accordingly. How much shit are we supposed to take from a poorer italy?
I didn't 'embrace' anything - but even if you do PPP adjustment, Russia just has the GDP of Germany, which means American Empire has .. how much.. 5x more ? 6x more ?
And somehow..
Right, despite possessing 10x (PPP) to 25x(nominal) the economic power of russia, the West (US, EU + UK), have barely given enough aid to equal the russian military budget. If someone's not trying, it's us. Somehow... it was still enough to inflict territorial losses on the russians.
Territorial losses ?
Russia still has Crimea and the separatist republics.
The 'equipment' given so far seems to have been used up assaulting tiny patches of land and has been now sitting out in the open in no man's land for weeks.
This video here probably shows 10% of tanks, IFVs given to Ukraine sitting abandonded in a few square kilometers of fields.
EDIT: added the video link.
You seem to count some subset of tanks. Poland alone gave Ukraine around 330 tanks and 240 IFV (per https://www.oryxspioenkop.com/2022/08/a-european-powerhouse-polish-military.html ).
This field has far less than 10% of that.
I mean the 'Western' aid of 'superior' Bradley, Leopard tanks, not superannuated T-72s given last year, which have already probably been used up during the winter.
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kherson and kharkov offensives. Obviously I'm not counting the gains russia made while we were still debating amongst ourselves what to do about it (zaporizhia), or even earlier, where we debating if we would do anything at all (crimea and donbas). Even taking your "probably" at face value, 10% of a few dozen tanks is nothing compared to the 2000 tanks and 2500 IFVs documented russian losses(oryx on the conflict. As you know, so far, the vast majority of our aid has not been in tanks, but it was clearly effective nonetheless.
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Here we go again. The Russians aren't even trying!
You'd think after more than a year of the world laughing at them, they'd start trying already.
I'm not saying they're not trying.
I'm saying they're so bad at this, they've mobilized so few people, they've messed up with munitions productions - yet they still haven't been beaten.
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I see we've come all the way from 'resistance is futile, Russian strength is overwhelming and their victory inevitable' to 'it's abject proof of weakness you haven't defeated the Russians already.'
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Biological reproduction rates pale in comparison to memetic ones. Ignoring the unfortunate reality that effectively no one has found a policy capable of flipping fertility declines, what use is a Russia of 400 million if 300 million read the New York Times, or at least watch Marvel movies?
That's kind of solipsistic as well. Russia doesn't have anything even closely resembling New York Times (I guess, Meduza which is an independent media opposed to the current regime; or Vedomosti, Wall Street Journal-like magazine, whose journalist was arrested, and which was bought by an oligarch close to Putin). The worst American rag is better than whatever Russia has. So why exactly Russian memes should propagate aside from them being anti-American?
But that's exactly my point - they shouldn't and won't. From the perspective of a hypothetical emperor of Russia, if you were to focus on one thing, population numbers are simply not the primary driver of success. You have to convince people that your cause is right. That's not just a post-modern perspective, that's the task of every leader in human history. (In some systems those you have to convince are an aristocracy, in some the wealthy, in others almost everyone, but it always works the same way.)
The Internet and automatic translation simply makes it impossible to be a big fish in a small pond, as your "subjects" will be inculcated in the most effective (read:virulent) ideas that they are exposed to on the web. You either win on that battlefield, or on the physical one. Putin was at least wise enough to recognize that he and his nation weren't up to the memetic battlefield; his mistake was overestimating Russia's ability on the physical plane.
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