On the other hand, it needs to be said that these issues are not going to be that significant in the full picture of the war – Russia still has plenty of howitzers, continues to produce them and a few ruptured barrels are not going to deter them at all.
To quote Stalin, quantity has a quality of its own.
According to the Estonian intelligence service Russia can train 50k soldiers every 6months. That is something less then 300soldiers per day. In other words Russia can not replace these sorts of losses with properly trained soldiers.
I love your optimism, and you are somehow right that they still don’t plan on this war to last years, but at the same time I don’t see any resistence to conscription living here, soldiers’s moms got shut up quick when they wanted to start askjng questions. They can grab as much people as they want, use them just to fill holes in defences, trained or not. There are some red lines the regime doesn’t want to cross, but since it was allowed to sign in for a contract service since day one, and there were cases of conscripted being bullied into signing into that, there’s always a way to find more meat. My region is kinda calm in that, but I can’t count nights I woke up in sweat thinking they came to take me. I hate it here.
And the harsh thought - maybe it shouldnt? Maybe all these people still believing that it’s OK to conquer another country should just die off? Or, at least, have a hard lesson of why it’s wrong?
Two years into this war I’m feeling lost, can’t even find what to think about it, finding my own relatives being all for murder.
They can do that, but without proper training losses will go up. Even this is mental. Right now Russia is at something like 700k boys being born in a year. This is completely unsustainable over years. Especially with a lot of young people having fled conscription.
It was unsustinable even before war with rising death, emmigration. All eastern Europe suffers from that, and what Cosovo conflict caused to ex-Chechoslovakia (did you ever wonder why so many pornstars came from here?), would happen to Ukraine, Russia and Belarus. And it would be particularly damaging to Russia, a country that spans across 8 timezones yet having half the people US have. There’s many ghost cities already, and I can imagine a lot more would die off, and with them the last industry this country inherited from USSR would die too. It’s a national sepuku. In ten years this place would resemble New Vegas, with everything concentrated in the capital and nothing everywhere else.
I mean in the beginning of the war it made sense to send even a small amount of money, later if seemed billions were pouring in so…
Today it looks like small donations can actually make the day brighter for the people over there, a small sum might become a a pair of gloves, 6 hours of light and a little warmth, some nicer food, …
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