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People probably know.
In China, people often talk amongst friends and relatives about the government, but never publicly criticize the government, especially not the central government. I expect this to be the same is russia. Unless they have a mind-control chip in their brain, there are probably a lot of dissatisfaction with the government, but nobody is gonna say it out loud.
Russia has always been like this, for a good hundred years and over.
You NEVER say what you actually think in public or at work, only with your closest friends behind closed doors.
Ah, so it's kind of like how I live my life. At work and with family they think I'm a mild mannered boring person who never curses, and has boring hobbies.
But then behind closed doors, I enjoy the idea of handcuffing a woman to a bed, sitting on her waist, and just tickling her for hours as she goes apeshit.
........but it gets harder to find women who want to let you do that to them as you get older.
Yeah people often say things like "how can they not see xyz" but they clearly do. We're creating opinions based on what they say publicly.
"A Soviet political joke describes a disgruntled man holding up a white piece of paper in the street in protest and, when asked why, the protester replies that everyone knows what the paper is supposed to say."
Its pretty easy to detect the authoritarian states as the ones where people can be arrested for actually doing such.
Happend in China/Hongkong. Happend in Russia. And also happens in the UK.
But the speed of economic change in Russia is increasing
Absolutely, that's been pretty clear for the past few months. The Russian economy was surprisingly resilient early on, but they are running out of tricks, and pouring money into the economy used to work, but now it will only make it worse.
Kremlin is blaming Western activities and sanctions for economic issues in Russia,
So the tone has taken a 180, they used to say that Russia would be fine without the West, and it would only hurt us more than it would hurt them.
Well look who is whining now!
That was the expectation I've seen. Russia was estimated to have 3 years of reserve. Year 4 is the turning point. From what's in the news, the estimate was not far from the mark and things can get weird next year.
estimated to have 3 years of reserve.
That would have been a very optimistic estimate 2-3 years ago. The reserves were supposed to hold much longer, like 10-20 years of embargo against Russia, But a lot of foreign currency has been frozen in western banks. The value of their gas and oil has been hit by Europe importing way less than we used to, and oil having embargo with a price ceiling mandated by EU.
The sanctions hit harder as Russian stock runs dry, and they can't replace it with Russian products. First because they already produce at capacity, second because they sometimes lack the know how.
The Russian government has run at enormous deficits, and that's despite mandating low prices from weapon producers. Something they used to be able to recoup with exports. But exports are halted now, because Russia needs it all.
So major industries are running at huge deficits, like the gas and oil companies and the military industrial complex. But the problems are even more widespread than that, because the high interest rate, makes it near impossible to invest in expanding production, and hard to even just maintain current production levels.
Inflation is estimated at just above 8%, but Russia has already had to emergency import eggs, butter prices are up 30% and potatoes are up 70%!
Next year there will be shortage of sugar, because they can't import seeds from Europe.
So even if they still had emergency funds to pull from, a lot of these problems can't be solved by throwing money at the problem.
Their banks are doing nothing short of magic but afaik they now burned through most of their cash reserves, so things could get bad fairly quickly. I'm not sure what they even can do at this point, and their long term prospect is even worse with all the brain drain and the loss of so many men.
Yeah. Isn't that kinda illegal.
There is a reason why they call that shithole authoritarian.
The war is necessary!!111
Look on the maps... Russia is π€. It totally needs more space!!!11
Quantity does not equal quality. Most of Russia is harsh and mostly useless tundra.
Climate change (specifically global warming) will make it better
Melted permafrost doesn't turn into valuable farmland. It will also cause higher CO2 emissions.
Not really. Melted permafrost leaves unstable terrain and the soil is still going to be lacking nutrients.
Not really. Taiga gets very little precipitation. If you warm it up, it'll turn into arid grass/shrubland, like most of Kazakhstan.
As warming changes, all the weather patterns we know and expect are going to change with it as well. It might not remain arid.
I have not seen any propaganda whatsoever about it actually being about needing more space.
future america has never been so easy to see
77 million americans looked at the horrors of russian terror and said "yes please"
And this is what happens when the Russian economy collapses. The good part that this means Russia can produce less weapons. However the struggling families will sell their men to Putin to survive. So we will see even higher losses for the Russians. By the end of this Russia will be done as a great power.
I mentioned this elsewhere, but I wonder if this will drive Europe towards aligning with China.
With the Russian economy struggling, many of its oligarchs can either share their insane wealth to prop up the war effort, or they can ask China for help. If Europe were to broker closer ties with China over the US, would they favour growth with Europe over propping up a failed war? Losing its biggest ally might be enough to make Putin decide that it's simply not worth it, to declare victory, and retreat back.
Those looking to succeed Putin are also likely looking at how easy it might be to oust an ageing leader, and to do basic shit like revoking a war to rebuild a global economy. I'm not saying that the Kremlin are likely going to rejoin the fold any time soon, but unfucking everything couldn't be easier.
I doubt it'll make Europe at large side with China, but Russia is going to be in massive debt to China. I'm curious how much power they've obtained there already during this war.