That uptick is quite striking:
https://www.google.com/finance/quote/RUB-USD?window=5Y
but it’s still pennies on the dollar. Their threat of a 4M ruble sanction on Wikipedia for documenting the Ukrainian invasion was only $49k. You could put that on a credit card.
I don’t understand how it’s clear the Soviets achieved “more than anyone else.” They might have, without saddled by an authoritarian government. But despite your constant harping about my lack of historical knowledge, you did know that their manned moon landing was cancelled after their N-1 booster blew up three times? Why? Lack of computers to control many small rockets at once. And of course, they’re timetable was determined autocratically. It wasn’t the threat from the west, it was the threats from their own government.
Lol. Where did you learn this history? Stalin regularly purged his generals for giving him bad news. Field promotions were cheap and easy to come by. Interestingly, this is why so many Russian generals have been “liquidated” recently. They’re right up on the front lines because no one else has authority or information to make decisions and it’s their head in the noose. Remind me, professor, when was the last time an American general was killed in action?
I think you should read Clausewitz again. NATO got Russia to break it’s teeth on an unaffiliated nation. That isn’t achieving Putin’s goals. It’s achieving NATO’s goals with a minimum of effort. With an image of a mad dog, Putin has driven fence-sitting nations to join the EU and NATO. All that’s left for Russia is to hide under the skirts of China. Checkmate.
Chechnya and Syria? So more war crimes, I’m afraid…
Consider how immature that is. “You better not stand too close to me, or I’ll beat up my next door neighbor!” The west is like, “Are you sure you want to do that? We won’t invite you to anymore parties and we’ll give him our spare guns…” Now Putin is crying that they made him get shot. An idiotic miscalculation of historic proportions.
Cheaters never prosper. It’s not creating security, but serfdom. All the lies, the assassinations, the war crimes have finally come home to roost. Because of Putin’s megalomania, Russia is now captured in China’s orbit. Great, now you don’t answer to western masters. Now, it’s eastern masters.
No, I said Stalinist, since he left a stain that wasn’t easily removed, even today. He did actually send Korolev to prison in Siberia, though. Imagine what the Soviet space program might have achieved, if getting sent to a gulag a daily option. Echoes of the past, as Putin threatens his generals with arrest for telling him what he doesn’t want to hear.
In the US, the space shuttle’s goal was to reuse expensive engines and thereby bring the cost per kg of payload down. This did not come to pass. The Soviets spent all the money to copy the same idea but never actually used it, because they concluded, as well, that it wasn’t economic.
The invasion is in progress. The results are unclear at the moment, but judging by how insistent Putin and ~~Lapdog ~~Lavrov are bleating more and more about peace talks, it implies the stalled offensive cannot be sustained much longer. I honestly don’t see how Ukraine can capitulate to demilitarize, given Russia’s repeated aggression.
Whining to the west doesn’t work. France walked a long, hard road. Vietnam didn’t complain about it’s plight, it adapted. India didn’t cave into the American sphere and look at them today. Those countries built themselves up, they didn’t try to succeed by dragging everyone else down. Russia’s current strategy is deeply flawed.
Russia supplies the world with a flood of simple to maintain rifles, sure. Older Soviet gear is always on sale, too, just like anything that wasn’t nailed down from that era. But night vision gear on Russian tanks is French. Russia just isn’t the high tech wonderland you imagine. You’re being thick headed insisting that any single country is self-sufficient.
Also, you what happened to the great Soviet stockpiles of nuclear weapons? They were sold to the American nuclear energy industry to power homes and televisions. The ultimate triumph of capitalism.
By relying on memetic warfare, like Brexit, rather than domestic reforms. They did the world a disservice by assaulting truth with the concept of fake news. Ironically, their anti-vax propaganda came back around to Russia and now they’re trying to deal with it in a population cynical of what the government says already, so good luck with that.
Looting grocery stores because your expired rations ran out does not speak to an effective supply chain.
You are the one that sees reality as “The West” and the rest. It’s an interconnected global economy, which makes your claims of Russia being able to be cut off from the society of nations hilarious. Even the US would struggle with that, today.
The US had air superiority in the first day or two of that war. So if it took a month to mop up the ground after that, what does this imply in the current context? Russia’s aging and ill-supplied military is going to progress even slower against more modern weapons and better intelligence. While having their economy ground down, something the US didn’t have to deal with then. When you paint it like that, this is looking like Putin’s Waterloo.
No, no, no! Adversarial implies a match among equals. Look at France. They actually stood up to the US. And got shut out of middle east oil every time. So they took their lumps and went nuclear. Rather than cry about American hegemony, they formed their own economic block, for reals. Do they go around trying to destabilize the world with deceit in order to make themselves look bigger? No! They did the hard work and paid their dues to remain free and proud. Russia could do that, if they abandon their strategy of trying to win by cheating. You cannot deepfake success.
The very idea of a spaceplane is flawed. But Stalinist brutality hammers out anything but conformity. Even Korolev himself spent time in a gulag! So it’s no surprise Soviet engineers simply aped whatever their spies said the Americans were working on. With better bells and whistles, because Capitalism is flawed! They could worked on something actually revolutionary, instead built a knock off they only flew once.
Consider that ridiculously long table in Putin’s bunker today with meek generals at the far end. Isn’t that the same mentality today? It wasn’t a recipe for success then nor is it now.
You misunderstand. It’s not belligerence. It’s contempt. Putin imagines a much stronger hand than he actually has. Visions of the glorious CCCP still dance in his head. But that’s long gone. If WW3 spills out of this, it’s because the real superpowers of the world, not Russia, get dragged into this.
Finally, a crack of truth! This might be the first thing we’ve ever agreed on. Of course, it was cynical realpolitik from the west that let the Russia wallow into mafia state it is now. America has it’s own oligarchy to deal with. And the world has much larger problems to grapple with beyond that. It annoys me that Putin is acting up now, distracting us from addressing the issues that will define this century.
So you’re saying Buran was a totally new concept sprung from the free thinking of the Soviet Union? “I’m just spitballing here, comrades… let’s make an oversized spaceplane that’s totally unlike the American one… but we’ll add jets to it!” That sounds exactly like this nationalization of McDonalds, where they keep everything exactly the same, but just change the logo. Good luck getting a resupply on those seasonal McRibs, Yogi.
The war started not with air domination, but with cruise missile salvos. Those have petered off, too. Both of these indicate that even if Russia could produce chips, they can’t replace them fast enough to risk their few modern jets or restock the smart missiles they had left over from bombing Syrian hospitals.
On the one had, you say the world will collapse without Russia, but on the other you say Russia will not collapse without the world. Despite all evidence to the contrary. A table with three legs will still stand, but a table with one… not so much.
It’s the 3rd week of the invasion and you’re waiting to see evidence of the invasion stalling? Ha ha! The plan was to take Kyiv within days. Russia’s main issue now is that without air support, their supply convoys are vulnerable to drone and shoulder-launched strikes. Recall that the plan was not to sit around stranded tanks for weeks, so it’s an open question of who will starve first, the besieged, or the besiegers?
Your BS about bombing civilians is straight up lies. Putin has been targeting civilians with bombs since he took power (Russians that time). Go find a Ukrainian maternity ward to hide in, if you trust him so much.
He’d spent years preparing for the lukewarm sanctions and half-hearted resistance of his first invasion. He clearly did a “uh oh”:
I find that crying about the legality of freezing the central bank reserves is ironic given it’s hampering an illegal invasion. You want to go rogue? Enjoy living outside the community of nations. Meanwhile, the invasion is stalling out for lack of computer chips to resupply guided missiles. But I thought you said, Russia was self-sufficient? It’s pure delusion to believe that, in this day and age.
I don’t hate Russia at all. I admire the Russian people. It’s Putin that’s created a mafia state, rewarding corruption that favors him, poisoning his rivals, and perverted the truth. Imagine what Russia could be with Kasparov at the helm. It’s like what could the CCCP have been able to accomplish without Stalin purging anyone with a mind of their own?
You apparently don’t realize that Putin admitted those funds were intended to bank roll the invasion through the sanctions. He was clearly surprised at the masterstroke the Canadian Deputy Minister of Finance has been waiting decades to unleash. “Oh no! We’re holding all this cash now! Whatever will we do!” Probably force Russia to use them as restitution in Ukraine, now.
But dying is the one thing you can be certain of…