So on the surface, it's more people to die in Ukraine, which is sad. On the other hand, one of the reasons women traditionally don't serve in armies is because if you need 100 kids to be born in 9 months, that can come from one single guy, but it can only come from 100 women. Something to consider in a country that is in a demographic crisis already.
They may end up serving in a different role than you may be assuming.
Making a corps of childbearering women under military supervision would be very dystopian, but also kinda in-character for Putin and the Russian government’s trajectory lately.
It’s not a stretch to imagine Putin and his ilk enacting some sort of horrific policy like that. They think of their citizenry as a natural resource to be exploited in a very direct sense. They do not care about their citizens in an individual sense. They only care about their citizens in an aggregated sense inasmuch as their citizens provide utility for their own goals and enrichment. That’s what a kleptocracy is, and the Putin regime is very much a kleptocracy.
It would be naive to think that. Dugin, his ideologue, wrote a book on their long term geopolitical strategy, of which Brexit, and funding US racists was a part of.
He made a massive miscalculation on the combat effectiveness of both the Russian and Ukrainian armies, which was a heavy blow to those goals, though. Let's hope it was a big enough mistake.
There is that of course, but I don't want to discount Ukraine here. From 2014 to 2022, everyone, including the West and Ukraine has meekly resigned not to escalate to open warfare after the start of the invasion. In 2022, during the first 3 days, Putin expected Kyiv to fall in three days, and so did the whole world. But it didn't. It's the kind of shit that will have Zelenskyy streets named after him around the world, while Putin will have as much share in the public consciousness as any of the Mongolian khans whose names historians quote as fun trivia, but not much else.
At this point, Russians are cursing the name of Gorbachev for the fall of the USSR, but in 50 years, they will be cursing the name of Putin for the fall of Russia.
Brexit happened, Trump was (and might be again) president, far right is growing in Europe. Outside of the battlefield, they are quite successful in their war against the West
The demographic consequences of Russia's misadventures will continue to echo for decades. The Russian security state has given Russia multiple lobotomies over the last ~100 years and that's more or less how they're able to stay on top of things. The stability they export is only an asset insofar as they don't have the same kind of domestic potential.