Russia faces a crisis regardless if Putin ends or continues the war in Ukraine, economist says
Russia faces a crisis regardless if Putin ends or continues the war in Ukraine, economist says
Continuing the war means the economy faces stagnation, while ending it would shut off the massive defense spending that's driven growth, Alexander Mertens writes.
Summary
Regardless of Putin’s decision regarding the war in Ukraine, Russia’s economy is facing a crisis due to factors such as sanctions, a shrinking sovereign wealth fund, and a labor shortage. The war has boosted growth, but Russia cannot sustain it without significant economic consequences.
Good. Russia deserves generations of misery for what they've done to Ukraine.
I'm not an economist or even especially well informed, but... Isn't war kind of... You know. Expensive?
Yeah I know it could pay off in the long term if you just swept up a country's worth of innocents, genocided them and grabbed their land (Hi Israel), but... Fuck up the war badly enough, and there's not going to BE a long term, just because the economy collapses. Right?
Bold of you to assume China will just let russia collapse. Ideally, China economically subjugates Russia and makes it essentially a satellite state
The plan is to split Russia, the west bit (with the people) goes to Europe to deal with, the east bit (with the land and more resources than God) goes to China.
And that gives us all 50-100 years of peace while both sides slowly digest what they have to deal with.
Yes, Europe gets the shitty half of this deal, but they also get security, and the only person to ever successfully charge from China, across the whole Russian steppe to attack Europe was Genghis Khan, doubt that's happening again.
War being expensive is especially ruinous with modern (ie anytime past the 18th century AD) countries being deeply interconnected through market systems. All that money just pissed away trying to grab someone else's land? Every other country in the world was investing that money in material or human capital incentives. When peacetime returns, unless you have a massive waiting market for your war economy production (like the US after WW1 and WW2), you will be at a massive disadvantage in the world market - causing a large number of domestic industries to suffer as they're undercut by products of either superior pricing/availability, quality, or both.
At this point, you can swing towards protectionism - but that will reduce the standard of living and efficiency of domestic industry as well, and potentially lead to backlash from other countries imposing protectionist policies in kind, damaging your exports and leaving your nation even poorer. So at the end of the day, no matter what you do, you've fucked over your own industries and budget for years at minimum, requiring significant political capital and competence in government just to make up the difference and catch up to the rest of the world - and that's not even getting into damage done to diplomatic reputations, actual loss of materiel, and the sheer human cost of throwing people into the meat grinder.
War requiring a war economy is a no-win scenario in the vast majority of cases.
yeah but for instance, Putin (having more than 200 billions $$$) and all his oligarchs friends, don't give a shit, they can live in super mansion with 23 bathrooms, high ends cars and all the refine food/wine from around the world
Putin and his Russian Mafia oligarchs don't mind the destruction of countless opportunities for their subjects. It's a sacrifice that they are willing to make.
You'd think they'd have learned from the cold war, but I guess not.
You’d think they’d have learned from the cold war, but I guess not.
Well, many parts of them have. Eastern Europe, formerly under Soviet conrol, is now firmly in market economies. Armenia has left the CSTO (Russia's wish.com NATO), and Ukraine famously kicked out its Russia puppet leader. All of these were part of the Soviet Union or under their control before.
fuckwits don't learn from history. putin has a vast wealth of real-world failure from which to draw lessons, such as the soviet occupation of afghanistan. but, no. he needed to stroke his pencil dick over some old maps of the Blyat Empire. and now russians have to join in the suffering they brought on their cousins.
Hard to learn when your baby formula is basically vodka.
1000 Days. 19 November 2024.
Oh boy happy fucking birthday to me I guess
Good.
I have a dream where I visit St Petersburg, Finland soon.
Koenigsberg Poland should be pretty cool too.
Finnish them.
Or maybe even Královec.
The damage he’s already done will last generations
I certainly hope so.
You shouldn't. The shit that's happening today is a direct result of previous fuckers that did generational damage. This one will only continue the cycle
They could have stopped at any time, but once their three day plan failed, putin decided to engage in a money-burning competition against a group of countries with a combined gdp roughly 25 times theirs..
He's not relying on Ukraine's allies running out of money, he's betting that they'll lose interest and/or vote for pro-Russian stooges before he loses the ability to win the war.
For him this is the best possible outcome. He remains relevant and firmly planted on the throne until he dies. Endless but not very active trench war is his dream, even a victory, whatever that could look like, is worse for him
...not if he wins the war. Like japanese in late WWII. Die hungry or die fighting.
Not only there is almost no possible scenario of him winning by any possible sane metric, there is no reality when Russia is recovering from this shit without fundamental changes. Whatever win can be, it's impossible and wouldn't help.
I absolutely agree with you on the impossibility to win by Russia, unlike most people nowadays. Like the ones who are sure Russia will win the instant Trump gets to office. Not even close to military complex and diplomacy realities.
About recovering economy, history proves the loser always loses big. Russia would never recover from war reparations + sanctions, unless it completely became a Nato satellite state, like Germany and Japan did after WWII. Of course we all know that will never happen with Russia.
Just to remember the only State in history to pay full war reparations is Finland and they did no big destruction.
Nah, not even then
fuckem.
How sweet is sound!
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