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this post was submitted on 16 Apr 2024
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Sure. Here's what I think:
I think the Russian GDP is roughly half of Germany's GDP alone, even though Russia is 50 times larger and came with some natural advantages as of a few decades ago (good education system, good fossil fuel reserves, things like that). Russia's entire GDP is quite a bit smaller than just the US yearly defense budget. I don't think single digit percentage swings up or down year by year mean all that much to that one way or another.
I do think it's accurate that Russia's surviving the sanctions overall surprisingly well. I think it's also true that they are close to a breakthrough in Ukraine if the US aid doesn't come through; Ukraine is getting drips of aid from various countries, but a quite successful Russian foreign influence operation has been holding up the Ukraine aid in the American congress for 6 months now, and without it, I think Russia's likely to actually start winning the war within a matter of months or weeks.
I don't think it's a strong advertisement for Russia that they have managed, by mobilizing their entire economic and military might, to penetrate a hundred miles or so across the border of a fairly tiny neighbor of theirs and then get stalled there for 2 years. I remember you saying that that was exactly the plan, so that they could bleed the western economies to death right there at the eastern border of Ukraine, but that doesn't seem believable to me.
I would expect that if the US aid comes through, then Ukraine will either slowly or quickly start winning the war again (although that's a long way away from saying I think they'll win completely if that happens). I think if the aid doesn't come through (or if another massive package gets held up in the future in the same way), then Russia stands a pretty good chance of starting to make some gains, maybe quite significant ones. I don't think that's a good statement about the relative economic / military prowess of Russia as compared with the whole West as a whole though.
A few decades ago was USA economic shock therapy that absolutely destroyed the country. "Natural advantages" don't factor into it.
It's literally growing faster than every country in the G7 while under the West's most aggressive sanction regime possible and you think it's "surviving"?
Russia's military is literally larger than it was when they started the SMO but nearly all measures. They haven't mobilized even half of their military might in this SMO. And they fought not only Ukraine's entire military but also military aid from the US that literally is equivalent to Russia's entire military budget. So they fought, dollar-for-dollar, a military that was larger than it and it came out bigger. How's that math for you?
I never said they were trying to bleed Western economies to death. I said their objective was to make the West overextend itself, because that's how the USA lost Vietnam and Afghanistan. If history isn't believable, what is?
Ukraine was never winning to begin with, aid or no aid. There has been no point in this conflict where Ukraine had the upper hand on the war writ large. Every thing that made any gains got swallowed up quite quickly afterward. And that was with aid equivalent to Russia's entire military budget.
If the West goes through a recession, or worse, while Russia goes through a boom cycle, you'll quickly see that absolute dollar values don't matter.
Dude
You don't get to say simultaneously "Russia so strong that the West will tremble before me" and "hey that's not fair, you stole my wallet when I got drunk and fell down and shit myself"
I won't say what you're saying is completely wrong, but Russia also had quite a large hand in the downfall of Russia, both before and after privatization
Sure. In 2023, Russia's GDP grew by 2.2%. But also, Libya's grew by 12.5%, and Guyana's grew by 38.4%.
I'm saying that the metric you and the BBC have chosen is relevant, sure, but it's also not the whole story.
Let me make sure I am understanding what you're saying: Russia fought a country that is 4% its size, and directly on its border, and spent an equal amount of money (which because of PPP means they had something like twice as much materiel), outproduced the West massively on artillery / ammunition / what have you, and they spent two years stuck on the border, which means their military's doing good.
Do I have all of that right?
(Actually it's more like 10 years, if you count the initial seizure of Crimea and Donbas, but they really started invading in earnest in 2022.)
(Also -- they're not guaranteed to stay stuck on the border. I do agree with you that the Ukrainians are nearing a collapse of their ability to defend if their aid doesn't come through in which case it'll be a very different situation.)
I'm just gonna let the analogy of Ukraine as Vietnam, with a massive country invading a much smaller country that never did anything to it, and then bleeding itself for years and years without achieving anything of value while the small country gets military support from geopolitical adversaries of the original massive country and hangs on giving stubborn resistance, just hang in the air for a while without saying anything else.
Jesus Christ, you guys took back the North? When did this happen? You gotta tell the people in Belgorod, they'll be thrilled.
War's a hell of a lot more complex than just whoever has more economic might is going to win, yes. That I will definitely agree with you on.
Strawmen do not become you. No one is saying Russia's military might will make the USA tremble. They are tiny. The point is that, like other tiny enemies the USA has faced down, the USA will lose, because despite their clear dominance in size, scale, supply chains, etc, they're still losing.
Yes, it is possible to say that Russia had it's economic capabilities completely ransacked by the West during liberalization and also that Russia is winning this proxy war and the USA can't do anything about despite spending the equivalent of the entire Russian military budget on it in a single year.
And, despite them spending that amount, Russia's entire military budget did not get spent on Ukraine. Again, Russia has not deployed half of its military to Ukraine (it can't because if it overextended itself like that it would be too vulnerable), so no, Russia did not spend the equivalent amount of money to occupy Eastern Ukraine and destroy most of Ukrainian production, it spent a fraction of its military budget on it, while the entirety of the aid that was equivalent to their entire budget was spent on defense and failed.
As for being "stuck on the border" you keep assuming their objectives and their strategy and then judging by those assumptions. It's pretty clear to most observers that Russia is simply not advancing rapidly and they have stated they don't intend to advance rapidly. And if you look at the terrain, there's good reason for it - it would require very long vulnerable supply chains in completely open fields. It's precisely why both the Germans and the French attempted to invade Russia through Ukraine. Russia is holding a position that prevents that kind of invasion, with a fraction of its force and it is growing it's total military size while doing it and it's doing it under massive sanctions.
As for Vietnam, you can easily see who's bleeding whom by looking at the maths of attrition. Russia is growing faster than the most powerful economies in the world, while increasing the size of its military (UK dropped swimming tests for its navy to bolster the ranks) and while outproducing all of NATO. The trap is for the USA, just like it was in Vietnam and like it was in Afghanistan. This time, however, the USA invasion didn't look like invasion because it was NATO expansion, which is physically just moving soldiers, bases, and weapons platforms into a sovereign nation in order to threaten the next neighbor. Russia sparked the conflict to stop that expansion and call the bluff of the NATO nations, and it looks like it was a bluff because, here we are.
As for Ukraine in the North, again, tactical gains are not changing the collapsing line nor shooting down missiles landing in Kiev. The North has been shown to be immaterial.
As for the economic might point missing the entire to topic, if Russia's economy grows its people and institutions will benefit. If NATO countries economies contract, its people and institutions will suffer, despite the dollar values being higher.
not when measured in PPP
100% accurate. We could say that the PPP is 2:1 and so the military economies they can bring to bear are roughly equal.
I.e. despite their overwhelming size and population advantage, Russia somehow winds up exactly evenly matched for a fight against Germany and Ukraine and nobody else involved.
Yes, they are roughly equal but one is growing and the other is on track for a two-year recession.
The economies? I could see the argument for Russia bleeding Western political support for Ukraine, but it's just fantasy (or propaganda) to suggest a single economy the size of Russia could bleed the combined economies of all Western countries to death.
Japan is currently in recession. The UK is currently in recession. Germany is "likely in recession". France is stagnating at 0% GDP growth in 2023Q3 and 2023Q4 (not technically a recession, but only by a hair). Italy is barely avoiding a recession. Outside of North America, no G7 company expects greater than 1% GDP growth in 2024.
Meanwhile, the US is seeing substantially hotter inflation numbers than expected, leading many to expect rate cuts to be delayed even further (despite the European Central Bank signaling their intention to lower rates soon). As a result, US interest payments are expected to exceed defence spending.
Western economies bleeding is not some prediction of the future: it's an observation of present circumstances. Whether Russia is responsible is up for debate, but it's undoubtable that Western economies are suffering and the only moderately resilient ones have proven to be the US and Canada.
And yet, if I remember right that was exactly the argument.
I do think there were some legit things in what they were saying yeah -- Russia's surviving the sanctions quite well, and they've been producing a fuck of a lot of artillery whereas individual countries in the West have sometimes had problems as they ramp up production again for a variety of reasons. But using that all to extrapolate out to, Russia's going to outproduce the whole of the West and that's exactly the plan and why they're still (for now at least) stuck at the border, that doesn't make a ton of sense to me no.
If all countries under discussion ramped up to full war time economies, like Russia is already doing, the West would outproduce Russia by at least an order of magnitude, maybe even two. Any suggestion otherwise is either ignorant or a bad faith argument.
But I think Putin knows this fact of economical imbalance, as he's doing a superb job undercutting Western support of Ukraine through subversion of the political process via corrupt politicians, keeping the US and others in a state of hand-wringing and infighting. If he truly believed any of his own propaganda, he would already actually be at war with NATO (instead of just claiming to be and not actually touching any NATO territory), and the West would coalesce around the clear immediate threat and begin the war time economic ramp up.
Well, sure. But you may as well say "if all countries under discussion magically whisked an army of robot supersoldiers into existence, they'd outpace Russia's fighting ability by an order of magnitude." It's just a pipe dream that ignores the material reality of the entire situation. The countries under discussion can't ramp up to "full war time economies" because they've long ago outsourced nearly all of their production capacity. If right now, they dropped everything else in order to rebuild their productive forces (that they willingly and knowingly dismantled for the sake of finance capital profits and honestly to also prevent domestic labor from having the kind of leverage it used to have) then it would take well more than a decade to get back to the kind of productive capacity necessary to outproduce Russia the way you're talking about. And that's if we're being extremely generous. That's simply not going to happen for numerous reasons ranging from the greed of finance capital to plain old logistics.
This is the economic imbalance that "Putin knows." He has known it all along and never needed to undercut western support of Ukraine because of it. The waning support from the west is due to the fact that they're now realizing what a lost cause Ukraine truly is and that no NATO Wunderwaffen or boomeranging giga-sanctions are going to save them.
This is just silly. Putin does not have that kind of ability.
Fantasy land. Cloud cuckoo. Complete failure to understand how geopolitics even begins to work in the age of nuclear powers, or even the meaning of the term proxy war, let alone the material circumstances of the countries you're talking about.
No it couldn't. They have already been trying to ramp up production and keep running into problems like shortages in cotton and lead times for factories.