At the rate this is going we'll probably get to play the Ukrainians as the hot new civilization in like the 12th Age of Empires DLC releasing in 2026. I see farming bonuses and their special tech will be "decommunization" or something.

If it helps, this won't be true in all likelihood. Part of the terror of the Iraq war was the annihilation of infrastructure, whereas my understanding is that that's been specifically avoided by the RF.

There's some truth to that, but I don't think we can really say Iraq was worse, looking back.

Iraq in 2005 was less devastated than Iraq in 2011, or Iraq in 2017. Regarding destroyed and maimed human lives, Ukraine may already be worse than Iraq 2005, that's two years into the forever war. Europe's economy cratering and Europe going full fascist might just be around the corner, there's your regional blowback. ISIS expanding to Syria took 10 years, who knows what we are going to see in the coming years.

Give this man the friggin' Hexbear gold medal

Uhm, because Gaza is destroyed now and there's no way two million people can live there for decades?

that being said I wouldn't bet that Germany's ownership class are collectively as smart or as capable as a frog

To me that's one of the more amazing things about the current crisis - the elite seems "all in" on the insanity.

Usually you have more material-oriented folks like the German industry association or unions going on media channels when political ideologues threaten their constituency too much, bit for the past two years - absolutely NOTHING.

They memory-holed Nordstream, nobody is calling for peace with Russia, there's no serious debate about the military grift, and absolutely no actual debate about the material origins of the current crisis. It's all just grasping at clouds, pretending the war isn't there, it's not going bad, there's no deindustrialization... this is all very bad.

2024 will be an interesting year.

the smartest thing Trump ever said

"You think our country's so innocent?" is my all time #1.

Well, Trump was impeached when he tried to meddle in Ukraine, so...

Yes but indirectly. The Engels airbase is named after the town Engels, which is a town in the former Volga German republic re-named so in like 1930.

the navy has its own army and that army has its own airforce

... and that mini-army needed it's own stupid helicopter-airplane hybrid that really only works in theory, lol

Why is the Indian probe using such a weird and time-consuming approach? Do they have so save energy, in other words not enough power in their upper stage for a direct moon shot? I've always wondered about these things, no clue about that part of physics.

I remember dozens upon dozens of shitposts on Quora about how Russia was supposedly unable to produce ball bearings because of sanctions.

Americans seem to have a weird fascination with ball bearings. In WW2 some intel genius figured the German war effort could be crippled by bombing the ball bearing factories in Schweinfurt. The first raid was a desaster; after rebuilding the US Air Forces in Britain for months, they tried again and lost even more bombers. At least Schweinfurt was 98% destroyed.

German motor vehicle production suffered no noticeable impact.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Schweinfurt_raid

The real counteroffensive was the guys we lost while probing