The US spends ~$50 billion a year just on maintaining our nuke arsenal. The entire military budget for Russia is ~$70 billion, and that includes maintaining a nuke arsenal supposedly larger than ours. Plus I think the percentage of Russian cruise missile failures in Ukraine was >60%. If those are any indications, their arsenal probably sucks. But realistically, how few out of thousands are actually required to cause global devastation and chaos? Probably a fraction.
I am amazed at how many people in the US claim our taxes here are absurd. The highest property tax someone can pay in this country is 8754 Swedish Kronor even for a huge mansion. With the present exchange rate that is 775 bucks. Do a massive percentage in your district rent and not have to worry about property taxes?
The problem with Putin is how does the rest of the world remove him without making things worse? The Russian army has shown how bad it is, but that's as the attacker invading a country that the average Russian doesn't understand or agree to invading. That said, many still support Putin and assume he has reasons for the invasion. For most Russian soldiers, their heart isn't in the invasion, however all that goes away if they become the defender. Even if you remove the prospect of nuclear war, the lessons of Napoleon and Hitler still apply...invading Russia to force a regime change is a non sequitur. That leaves an internal violent regime change....which historic averages means whomever comes to power is more hardline and repressive.
Did I miss some juicy posts somewhere? Because anyone seriously proposing that a sovereign nation just roll over to a foreign invader is... well let's just say I'm surprised their keyboard still works, what with all the drooling and pounding of fists. This isn't some backwater African country ruled by the local cabals where the government du jour is completely irrelevant to the local population.
We don't, because we can't. The only solution that works is his removal by his own people. Anything that hints at an outsider taking him out, and you've got a martyr.
If they launch a MIRV, the one and only way to stop it is with a hypersonic missile before it reaches our upper atmosphere. If it more than likely doesn’t, then basically every single person on this planet is fucked. Because half a dozen locked atomic bombs are coming down, and the wind will do the rest during the fallout.
Putin can't nuke Ukraine and sustain claims that he's retaking "Russian" territory. IE, he can't nuke his own "people". This is a land grab first and foremost, and nuking the land would crater the value of some of the most valuable real estate on Earth (strategic value, agricultural and shipping value, etc.). So, a lot of the hyperbole on tactical nukes needs to be focused on Kiev, not of the places Putin would like to incorporate. He also has to bank on nukes and a few other pieces of the Russian arsenal not worth using, in light of the international response. WMD's will force the Western response to double down, and he knows his economy can't last 4-6 months without oil revenues, and his ability to smuggle it out under Western blockades would be increasingly diminished. He'd go from the world's wealthiest individual to watch the wealth of his family and inner circle be essentially the most targeted assets on the planet. A nuke is a suicidal move, on several levels. Lastly, those folks in the inner circle who are ahem, suicided....there's only so much fear they can take. When their fate is sealed, or they perceive it to be, there's an appeal to take Putin with them. It's one of the reasons he's holed up in a private estate as opposed to in Moscow. So, the pressure exerted upon him by the folks losing billions is real, and the suicides or mishaps that keep befalling the Russian elites has a limit. You can kill 5 or 6 of them as warnings. As those numbers start to grow, the destabilization caused by their deaths exponentially increases, and the ones who are afraid of being suicided may just take a few parting shots...In Putin's case, they don't need to be fatal to effectively demonstrate a vulnerability or a weakness. He's painted himself into a corner here, but the reality is that Ukraine will always have this sort of threat from Russia. Putin might be removed, or die or whatever, but it's not like after that Russians will be giddy to acknowledge the soveriegnity and solidarity. The damage has been done, and the best Ukraine can hope for is a ceasefire leading to negotiations that make legitimate concessions. Ukraine will be prepared for this as long as it exists, and if Russia can knock over Kiev during an election cycle, they only have to succeed once. The West will refuse to meddle in an election where Russia installs a puppet. Putin can turn this to his advantage and consolidate power, rebuild their military apparatus (I refuse to believe the shambles it was in was a complete surprise to an entire country), and double down on some of the more....antagonistic tenets of Russian domestic and foreign policy. There's an entirely likely scenario that losing Ukraine results in much worse outcomes over the next 2-10 years.
The West doesn’t need to blockade the ships, they just need to seize a couple tankers, or outsource it someone who will. Seized tankers result in the loss of insurance policies for the shipping companies. And most ports will not let ships dock without insurance. The kicker is something like 90% of all maritime insurance policies globally are held by European companies.
Oh look, Russia is facing tremendous social decline: https://fortune.com/2022/10/18/russ...n-war-plunging-birth-rate-form-perfect-storm/ "For Putin, who just turned 70, Russian demography has long been an existential issue, and just last year he declared that “saving the people of Russia is our top national priority.” He’s presided over efforts to buy time with costly policies that contributed to a steep gain in longevity and ranged from lump payments for new mothers to mortgage relief for families." "But as Russia approached the invasion of Ukraine in February, it was coming off its deadliest year since World War II — made worse by the pandemic — with the population in decline since 2018. It reached 145.1 million on Aug. 1, a fall of 475,500 since the start of the year and down from 148.3 million in 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed." Those numbers are STAGGERING. Also, they gloss over some enormous health and social issues ranging from aging, COVID-19 and that old fave, rampant alcoholism, with all the issues that entails. It also explains some of the heavy-handed and aggressive behavior the regime has taken towards Ukraine, homosexuals, etc. Russia in demographic decline is also in economic, cultural and geopolitical decline, and from Putin's perspective, weakening by the day. To put in perspective, the US population in 1991 was 252 million and is currently about 330 million. China's was 1.151 billion in 1991 and currently sits at 1.402 billion. Russian decline over that period is very much an existential threat, one that they are increasingly desparate to combat through annexation or "forced immigration".
I wonder how much mass exodus has to do with it. If people are leaving Russia (which they are) using brute force on people who hate you to replace them as citizens is as counter-productive as it gets. THAT is a great way to get a coup put on you. Does anybody have a good or reliable lowball on how much money Putin has stolen simply for himself? Some estimates say he has a quarter of a trillion dollars in dirty money.
I don’t know if anyone does. It’s probably some absurd amount, though. It would like the President of the US getting a cut of the profits from every Fortune 500 company.
Isn't population decline - or stabilization, at the very least - inevitable in any society? Population can't keep growing forever, and resources are finite. What do you think the demographics of all those African countries will look like in fifty years?
My understanding is that it's sort of similar to the British monarchy, except he has shell companies to obscure his true holdings. Based on even the gentlest of estimates, he's one of the wealthiest people on earth....if his assets are actually his. The Russian decline isn't a recent thing. The mass exodus causes by the call ups is minor in comparison to the huge demographic challenges. Their population remaining stagnant for 30 year is fucking absurd. Like....the only other country I could think of would be North Korea. Population growth is on sort of a bell curve, as countries develop their growth stabilizes to replacement rate, or slightly under. Japan and Italy are confronting demographic cliffs that don't come anywhere near Russia's and it was enough to cripple the Japanese economy. The growth rate is influenced by a ton of things, but yeah....populations are expected to grow. That Russias has not speaks to a lot of fundamental issues that are destabilizing at best. Put simply: no young people are assuming the economic burden imposed by the old, and these figures imply massive health and social issues that would indicate a society in rapid decline. Shits fucked yo.
@downndirty , I don't think you really answered the question I asked above; I don't expect you to have ALL the answers, but you're a sharp guy who deals with these kind of things for a living. How is a constantly growing population supposed to be sustainable in the long run? Resources are finite. We can see this with animal populations; it has been documented at length that uncontrolled population growth will eventually result in a "dead end." Why are humans supposed to be any different? We are already fucking up this planet at a level that hasn't been seen in thousands of years.
It’s not constantly growing, at least not for much longer. There will be a demographic decline in nearly every major industrialized country worldwide this decade. Some countries will be hit so hard by that and supply chain breakdowns that they will go through a period of deindustrialization. China’s decline will probably be one of the most dramatic. They will likely have about half their current population by 2050.
We're in no danger of hitting peak population in terms of resources, density, etc. Few places are actually in danger of overpopulation their specific location, thanks to a global supply chain. FWIW, 7 billion of us could occupy a space about the size of Texas with a population density of a Manila, Jakarta, Shanghai or Tokyo. I'm not one of these Malthusian folks who thinks we have too many people, but rather the way too many people are currently living is unsustainable. Resources are finite, but we currently produce enough calories, materials for housing, potable water, energy, etc. to satisfy global demand, in some cases with some surplus. We can't keep growing indefinitely, and as countries develop (driven in particular by investments in women...education, autonomy, sexual education and reproductive health, etc.) they don't produce as many kids. Generally speaking, a country on the bottom of the development ladder, like a Honduras, has a TON of children per capita because of the health and social issues that kill off a bunch of them before adulthood. Middle-income countries like Russia and Indonesia see that start to taper off, and higher-income countries see it dip below replacement level. Those places can either import people via immigration (it's suddenly WAY easier to get an Italian citizenship) or shrink (Japan). A country like Russia LOSING population from the simple nature of it's demographics is pretty fucking wild. Over that window of time, it's just....unbelievable.
Something to keep in mind regarding use of nuclear weapons. As long as the fireball doesn't touch the ground, the fallout is actually quite low. The air burst of a tactical nuke (Hiroshima/Nagasaki size) would produce a blast wave that would flatten several square kilometers of a city or wipe out sizable troop concentrations, but not leave a nuclear waste land. The video below at about 55:40 breaks it down a bit more, as well as go on to detail reasons why Russia would likely not find use of nuclear weapons favorable for them, geopolitically as well as internally.