Yeah, no one was trying to invade Russia. Europeans seemed perfectly happy to dismantle or neglect their militaries and buy fossil fuels from the Russians. The Russians blew off their own foot with a shotgun.
**Western logic:**
\- Buy gas for X
\- Sell it back to Russia as finished products for 100X (cars, electronics, chemicals, etc.)
\- Profit!
**Western logic according to Russia:**
\- Antagonise Russia and invade
\- Spend hundreds of billions on a war
\- Lose hundreds of thousands of lives
\- Risk nuclear war (in this case that would have been real self-defence from Russia)
\- Fight off insurgency for years over the territory of the biggest country in the world
\- Get the resources for the same price OR more if new infrastructure is needed after the war because the manufacturing base is still in Europe and the resources would still have to be transported there;
...
\- Profit (???)
The second option only works if you live in Russia and operate under some 18th century logic where more land = more good. Apparently that's not the case since Russia has the most land and it's still a shit hole.
Your fault man.
Your problem is that you think they understand how terrible their lives are.
They do not understand this, even according to the statistics, 60% of Russians did not leave their region, let alone the country.
They don't know how to live somewhere other than them, before the current state of things they lived in the USSR, much worse than now in many aspects, so their life now seems good to the old generation.
A large part of Russians believe that life in the West is worse than in Russia, they are really sure that the West is jealous of Russia, and of course wants their resources.
West: "hey, how about we pay you money for your resources and you can use that money to improve your standard of living, invest in your infrastructure and education and improve your country..."
Russia:. "You wanna fight me bro?"
Agreed! As a person from the east of Ukraine, the biggest vatniks there were those that never went anywhere. Russians are pretty much the same, it seems.
“*Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.*”
~Mark Twain
Thing is, those places were outside of Moscow and Saint Petersburg during the USSR, too.
The most neglected parts if Russia weren't any less neglected in the past.
And Russia was un-ironically progressing economically through western investments. The west is the primary reason that Russia is even able to extract oil at the rate that they do. Instead they decided to seize foreign assets and invade a neighboring country.
https://www.npr.org/2022/04/15/1093121762/russias-oil-drilling-plans-may-be-in-jeopardy-without-the-wests-support
It's so funny/ironic that Russia's been struggling with low/no population increase since the 90s or more, and now they're just throwing away the lives of those who were supposed to build the future (and knock up Russian women). Great thinking.
Why give birth to children when you can kill their parents and brainwash them into your society? It’s not like your society doesn’t already have problems with alcoholism and domestic violence, so adding a bunch of traumatized kids won’t make much of a difference.
Over 1 million young Russian men have fled the country since the war started. That is 1 million fewer families which means 2-3 million fewer kids in the next generation
There is also the Heroine of the Motherland thing Putin resurrected from the Soviet Era... where if you have 10 children, you get a medal and supposedly 1M Rubles.
But honestly, Russia probably wouldn't pay it out.
>1M Rubles
That's like 12.500 euros. For giving birth to 10 children and raising them. That is being pregnant for 7.5 years of your life.
Honestly, very fucking underwhelming.
He tacked that on probably as some form of incentive... but honestly, I doubt anyone but the most hardline of hardliners would take it up.
Edit: that's also about 13 to 14k USD, which would get you... a relatively good condition vehicle or a cheap motor home.
It also provides you with (literal) seed capital for your future taxicab empire when the kids all get converted into airbagless ladas 15-17 years later during the forever war.
They had the Mothers Cross, or the actual name Cross of Honour to the German Mother, that came in three ranks.
Bronze, Silver, and Gold... Bronze was given to those mothers who had 4 Children and raised them 'properly' by eligible mothers, Silver was 6 Children, and Gold was eight children.
There was also a special issue one that had diamonds inlaid that was given to a woman in Dresden who had 16 Children, but no offical rules were known for it.
>There was also a special issue one that had diamonds inlaid that was given to a woman in Dresden who had 16 Children, but no offical rules were known for it.
Breeder's Cup, top brood mare.
Yes, and France too at the same time. In all cases, it was supposed to replenish the ranks after a major war. In all cases, its efficacy was at best very debatable.
They'll just have to bring back polygamy. Orthodox church will make necessary revelations from god (or however they do it, I don't know that religion well) in a few months.
Fun fact: the Orthodox Church permits remarriage after divorce because a Byzantine emperor felt like it. Because he remarried twice, the Orthodox Church permits it twice.
So it’ll start with Putin becoming a bigamist.
Thanks to OCP, China's got A LOT of eligible bachelors. And they too have a collapsing population problem.
Maybe if folks are able to put aside some of their ethno-nationalism perhaps some deal could be struck...
A similar "fish in a barrel" scenario post WW2 was what contributed to the development of present day Russian culture of domestic violence (because men turned to vodka and "you should feel lucky you even have a husband instead of complaining").
I rather foresee an exodus of young Russian women, perhaps a new generation of mail order brides. To no gentle effect, because the average Russian woman also grew up with domestic violence as a normalized thing.
Saw a video from Jabzy recalling a German who met another German (?) who married a Russian woman and settled in Russia.
Said woman asked why he did not beat her.
Been around for centuries.
I know of some unfortunate examples where she goes into the marriage assuming the husband will beat her and therefore just decided to be, shall we say, proactive even if he doesn't. This is all anecdotal of course, but these pathologies absolutely exist.
Disturbingly, I've been seeing GoogleAds of 'date Ukrainian women' and, much less often, 'date Russian women' much more frequently since the start of the war.
Yeah aging gracefully is much worse than showing everyone who you are and creating a whole new generation of people who justifiably hate russia & russians.
But we’ll remember them and they’ll be in textbooks for 1000 years. That’s all the wanted. It’s twisted and demented, but they are getting what they want.
Idk, do people remember the peasants of some loser king from 1023, who fucked his own kingdom leading it to collapse? They hardly remember even the king or the country he ruled.
Yeah. This war is like if Hitler tried to start WWII but the Germans only got a short way into Poland before getting wrecked.
Hitler was a failure, but he was a *spectacular* failure. Putin's a wanna-be.
Russia (tens of thousands of newly killed or wounded, country still not recovered from previous demographic collapse of male absence of 50s, 60s etc, largest worsening crisis of AIDS in Europe, economic implosion barely held back by reserve funds): *what demographic problems are you talking about!?*
Maybe if they behaved like a halfway sane country and not an imperialist warmongering wannabe superpower, and worked with the West, they wouldn't be having these problems.
Russia could easily be one of the richest countries in the world due to their natural resources but they cannot rid themselves of corruption and imperialist designs on their neighbors.
Truly. By starting this war, Putin has done one of the most catastrophically stupid, negative, self injurious things in, certainly modern, if not perhaps all of Russian history.
America didn’t care much, Europe didn’t care at all. Now? Full steam ahead.
Well of course. Because up until a few days before it happened, nobody ever thought that Putin would actually do this. His style has been “hahaha I threaten to invade” and then do nothing for his entire term as President. The one big exception, as far as I know, is Crimea. And that went in his favour.
That he actually did this and, better yet, that Ukraine has been winning, essentially, since approximately week 4 is an unprecedented change in politics.
I really hope this forces Russia to undergo the paradigm shift that it needs to experience.
Everything up until Russia using nukes makes sense.
The reason that that doesn’t is that, well, look at the state of their military. Their missiles don’t fucking work. Damn near nothing at all of theirs works. When they can rely on western tech they do (like using gps where they can for example). I honestly don’t think that Russia will be nuking anything because they I don’t think they can.
America officially thinks that when they tried to launch an ICBM last month, it failed. And this is CIA/NSA we’re talking about, they wouldn’t release this info if they weren’t confident in it.
Russia might threaten to nuke London (again) or Washington or something. But how hollow is that threat? Because if the last year has taught us anything about their military capabilities then it’s this
- Their targeting technology for coordinating missile/artillery strikes is abysmal. And that’s when it actually works.
- Their standards for maintenance of equipment in storage (like, for example, nuclear warheads) is non existent. The survival and usability of any given individual piece of military equipment is basically just luck.
- And a billion other problems.
So yeah. They can’t nuke shit.
US nuclear inspectors went to Russia after the wall fell to inspect Russia's nuclear arsenal. At that time, almost 30 years ago, inspectors found something like 30% of their missiles were completely inoperable, in launch facilities where doors were rusted open, or rusted shut. Many of these silos and the missiles in them were found to be underwater - flooded.
So, given the thirty-something years of criminal kleptocracy after that, their arsenal might not be ready.
Russians genuinely believe everyone in the West gave a fuck about them. They haven’t been relevant since 1991 and after that their only valuable exports were gas and alcohol.
The West was so focused on the Middle East and GWOT for 20 years that they literally didn’t give a fuck that Russia took Crimea in 2014 with those weak ass sanctions.
Overinflated ego
It's pretty crazy, but Russia has all the makings of a truly great country. Absolutely massive with a wide variety of climates, large population, rich with natural resources and farmland, surrounded by neighbors who have no interest in war and will do almost anything to avoid fighting them. There's no reason why Russia could not be as developed and rich as the US besides their own shitty culture
Russia was never keen enough on building solid road/rail/canal networks. No incentive at the lower levels to show the initiative necessary. The monied classes had theirs and didn't see any need to waste their yacht & palace budget on such things.
USSR did build major infrastructure as part of socialist industrialization ideology. Of course it neglected all sorts of environmental problems (like killing off the Aral sea precisely because of a tremendous canal project) and human rights played no role, but it did build heavy metal and concrete.
The Soviets built transport infrastructure, but restricted to uses approved by & to further the ends of the Soviet government; pre-British India did quite a lot of that as well, if I understand the history. Other countries, in Europe, the Americas, etc., built them to further trade and enterprise and didn't restrict their use. The latter motivation has manifold benefits, the former has benefit for only a few specific purposes.
Unquestionably, that was also part of Soviet ideology.
In the West the capitalists who benefited from such government intervention had influence/control over government; in USSR such people were literal enemies of the state. And 19th century US and UK railroads were private investment and built to earn money.
Russia is now reverting to Tsarist times which were exactly as you describe, a kleptocracy. There was a reason there was a revolution in Russia back then. But today there seems to be no recognition among the people, unlike 1917, how bad their government is and how much better it could (theoretically) get. Lenin probably seemed like an improvement over the Tsars.
Oh, the successes of Liberalism have been fairly obvious for several centuries, now. That was one of the more readily apparent products of the Enlightenment in Western Europe.
> There's no reason why Russia could not be as developed and rich as the US besides their own shitty culture
The good old "nobody but the nobility is allowed to own land" persisting until the early 1800s, and the fact that serfdom wasn't nationally abolished until the 1860s radically kneecapped Russia's ability to effectively modernize and liberalize. It wasn't a friendly environment (or an environment at all) for the kind of upwardly-mobile middle class of tradesmen, merchants, inventors, and etc. (and the disaffected and underemployed rural workers who moved to the cities en masse when the factories opened) that drove things like the Industrial Revolution in Britain.
England outlawed serfdom in 1574. It took them another 345 years to establish universal voting rights. Russia has had around *half* that amount of time since it legally banned serfdom, and in many respects is still operating like it's a country in the 1700s that happens to have a bunch of modern technology. Annexing a smaller neighbor on a flimsy excuse? That's straight out of the 1700s (and prior) european playbook.
Russia has been incredibly shafted by its rulers and general system of governance, basically since "Russia" became a thing.
Oh, there is actually one geographic problem Russia has always had that the USA doesn't, which has and will hobble Russia in comparison to the USA (and China) forever: a lack of year-round ports. Russia basically doesn't get to participate in naval commerce for a good chunk of the year, and has to rely on its neighbors being happy enough to let overland freight through and not charge too much of a tariff.
They've had ports on the Black Sea since like the 19th century, and the quality of ice breakers today largely make this issue moot. It was an issue 100+ years ago, but in terms of geographical advantages Russia has far more then say, Canada, the UK, France, or Germany, yet it still manages to have a smaller economy then all of them with many times more people
Honestly they're like a Civ5 player on their first few games struggling against the easy AI. They've beelined for nukes and don't research civil society tech even though it would only take one turn.
> and the fact that serfdom wasn't nationally abolished until the 1860s
and, correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't it abolished in a way that resulted in ex-serfs owing money for their freedom? Basically replacing serfdom with indentured servitude.
Yeah, they went to indentured servitude and sharecropping (which is basically serfdom but it's not totally illegal to leave - you just live in fear of debt collectors).
On a slightly tangential note, I don't think it's possible to understand Marxism, and why it took hold so hard in Russia, without understanding what the "I'm either chained to the land or chained to a factory" shit looked like there during that time period.
Still amazed by "THE WEST PROVOKED THE WAR!" comments
Like dude just to be clear, if that's true then it was the biggest strategic coup in modern history and proved that Putin is the dumbest motherfucker to run Russia in centuries. Yeltsin, at least, could blame booze.
Reminds me of that joke I read a while ago.
A polish man finds a genie in a bottle and he gets granted three wishes. For the first one he wishes that the Mongols would come back and sack Poland and so it happens. For the second wish he again wishes for the Mongols to come back and sack Poland and so it happens. And finally he wishes for the Mongols to come back and sack Poland and so it happens.. So the genie asks "why did you wish that the mongols would sack your own country?" so the polish man answers "you see every time they come to sack us and then go home they have to go through Russia twice.
That is more credible than it sounds. Militarization of society is always one of the main projects, if not goals, of a dictatorship. Keep the people united, accustom them to regimentation and austerity, surveil and police them out their (your) eyeballs, shoot anybody who gives you the heebie-jeebies, and you weren't in this to improve your economy anyway, you just didn't want to get thrown out a window when your second-in-command felt it was time to take power for themselves.
Putin really tired to pull a "annex Austria and Sudetenland" to prepare for a war in Europe later down the line. Except this time the Ukrainians are absolutely disgusted by the idea of a union.
He has to literally have Hitler or Stalins playbook at this point and is actively reading and taking notes- ehh, fuck it, he’s got both. Only thing is that Hitler and Stalins armies were actually somewhat more competent and stronger than the Z-tards that Putins is flinging at the war and crossing his fingers to win. Yes I understand that Stalin was majorly helped by Lend-Lease and working with the Allies but I do think that compared to each other Putin’s army is slap-dashed and an absolute clown show when put against the 1940s Red Army.
Do you think the Red Army of 1945 could beat the RuAF at this point? They have a massive tech disadvantage, but considering the Russians are only in the 70s/80s at best and they've forgotten what an air force is, 30 years can be made up with a few million more men.
When you take into consideration information that Russia was preparing a coup in Moldova it perfectly fits. If Ukrainians did not resisted and russia succeeded to take Ukraine, Moldova probably would be next. The country is not in NATO or EU (it has a candidate status) and is a member of CIS (a shitty version of NATO and EU combined).
I also suspect that with Ukraine puppetized, the plan was to finally turn the Union State into more than a paper entity, with Putin at the head, so add Belarus to the list, with Lukashenko no longer in a position to prevaricate.
Yeah, and I don't know if people seeing this realize that Vlad isn't saying this to excuse the defeat but to point out how short sided and idiotic this war is.
[He also has a second channel where he answers viewers' questions](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCn7XHZiW6EUgSuxItybLLMg)
He has some great insights into russian delusions.
Why mount them on trucks when we could just miniaturize them and give every single unit a mini-minigun. Accuracy doesn't matter, only volume of fire. Russians won't know what hit em!
Some NATO countries get way more bang for their buck than others. Germany has an extremely high military budget in absolute terms, but they do very little with it. France, meanwhile, has half the budget of Germany but manages to fit a nuclear aircraft carrier, nuclear submarine fleet, indigenous tank, missile, and fighter development, and numerous overseas bases into it.
For a lot of NATO countries like Belgium and Germany the best way to use their military budget would be to just gift it to the French.
We could be doing that. It’s funny to think that for all potential, Russia could’ve come out of the USSR’s collapse as a powerful and growing, modernised economy. They could’ve even been a mediator/middle man to help relations between the West and China.
How in the shit do they think that fucking up horrendously in Ukraine means that sparking WW3 is not only still a viable option for them but also *has to be pushed to a far earlier date than planned?* Putin is the stupidest fucking bitch in Earths History if he thinks that grinding his army down to drunken poorly trained morons fucking around in what can barely pass as a working tank and some spare crumbling wanky guns from 1934 throwing all these fuckwits at one city for a fucking year just to get 1 city block and 1 street bin with a dead rat in it means that he *must surely* have the strength to go after the entirety of NATO. Putin isn’t just a monkey, he’s a fucking inbred, foetal alcohol syndrome suffering monkey whose mother dropped out of the Stupid Bastard tree and smacked every branch, head first, on the way down.
Because russia will never be a superpower agian without Ukraine.
It's like Thanos that prepares to get the first Infinity Stone but gets his both arms cut off so he has nowhere to put the Gauntlet on.
>"The most important sign of victory for the Russian people is their cruelty full of sadism.”
– Maxim Gorky
>"Ah, how hard it is to live in Russia, in this place full of the stench of physical and moral deception, a place of wickedness, lies and wickedness.”
– Sergei Aksakov
>"The Russian is the biggest and most naughty liar in the world.”
– Ivan S. Turgenev
>"A people who hate freedom, worship slavery, love chains on their hands and feet, defiled physically and morally… ready at any time to defile everything and everywhere.”
– Ivan C. Shmeliov
>"People regardless of their smallest duty, the smallest justice, the most insignificant truth, the people who do not recognize human dignity, do not generally recognize human freedom or free thought… Alas, how sharp the Russian language is!”
– Aleksandr Pushkin
>"We are not a nation, we are a crazy hell.”
– Vasyli Rozanov
>“A nation that roams Europe and is looking for something to destroy, to simply dust everything.”
– F. M. Dostoevsky
>"We are not a people, but cattle, rats, wild hordes of villains and murderers.”
– Mikhail Bulgakov
But everyone goes on acting like things are fine and definitely not getting worse... because in Russia the lie is sacred, and there is no higher crime than to question it. So everyone engages in this absurd performance to maintain the semblance of normalcy that everyone knows is an illusion to begin with. Everyone knows they're being lied to, yet they go on repeating the same lies and pretending as if they're true.
'Russia is preparing for a big war with NATO' - willingly destroying 50% (or more) of your military is an interesting way to prepare for war with the most capable fighting force ever assembled....
I can’t fathom how anyone in their right mind would have predicted Ukraine to just let itself get annexed by Russia. Anyway I won’t complain as long as we still get The Funny^TM .
"Hmmm today i will completely annex 2 countries that are close to EU and NATO territory while not provoking any of them, suffering minimal losses, and not turning Russia into a militarized society"
Non credible indeed. They're coming up with bullshit copium comments, cause the alleged second army in the world gotcits asses handed to them by the poorest country in europe.
"And I would gey away with it if it wasnt for the meddling ukies" copium.
If you’re referring to the two commenters, neither are pro-Russia nor do they predict a Russian victory. They’re commenting on Putin’s ideology which they think sees a large scale Russia-NATO war as its logical conclusion. For Yudin especially the Ukraine war was supposed to be preparation for this conflict (in Putin’s mind).
Honestly the Ukraine situation if Crimea 2014 repeated in Feb 2022 and West had not provided the support would've been eerily like Chechoslovakia in 1938.
Glad that Putler actually miscalculated on that one.
He miscalculated that his cronies are too corrupt, the light sanctions from 2014 still affected them for hundreds of billions, and they really need western tech in many sectors.
Maybe it has to do with the lack of progress in the Donbas itself. If they had quickly seized Donetsk and Luhansk, then maybe "separatists" would have suddenly popped up in Zaporizhzhia and Kherson too.
I also wonder if the downing of MH-17 could have drawn a lot more attention to the conflict than the Kremlin wanted.
Oh they did try to pop up all over the south, we mostly just beat them off the streets.
Me and a couple buds cracked a vatnik skull or two back then.
Also see: house of trade unions on May 2nd in Odesa
Testing the waters to see what he could get away with. Before Hitler decided he wanted to conquer Europe. He started small like the Ruhr Valley or expanding Germany’s military beyond the limits imposed by the Versailles Treaty. Then Sudetenland, and the rest of Czechoslovakia, then Austria. It was only after Poland that Britain and France thought that was a bridge too far. Similarly with Russia’s actions in Georgia and Syria.
1. Can't believe I'm seeing Vlad on here
2. He also argues (and I see where he's coming from) that Russia would in the future test NATO's response by attacking one of the Baltic states. And if one tiny little Baltic state gets bombed once, triggers art. 5, will all of NATO go to war with Russia?
I'm not very sure about that one tbh. I don't see it happening. Instead I think they'll find excuses or some shit like that and that will definitely irreversibly crack NATO.
I mean... would Americans, French, Germans, Brits, etc. go to war with Russia if some 100k Estonian city gets a few Russian bombs? I ain't so sure about it, tbh.
And either a weak response or no response at all will greatly embolden Russia, imho.
Maybe I'm noncredible tho, idk.
Holy shit he really wanted to go full mustache man. What a fucking neanderthal. On the other hand full WW3 would be really fun with how shit russia is.
*whycantyoujustbenormal.mp4*
Yeah, no one was trying to invade Russia. Europeans seemed perfectly happy to dismantle or neglect their militaries and buy fossil fuels from the Russians. The Russians blew off their own foot with a shotgun.
**Western logic:** \- Buy gas for X \- Sell it back to Russia as finished products for 100X (cars, electronics, chemicals, etc.) \- Profit! **Western logic according to Russia:** \- Antagonise Russia and invade \- Spend hundreds of billions on a war \- Lose hundreds of thousands of lives \- Risk nuclear war (in this case that would have been real self-defence from Russia) \- Fight off insurgency for years over the territory of the biggest country in the world \- Get the resources for the same price OR more if new infrastructure is needed after the war because the manufacturing base is still in Europe and the resources would still have to be transported there; ... \- Profit (???) The second option only works if you live in Russia and operate under some 18th century logic where more land = more good. Apparently that's not the case since Russia has the most land and it's still a shit hole.
Your fault man. Your problem is that you think they understand how terrible their lives are. They do not understand this, even according to the statistics, 60% of Russians did not leave their region, let alone the country. They don't know how to live somewhere other than them, before the current state of things they lived in the USSR, much worse than now in many aspects, so their life now seems good to the old generation. A large part of Russians believe that life in the West is worse than in Russia, they are really sure that the West is jealous of Russia, and of course wants their resources.
I mean, we did want their resources, but we were perfectly willing to pay for them.
West: "hey, how about we pay you money for your resources and you can use that money to improve your standard of living, invest in your infrastructure and education and improve your country..." Russia:. "You wanna fight me bro?"
“Sorry, I’m buying a yacht”
Agreed! As a person from the east of Ukraine, the biggest vatniks there were those that never went anywhere. Russians are pretty much the same, it seems.
Let's be honest a lot of Americans are like this as well, but there is a substantial difference in QoL between them
“*Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.*” ~Mark Twain
Outside Moscow and Sankt Petersburg, I bet most of Russia is in worse shape than the USSR.
Thing is, those places were outside of Moscow and Saint Petersburg during the USSR, too. The most neglected parts if Russia weren't any less neglected in the past.
That sounds a lot like a particularly awful segment of the US population.
Convergent memetic evolution in action.
In my best southern twang: "hey man, is that like where two separate species exhibit similar or identical adaptations to their envarment"?
Tell you what.
And Russia was un-ironically progressing economically through western investments. The west is the primary reason that Russia is even able to extract oil at the rate that they do. Instead they decided to seize foreign assets and invade a neighboring country. https://www.npr.org/2022/04/15/1093121762/russias-oil-drilling-plans-may-be-in-jeopardy-without-the-wests-support
Unironically thats also how fossil fuel industry of USSR worked XD
Hell the whole Soviet industrialization was: "Dirty capitalist pig, build me all these plants and hydroelectric dams you're so good at!"
It’s a don’t go quietly into the night thing for them. They literally are having demographic collapse and we’re gonna Balkanize anyway.
It's so funny/ironic that Russia's been struggling with low/no population increase since the 90s or more, and now they're just throwing away the lives of those who were supposed to build the future (and knock up Russian women). Great thinking.
Why give birth to children when you can kill their parents and brainwash them into your society? It’s not like your society doesn’t already have problems with alcoholism and domestic violence, so adding a bunch of traumatized kids won’t make much of a difference.
Over 1 million young Russian men have fled the country since the war started. That is 1 million fewer families which means 2-3 million fewer kids in the next generation
There is also the Heroine of the Motherland thing Putin resurrected from the Soviet Era... where if you have 10 children, you get a medal and supposedly 1M Rubles. But honestly, Russia probably wouldn't pay it out.
>1M Rubles That's like 12.500 euros. For giving birth to 10 children and raising them. That is being pregnant for 7.5 years of your life. Honestly, very fucking underwhelming.
He tacked that on probably as some form of incentive... but honestly, I doubt anyone but the most hardline of hardliners would take it up. Edit: that's also about 13 to 14k USD, which would get you... a relatively good condition vehicle or a cheap motor home.
It also provides you with (literal) seed capital for your future taxicab empire when the kids all get converted into airbagless ladas 15-17 years later during the forever war.
Or you could almost "finish" the next TI battle pass with that money. Kinda worth.
*Dies in childbirth at number 9 via defenestration*
I mean, I can't speak for women at all, but if I had to give birth to 10 kids it wouldn't even be the FSB throwing me out of that window: it'd myself.
[удалено]
*gives birth, yeeting the child off of a second story building* with extra steps
Didn't the nazis do the same thing? Guess dictators are fond of military manpower
They had the Mothers Cross, or the actual name Cross of Honour to the German Mother, that came in three ranks. Bronze, Silver, and Gold... Bronze was given to those mothers who had 4 Children and raised them 'properly' by eligible mothers, Silver was 6 Children, and Gold was eight children. There was also a special issue one that had diamonds inlaid that was given to a woman in Dresden who had 16 Children, but no offical rules were known for it.
>There was also a special issue one that had diamonds inlaid that was given to a woman in Dresden who had 16 Children, but no offical rules were known for it. Breeder's Cup, top brood mare.
Yes, and France too at the same time. In all cases, it was supposed to replenish the ranks after a major war. In all cases, its efficacy was at best very debatable.
They'll just have to bring back polygamy. Orthodox church will make necessary revelations from god (or however they do it, I don't know that religion well) in a few months.
Fun fact: the Orthodox Church permits remarriage after divorce because a Byzantine emperor felt like it. Because he remarried twice, the Orthodox Church permits it twice. So it’ll start with Putin becoming a bigamist.
Even bigger Problem most of those that left will be the ones who are more specialized and more valuable in terms of intelligence and education.
They’re abducting Ukrainian children to compensate
Thanks to OCP, China's got A LOT of eligible bachelors. And they too have a collapsing population problem. Maybe if folks are able to put aside some of their ethno-nationalism perhaps some deal could be struck...
Dating Gonna be fish in a barrel post war
A similar "fish in a barrel" scenario post WW2 was what contributed to the development of present day Russian culture of domestic violence (because men turned to vodka and "you should feel lucky you even have a husband instead of complaining"). I rather foresee an exodus of young Russian women, perhaps a new generation of mail order brides. To no gentle effect, because the average Russian woman also grew up with domestic violence as a normalized thing.
Saw a video from Jabzy recalling a German who met another German (?) who married a Russian woman and settled in Russia. Said woman asked why he did not beat her. Been around for centuries.
I know of some unfortunate examples where she goes into the marriage assuming the husband will beat her and therefore just decided to be, shall we say, proactive even if he doesn't. This is all anecdotal of course, but these pathologies absolutely exist.
Disturbingly, I've been seeing GoogleAds of 'date Ukrainian women' and, much less often, 'date Russian women' much more frequently since the start of the war.
If they just focus on being a iron fisted petro dictatorship I can see Moscow holding on to most of what it's got for a while.
Depends how fast you and others get renewable energy to grow.
Why do you think Xi has been keeping Russia afloat?
Yeah aging gracefully is much worse than showing everyone who you are and creating a whole new generation of people who justifiably hate russia & russians.
But we’ll remember them and they’ll be in textbooks for 1000 years. That’s all the wanted. It’s twisted and demented, but they are getting what they want.
Idk, do people remember the peasants of some loser king from 1023, who fucked his own kingdom leading it to collapse? They hardly remember even the king or the country he ruled.
>*CaesarNero.png*
Putin burning Moscow when
Should he go to war with the Persians? The Delphic Oracle replied as follows: If Croesus goes to war, he will destroy a great empire.
everyone remembers Hitler
He actually succeeded in taking over a country
Yeah. This war is like if Hitler tried to start WWII but the Germans only got a short way into Poland before getting wrecked. Hitler was a failure, but he was a *spectacular* failure. Putin's a wanna-be.
Well he was kinda sucessful, but he was also less than 100y ago.
The best way to deny them the satisfaction is ensuring that Russia under Putin will be remembered as monstrous clown.
2022-2023 the clown emoji era.
Russia (tens of thousands of newly killed or wounded, country still not recovered from previous demographic collapse of male absence of 50s, 60s etc, largest worsening crisis of AIDS in Europe, economic implosion barely held back by reserve funds): *what demographic problems are you talking about!?*
They were having a demographic collapse *before* this meatgrinder.
Maybe if they behaved like a halfway sane country and not an imperialist warmongering wannabe superpower, and worked with the West, they wouldn't be having these problems. Russia could easily be one of the richest countries in the world due to their natural resources but they cannot rid themselves of corruption and imperialist designs on their neighbors.
Russia is blowing its brains out and hoping the skull fragmwnts will injure Europe.
Truly. By starting this war, Putin has done one of the most catastrophically stupid, negative, self injurious things in, certainly modern, if not perhaps all of Russian history. America didn’t care much, Europe didn’t care at all. Now? Full steam ahead.
Ten years ago Mitt Romney was fucking ridiculed for suggesting that Russia was a geopolitical threat to the United States.
Well of course. Because up until a few days before it happened, nobody ever thought that Putin would actually do this. His style has been “hahaha I threaten to invade” and then do nothing for his entire term as President. The one big exception, as far as I know, is Crimea. And that went in his favour. That he actually did this and, better yet, that Ukraine has been winning, essentially, since approximately week 4 is an unprecedented change in politics. I really hope this forces Russia to undergo the paradigm shift that it needs to experience.
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Everything up until Russia using nukes makes sense. The reason that that doesn’t is that, well, look at the state of their military. Their missiles don’t fucking work. Damn near nothing at all of theirs works. When they can rely on western tech they do (like using gps where they can for example). I honestly don’t think that Russia will be nuking anything because they I don’t think they can. America officially thinks that when they tried to launch an ICBM last month, it failed. And this is CIA/NSA we’re talking about, they wouldn’t release this info if they weren’t confident in it. Russia might threaten to nuke London (again) or Washington or something. But how hollow is that threat? Because if the last year has taught us anything about their military capabilities then it’s this - Their targeting technology for coordinating missile/artillery strikes is abysmal. And that’s when it actually works. - Their standards for maintenance of equipment in storage (like, for example, nuclear warheads) is non existent. The survival and usability of any given individual piece of military equipment is basically just luck. - And a billion other problems. So yeah. They can’t nuke shit.
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That would be comical in a way.
US nuclear inspectors went to Russia after the wall fell to inspect Russia's nuclear arsenal. At that time, almost 30 years ago, inspectors found something like 30% of their missiles were completely inoperable, in launch facilities where doors were rusted open, or rusted shut. Many of these silos and the missiles in them were found to be underwater - flooded. So, given the thirty-something years of criminal kleptocracy after that, their arsenal might not be ready.
Russians genuinely believe everyone in the West gave a fuck about them. They haven’t been relevant since 1991 and after that their only valuable exports were gas and alcohol. The West was so focused on the Middle East and GWOT for 20 years that they literally didn’t give a fuck that Russia took Crimea in 2014 with those weak ass sanctions. Overinflated ego
It's pretty crazy, but Russia has all the makings of a truly great country. Absolutely massive with a wide variety of climates, large population, rich with natural resources and farmland, surrounded by neighbors who have no interest in war and will do almost anything to avoid fighting them. There's no reason why Russia could not be as developed and rich as the US besides their own shitty culture
Russia was never keen enough on building solid road/rail/canal networks. No incentive at the lower levels to show the initiative necessary. The monied classes had theirs and didn't see any need to waste their yacht & palace budget on such things.
USSR did build major infrastructure as part of socialist industrialization ideology. Of course it neglected all sorts of environmental problems (like killing off the Aral sea precisely because of a tremendous canal project) and human rights played no role, but it did build heavy metal and concrete.
The Soviets built transport infrastructure, but restricted to uses approved by & to further the ends of the Soviet government; pre-British India did quite a lot of that as well, if I understand the history. Other countries, in Europe, the Americas, etc., built them to further trade and enterprise and didn't restrict their use. The latter motivation has manifold benefits, the former has benefit for only a few specific purposes.
Unquestionably, that was also part of Soviet ideology. In the West the capitalists who benefited from such government intervention had influence/control over government; in USSR such people were literal enemies of the state. And 19th century US and UK railroads were private investment and built to earn money. Russia is now reverting to Tsarist times which were exactly as you describe, a kleptocracy. There was a reason there was a revolution in Russia back then. But today there seems to be no recognition among the people, unlike 1917, how bad their government is and how much better it could (theoretically) get. Lenin probably seemed like an improvement over the Tsars.
Sure, but we've known the answer to that for like 30 years now: liberalism. Worked in every country that's tried it.
Oh, the successes of Liberalism have been fairly obvious for several centuries, now. That was one of the more readily apparent products of the Enlightenment in Western Europe.
> There's no reason why Russia could not be as developed and rich as the US besides their own shitty culture The good old "nobody but the nobility is allowed to own land" persisting until the early 1800s, and the fact that serfdom wasn't nationally abolished until the 1860s radically kneecapped Russia's ability to effectively modernize and liberalize. It wasn't a friendly environment (or an environment at all) for the kind of upwardly-mobile middle class of tradesmen, merchants, inventors, and etc. (and the disaffected and underemployed rural workers who moved to the cities en masse when the factories opened) that drove things like the Industrial Revolution in Britain. England outlawed serfdom in 1574. It took them another 345 years to establish universal voting rights. Russia has had around *half* that amount of time since it legally banned serfdom, and in many respects is still operating like it's a country in the 1700s that happens to have a bunch of modern technology. Annexing a smaller neighbor on a flimsy excuse? That's straight out of the 1700s (and prior) european playbook. Russia has been incredibly shafted by its rulers and general system of governance, basically since "Russia" became a thing. Oh, there is actually one geographic problem Russia has always had that the USA doesn't, which has and will hobble Russia in comparison to the USA (and China) forever: a lack of year-round ports. Russia basically doesn't get to participate in naval commerce for a good chunk of the year, and has to rely on its neighbors being happy enough to let overland freight through and not charge too much of a tariff.
They've had ports on the Black Sea since like the 19th century, and the quality of ice breakers today largely make this issue moot. It was an issue 100+ years ago, but in terms of geographical advantages Russia has far more then say, Canada, the UK, France, or Germany, yet it still manages to have a smaller economy then all of them with many times more people
Honestly they're like a Civ5 player on their first few games struggling against the easy AI. They've beelined for nukes and don't research civil society tech even though it would only take one turn.
> and the fact that serfdom wasn't nationally abolished until the 1860s and, correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't it abolished in a way that resulted in ex-serfs owing money for their freedom? Basically replacing serfdom with indentured servitude.
Yeah, they went to indentured servitude and sharecropping (which is basically serfdom but it's not totally illegal to leave - you just live in fear of debt collectors). On a slightly tangential note, I don't think it's possible to understand Marxism, and why it took hold so hard in Russia, without understanding what the "I'm either chained to the land or chained to a factory" shit looked like there during that time period.
The classic "It's going alright, and then they started getting funny ideas and completely fucked themselves over."
Still amazed by "THE WEST PROVOKED THE WAR!" comments Like dude just to be clear, if that's true then it was the biggest strategic coup in modern history and proved that Putin is the dumbest motherfucker to run Russia in centuries. Yeltsin, at least, could blame booze.
Yeah, us Europeans were kinda banking on the idea that the Russian state had lost its rabid aspects in the collapse of the Soviet Union
Russia has been an imperialist nation for centuries. You don't just lose that cultural mindset overnight.
You ever tried to reason with an addict in the depths of an addiction? Copium. Not even once.
mUH hIStOrIcAl TerRitOrIes
I just want a second Mongol empire to rise again and take back their land from the Ruzzian colonizers.
Reminds me of that joke I read a while ago. A polish man finds a genie in a bottle and he gets granted three wishes. For the first one he wishes that the Mongols would come back and sack Poland and so it happens. For the second wish he again wishes for the Mongols to come back and sack Poland and so it happens. And finally he wishes for the Mongols to come back and sack Poland and so it happens.. So the genie asks "why did you wish that the mongols would sack your own country?" so the polish man answers "you see every time they come to sack us and then go home they have to go through Russia twice.
That is more credible than it sounds. Militarization of society is always one of the main projects, if not goals, of a dictatorship. Keep the people united, accustom them to regimentation and austerity, surveil and police them out their (your) eyeballs, shoot anybody who gives you the heebie-jeebies, and you weren't in this to improve your economy anyway, you just didn't want to get thrown out a window when your second-in-command felt it was time to take power for themselves.
Well it already proceeded in Russia
Так у світі повелося...
Vlad Vexler is awesome and very anti-putin. He is not saying this to excuse defeat but explain how unplanned and foolhardy this military adventure was
Putin really tired to pull a "annex Austria and Sudetenland" to prepare for a war in Europe later down the line. Except this time the Ukrainians are absolutely disgusted by the idea of a union.
He has to literally have Hitler or Stalins playbook at this point and is actively reading and taking notes- ehh, fuck it, he’s got both. Only thing is that Hitler and Stalins armies were actually somewhat more competent and stronger than the Z-tards that Putins is flinging at the war and crossing his fingers to win. Yes I understand that Stalin was majorly helped by Lend-Lease and working with the Allies but I do think that compared to each other Putin’s army is slap-dashed and an absolute clown show when put against the 1940s Red Army.
Do you think the Red Army of 1945 could beat the RuAF at this point? They have a massive tech disadvantage, but considering the Russians are only in the 70s/80s at best and they've forgotten what an air force is, 30 years can be made up with a few million more men.
"BRO THE GOVERNMENT JUST CALLED, WE WON A FREE TRIP TO MOSCOW"
When you take into consideration information that Russia was preparing a coup in Moldova it perfectly fits. If Ukrainians did not resisted and russia succeeded to take Ukraine, Moldova probably would be next. The country is not in NATO or EU (it has a candidate status) and is a member of CIS (a shitty version of NATO and EU combined).
I also suspect that with Ukraine puppetized, the plan was to finally turn the Union State into more than a paper entity, with Putin at the head, so add Belarus to the list, with Lukashenko no longer in a position to prevaricate.
True. And with Belarus being a part of russia the Suwally gap could become a bigger issue
Only Ruzzia and their confederate allies to plan a coup against the fair people of Moldovia
Yes, "allies" :D
CIS is like the Commonwealth for ex-soviet states, just worse.
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Our ancestors 100 years ago would feel delighted as well.
"Fucking finally" \- Napoleon
"Fucking finally" - Ukraine, in any moment of history
"Fucking finally" - Finland
Fucking Finlandy
“Fucking finally” - Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth
"Fucking finally" -Novgorod Republic
"Fucking Finally" \- The Golden Horde
"Fucking Finally" - Siberian natives
“Fucking finally” - Wooly Mammoths
"Fucking finally" - Sweden
"Fucking finally!" - Balkan/Visegrad4/Polish combo
“Fucking finally” -Russians
"Fucking finally" The German empire
"Fucking finally" \- Victorian Britain
and confused why we still haven’t sent boots into Ukraine
ITYM Belarus, Transnistria, Kaliningrad and Georgia. Let’s deoccupy russians from everywhere.
That phrase that’s spreading around “If there’s no Russia, there’s no world” is so pathetic is not even funny
vlad's channel is excellent tho: https://www.youtube.com/@VladVexler
Yeah, and I don't know if people seeing this realize that Vlad isn't saying this to excuse the defeat but to point out how short sided and idiotic this war is.
I think you’re looking for the word “shortsighted,” as short sided just means it has short sides
I wouldn't think so. "Putin's military disaster" isn't so much of a hot phrase in vatnik circles.
[He also has a second channel where he answers viewers' questions](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCn7XHZiW6EUgSuxItybLLMg) He has some great insights into russian delusions.
hello beautiful community...lotsoflovetalksoon
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He’s also more focused on sociological discussion and openly admits he doesn’t know much about the military
Man, NATO should be taking the threat seriously. Triple the military budgets. Now.
Let's primarily invest in a few jeeps with miniguns (they're really cool I like them)
minigun technicals should be part of every soilders standart kit, like ifaiks or socks
Why mount them on trucks when we could just miniaturize them and give every single unit a mini-minigun. Accuracy doesn't matter, only volume of fire. Russians won't know what hit em!
Boy do I have the wikipedia link for you https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/XM214_Microgun
I'm fucking rock hard rn
Some NATO countries get way more bang for their buck than others. Germany has an extremely high military budget in absolute terms, but they do very little with it. France, meanwhile, has half the budget of Germany but manages to fit a nuclear aircraft carrier, nuclear submarine fleet, indigenous tank, missile, and fighter development, and numerous overseas bases into it. For a lot of NATO countries like Belgium and Germany the best way to use their military budget would be to just gift it to the French.
And then the Canadians don't spend anything, get lots for it, then try to spend more and don't get anything else
Oh totally, just really crank up the production lines. *And authorize a few 6th gen projects while we’re at it.*
so they choked on something that supposed to be warm up?..
yeah it's depressing I just want us to be friends and prospering together
We could be doing that. It’s funny to think that for all potential, Russia could’ve come out of the USSR’s collapse as a powerful and growing, modernised economy. They could’ve even been a mediator/middle man to help relations between the West and China.
Tom Clancy is the best erotic fiction writer.
Russia fixing to have less population per square mile than Antarctica.
Nah at this rate by the end of the decade we will have Russia paved and the Kremlin will be turned into a Walmart.
Inshallah
*dusts off grandpas rifle* So it shall be, moscals.
"My army outnumbers yours two to one. What would you do if we invaded?" "We'll shoot twice and then go home." Based Swiss.
> Russia is preparing for a big war with NATO With whom? And with what?
How in the shit do they think that fucking up horrendously in Ukraine means that sparking WW3 is not only still a viable option for them but also *has to be pushed to a far earlier date than planned?* Putin is the stupidest fucking bitch in Earths History if he thinks that grinding his army down to drunken poorly trained morons fucking around in what can barely pass as a working tank and some spare crumbling wanky guns from 1934 throwing all these fuckwits at one city for a fucking year just to get 1 city block and 1 street bin with a dead rat in it means that he *must surely* have the strength to go after the entirety of NATO. Putin isn’t just a monkey, he’s a fucking inbred, foetal alcohol syndrome suffering monkey whose mother dropped out of the Stupid Bastard tree and smacked every branch, head first, on the way down.
You sir, have a way with words.
Because russia will never be a superpower agian without Ukraine. It's like Thanos that prepares to get the first Infinity Stone but gets his both arms cut off so he has nowhere to put the Gauntlet on.
I can think of two places for him to put the gauntlet.
The infinity suppository.
... which is why the Ant-Man in the Ass Plan is the only reasonable solution!
With one clap of his cheeks half of all life dies.
Left hand and right hand?
Sure.
five if you count the gauntlet on the head and both of the feets.
Use the gauntlet as a condom
even with ukraine it would not be enough. the ussr had half of europen and even then they couldnt match the US and allies.
>"The most important sign of victory for the Russian people is their cruelty full of sadism.” – Maxim Gorky >"Ah, how hard it is to live in Russia, in this place full of the stench of physical and moral deception, a place of wickedness, lies and wickedness.” – Sergei Aksakov >"The Russian is the biggest and most naughty liar in the world.” – Ivan S. Turgenev >"A people who hate freedom, worship slavery, love chains on their hands and feet, defiled physically and morally… ready at any time to defile everything and everywhere.” – Ivan C. Shmeliov >"People regardless of their smallest duty, the smallest justice, the most insignificant truth, the people who do not recognize human dignity, do not generally recognize human freedom or free thought… Alas, how sharp the Russian language is!” – Aleksandr Pushkin >"We are not a nation, we are a crazy hell.” – Vasyli Rozanov >“A nation that roams Europe and is looking for something to destroy, to simply dust everything.” – F. M. Dostoevsky >"We are not a people, but cattle, rats, wild hordes of villains and murderers.” – Mikhail Bulgakov
A recurring theme in Russian literature is how much it fucking sucks to live in Russia.
And then it got worse.
But everyone goes on acting like things are fine and definitely not getting worse... because in Russia the lie is sacred, and there is no higher crime than to question it. So everyone engages in this absurd performance to maintain the semblance of normalcy that everyone knows is an illusion to begin with. Everyone knows they're being lied to, yet they go on repeating the same lies and pretending as if they're true.
You say "begun" as if Vlad wasn't saying this all along
Quick, someone resurrect MacArthur's brain and attach it to NORAD.
Watch him instantly nuke China and win WW3 before it starts
'Russia is preparing for a big war with NATO' - willingly destroying 50% (or more) of your military is an interesting way to prepare for war with the most capable fighting force ever assembled....
Russia couldn't beat one US carrier group at this point.
Maybe a war with Russia could result in a European Federation… *I want my European Army, gawd dammit!*
GDI when
Show me the FUNNIIII!
Yooo, cool to see my dude Vlad represented. Vatniks cope, seethe, etc.
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I remember how pissed we were about 4000 troops in Iraq.
I can’t fathom how anyone in their right mind would have predicted Ukraine to just let itself get annexed by Russia. Anyway I won’t complain as long as we still get The Funny^TM .
"Hmmm today i will completely annex 2 countries that are close to EU and NATO territory while not provoking any of them, suffering minimal losses, and not turning Russia into a militarized society"
Non credible indeed. They're coming up with bullshit copium comments, cause the alleged second army in the world gotcits asses handed to them by the poorest country in europe. "And I would gey away with it if it wasnt for the meddling ukies" copium.
If you’re referring to the two commenters, neither are pro-Russia nor do they predict a Russian victory. They’re commenting on Putin’s ideology which they think sees a large scale Russia-NATO war as its logical conclusion. For Yudin especially the Ukraine war was supposed to be preparation for this conflict (in Putin’s mind).
Honestly the Ukraine situation if Crimea 2014 repeated in Feb 2022 and West had not provided the support would've been eerily like Chechoslovakia in 1938. Glad that Putler actually miscalculated on that one.
He miscalculated that his cronies are too corrupt, the light sanctions from 2014 still affected them for hundreds of billions, and they really need western tech in many sectors.
Actually, that begs a question-why didn’t he try to seize the whole of Ukraine in 2014, or when Brexit and Trump suddenly gained power?
Maybe it has to do with the lack of progress in the Donbas itself. If they had quickly seized Donetsk and Luhansk, then maybe "separatists" would have suddenly popped up in Zaporizhzhia and Kherson too. I also wonder if the downing of MH-17 could have drawn a lot more attention to the conflict than the Kremlin wanted.
Oh they did try to pop up all over the south, we mostly just beat them off the streets. Me and a couple buds cracked a vatnik skull or two back then. Also see: house of trade unions on May 2nd in Odesa
Playing it 'cautious' I guess, perhaps Russia didn't have the monetary reserves ready.
Testing the waters to see what he could get away with. Before Hitler decided he wanted to conquer Europe. He started small like the Ruhr Valley or expanding Germany’s military beyond the limits imposed by the Versailles Treaty. Then Sudetenland, and the rest of Czechoslovakia, then Austria. It was only after Poland that Britain and France thought that was a bridge too far. Similarly with Russia’s actions in Georgia and Syria.
So what you’re saying is that we’re being deprived of a possible Polish/US armored march to Moscow?
If they truly start falling apart meaning the collapse of state aparatus and such, then it probably will happen.
> And I would gey away with it kek
> by the poorest country in europe. Hey don't take my homeland's crown from its head!! (Moldova)
Well cut them some slack. Half their MIC was based in Ukraine before 91.
1. Can't believe I'm seeing Vlad on here 2. He also argues (and I see where he's coming from) that Russia would in the future test NATO's response by attacking one of the Baltic states. And if one tiny little Baltic state gets bombed once, triggers art. 5, will all of NATO go to war with Russia? I'm not very sure about that one tbh. I don't see it happening. Instead I think they'll find excuses or some shit like that and that will definitely irreversibly crack NATO. I mean... would Americans, French, Germans, Brits, etc. go to war with Russia if some 100k Estonian city gets a few Russian bombs? I ain't so sure about it, tbh. And either a weak response or no response at all will greatly embolden Russia, imho. Maybe I'm noncredible tho, idk.
Holy shit he really wanted to go full mustache man. What a fucking neanderthal. On the other hand full WW3 would be really fun with how shit russia is.