I would expect the smart ones would push and roll the car by hand.

And the ironic “just a moment…” preview of the link here

And they are

• relatively healthy (enough to be sent to die)
• men
• of working age

And given that those that are enough wounded to be discharged also can’t really work as before, we’re looking at something like 5-10% of the male workforce.

That’s a lot a lot.

Well, it’s complicated :) I believe the psychology defines several important phases in this regard (I’ll wing them from the top of my head). First is the discovery of boundary me/not me for the newborns. That’s when they realise their mom is not part of them. Then there’s simple us/not us. That’s when we’re awkward about people outside our immediate family. Then there’s the teenage rebellion phase, where we discover “my group” of people with similar interests. The “mom, it’s not a phase” time. And the final, for the rest of one’s life, is the phase of discovering “me as an individual”.

So to your answer, yes, everybody feels they don’t fit, but for many it’s easier because they can use their social skills while some are “blessed” to figure out in hard mode.

Soviet Union was never a communist or even a socialist state. Tyrannical oligarchy with slaves, casts, kings, you name it. Disregard for human life is cultural for them. Traditional values.

From what I understand, this is the next best thing. If the refineries cannot accept the raw because of the damage, the pumps cannot just keep pumping, they have to be stopped and reactivating them is expensive both in time and money.

Ah yes, two nations famous for their appreciation of individual human life /s

Civilian disobedience can take many forms, not all of them involve an active confrontation with the government or police.

Unfortunately, from what it looks like, all everyday russians are living their normal everyday lives.

Unfortunately this means that the majority of the population either supports the war (especially as long as they’re winning) or are zombified enough not to care.

In either case, those are people that will be fine with being conscripted and sent to the front. As long as they’re not getting hurt, themselves, of course.

By all means, I’m not advocating russian style of bombing obviously civilian targets, but those russians are far from poor and powerless.

They do nothing because it’s uncomfortable.

I went for an ADHD evaluation and the doctor doing it said: “yeah, we should do autism next”

Not until they were stolen, I presume

They’re not. At the rate of their “winning” they will grind themselves into nothing and quite soon, hopefully.

See, ruzzia is claimed to be big and have lots of people. Big, true, people, not so much. Let’s have a calculation.

Their population is 140 million. Half are women. 70 million. 10% are the right age for war, but let’s count 20%. 14 million potential soldiers. Easily half of those are alcoholics or otherwise sick. 7 million. Then you actually need people to work at factories and what not, you cannot just send everyone to the war. Let’s say half, so we’re down to 3.5 million. Let’s assume they conscripted those. In the military you need cooks, drivers, mechanics, instructors etc. They say that in an army every frontline soldier is backed by 4-6 support personell, this is ruzzia, so let’s assume just one, even if that’s impossible. Now we’re down to 1.5 million soldiers.

They already lost close to a million (dead and wounded), yes some are back after recovering, but they’re close to literally run out of people who can support their “slow winning”. 40k Koreans? Not statistically significant. Weapons? They’re already using vintage shit because they lost the modern ones.

Yes, they’re still grinding but extremely slowly and their replenishment rate is nowhere close to be sustainable.

Pessimistically, Ukraine needs to hold till the end of 2026, optimistically, ruzzian aggression will collapse within the next 6 months.

Btw, it will not be gradual. They will pretend until the end and then it will be fairly quick. WW1 lasted 4 years and was a war of attrition, mostly static with a quick collapse in the last 6 months or so.

So no, they’re not winning. If anything, they already lost.

If we were to take over the entire connectivity capacity for Ukraine and all the citizens, — we wouldn’t be able to do that.

Luckily, that’s not needed. Let’s start with covering 50% of the frontline needs.

A hundred dictators is still better than a hundred and one dictator. When one approached a difficult task, it’s better to divide it into smaller tasks.

This difficulty to believe it’s actually quite fundamental to what’s happening.

If you like, I invite you to imagine what would be the explanation if these numbers were true. (Even adjusted for being dead and wounded)

101 artillery pieces is also quite something!

Nope. He just doesn’t care. That’s much worse.

Yeah, me too. Looks like this year will be make it or break it.

US’ help was critical so far and when it was paused for six months Ukraine noticed.

On the other hand, when it was paused, Ukraine noticed, but didn’t immediately fail. On top of that there were recent reports that Ukraine has enough supplies until summer. On top of that there Zelensky’s statement that Ukraine is now producing up to 30% of what it needs in the battlefield. And on top of that, while US help was significant, the contributions from other countries were also nontrivial and many of them invested into increasing production.

So all in all, US’ help was and stays important (even if it was quite often a little too late), but if it stops, I believe Ukraine can still win, but that will be quite bad for the States as Trump will not be able to claim this victory and also the military industry will lose quite a lot of advertisement when Ukraine wins with Owen, German, French, Korean or any other weapons.

Indeed, the point is that despite a “small” percentage, it’s not 50 times, nor 40 times, but at best 0.5 times longer. Which is still too much damage to Ukraine, but we still can win.

While this might sound like ruzzia can continue like this 50 times longer, the reality is quite different. Let’s have a look. https://tradingeconomics.com/russia/unemployment-rate

Their unemployment rate hit the historic low in September 2023. Yes, they still have 1.8 million unemployed, but since the number stayed the same while there’s a demand for human force, those are actually likely unemployable ones.

Before the war they had roughly double of that amount of unemployed ones.

So looks like

1. They already employed everybody they could
2. They already sent to war (and lost) everyone who wasn’t bringing much value

Add to that about quarter a million (assuming only 25% are men of that age) of who left (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_emigration_during_the_Russian_invasion_of_Ukraine)

So yeah, they only lost 2% of potential soldiers, but it appears that already since a year ago they lost all “spare” men and every single one they scrape now is a) likely not fit for military b) was involved in military economy

Yes, they can continue like this for a while, but the cost of each new soldier will be bigger and bigger, the quality and equipment lower and lower. And the system will snap way before all of them are “expended”. Ukraine says summer next year ( https://www.kyivpost.com/post/39020 ) given all this I tend to believe that forecast.