Comment on Linus Torvalds affirms expulsion of Russian maintainers
rottingleaf@lemmy.world 2 months agoWe’ve seen missiles taking off and getting intact to all parts of Ukraine, then exploding.
Their precision was far worse than advertised by Russian state propaganda, but that’s irrelevant.
A nuclear weapon doesn’t have to be more precise than needed to hit an average county, in US terms.
Also the Russian economy has done nothing of the sort. Its good, nice things dependent on Western companies have died, say, cars production.
But even in their advertised form sanctions work on the span of decades, not years or months.
The performance of the Russian military was what you say in 2022, but now it is good enough for Russia to be making advances in Ukraine now. Ukraine is bleeding.
This is easily solvable by Western troops being sent to the grinder (one can do that unofficially - everyone does) on a bigger scale. For whatever reason this doesn’t happen.
About performance of the Russian military … I’m not sure you realize how much experience matters. Humans are soft, unreliable creatures. A learning structure created by most experienced, intelligent, honest humans will decay over time if it’s not checked against reality, that being war. And war against a military close to its equal, not against someone much weaker.
Russian military in 2022 was very different from what it is now. So was Ukrainian military, but like I said, Ukraine is bleeding.
My point is that both militaries in experience (not talking about anything else) will be among the best in the world when this war ends.
NeilBru@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Yes, I know how nuclear weapons work, and usually a MIRV delivers warheads to airburst over military bases and population centers.
I didn’t make this claim that the Russian economy has evaporated. The person I responded to did.
What I actually think is that Putin is largely fucked if he can’t convince Xi to create and enforce using an alternative to petro-dollars and SWIFT to BRICS.
Even if the North Koreans he’s recently imported help him take Kyiv, he will need money to keep his proverbial boot heel on a guaranteed drawn out Ukrainian insurgency that will never let his army sleep.
rottingleaf@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Drawn out insurgency is something that won’t happen the way you are talking about it, Chechens have already tried.
Admittedly, it was harder to feel compassion to them for the general population outside of Chechnya, because those “revered freedom fighters” even in the years of their “almost independence” would have people lynched on the streets, do kidnappings and slavery and what not. They were similar to ISIS.
Our world is, ahem, very complex. Propaganda may be clearly insincere, but match the general direction of what the population knows and how it feels.
Getting back to Ukraine - I feel that Putin’s goal is not occupying whole of Ukraine, it’s making it subservient.
About him being largely fucked - I remember people in 2008 saying that the whole of the Russian regime are dumb thieves and are largely fucked. I wouldn’t such things about people holding such amounts of power for so many years.