That’s interesting. In one breath The Guardian is saying money but I guess what you’re showing me is The Guardian indicating it’s more of a production issue. I guess I could read the new link you’re sharing but I’m going to guess it doesn’t really cover how Russia is outpacing the western world.
The whole thesis of the article is basically that western private industry driven industrial complex can’t compete with Russian state driven industry because it’s not profitable for companies to do so. Russia was able to do things like plan for surge capacity and to keep large mothballed factories ready for use even though it didn’t make financial sense to do so. Western military defence contractors are not willing to do this because it affects the bottom line negatively.
Furthermore, as it becomes increasingly evident that Russia is winning the war and the whole thing isn’t going to last that much longer, the companies have zero incentive to invest into building large new facilities that will only be used for a short time.
This war is basically invalidating the whole free market model.
So basically another version of guerilla warfare, right? The US is trash at guerilla warfare. Thinking Afghanistan and Vietnam, off the top of my head. We don’t even fuck with Central America on the ground. Just economically. It sounds like Russia’s figured out a way to fight outside of the free market … which is honestly funny as fuck when I think about how shitty the defense contractors in the US are for perpetuating death for cash. And here’s Putin, perpetuating death for lesser.
The idea of running some sort of an insurgency has been floated around a lot. I agree that it’s a dumb idea and I imagine it will backfire spectacularly because Ukrainian nationalists will be resentful of the west when the war is lost. They will blame the west for not full supporting Ukraine and for using them as a battering ram against Russia. Europe might end up seeing a sharp rise in terrorism in the near future. Also worth remembering that a lot of the weapons sent to Ukraine ended up on the black market, and likely in the hands of far right cells across Europe.
Winning the war, that’s just fantasies. Even now when Ukraine can’t shoot close to what they need the Russians can’t make any remotely decisive offensives. They just don’t have the capability for that. Best they can hope for is to keep what they have gained and mine the hell out of all ground in-between the lines lol
They are winning the war tho, they’ve been destroying Ukraine military capabilities, creating buffer zones between russia - ukraine and even developing economic alliances with the rest of the world through BRICS. Meanwhile Ukraine economy gets worse by the day, same for Europe.
The Russians don’t need to make decisive offensives because those are very costly as Ukraine discovered last summer. What the Russians are doing is a slow push of attrition all across the front using their superior artillery and air force power. Ukraine and the west are very clearly not able to keep up with that. Now we’re already starting to see the signs of the Ukrainian army breaking under pressure with the loss of Avdevka being a prime example of that.
