• Buelldozer@lemmy.today
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    2 months ago

    The education system collapsed with the death of the USSR so even before the War in Ukraine started they didn’t have enough Engineers and Technicians to make their country work. Their population has been declining for decades and COVID killed another Million. Then ~700,000 people, mostly men, fled the country when the War started. Then another ~500,000, again mostly men, fled the country when the first conscription was announced. Those 1.2 Million people, mostly men, were likely the ones with the education or trade skills that Russia could really use right now.

    If that wasn’t enough Russia has suffered over 600,000 casualties in Ukraine and is now seeking to replace losses with a 3rd round of conscription, so there goes another 130,000 people out of the labor pool.

    Russia is now eating its demographic and economic seed corn trying to support a war that has no possibility of a positive outcome. The death spiral is locked in and I’m predicting a collapse of the Russian state no later than 2035.