The reason Russia couldn’t handle Ukraine was only because of huge amounts of weapons coming from NATO, more than half from the USA, starting from long before the war started with huge numbers of MANPADS and ATGM’s . If NATO’s resolve weakens, countries will fall one by one to Russia, as its military and production capabilities are still many times larger than any country in Europe.

It won’t be long before the internet is just bots talking to each other and advertisers paying them to do so.

I vividly remember the Digg migration and Reddit is so very much like Digg these days.

The only ones who survive will be the ones who defect.

So you just had to wait 5 days

Would be nice but it’s not the case.

For me seems pretty par for the course in war. Some stuff happens, you get a report from someone who saw it, you get a video, then some more official accounts. That’s how a lot of things happen. If you want to use a very high burden of proof then you will have to wait a while to know what’s going on.

North Korean troops arriving at a training ground in Eastern Russia

Well this is true of most news sources. They find a source, make an eye catching headline and story about it. It’s for us to read things and weigh the biases and veracity of the information. I also wish it were otherwise, but it’s not.

As long as they can find soldiers and equipment somewhere and the economy doesn’t completely collapse, they can keep going. It will get harder every year but I think it could still go on for years more.

This is true for basically everything in a war zone. Some idea is better than no idea IMO. Yes, you have to piece together your own assessment from the data, but I’d prefer to have the data than not.

Dictatorships can take a lot of abuse before falling apart. Look at North Korea. People are starving and still that fuckers in power.

Poverty can explain most things.

Much of the respect we have for Russian education goes back to the excellent STEM education they had in the Soviet days. This has largely been eroded away in modern times, and much of the technology and infrastructure they have are being held together by Soviet educated older folks.

There are places that just have this too:

https://youtu.be/7kySzXIWf-4?si=Gmsf90GX0YblwdUs

He means they only know how to shit in a hole in the ground. That kind of poverty tends to not go hand in hand with the top educational institutions.

Yes but I doubt they are getting sent to Ukraine. The ethnic minority regions that Russia keeps dirt poor are sent 70:1 in some cases compared to recruits from Moscow. And I’d bet it’s a big ratio also between the well educated and poorly educated in Moscow too.

Ha. This is starting to get interesting.

That’s a pity. I work for a large US software company and after the war began, we made a decision to close all operations inside Russia.

We gave our employees in Russia a choice, they could either stay in Russia and get a pretty nice severance package, or they could move out of Russia and get a pretty nice repatriation package to the country of their choosing. Many went to expensive places like Sweden and got their packages converted to local pay with many months extra pay for moving expenses.

We didn’t fire any Russians living outside of Russia, of course. Assuming everyone from a country is a spy is pretty silly.

This shit isn’t world news. It’s local news. I don’t need to hear about every murder happening in every corner of the world.