Ukraine's innovation and perseverance under extreme duress is inspirational. I hope they continue their path towards a stronger, more democratic and more corruption-free nation who can stand tall and resist tyrannical States like Russia
I'm really rooting for Ukraine here, and it looks like they are well on their way to succeeding pushing Russia out.
But the corruption issue ... for this particular problem, old habits unfortunately die really, really hard.
When corruption has become interwoven into the fabric of a society the way it has in Ukraine, and for such a long time, rooting it out will be very, very hard.
This kind of stuff typically requires two generations to die out and a super strong, long-term political will.
All countries distancing themselves from Russia and aligning with the EU have managed to reduce corruption. It's a winning formula, so will very likely happen with Ukraine too after the corrupting Russian influence is eradicated.
As someone whose worked as a consultant for the EU for years, eventually realizing who the sales people of my company were (... related to), I wonder what you mean. I really wonder what you mean.
Government spending is how the Brussels economy works (there's technically 11 and in practice about 7 different governments, all of whom have similar needs), and you get government spending assigned to you by "knowing" government deciders ...
I thought I was clear? I mean the western corruption isn't in any shape or form comparable to Russian corruption, and how it pervaded all the Eastern Bloc. It does take long time to root it out, as it affects and degrades the whole society. You really, really can't compare it to what we have in the west, and everybody is better off when they get to escape it.
It helps to understand how Russian-style corruption works.
The system there is entirely hierarchical. Think organized Mafia as seen in movies, but but much wider both vertically and horizontally.
In that system, as an individual, you have only two path in life: poverty no matter your educational level and talent, or having a patron within the corrupt hierarchy.
If you get a patron, your life is going to be good as long as you remain in his good graces, and he remains on the good grades of his patron, and so on, all the way up to Putin. If any link in the chain above you breaks, you're back to poverty. So you now have a whole set of duties toward your entire "clan", starting with your patron and going all the way up.
There's no justice or fairness anywhere in this system, only loyalty, and the ocasional disloyalty disputes as the upper layers fight for domination.
And there's no private property either. All property is Putin's, who grants access to slices of it to his immediate underlings, who in turn grant access to theirs, and so on, until you too get yours. That grant can be revoked at any time, for any reason whatsoever.
Compared to that, corruption in normal countries is extremely simple, generally having one layer or two, not being so comprehensive that it encompasses the whole of society, and not structured in such a way that your life depends on it, to the point that in most countries you can rise and prosper in society without taking part in corruption, even if it's harder to do so.
In Russia and its satellites this simply isn't the case.
Poland, while not entirely corruption-free, has managed very well after the transition from Russian-dominated communism. For reasons I still do not understand, organized crime was rooted out in the 90s, and gambling restricted to almost nothingness (gambling is always tied to organized crime).
Not perfect, but doing pretty well, and the effects can be seen.
Former Yugoslavia. From what I hear from my parents' generation, you couldn't do anything or it would take a serious amount of time without bakshish, today it' pretty frowned upon, at least in the EU countries. Serbia and Bosnia are a different game...
> Any examples of nations that succeeded in this regard? (currently corruption-free states)
It's all a matter of degrees of course, but Singapore and Switzerland spring to mind.
I'm not claiming either is corruption-free (there is no such thing unfortunately), but in terms of comparables, it's night and day between these nations and many other countries.
> corruption has become interwoven into the fabric of a society
It is part of every society, but Ukrainians and the west perceive it as a problem for Ukraine while, say, Danes do not, although Denmark [1] is utterly corrupt in its own ways.
Corruption is problem only for states that underwent recent political transitions and where class struggle has not been a thing for various reasons. Ukraine improves quickly, but signs of improvement are not in the corruption perception indices but in people manifesting their opinions on the streets, like in the recent ousting, then re-hiring of the Defense Minister.
When socialism gets a chance to push its culture into a society, it really all goes down the drain hard and fast, they are great at using natural circumstances to push a revolution, but what they do with the conquered societies is beyond horrifying. The Inter-generational damage in corruption and zero-sum distrust is staggering.
What Ukrainian software and hardware engineers are achieving, with very significant European support, is nothing short of inspirational. Within four years, under very tough circumstances, they have invented and deployed at immense scale all kinds of systems and technologies that previously didn't exist, allowing them to conduct warfare via remote control and spare their very limited manpower as much as possible. The level of innovation doesn't get the recognition or study it deserves.
I think attacks on WB have other reasons rather than milimtary equipment. You can find drone parts on any marketplace: Ozon, WB, Aliexpress Russia and Avito of course.
And Avito in this case would be your first target if only Avito was not a craigslist "alternative".
The real reason for attacking WB is that it has deeper connection to Putins pals and has larger logistic centers with lots of goods. WB won't be able to compensate this for the sellers and this will hurt a lot.
It won't metter much for military oprations (if you are a soldier you ca just order from Avito or Ali) but this can disrupt internal logistics and hurt the economy greatly.
I think it's a way of inflicting a lot of pain on the Russian population in a very public way, without actually killing lots of Russian civilians. Obviously it's in no way bloodless, but inflicting casualties is not really the aim.
Even after 4 years of war, when the conflict directly affects them, Russian civilians seem genuinely bewildered. They have difficulty comprehending why this is happening to them. They've hardly felt they've been in a war at all, for them it's mainly been an economic downturn.
This is all good news, but one must remember that airpower alone does not win wars.
> Overall then, the promise of strategic airpower, that it could win wars entirely or primarily from the skies, turns out so far to have been largely a mirage
> Instead, efforts to use strategic bombing to coerce surrender have repeatedly shown that being bombed hardens civilian resolve to continue resisting. By contrast, bombing can have some effect on industrial production, but only in wars where that production matters and is available to be bombed
> Crucially, the coercive effect of these bombing efforts is not only limited, but it is also not delivered via popular will but rather through the political calculus of the leadership
> By contrast, bombing can have some effect on industrial production, but only in wars where that production matters and is available to be bombed
The russian oil refineries that have been very successfully attacked seem to meet the definition of this. One obviously useful thing for the Ukrainians to do is to cut off the supply of refined diesel and petrol to the Russian army's vehicles.
If this also has the effect of causing significant pain to the russian domestic economy (lack of fuel for general civilian vehicle uses of all types), it has the additional benefit of being a very real and public pain point causing dissatisfaction with the average russian civilian.
Indeed. And bringing the attacks deep in to Russia may embarrass the regime and may have led Putin to (allegedly) stage a frontline visit [0].
And yet we must never forget that there is no such thing as a wunder waffe and reducing German cities to rubble did not break the civilian resolve.
Throughout the Russian invasion of Ukraine I saw a common pattern: one side gains a technological or doctrinal advantage, may or may not make progress, the other side adapts and the situation levels out again.
Thing is - there's no need to break the Russian civilian resolve, because nobody has the goal of invading and occupying Russia. It just needs to become far too painful for Russia to continue on its present course of action.
Let's say theoretically that Ukraine successfully takes 90% of Russia's oil refineries out of action and this crashes the domestic petrol/diesel supply so thoroughly that plowing, seeding and harvesting with mechanized agriculture equipment also crashes in Russia. Or there is a breakdown of cold chain transport warehousing/trucking and grocery supply due to lack of diesel fuel for all of the trucking. Could it result in a collapse of the russian state and civil war? Very possibly.
The general point on air power is a real thing, but I don't think we can directly conclude that bombing will always harden civilian resolve. It very much depends on the population's pain tolerance.
In Vietnam when the NVA attacked a chain of US military bases simultaneously they lost every single battle, by a huge margin. It wasn't even close, the USA suffered about a quarter as many casualties, yet it broke the back of US commitment to the war. That's because the NVA could take 110k casualties and maintain their commitment, but for the USA about 25k casualties was intolerable.
On the battlefield Russia is losing masses of troops, but as Vlad Vexler points out, because these are mostly essentially paid mercenaries this is seen by the Russian population as a transactional risk they are taking.
Direct pain for the general civilian population is another matter. Most Russians seem oblivious to the fact they are actually in a war with a neighbouring country. They seem utterly bewildered by the fact Ukraine is even attacking Russia at all, it doesn't seem to make any sense to them. This is why the government has done everything they can to avoid resorting to a wave of conscription, they want the whole thing to seem very distant and abstract.
I think the pain tolerance of the Russian population over this is minimal, bringing it home to them is really important. The only thing is they have no accessible ways to translate that into political action, but if they are ever going to wake up, prods like this play an important role IMHO.
Your point about avoiding conscription and using contract troops (mercenaries) or undesirables is supported by War on the Rocks' reporting. And who knows, maybe setting the periphery of St Petersburg and Moscow on fire made the war very real to the otherwise insulated cities. One can hope.
And yet, the lower bound of Russian deaths (not casualties) is 230k [0], a speculated upper bound 500k. In comparison, the US counts 250k military deaths in the European theatre of WW2 and the UK 383k. [1] If true, those are staggering losses for Russia, even when controlling for population sizes. I am not convinced that Russia will buckle anytime soon, even under crippling long-term costs.
I wish for a swift and decisive victory for Ukraine.
> They seem utterly bewildered by the fact Ukraine is even attacking Russia at all, it doesn't seem to make any sense to them.
There was a recent comment chain on HN that showcased very well the pretzel that a surprisingly large number of Russians are turning themselves into to "explain" the events: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48876070
They have been propagandized to such extent that they just cannot accept the reality even when it becomes completely undeniable. Ukraine blows up something near them in Russia, and they go completely off the rails explaining how this has nothing to do with Russia nor Ukraine, but is some IMF-Blackrock-NWO scheme against Slavs, with references to the 1999 staged terrorist attacks in Russia that solidified Putin's rise to power. The war isn't real and a "third party" is in charge of both militaries and using them to play mind games on Russians to coerce them into accepting "globalist plans".
It's utterly fascinating to observe the breakdown of sense of reality in real time as lifelong propaganda narratives (like the might of the Russian army) turn out to be lies and the world they thought they lived in turns out to be a mirage. And it's remarkable that these conspiracy theories are not coming from central figures, such as a small circle of social media grifters (vaccine-autism, chemtrails, flat earth, etc), but appear from the grassroots, which is why there are so many variations. Many millions of people are still trying to make sense of these events within a propagandized worldview that they cannot let go of.
hyperreality and "the russian firehose" of propaganda means they're constantly blasted with distractions + real and false explanations.
a busy person doesn't have the time to evaluate all of these and ultimately slips into intellectual shot-cuts, which is usually defaulting to a curator or aggregator they trust (which is also easy to control), or just rationalizing whatever stream of BS they feel most comfortable with
similar methods were every effective in the US' Iraq/Afghanistan efforts, where the busy population was too distracted by mustache memes and Imagine Dragons and Fox News to mount any serious intellectual discussion; it was a volunteer-only war, and unless you have some skin-in-the-game already you didn't think about it. Why get upset about Korignal Valley when the new season of The Walking Dead is on?
the guiding intellectual stream of the Russian government is Dugan, as best exemplified in Foundations of Geopolitics.
Dugan is unambiguously hard right and has intellectual ties to other openly fascist types. His ideology is explicitly ethno-centric and has a strong resemblance to classical Fascism (in the Ur-Fascism sense), and a looser one to German-style National-Socialist thought, esp. as it relates to Russian ethnic domination of Europe
Also “ethnocentric”. But as usual, we first need to have a shared definition of fascism. If we use Eco’s Ur-fascism, many aspects are there (the moral and cultural decadence of the West, which is both too strong and too weak)
For not being fascist, the propaganda and general 'optics' and messages coming out of Russia sure look a lot like Germany in the 1930s, and Ukraine is basically the same playbook as Sudetenland - both started with a claim that a suppressed German/Russian minority must be protected from atrocities by the Czechoslovakian/Ukrainian 'aggressors' by integrating those lands into the 'Reich'. Thankfully Putin is by far not as successful bringing a much smaller country to its knees than Hitler was.
Also, most recent developments on the battlefield are driven by Ukraine's own innovations - better drones, interceptor drones, their own cruise missiles, etc. All the lessons are being absorbed by Europe and the US.
By far most credit should go to the Ukrainians. They are the ones under attack, they are the ones defending democracy and freedom, and they are the ones who are resisting the Russians against all odds.
The US is providing some help but less so than Europe and much less so than what Ukraine is contributing.
And by saying "to the last Ukrainian" you're spreading a Russian-propaganda narrative. This slogan has been repeatedly used by Russian officials (including Putin, Peskov, Zakharova, Matviyenko), it's a recurring theme in the Russian information space and it's used by Russian bots.
Yes, but he has access to free information, so can easily check what is the current and historical Russian contribution to the world. At that point, siding with Russia is of course an active stance of supporting the crimes of Russia. Patriotism is not a valid excuse if your motherland is always the aggressor.
Well, true, Russia has a long history so I was overly broad. Aggressor in almost all conflicts is more accurate.
In WW2 it was the second major aggressor of course. WW1 Germany declared war before Russia invaded, so debatable. Wasn't an aggressor in the Napoleonic wars as far as my history knowledge serves me.
Funny, it's new Ukrainian minister of defense who has proclaimed "This [Russia] is a nation, along with its leadership, that has no right to exist."[0], but it's Russia who is in the "fascist form"
There's plenty of screenshots and info online showing that wildberries was (and still is) stocking and selling single use munition FPV parts for use by russians building drones for their own offensive military operation against Ukraine. If you turn your warehouse into a storage depot for military equipment don't be surprised if the country you've invaded bombs it.
The ukrainian leadership has been quite clear that attacks such as this against valid munitions-warehousing facilities will cease once the russians withdraw from the territory they have temporarily occupied and back to their original borders.
If you're actually calling the Ukrainians, defending their own country against invasion, "terrorists", at this point you're just parroting RT and Sputnik English-language talking points.
> Wonder if we'd be as pumped about it here in the US if Iran managed to carry out similar attacks intended to ideologically attack and manipulate civilians by terror
You mean if Iran did what the US are doing? I am guessing the US would cry foul and say it was unfair. Maybe follow it up and say something like "if they don't stop we will erase their civilisation"
It is a civilian infrastructure target, which is being used by the military for storage, warehousing and distribution. Items such as drone parts, drone release mechanisms for payloads, fiber optic spools, body armor gear and the logistics network.
If US was using walmart to supply troops, even if its mostly used by civilians it could make it a legitimate target
This is a slippery slop. You could justify glassing 100% of Israeli's populated area by this logic.
>If US was using walmart to supply troops, even if its mostly used by civilians it could make it a legitimate target
RIP all the Walmarts within a 20 min drive of a US military base but most of all RIP to the Ford dealerships for your role in supplying young enlisted gentlemen with logistical materiel (Mustangs)
This is war, not a slope. Escalations happen in every conflict this is the next step. And why bring Israel into this? Especially when they glassed Palestine...
Russia has been doing the same for years - especially trying to destroy all electrical and heating infrastructure during Winter. Ukraine has the right to retaliate, now that they're able to.
To add to this, Russia recently attacked Ukraine's post and parcel infrastructure (1).
Does this not very simply constitute yet another large scale attack by Russia on civilian infrastructure?
But mostly, this site in Russia is a legitimate target because it supplies the Russian military.
> intended to ideologically attack and manipulate civilians by terror
Do you mean ... rid Russian civilians of the notion that they can ignore the war that Russia started, because it's happening "over there, not here" ?
Well, yes, that too. No doubt the civilians are complaining now that it's not fair. It wasn't fair when the missiles went the other way, but they could ignore that. Public opinion matters, less so in Russia but it still matters.
You obviously wouldn't, since it would be happening to you. It's war though. We don't like to talk about it but WW2 was won in parts by fire bombing major cities all over Germany. It didn't start that way, in the beginning the targets were mainly military, but as the war went on, things changed. I am not as familiar with the war in the pacific, but we all know that two nuclear bombs were used to avoid an invasion of Japan.
That being said the modern war logisitcs (and economy) are sort if wild. Imagine the USA and Canada were in a land war and you needed parts for a bunch of drones. Rather than turning to your goverment or official military industrial complex, you'd turn to Temu resellers on Amazon to get your fiberoptic spool. Which means it's a legitimate target, but I suspect that it's also a great way to impact a lot of Russian citizens without fire bombing them.
It's OK, there is no war anyways, it's just a short lived infrastructure restructuration operation on foreign territory, the US is doing the same right now so it seems to be allowed.
The laws of war apply at all times to all belligerents, and the enemy breaking them does not justify breaking them in turn.
If the current global crisis ever ends, how the world deals with human rights violations on both sides of this conflict will reveal whether any of this actually matters, or whether it’s all just a slugfest where the only objective is to determine who comes out on top.
There's no such thing as "both sides" here. It's a fundamentally flawed argument in this war. One country launched an unprovoked full scale war on a much smaller country with the goal of a colonial conquest (hopefully that's very clear by now). The amount of atrocities it has already done against Ukraine and its people will never be outweighted by pretty much anything Ukraine can do in the future as a part of its literal survival efforts.
Besides this, the laws only exist when there's something to enforce them. Has anything (apart from Ukraine's "kinetic sanctions") been enforcing much on the invader to make them obey those "laws"? At least treating POWs with dignity (like Ukraine generally does btw) and not putting them through the Gulag system that russia has revived with newfound cruelty?
Please country a only fight with this type of attacks so that the people you kill are only people forced to fight against you to protect themselves but not the civilians.
War is war. You kill and destroy a country thats it.
Its not a conflict? Russia/Putin started to attack Ukraine. Thats it, russia is bad, ukraine is not.
Oh no don't use cluster bombs they are bad / different bad than normal bombs.
Btw. if countries like the USA wouldn't create cluster bombs, Saudi Arabia couldn't use them against civilians.
Early in the war there have been discussions about this and the rumblings were that Russia wanted to use tactical nukes on the battlefield, but China said "no".
During the past winters Russia was deliberately bombing energy infra in Ukraine with civilians left freezing in their apartments. I know that two wrongs don't make a right, but why should we expect Ukraine to fight cleanly against an invading force 5 times its size and resources, which has been obliterating its cities, occupied 20% of its land and committed every war crime imaginable?
Pretty much yes. Russia Launched a massive invasion on a smaller country and they are fighting back. America did the same with Iran. Same as the United arab would did against Israel. Twice.
You're not the bad guys, there's a huge difference between the attack vs Iran and the attack vs Ukraine. Iran is an authoritarian regime which repeatedly said that Israel should cease to exist, has killed tens of thousands of their own people, aims to obtain nuclear weapons and supports 4+ terrorist organizations in the Middle East.
> So abducting the leader of one country (against international law) and killing the leader of another country (against international law) is fine?
Depends on the leader and the country. Abducting or killing Hitler would be fine. The problem in this case was that killing the leader isn't enough to change the regime. But the regime is objectively evil and much more so than the US.
> After a certain country shredded a nuclear deal and made it increasingly hard for international organizations to do inspections.
Fair point, but the issue with the previous deal was that it forced Iran just to pause the program. Now they're possibly invulnerable and it may be the case that there's no way to stop them from developing nukes. The regime should have been removed when Iran didn't have thousands of ballistic missiles.
I agree with the evilness of the regime. However, the problem is that when individual countries start to decide who is evil and who not, countries just declare someone evil when it is convenient to them ("there are nazis in Ukraine!") and you have a pretense to invade a country.
International law and organizations exist to avoid this issue. But the US and Russia (and maybe China) have been systematically undermining international institutions because they like to be able to attack someone at their convenience and not be held responsible for it.
Not sure why Ukraine should be singled out and berated for attacks on what are essentially dual use facilities. At least Ukraine doesn't do obious terror attacks against civilians like Russia does.
It does, but I don’t think the Ukrainians will get much flak for it. Bombing consumer goods distributors doesn’t worry people as much as bombing food distributors or chemical warfare on farms (eg Agent Orange), and besides that direct strategic bombing of civilian targets was heavily used in WW2 without much backlash. I think they’d get a lot of flak if they started doing that.
"A search for “military supplies” on the Wildberries website Thursday yielded over 78,000 items, including body armor, first aid kits and rations. The site also offers drone equipment, including FPV goggles and kit that can be used on the battlefield."
At the time I posted my comment their post was down-voted and it was obvious why so but articulating that is verboten? Oh dearie me, whatever shall I do.
I know about the guidelines, I've been on here since 2010, like yourself.
Russia will cave in economically any minute now, they’ve been on the brink of economic collapse since March 2022. In fact rural Russia is poorer than Africa, so the sanctions are definitely working.
anyway russia has a high GDP for sure but guess what it did the last 4 years? It threw that money into ukraine without getting anything from it.
No new schools, no teachers / educated kids, no housing, no streets. Instead taking out massive loans, reducing their reservers.
And now no one is willing to buy russian bonds.
Russia is hurting itself A LOT and is now going after retirement money.
Russia HAS to start selling oil again but has to spend a lot of time and money on fixing what got destroyed while the war is still ongoing and the tacktik clearly shows how well it works. Ukraine will not stop tomorrow just because.
As long as russia is not winning or stoping this, its very very expensive for everyone in russia.
Collapse no clue how you would define it but at least from a world power russia already collapsed. The only two things keeping russia at this 'level' is their oil and the nuclear threat.
Well, "news streets" just sound weird. If you build a new apartment building or a whole block (which is now it is done these days in Russia, especially Moscow) - you build a street unless there is already one.
And there is no point in a random new street. Like... for what?
Ukraine's innovation and perseverance under extreme duress is inspirational. I hope they continue their path towards a stronger, more democratic and more corruption-free nation who can stand tall and resist tyrannical States like Russia
> and more corruption-free nation
I'm really rooting for Ukraine here, and it looks like they are well on their way to succeeding pushing Russia out.
But the corruption issue ... for this particular problem, old habits unfortunately die really, really hard.
When corruption has become interwoven into the fabric of a society the way it has in Ukraine, and for such a long time, rooting it out will be very, very hard.
This kind of stuff typically requires two generations to die out and a super strong, long-term political will.
I hope they'll pull it off, but it won't be easy.
Any examples of nations that succeeded in this regard? (currently corruption-free states)
All countries distancing themselves from Russia and aligning with the EU have managed to reduce corruption. It's a winning formula, so will very likely happen with Ukraine too after the corrupting Russian influence is eradicated.
As someone whose worked as a consultant for the EU for years, eventually realizing who the sales people of my company were (... related to), I wonder what you mean. I really wonder what you mean.
Government spending is how the Brussels economy works (there's technically 11 and in practice about 7 different governments, all of whom have similar needs), and you get government spending assigned to you by "knowing" government deciders ...
> I wonder what you mean
I thought I was clear? I mean the western corruption isn't in any shape or form comparable to Russian corruption, and how it pervaded all the Eastern Bloc. It does take long time to root it out, as it affects and degrades the whole society. You really, really can't compare it to what we have in the west, and everybody is better off when they get to escape it.
The level of cluelessness contained within this comment is truly incredible.
Look at the rest of the world sometimes instead of just navel-gazing. Have you ever traveled outside the EU?
It helps to understand how Russian-style corruption works.
The system there is entirely hierarchical. Think organized Mafia as seen in movies, but but much wider both vertically and horizontally.
In that system, as an individual, you have only two path in life: poverty no matter your educational level and talent, or having a patron within the corrupt hierarchy.
If you get a patron, your life is going to be good as long as you remain in his good graces, and he remains on the good grades of his patron, and so on, all the way up to Putin. If any link in the chain above you breaks, you're back to poverty. So you now have a whole set of duties toward your entire "clan", starting with your patron and going all the way up.
There's no justice or fairness anywhere in this system, only loyalty, and the ocasional disloyalty disputes as the upper layers fight for domination.
And there's no private property either. All property is Putin's, who grants access to slices of it to his immediate underlings, who in turn grant access to theirs, and so on, until you too get yours. That grant can be revoked at any time, for any reason whatsoever.
Compared to that, corruption in normal countries is extremely simple, generally having one layer or two, not being so comprehensive that it encompasses the whole of society, and not structured in such a way that your life depends on it, to the point that in most countries you can rise and prosper in society without taking part in corruption, even if it's harder to do so.
In Russia and its satellites this simply isn't the case.
Poland, while not entirely corruption-free, has managed very well after the transition from Russian-dominated communism. For reasons I still do not understand, organized crime was rooted out in the 90s, and gambling restricted to almost nothingness (gambling is always tied to organized crime).
Not perfect, but doing pretty well, and the effects can be seen.
Part of the reason was putting into law the option to become a crown witness, famously used by Jarosław "Masa" Sokołowski.
In my view what really did them in was Poland's EU accession later on. It gave young men alternatives to joining organised crime as foot soldiers.
Of course many criminals emigrated as well, but on foreign turf they weren't nearly as successful.
Right now it's demographics, with the average age of a felon going from ~20 to ~34 between 2000 and now. These people focus on e-commerce scams.
Former Yugoslavia. From what I hear from my parents' generation, you couldn't do anything or it would take a serious amount of time without bakshish, today it' pretty frowned upon, at least in the EU countries. Serbia and Bosnia are a different game...
> Any examples of nations that succeeded in this regard? (currently corruption-free states)
It's all a matter of degrees of course, but Singapore and Switzerland spring to mind.
I'm not claiming either is corruption-free (there is no such thing unfortunately), but in terms of comparables, it's night and day between these nations and many other countries.
> corruption has become interwoven into the fabric of a society
It is part of every society, but Ukrainians and the west perceive it as a problem for Ukraine while, say, Danes do not, although Denmark [1] is utterly corrupt in its own ways.
Corruption is problem only for states that underwent recent political transitions and where class struggle has not been a thing for various reasons. Ukraine improves quickly, but signs of improvement are not in the corruption perception indices but in people manifesting their opinions on the streets, like in the recent ousting, then re-hiring of the Defense Minister.
[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt32482555/
Corruption in Ukraine is democratized; corruption in the EU is only for the rich and powerful.
This is another way to put it, yes.
When socialism gets a chance to push its culture into a society, it really all goes down the drain hard and fast, they are great at using natural circumstances to push a revolution, but what they do with the conquered societies is beyond horrifying. The Inter-generational damage in corruption and zero-sum distrust is staggering.
What Ukrainian software and hardware engineers are achieving, with very significant European support, is nothing short of inspirational. Within four years, under very tough circumstances, they have invented and deployed at immense scale all kinds of systems and technologies that previously didn't exist, allowing them to conduct warfare via remote control and spare their very limited manpower as much as possible. The level of innovation doesn't get the recognition or study it deserves.
https://wildberriesbingo.com
Based on this, if I were working at the White Pillars WB, I would find another job and not go into work anymore.
I think attacks on WB have other reasons rather than milimtary equipment. You can find drone parts on any marketplace: Ozon, WB, Aliexpress Russia and Avito of course.
And Avito in this case would be your first target if only Avito was not a craigslist "alternative".
The real reason for attacking WB is that it has deeper connection to Putins pals and has larger logistic centers with lots of goods. WB won't be able to compensate this for the sellers and this will hurt a lot.
It won't metter much for military oprations (if you are a soldier you ca just order from Avito or Ali) but this can disrupt internal logistics and hurt the economy greatly.
I think it's a way of inflicting a lot of pain on the Russian population in a very public way, without actually killing lots of Russian civilians. Obviously it's in no way bloodless, but inflicting casualties is not really the aim.
Even after 4 years of war, when the conflict directly affects them, Russian civilians seem genuinely bewildered. They have difficulty comprehending why this is happening to them. They've hardly felt they've been in a war at all, for them it's mainly been an economic downturn.
This is all good news, but one must remember that airpower alone does not win wars.
> Overall then, the promise of strategic airpower, that it could win wars entirely or primarily from the skies, turns out so far to have been largely a mirage
> Instead, efforts to use strategic bombing to coerce surrender have repeatedly shown that being bombed hardens civilian resolve to continue resisting. By contrast, bombing can have some effect on industrial production, but only in wars where that production matters and is available to be bombed
> Crucially, the coercive effect of these bombing efforts is not only limited, but it is also not delivered via popular will but rather through the political calculus of the leadership
https://acoup.blog/2022/10/21/collections-strategic-airpower...
> By contrast, bombing can have some effect on industrial production, but only in wars where that production matters and is available to be bombed
The russian oil refineries that have been very successfully attacked seem to meet the definition of this. One obviously useful thing for the Ukrainians to do is to cut off the supply of refined diesel and petrol to the Russian army's vehicles.
If this also has the effect of causing significant pain to the russian domestic economy (lack of fuel for general civilian vehicle uses of all types), it has the additional benefit of being a very real and public pain point causing dissatisfaction with the average russian civilian.
Indeed. And bringing the attacks deep in to Russia may embarrass the regime and may have led Putin to (allegedly) stage a frontline visit [0].
And yet we must never forget that there is no such thing as a wunder waffe and reducing German cities to rubble did not break the civilian resolve.
Throughout the Russian invasion of Ukraine I saw a common pattern: one side gains a technological or doctrinal advantage, may or may not make progress, the other side adapts and the situation levels out again.
0 - https://xcancel.com/Gerashchenko_en/status/20733425637973812...
Thing is - there's no need to break the Russian civilian resolve, because nobody has the goal of invading and occupying Russia. It just needs to become far too painful for Russia to continue on its present course of action.
Let's say theoretically that Ukraine successfully takes 90% of Russia's oil refineries out of action and this crashes the domestic petrol/diesel supply so thoroughly that plowing, seeding and harvesting with mechanized agriculture equipment also crashes in Russia. Or there is a breakdown of cold chain transport warehousing/trucking and grocery supply due to lack of diesel fuel for all of the trucking. Could it result in a collapse of the russian state and civil war? Very possibly.
> And yet we must never forget that there is no such thing as a wunder waffe and reducing German cities to rubble did not break the civilian resolve.
perhaps not, but exhaustion did lead to the Russian Revolution, and toppling the Tsar is what the AFU is explicitly hoping for...
The general point on air power is a real thing, but I don't think we can directly conclude that bombing will always harden civilian resolve. It very much depends on the population's pain tolerance.
In Vietnam when the NVA attacked a chain of US military bases simultaneously they lost every single battle, by a huge margin. It wasn't even close, the USA suffered about a quarter as many casualties, yet it broke the back of US commitment to the war. That's because the NVA could take 110k casualties and maintain their commitment, but for the USA about 25k casualties was intolerable.
On the battlefield Russia is losing masses of troops, but as Vlad Vexler points out, because these are mostly essentially paid mercenaries this is seen by the Russian population as a transactional risk they are taking.
Direct pain for the general civilian population is another matter. Most Russians seem oblivious to the fact they are actually in a war with a neighbouring country. They seem utterly bewildered by the fact Ukraine is even attacking Russia at all, it doesn't seem to make any sense to them. This is why the government has done everything they can to avoid resorting to a wave of conscription, they want the whole thing to seem very distant and abstract.
I think the pain tolerance of the Russian population over this is minimal, bringing it home to them is really important. The only thing is they have no accessible ways to translate that into political action, but if they are ever going to wake up, prods like this play an important role IMHO.
Your point about avoiding conscription and using contract troops (mercenaries) or undesirables is supported by War on the Rocks' reporting. And who knows, maybe setting the periphery of St Petersburg and Moscow on fire made the war very real to the otherwise insulated cities. One can hope.
And yet, the lower bound of Russian deaths (not casualties) is 230k [0], a speculated upper bound 500k. In comparison, the US counts 250k military deaths in the European theatre of WW2 and the UK 383k. [1] If true, those are staggering losses for Russia, even when controlling for population sizes. I am not convinced that Russia will buckle anytime soon, even under crippling long-term costs.
I wish for a swift and decisive victory for Ukraine.
0 - https://200.zona.media/
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties
They have been propagandized to such extent that they just cannot accept the reality even when it becomes completely undeniable. Ukraine blows up something near them in Russia, and they go completely off the rails explaining how this has nothing to do with Russia nor Ukraine, but is some IMF-Blackrock-NWO scheme against Slavs, with references to the 1999 staged terrorist attacks in Russia that solidified Putin's rise to power. The war isn't real and a "third party" is in charge of both militaries and using them to play mind games on Russians to coerce them into accepting "globalist plans".
It's utterly fascinating to observe the breakdown of sense of reality in real time as lifelong propaganda narratives (like the might of the Russian army) turn out to be lies and the world they thought they lived in turns out to be a mirage. And it's remarkable that these conspiracy theories are not coming from central figures, such as a small circle of social media grifters (vaccine-autism, chemtrails, flat earth, etc), but appear from the grassroots, which is why there are so many variations. Many millions of people are still trying to make sense of these events within a propagandized worldview that they cannot let go of.
hyperreality and "the russian firehose" of propaganda means they're constantly blasted with distractions + real and false explanations.
a busy person doesn't have the time to evaluate all of these and ultimately slips into intellectual shot-cuts, which is usually defaulting to a curator or aggregator they trust (which is also easy to control), or just rationalizing whatever stream of BS they feel most comfortable with
similar methods were every effective in the US' Iraq/Afghanistan efforts, where the busy population was too distracted by mustache memes and Imagine Dragons and Fox News to mount any serious intellectual discussion; it was a volunteer-only war, and unless you have some skin-in-the-game already you didn't think about it. Why get upset about Korignal Valley when the new season of The Walking Dead is on?
Good job, Ukraine! Russia must be destroyed in its current fascist form.
I don’t think it’s fascist? More of a kleptocratic dictatorship.
I agree with the general sentiment though!
the guiding intellectual stream of the Russian government is Dugan, as best exemplified in Foundations of Geopolitics.
Dugan is unambiguously hard right and has intellectual ties to other openly fascist types. His ideology is explicitly ethno-centric and has a strong resemblance to classical Fascism (in the Ur-Fascism sense), and a looser one to German-style National-Socialist thought, esp. as it relates to Russian ethnic domination of Europe
Also “ethnocentric”. But as usual, we first need to have a shared definition of fascism. If we use Eco’s Ur-fascism, many aspects are there (the moral and cultural decadence of the West, which is both too strong and too weak)
For not being fascist, the propaganda and general 'optics' and messages coming out of Russia sure look a lot like Germany in the 1930s, and Ukraine is basically the same playbook as Sudetenland - both started with a claim that a suppressed German/Russian minority must be protected from atrocities by the Czechoslovakian/Ukrainian 'aggressors' by integrating those lands into the 'Reich'. Thankfully Putin is by far not as successful bringing a much smaller country to its knees than Hitler was.
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Europe provided the vast majority of the funding: https://www.kielinstitut.de/topics/war-against-ukraine/ukrai...
Also, most recent developments on the battlefield are driven by Ukraine's own innovations - better drones, interceptor drones, their own cruise missiles, etc. All the lessons are being absorbed by Europe and the US.
By far most credit should go to the Ukrainians. They are the ones under attack, they are the ones defending democracy and freedom, and they are the ones who are resisting the Russians against all odds.
>by Ukraine's own innovations
Like this? "British coder who revolutionised Ukraine’s drone army on paternity leave" [0]
[0] https://www.thetimes.com/world/russia-ukraine-war/article/ru...
The US is providing some help but less so than Europe and much less so than what Ukraine is contributing.
And by saying "to the last Ukrainian" you're spreading a Russian-propaganda narrative. This slogan has been repeatedly used by Russian officials (including Putin, Peskov, Zakharova, Matviyenko), it's a recurring theme in the Russian information space and it's used by Russian bots.
He's spreading overtly obvious Russian propaganda, he's clearly very aware of it and just prefers to take the side of evil.
Well, he is russian. It's pretty obvious to any other russian simply from the way he composes his replies.
Yes, but he has access to free information, so can easily check what is the current and historical Russian contribution to the world. At that point, siding with Russia is of course an active stance of supporting the crimes of Russia. Patriotism is not a valid excuse if your motherland is always the aggressor.
>is always the aggressor
Well, lets's be honets: not always. But, yes, he's a your typical example of a paid bot or a genuine low IQ nationalist. Quite a few of them here.
Well, true, Russia has a long history so I was overly broad. Aggressor in almost all conflicts is more accurate.
In WW2 it was the second major aggressor of course. WW1 Germany declared war before Russia invaded, so debatable. Wasn't an aggressor in the Napoleonic wars as far as my history knowledge serves me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_of_Troubles and Polish invasion it the most notable event I guess.
But - sure, in most other cases Russia in either an invader or a part of a larger conflict for influence, like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Years%27_War or Napoleonic Wars.
I am not Russian. Born in England, live in Ireland.
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Funny, it's new Ukrainian minister of defense who has proclaimed "This [Russia] is a nation, along with its leadership, that has no right to exist."[0], but it's Russia who is in the "fascist form"
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8DZMpx--UA
It would be like calling Roosevelt a fascist because he said "Nazi Germany as a nation has no right to exist". It's ridiculous.
>It would be like calling Roosevelt a fascist because he said "Nazi Germany as a nation has no right to exist".
"Nazi" is doing all the heavy work in your argument, separating German people and Nazi ideology.
There is no such separation in Ukrainian defense minister's words.
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There's plenty of screenshots and info online showing that wildberries was (and still is) stocking and selling single use munition FPV parts for use by russians building drones for their own offensive military operation against Ukraine. If you turn your warehouse into a storage depot for military equipment don't be surprised if the country you've invaded bombs it.
The ukrainian leadership has been quite clear that attacks such as this against valid munitions-warehousing facilities will cease once the russians withdraw from the territory they have temporarily occupied and back to their original borders.
I mean… https://www.amazon.com/s?k=fpv+pcb
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If you're actually calling the Ukrainians, defending their own country against invasion, "terrorists", at this point you're just parroting RT and Sputnik English-language talking points.
There's plenty of screenshots and info online showing that the Neiman Marcus cookie recipe costs $250
> Wonder if we'd be as pumped about it here in the US if Iran managed to carry out similar attacks intended to ideologically attack and manipulate civilians by terror
You mean if Iran did what the US are doing? I am guessing the US would cry foul and say it was unfair. Maybe follow it up and say something like "if they don't stop we will erase their civilisation"
It is a civilian infrastructure target, which is being used by the military for storage, warehousing and distribution. Items such as drone parts, drone release mechanisms for payloads, fiber optic spools, body armor gear and the logistics network.
If US was using walmart to supply troops, even if its mostly used by civilians it could make it a legitimate target
This is a slippery slop. You could justify glassing 100% of Israeli's populated area by this logic.
>If US was using walmart to supply troops, even if its mostly used by civilians it could make it a legitimate target
RIP all the Walmarts within a 20 min drive of a US military base but most of all RIP to the Ford dealerships for your role in supplying young enlisted gentlemen with logistical materiel (Mustangs)
This is war, not a slope. Escalations happen in every conflict this is the next step. And why bring Israel into this? Especially when they glassed Palestine...
Russia has been doing the same for years - especially trying to destroy all electrical and heating infrastructure during Winter. Ukraine has the right to retaliate, now that they're able to.
To add to this, Russia recently attacked Ukraine's post and parcel infrastructure (1).
Does this not very simply constitute yet another large scale attack by Russia on civilian infrastructure?
But mostly, this site in Russia is a legitimate target because it supplies the Russian military.
> intended to ideologically attack and manipulate civilians by terror
Do you mean ... rid Russian civilians of the notion that they can ignore the war that Russia started, because it's happening "over there, not here" ?
Well, yes, that too. No doubt the civilians are complaining now that it's not fair. It wasn't fair when the missiles went the other way, but they could ignore that. Public opinion matters, less so in Russia but it still matters.
But targeting military logistics matters more.
1) https://newsukraine.rbc.ua/news/russia-strikes-nova-poshta-t...
https://www.kyivpost.com/post/78220
You obviously wouldn't, since it would be happening to you. It's war though. We don't like to talk about it but WW2 was won in parts by fire bombing major cities all over Germany. It didn't start that way, in the beginning the targets were mainly military, but as the war went on, things changed. I am not as familiar with the war in the pacific, but we all know that two nuclear bombs were used to avoid an invasion of Japan.
That being said the modern war logisitcs (and economy) are sort if wild. Imagine the USA and Canada were in a land war and you needed parts for a bunch of drones. Rather than turning to your goverment or official military industrial complex, you'd turn to Temu resellers on Amazon to get your fiberoptic spool. Which means it's a legitimate target, but I suspect that it's also a great way to impact a lot of Russian citizens without fire bombing them.
It's OK, there is no war anyways, it's just a short lived infrastructure restructuration operation on foreign territory, the US is doing the same right now so it seems to be allowed.
There comes a time. How many apartments have been bombed by Russia?
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Could you expand on that please - what exactly do you mean and how did you arrive at that conclusion?
The laws of war apply at all times to all belligerents, and the enemy breaking them does not justify breaking them in turn.
If the current global crisis ever ends, how the world deals with human rights violations on both sides of this conflict will reveal whether any of this actually matters, or whether it’s all just a slugfest where the only objective is to determine who comes out on top.
There's no such thing as "both sides" here. It's a fundamentally flawed argument in this war. One country launched an unprovoked full scale war on a much smaller country with the goal of a colonial conquest (hopefully that's very clear by now). The amount of atrocities it has already done against Ukraine and its people will never be outweighted by pretty much anything Ukraine can do in the future as a part of its literal survival efforts.
Besides this, the laws only exist when there's something to enforce them. Has anything (apart from Ukraine's "kinetic sanctions") been enforcing much on the invader to make them obey those "laws"? At least treating POWs with dignity (like Ukraine generally does btw) and not putting them through the Gulag system that russia has revived with newfound cruelty?
I never understood 'laws of war'.
there is no law in war.
Please country a only fight with this type of attacks so that the people you kill are only people forced to fight against you to protect themselves but not the civilians.
War is war. You kill and destroy a country thats it.
Its not a conflict? Russia/Putin started to attack Ukraine. Thats it, russia is bad, ukraine is not.
Oh no don't use cluster bombs they are bad / different bad than normal bombs.
Btw. if countries like the USA wouldn't create cluster bombs, Saudi Arabia couldn't use them against civilians.
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Early in the war there have been discussions about this and the rumblings were that Russia wanted to use tactical nukes on the battlefield, but China said "no".
https://www.newsweek.com/china-news-reacts-after-russia-chan...
Apparently they still regularly do: https://www.politico.eu/article/volodymyr-zelenskyy-china-ur...
I am happy that some cooler heads prevail.
Because every other country on the planet would declare war and i would also assume USA would assesinate Putin for it.
During the past winters Russia was deliberately bombing energy infra in Ukraine with civilians left freezing in their apartments. I know that two wrongs don't make a right, but why should we expect Ukraine to fight cleanly against an invading force 5 times its size and resources, which has been obliterating its cities, occupied 20% of its land and committed every war crime imaginable?
Pretty much yes. Russia Launched a massive invasion on a smaller country and they are fighting back. America did the same with Iran. Same as the United arab would did against Israel. Twice.
Insert “are we the bad guys” meme.
You're not the bad guys, there's a huge difference between the attack vs Iran and the attack vs Ukraine. Iran is an authoritarian regime which repeatedly said that Israel should cease to exist, has killed tens of thousands of their own people, aims to obtain nuclear weapons and supports 4+ terrorist organizations in the Middle East.
So abducting the leader of one country (against international law) and killing the leader of another country (against international law) is fine?
aims to obtain nuclear weapons
After a certain country shredded a nuclear deal and made it increasingly hard for international organizations to do inspections.
supports 4+ terrorist organizations in the Middle East
Because the US has never supported, funded, and trained terrorist organizations?
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In this case, in contrast to Ukraine, it's also possible that both sides are the bad guys.
> So abducting the leader of one country (against international law) and killing the leader of another country (against international law) is fine?
Depends on the leader and the country. Abducting or killing Hitler would be fine. The problem in this case was that killing the leader isn't enough to change the regime. But the regime is objectively evil and much more so than the US.
> After a certain country shredded a nuclear deal and made it increasingly hard for international organizations to do inspections.
Fair point, but the issue with the previous deal was that it forced Iran just to pause the program. Now they're possibly invulnerable and it may be the case that there's no way to stop them from developing nukes. The regime should have been removed when Iran didn't have thousands of ballistic missiles.
I agree with the evilness of the regime. However, the problem is that when individual countries start to decide who is evil and who not, countries just declare someone evil when it is convenient to them ("there are nazis in Ukraine!") and you have a pretense to invade a country.
International law and organizations exist to avoid this issue. But the US and Russia (and maybe China) have been systematically undermining international institutions because they like to be able to attack someone at their convenience and not be held responsible for it.
lots of folks would probably cheer the odd data center getting lit up!
Are you also so concerned about Russia lobbing ballistic missiles at Ukrainian city centers?
> if Iran managed to carry out similar attacks
Iran did manage to attack Amazon facilities, just not in the US: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/21/iran-war-update-five-things-...
...and the US also attacked 'civilian infrastructure' in Iran:
https://www.dw.com/en/us-strikes-on-southern-iran-infrastruc...
Not sure why Ukraine should be singled out and berated for attacks on what are essentially dual use facilities. At least Ukraine doesn't do obious terror attacks against civilians like Russia does.
It does, but I don’t think the Ukrainians will get much flak for it. Bombing consumer goods distributors doesn’t worry people as much as bombing food distributors or chemical warfare on farms (eg Agent Orange), and besides that direct strategic bombing of civilian targets was heavily used in WW2 without much backlash. I think they’d get a lot of flak if they started doing that.
I think the thought experiment of if Iran did this to the US is more interesting.
It doesn't seem Ukraine's end goal is for Russians to be happy about it.
>Does this not very simply constitute a large scale attack on civilian infrastructure?
you mean like this "Russia Hits Nova Poshta Hub in Zaporizhzhia, Drone Attacks Kill 2 in Sumy" https://www.kyivpost.com/post/72051 March 17, 2026 ?
also https://edition.cnn.com/2026/07/23/europe/russia-ukraine-con...
"A search for “military supplies” on the Wildberries website Thursday yielded over 78,000 items, including body armor, first aid kits and rations. The site also offers drone equipment, including FPV goggles and kit that can be used on the battlefield."
> Does this not very simply constitute a large scale attack on civilian infrastructure?
No.
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In case you missed it in the guidelines:
Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
This is probably why your comment is getting downvoted.
At the time I posted my comment their post was down-voted and it was obvious why so but articulating that is verboten? Oh dearie me, whatever shall I do.
I know about the guidelines, I've been on here since 2010, like yourself.
Russia will cave in economically any minute now, they’ve been on the brink of economic collapse since March 2022. In fact rural Russia is poorer than Africa, so the sanctions are definitely working.
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"Ok guy" :D are you russian?
anyway russia has a high GDP for sure but guess what it did the last 4 years? It threw that money into ukraine without getting anything from it.
No new schools, no teachers / educated kids, no housing, no streets. Instead taking out massive loans, reducing their reservers.
And now no one is willing to buy russian bonds.
Russia is hurting itself A LOT and is now going after retirement money.
Russia HAS to start selling oil again but has to spend a lot of time and money on fixing what got destroyed while the war is still ongoing and the tacktik clearly shows how well it works. Ukraine will not stop tomorrow just because.
As long as russia is not winning or stoping this, its very very expensive for everyone in russia.
Collapse no clue how you would define it but at least from a world power russia already collapsed. The only two things keeping russia at this 'level' is their oil and the nuclear threat.
While I generally agree. this part:
>No new schools, no teachers / educated kids, no housing, no streets.
Is factually false on all accounts. (not sure I understand the "no streets" part though, are you talking about fixing pavement as a national sport?)
Russia spends a lot of money on war and not on "new streets" or fixing existing streets.
Long lasting infrastructure investments for longterm gains.
Well, "news streets" just sound weird. If you build a new apartment building or a whole block (which is now it is done these days in Russia, especially Moscow) - you build a street unless there is already one.
And there is no point in a random new street. Like... for what?