Putin Is A New “Vlad The Impaler” For How He Has Impaled Russia
Putin is doing historic damage to Russia.
Bloomberg has reported that Russia is looking into easing restrictions against child labor as the Russian economy is tanking due to sanctions, the mass mobilization of draftees for the war in Ukraine, and the mass exodus of young men into neighboring countries.
Russia already has a huge demographic problem in that its birth rate is catastrophically low, Russians are 30 years late on having a large number of 30-year-olds, and Vladimir Putin is currently killing and maiming tens of thousands of its limited supply of young men in an unwindable war in Ukraine. Putin is now sabotaging the future livelihoods of Russian teenagers’ education and future productivity by incentivizing them to leave high school to do some of the jobs left vacant by their fathers, brothers, and uncles.
Meanwhile, Putin’s war has gotten the Russian economy largely kicked out of the international order, meaning that their workers are facing a gradual decline back to the 1980s. Russian dependence on Western technology alongside Western companies pulling out of Russia in protest of the war means that Russian manufacturing industries will collapse thanks to their near universal reliance on Western parts, maintenance, software, high-end computer chips, and advanced tools and machinery.
Essentially, Putin has pushed Russia’s economy into a hole, and is still digging. And for what? To continue pretending to be Peter the Great for a few more months? To send tens of thousands of young Russians to their deaths so that the Russian borders can extend a few dozen extra miles? By any sensible calculation, this war is a catastrophe for Putin and Russia. Russia has gained a small percentage of Ukrainian territory in exchange for a new-found Ukrainian nationalism backed by the military industrial complexes of a dozen of the world’s most sophisticated militaries. It signifies the end of Russian influence in Ukraine forever as the vast majority of Ukrainians now overwhelmingly support their democratic government, desperately seek inclusion into the European Union, and favor entry into NATO if possible.
In the south of Ukraine, Russia is poised to even lose territory facing its most formidable opponent in Crimea: geography. With Ukraine’s liberation of Kherson following Russia’s retreat from its forward air bases and military stockpiles in the region afraid of the ever advancing range of HIMARS and other Western artillery systems, the remaining Russian troops are currently being backed into a Crimean corner with the Kerch Bridge being their only escape route. Ukrainians have already attacked this bridge once with a daring truck bomb, but Ukrainians are getting closer and closer to finishing the job.
The annexation of Crimea was Putin’s crowning geopolitical achievement for his conception of a new Russian empire, so its loss will be a crowning failure of Putin’s disastrous Ukrainian invasion and putrid dictatorship. Yet the more Putin tries to defend and keep Crimea, the more he’s keeping troops and materiel from Ukraine’s eastern territories like the Donbas, which is the only front Russia has had some incremental success in since the Ukrainians launched their counter-offensive.
A casual glance at a map makes it obvious Russian troops have no business staying in Crimea beyond ideological hubris, particularly because Ukrainians will soon have the capacity to control its water supply, and Russia risks having thousands of its troops stuck in a 21st Century siege if the Kerch Bridge is blown up. Unfortunately for Russian soldiers, non-military strategist Putin is giving off some real Hitler vibes with frequent standing orders for Russian military units to not retreat in the face of increasingly better trained, better armed, and extremely better motivated Ukrainian units.
The biggest problem with Putin’s facade of military might is that he has already revealed that the Russian military is a joke. Except for a legacy supply of nukes courtesy of the Soviet Union, the Russian military has proven itself incapable of projecting power even in eastern Ukraine’s historically invadable flat plains with few geographic obstacles. If Russia is getting curb-stomped in Ukraine with old, Soviet tanks and MiG planes, few modern anti-air systems, and a dozen or so gifted HIMARS, imagine what other former-Soviet states like the Latvians and Poles could do to future Russian invasion plans with F-16 jets, lots of HIMARS, and top of the line NATO air defense systems.
Beyond military debacles, at home there is no good future for the Russian people. Their standard of living is falling dramatically, their industries are collapsing, their nationalistic worldview is shattering, and their lives will only get worse the longer Putin keeps wasting Russia’s young men and the country’s money on a failed war.
Russian oligarchs and government kleptocrats are stealing even more from the Russian people and state to maintain their glamorous and decadent lifestyles. Russia has never been known for having a big government that takes care of its people, and what little government services and public goods the government does provide will almost certainly fade away as their economy reverts to the chaos and lack of vitality that helped get Putin elected in the first place.
Russian standards of living will fall even further behind the rest of the West, and even regular household appliances will likely continue being appropriated for the military desperately trying to get its hands on low-end computer chips. More and more government finances will divert solely to replacing the massive amounts of military equipment and hardware being destroyed on a daily basis in Ukraine. These autocratic failures will hurt most the millions of non-Slavic and non-Eastern Orthodox peoples of Russia that Putin’s ethno-nationalist government has long neglected, which will further disintegration Russian society.
Way to go, Putin. He’s no Peter the Great, he’s Vlad the Dumbass.
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