I find it funny every time people find it surprising that Russia, “a country with the GDP the size of Italy” turned out to be able to hold the entire world economy hostage, sanctioning it proved deadly for the ones doing the sanctioning, and its currency actually appreciated significantly once it was removed from the forex markets.

The explanation is very straightforward, but not simple, and points to something vital, so I’m going to get into the weeds, so to speak.

The first aspect is that Russian economy behaves in patterns typical for 3^rd world colonies of great powers. This means that it exports mostly cheap raw materials and imports expensive industrial products. This doesn’t look like an accident, but any amount of reduction in exports and utilization of those raw materials for domestic production increases their profits significantly, which explains why Russia thrives under sanctions.

Also, the reason why Russian currency recovered is because America can’t use its financial trickery to print money out of thin air and then suck their resources dry, and export their overpriced goods back. Furthermore, due to restrictions on use of USD and EUR for international payments, RUB suddenly became highly necessary.

The GDP question is trickier to answer, because there are several layers to the issue. The first is that the GDP was synthetically and deliberately underestimated, compared to the GDP of Western countries; for instance, Russia has a huge gray economy which is completely ignored, and if you do, it becomes hard to explain the actual purchasing power of the Russian people, which is much greater than one would guess. Also, the prices of domestically produced goods and services are quite low. Also, the credit rating agencies are an instrument of American foreign politics and are inherently fraudulent; they basically serve the purpose of making credit cheap for countries that are subservient to America, and expensive for those America wants to compete with. Russia is an especially interesting case because it had very low debt, it serviced it reliably, and its credit rating was bordering on junk. This made credit very expensive for both Russian state and Russian corporations and citizens. In an average Western country, debt is cheap and is widely used to grow businesses and finance spending. All of this increases the GDP numbers. In Russia, since debt was expensive, they had to finance growth from exports of raw materials, which is another factor that led to the smaller nominal GDP, but with the benefit of an almost nonexistent sensitivity to debt-related pressures such as the devaluation of the credit rating, which would be lethal for any Western country. Basically, by making things hard for Russia during the past decades, America in fact made Russia resilient, independent and insensitive to foreign pressure.

There’s also the question of Russian military, which is greatly underestimated in the West based on the numerical indicators. Those are even more deceptive, because Russian weapons manufacturing is designed to be incredibly cost-effective, and the weapons themselves are highly resilient and good in actual combat. Also, there’s the mistaken belief that Western weapons are technologically superior. This is not the case; if anything, it’s the other way around. The idea that Western weapons would magically change the situation in Ukraine is a complete illusion. Technologically, Russia has everything from spy satellites, rockets and aviation to drones and, for all intents and purposes, killer robots. The only thing they don’t have are the aircraft carriers, and that’s because they never had an use for them in their strategic planning. They are used for projecting power to weaker remote countries, and Russia never had any interest in that, so they made a few aircraft carriers just as a token and for experimentation, but they never invested much resources in them because they are of marginal use. It is my estimate that in any military conflict between NATO and Russia, NATO would be beaten so decisively, they would have to resort to the use of nuclear weapons. Ukraine is de facto the strongest NATO military at this point, and they are basically destroyed by Russia’s little pinky finger. America would not fare any better, because for each escalation in weapons strength and sophistication, Russia has an equal or stronger response. Each attack on Russian mainland would be matched by an attack of equal or greater magnitude on American mainland. America is neither safe nor protected from Russian retaliatory strikes, because Russia is neither Vietnam nor Iraq. America never fought an enemy that can strike their mainland at any time with whatever power they choose. That experiment would end very badly, and quickly.

There’s another important issue, perhaps the most important of all – the West is used to setting the market terms in ways that price their imports very low, and their exports very high; basically, what you produce is cheap and worthless, and what we make and export is precious and wonderful. This created an illusion of Western supremacy which ended as soon as they actually started believing their own propaganda, and sanctioned those “cheap and worthless” products, which turned out to be essential things nobody can live without in a modern society, and the stuff they make and export turned out to be trinkets with inflated brand value that nobody really needs, and are rather in the domain of “wants”. Nobody really needs an iPhone, a Mac or some fancy brand of ice cream. I’m writing this on a late-2017 Asus Zenbook, running Linux and LibreOffice, and it’s fine; it’s more than fine in fact; it would be considered alien tech in the 1990s. My new Macbook is better, but it’s not that much better that I would trip over myself and die if I had to use less advanced tech without American IP. More likely, I would shrug it off and do perfectly fine, realizing that I need America and their stuff much less than everybody thinks they do. I actually test such ideas occasionally, checking how much stuff I actually need to function in a modern society, and how much of what I have is merely “want the new shiny gadgety thingy”, and I concluded that I could do with a Raspberry Pi in a pinch, but not without electricity, diesel and gas, let alone food. Apparently, Russia produces the stuff we actually need, and the West produces the “intellectual property” in the stuff that we want; not even the actual stuff, mind you. So, the question is, could everybody survive with Chinese smartphones and laptops, but without Russian minerals and hydrocarbons? Yeah. It turns out that something is cheap when it’s abundant and you just assume it’s there, like air, but when air suddenly isn’t there for you to breathe, it becomes precious quite suddenly.

When you turn out to need someone for basic survival, and they don’t need you very much at all, it means that, for all intents and purposes, they are more powerful and important.

I’ve seen all those people in the West saying it’s so bad the Russians have an artillery advantage over Ukraine, let’s send Ukraine more artillery to give them more of a chance.

At this, I raise my eyes to heaven and think, God, kill me now, please, I can’t listen to those idiots any more, I need a vacation.

But let’s do it slowly so that even the average person in the West, who’s been living on a diet of celebrity gossip and CNN, can understand it.

Why do people use artillery in a war? The answer is, it’s the most cost-effective way of sending bombs across to the enemy. You basically spend the cost of ammunition, and the gun is cheap and re-used, with low maintennance. In comparison, aviation is a very expensive way of doing it; you have the cost of training a pilot throughout his career and the risk of his death or capture, you have an aircraft that goes through fuel like crazy, and needs maintennance, meaning parts and support crew. The rockets are even worse, because the airplane at least is re-used unless it’s shot down, and a rocket is a sophisticated device that is destroyed after a single use.

Why do people not use artillery in a war? First, it has limited range by definition. In the first world war they tried to make longer range guns, but it proved to be a bad idea because the barrels of those guns wore out so quickly that they had to have bigger calliber rounds for each firing. They were also stationary or tied to the railroads, and so on. Basically, the bigger the gun, the less cost/effective it is, and it creates more problems than it solves, which is why people made airplanes and rockets for solving the artillery range issues. The second problem with the artillery is that it’s a good target if the enemy has active airforce and/or long range rocket systems. Basically, in a modern war, you don’t ever hope to really use the artillery because you have to count on the fact that your enemy is going to see it as soon as it’s in a firing position, and then they’re going to pulverize it.

So, why is Russia using artillery? They are using it because they destroyed the enemy’s airforce within the first few hours of the war. Then they pulverized it more for good measure. If Ukraine had any long-range weapons that could be used against Russian artillery or airforce, it was destroyed very quickly because it was a threat that limited deployment of Russia’s cheaper and cost-effective systems. The only thing Russia couldn’t take out were the intelligence/recon systems because Ukraine outsourced those to America, and one would need to take out the American satellite network in order to prevent Ukraine from precisely targetting Russian weapons and command points. It’s doable, but they decided against it at this point because it would escallate things beyond the point that was deemed cost/effective in the current situation. So, basically, Russia is using the artillery because it’s the most cost/effective way of sending bombs to the enemy, and the enemy has no effective counter-measures.

Why can’t Ukraine use the artillery? Because unlike Ukraine, Russia can use long-range missiles and airforce, because it has total control over the sky of Ukraine, meaning that anything other than their own stuff flies there, it gets shot down instantly. NATO can’t change this situation because their stuff would get shot down as easily and quickly as the Ukrainian stuff, and that would escallate the situation past the point they deem acceptable at the moment. Essentially, if Ukraine deploys its own artillery to counter Russian artillery, Russian airforce destroys it as soon as it is deployed, unless there’s excessive risk to the civillian population. If the position has air defences that make it hard for the airforce, the Russians use Kalibr missiles to pulverize the air defences first, and then send the airforce to pulverize the artillery. Since only the Russians can do that, whatever artillery NATO sends to reinforce the Ukrainians will simply be destroyed following the same principle.

Basically, the reason why Russia can use the WW1 equipment is because they stripped down their enemy so much, that it makes no sense to use the expensive ways of delivering bombs when cheapest ones will do; they are basically optimizing warfare for cost-effectiveness. No, they didn’t run out of the sophisticated missiles, but you won’t use your iPad to swat flies if you have a slipper handy, either. They use the expensive stuff when nothing cheaper will do, but once they moved in with the artillery, you know the war is basically over, because in modern warfare the artillery is so easy to take out, you never get to use it unless you already reduced your enemy to the point of late 19^th century.

To conclude, the idea that Ukraine needs more artillery to counter Russian artillery supremacy is incredibly stupid and people saying this are idiots.

I haven’t been writing anything here for several reasons. First, I wrote my opinion on the closed forum in Croatian language and simply never got around to translating the articles here. Second, I haven’t been feeling well, due to the enormous pressure of all this toxic garbage I’m ingesting and analysing; it’s not health food, by any means. Third, I didn’t have anything really new to say, because things are progressing at their rather slow pace and it’s not like I have anything dramatic to report every couple of days, like those attention whores online who try to keep the audience wound up with artificial drama in order to get money from ads and Patreon.
Also, I’m trying to figure out what’s going on myself, because it’s not like I have a very clear idea. The facts are hard to discern, and even then it’s hard to understand what they mean. But let me share some of my provisory conclusions.
One of the most fascinating things, if I’m interpreting the facts correctly, is that Russia managed to invert the “bear trap”. You see, the entire Ukraine thing was designed by America and the UK as a new Afghanistan or a Vietnam for Russia, an endless war where they would lose people and equipment, suffer sanctions that will create a black hole that will suck all of Russia’s resources and create impoverishment, domestic discontent, worldwide isolation and, eventually, a repeat of the 1990s collapse of Russian society, which the Americans see as some sort of a golden era that needs to be brought back. What actually happened is that Russia is doing this with their little finger, and they designed the entire thing so that it consumes as little of their manpower, equipment and intelligence capacity as possible while still winning the war, while consuming as much of the manpower, equipment and financial resources of their enemy (America and their vassals). From what I can see, their losses from the war are insignificant compared to their losses to the American covid bioweapon, they get to train their troops in an actual conflict instead of devising massive maneuvers and exercises that they do every now and then, they get to iron out all the flaws in their tactics, see which weapons actually work and which are expensive failures, their economy is getting healthier because the remaining foreign dependencies are removed (which would be very hard to do in normal circumstances because some imports are so much cheaper than designing the entire thing domestically that it wasn’t worth doing), their society is getting healthier because the people are finally understanding that the West actually hates them, and I mean “hates” as “wants to destroy them”, and “them” as literally them, the people, despite all the hypocritical talk about hating Putin. They hate Putin because he is the personification of Russian people, a personification of strong and independent Russia. They hate Putin because they want to enslave and kill the Russian people, and the formerly pro-western part of Russia is starting to get it. So, basically, Russia has cheap food, cheap energy, and is winning the war with their little pinky finger. At the same time the West is having a slow bankruptcy avalanche; their finances were shit for decades already, they don’t produce any actual goods, they destroyed their energy sector with all that carbon bullshit, they destroyed their capitalist economy with hyper-regulation, they imported huge numbers of worse-than-useless refugees from all kinds of shitholes because of their misguided ideology, and now they are adding the additional stress of increased military spending, combined with the circular firing squad maneuver of sanctioning their major provider of food and energy.
At this point, Russia is destroying the NATO equipment as fast as it is arriving in Ukraine. They are adhering to the doctrine of minimizing exposure to harm, while exerting maximum pressure on the enemy, to the point where the entire Ukrainian military that has been surrounded in Donbass is crumbling, and the Russians are already experiencing a shortage of men handling the prisoners who keep surrendering faster than they can properly process them, which I guess is a nice problem to have for a military.
America’s main problem at the moment is that they seem to be losing the Ukrainian military, and they are trying to prevent that by all means, because if that happens they will find it difficult to justify pumping all that money out of the West, pretending it’s directed at Ukraine, while it is actually directed at their offshore bank accounts, while the Ukrainian Nazis get a hefty “commission”. It’s all a giant money-extraction scheme that uses the American printing press while people still accept that shit for goods and services, because a day will soon come when it will dawn to a sufficient number of people that allowing Americans to buy up the world’s real estate and goods with fake money, backed only by the fear of American military power, is not in their best interest.
NATO has been sliding down a slippery slope of committing themselves to increasingly provocative and hostile actions against Russia, thinking that Russia is apparently afraid of going into open war against them so it’s all fine.
America and NATO are basically in a situation where they are accelerating their collapse through instruments the Russians managed to leverage against them, and the entire thing is like a black hole, or a meat grinder. The Russians are going at it slowly because taking Ukraine was never their goal; defeating the West is. They took pains avoiding the kinds of mistakes that could cost them, such as trying to show off by trading casualties for time. They don’t care if this war lasts as long as it can, if the dynamic remains as it is now, where they are turning the meat grinder slowly with their little finger, and the West keeps being dragged into it.
Sure, if the collective West were what it used to be, with a vibrant capitalist economy, the Russia would never be able to pull off such a stunt, but the West consists of hysterical women in places of power, of communists educated way beyond their intelligence, and of people who don’t actually know how to do anything useful in the real world, and actually look down their noses at anything that has anything to do with actual physical reality. In such a geopolitical layout, where Russia controls the things of the real world, and the West lives in la la land and tries to win real wars on Twitter, the image of the meat grinder which Russia turns and the West falls into is actually quite valid. If this gets any worse, they might actually smell the coffee and turn to China, which they see as the weaker opponent, probably because they think the entirety of the war will be waged on Taiwan, where China won’t be able to utilize its massive land forces. Also, the Russians look as if they’re just doing their thing and waiting for the Americans to get desperate and over-commit, at which point all hell will break loose.