Russo-Ukrainian War Thread - Page 725

On September 15 2024 14:43 Yurie wrote:
Yes the war is VERY costly for Ukraine. Which is why the EU is financing their government spending.
https://www.ifw-kiel.de/topics/war-against-ukraine/ukraine-support-tracker/
Scroll down to Government support to Ukraine: Type of assistance, € billion
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Ukraine is fighting a defensive war. They win each week where Russia gain a few square km since sooner or later Russia will give up due to how costly it is. Of course Ukraine would win more if they were making gains.

On September 16 2024 09:01 zboh wrote:


Yes, we know, Ukraine has no money for this war and it depends on NATO, but why "sooner or later". Is that "sooner or later" based on optimism or on something more tangible? More Ukrainian casualties and more damage to Ukraine is "winning" every week?
Can you see what Victory would look like for Ukraine in ten years time?

On September 16 2024 09:17 KwarK wrote:

If the war were still going then in 10 years I'd expect to see Ukraine taking back all occupied territory including Crimea. Russia isn't capable of producing the quantity of hardware capable to win, they've burned through 60 years of built up Soviet stocks in 3 years. It'd take the Soviet Union a decade to make what Russia is using in a year and, to put it bluntly, Russia is not the Soviet Union. Meanwhile the economies of the west, each of which dwarfs Russia, are gearing up for rearmament. Any one of them could outspend Russia in Ukraine alone. If they're still fighting in a decade then the Russians will be fighting with sticks and stones while the Ukrainians fire prsm.

Russia's economic plan is reliant on the war ending mid 2025 to allow them to massively scale down their military spending in 2026. They don't have a plan B, they're paying 20% on government debt and are engaged in a bidding war for labour against themselves.

Russia doesn't have a theory of victory. They know how to destroy a children's hospital but they really don't have any idea of how to get from where they are to a state where Ukraine has been conquered.

On September 17 2024 02:56 ZeroByte13 wrote:
There are articles like this about both sides being close to collapse because of exhaustion and lack of equipment.
If their depiction of the situation is close to reality it looks like a "who collapses first" competition.
Though the same ideas were around a year ago too, that this or that side just can't go on like this for much longer, yet it seems not much has changed since then, globally at least.

On September 16 2024 09:17 KwarK wrote:

If the war were still going then in 10 years I'd expect to see Ukraine taking back all occupied territory including Crimea. Russia isn't capable of producing the quantity of hardware capable to win, they've burned through 60 years of built up Soviet stocks in 3 years. It'd take the Soviet Union a decade to make what Russia is using in a year and, to put it bluntly, Russia is not the Soviet Union. Meanwhile the economies of the west, each of which dwarfs Russia, are gearing up for rearmament. Any one of them could outspend Russia in Ukraine alone. If they're still fighting in a decade then the Russians will be fighting with sticks and stones while the Ukrainians fire prsm.

Russia's economic plan is reliant on the war ending mid 2025 to allow them to massively scale down their military spending in 2026. They don't have a plan B, they're paying 20% on government debt and are engaged in a bidding war for labour against themselves.

Russia doesn't have a theory of victory. They know how to destroy a children's hospital but they really don't have any idea of how to get from where they are to a state where Ukraine has been conquered.

On September 17 2024 06:36 iFU.spx wrote:


Economic plan is reliant on the war ending mid 2025? How did you come up with this conclusion?
Russia isn't capable of producing the quantity of hardware capable to win, they've burned through 60 years of built up Soviet stocks in 3 years.? What do you mean by "hardware" and how did you come up with "they've burned 60 years of built up Soviet stocks in 3 years"?

On September 17 2024 06:43 Gorsameth wrote:
Russia had large reserves of tanks and vehicles, a remnant from the cold war. These are stored in large storage yards (just like the US stores its surplus supply in the desert). These sites are monitored, images from them are publicly available. People count them when they get updated. They can see the equipment being removed from storage.

Does this paint a complete picture? no. Does it give indications? yes.

On September 17 2024 06:36 iFU.spx wrote:


Economic plan is reliant on the war ending mid 2025? How did you come up with this conclusion?
Russia isn't capable of producing the quantity of hardware capable to win, they've burned through 60 years of built up Soviet stocks in 3 years.? What do you mean by "hardware" and how did you come up with "they've burned 60 years of built up Soviet stocks in 3 years"?

The GDP growth rates remained high in 2024 Q1 and Q2, while inflation was accelerating. This suggests that overheating in the economy has remained considerable. Labour force and production capacity reserves have been almost exhausted. Shortages of these resources might cause a situation where the economic growth will be slowing down despite any attempts to boost demand. Moreover, this boost will only further accelerate inflation. This is actually a scenario of stagflation that could only be stopped by way of a deep recession. Today’s additional tightening of our policy will help prevent such a scenario.

“Russia doesn’t have any illusions’’ regarding its capacity to export to India either, Cowshish said, since its domestic defense needs have now multiplied. For example, the Indo-Russian Rifles Private Limited — a factory established in 2019 to co-produce more than 600,000 assault rifles for the Indian armed forces — is reportedly still waiting for the delivery of tranches of Russian Kalashnikovs.

And according to Rahul Bedi, a senior defense journalist in New Delhi, this is just one of the many items Russia has failed to ship. “No one publicly speaks about this because it’s so sensitive,’’ he said.

“Russia was supposed to deliver five S-400 air defense systems — two are still remaining and no progress has been made. Then, we wanted to lease a Russian nuclear submarine and that was slated to be here by 2025. Now, I’m given to understand that the lease could have been scrapped. In addition, [there were] four frigates — two Russian and the other two were to be jointly produced in Goa — nothing has happened on that front either,’’ Bedi said. “It’s a huge mess.’’

On September 17 2024 08:33 KwarK wrote:

Sure.
So Russia releases budgets for next three years each year. They released one last year which outlined their military spending plans.

The 2023 one had military spending as a % of GDP as follows:
2023 - 5.86%
2024 - 7.89%
2025 - 6.18%
2026 - 5.35%

showing that they anticipated a decline in military spending in 2025 after the 2024 surge won the war. For context, that 2026 number is lower than the 2016 peacetime number. The budget is pretty clear on this, they do not plan to still be fighting in 2026.

The economic strain is also pretty obvious. On July 1 2024 the government ceased giving mortgage subsidies. On June 21 Sber shut down the application process for subsidized mortgages. The one year bond rate that the Russian government is paying is 18.66% today. That's higher than my credit card (not that I carry a balance).

The Governor of the Bank of Russia is desperately hiking interest rates to try to curtail demand in the Russian economy to prevent the economy from overheating. Without getting too deep into macroeconomic theory because I don't know your background in that area, a high interest rate pays someone not to spend their money but instead to save it. That reduction in present day spending lowers the present day demand for goods and therefore Russian labour. That in turn reduces the competition and therefore price paid for goods, controlling inflation. The Russian government is throwing money at the problem of Ukraine which is reflected by high salaries for soldiers, high salaries for munitions factory workers, and high salaries everywhere else because if everyone else doesn't match salaries then they'll lose their workers to munitions factories. So then all these workers are flush with cash and they want consumer goods to spend it on but of course the supply of consumer goods is down because an increasing portion of the economy is spent making tanks. And so they get into a bidding war on a Lada because there aren't enough Ladas to go around and all of them are making twice as many rubles as they did the year before. The price soars due to the demand pressure. Lada then realizes that times are good and that the demand for Ladas is huge and so it starts paying out overtime, bids more for steel, pulls in more workers at higher rates, and so forth in a desperate attempt to churn out more Ladas. At which point the state now has to bid even more to get people to go to Ukraine because the Lada factory also now has signup bonuses.

So Elvira Nabiullina says "hold off, don't buy a Lada this year, don't even bid on one, let me hold the money for you and I'll give you enough to buy a Lada and still have a bunch of money next year". She's paying people not to bid against the government and then the government can use the money they would have spent on a Lada to bid unopposed for that labour in the area it wants it (armaments).

But don't take my word for it, here's what she said on July 26 2024 in her official statement.

You can watch it in Russian here.

In the June statement, which you can find here, she makes repeated references to a baseline scenario and the risks presented if that does not materialize. The baseline scenario includes a slackening of demand for labour in 2025 and 2026. That demand is fueled by the war in Ukraine. If the demand for labour is not reduced then the baseline scenario we're into risks territory.

If this year you take the 20% offer to not bid against the Russian military for industrial output then that’ll help slightly with inflation this year. Let’s say you planned to spend a million rubles on something discretionary in 2024. Instead you give Elvira a million rubles, taking them out of the economy for a year.

2025 she returns your 1.2m rubles to you and now you’re looking to spend. You’ve now got 2.2m, the 1m from 2024 that you postponed spending and another 1m from 2025. You’re looking to divert output from the needs of the military to meet your needs, and you’re willing to pay for that. But the war is still going and there’s no end in sight. So Elvira comes back and asks you to wait in exchange for another 20% because what else can she do. If she lets you and everyone else bid against the army during a war inflation will spiral out of control. Let’s say you’re a patriot and you’re willing to play ball, you put it off for another year, this time with a payout of 2.64m.

2026 rolls around and you now have 3.64m in your pocket. Probably more because inflation is going nuts due to the overheated economy. You’re also kinda pissed about waiting three years for a fucking Lada and so when she asks you to reup 20% isn’t enough. At a certain point you want to spend some money after years of saving. But you’re not crazy and so there is a certain rate you’d accept if she offers it, it’ll just be high.

Take a look at the Russian central bank interest rates since 2022 and you’ll see you’re already a few years into this cycle with no end in sight.
September 2022 7.5%
September 2023 13%
September 2024 18%
And this is her doing a good job. This is her holding back a tidal wave of consumer demand trying to flood Russia with inflationary pressure. With Russian wages going through the roof this is her trying to do anything but let them spend it because the economy literally would not survive that.

Regarding the exhaustion of accumulated military supplies, there's no shortage of satellite imagery on the internet substantiating it if you want to see how different boneyards look on different dates. This paywalled German newspaper article has some but youtube has more.
https://www.sueddeutsche.de/projekte/artikel/politik/russland-ukraine-panzer-materialmangel-satellitenbilder-e168870/

We can also see it a lot in the Oryx confirmed loss database loss mix over time. The kinds of vehicles lost early in the war were newly built or recently modernized tanks. As those were lost the mix shifted to a handful of newly built (there's always some coming off the production line) and a greater proportion of older refurbished but not modernized tanks (no upgraded sensors/sights). As those were lost the refurbished tanks got older and older. You can go on Oryx yourself and see that the tanks Ukraine is destroying today are decades older than the tanks that they were destroying years ago. There are photos, look at them. That's a T-55 destroyed in Ukraine. Ask yourself why a T-55 is in Ukraine if the Soviet inheritance has not been spent.

We can also see it in the North Korean artillery ammunition. North Korea, which also had a huge surplus built up, is now a critical supplier of Russian artillery ammunition. When Russia chose to a ten to javascript:addUBB_selected('reply_area', 'spoiler')one shell exchange strategy with Ukraine to level Bakhmut and other cities it did so based on an assumption of a relatively quick end to the war. It couldn't sustain the shell rate forever, but it believed that it could sustain it for long enough to achieve a decisive victory before depleting supplies. It misjudged that and had to go to North Korea, in breach of its own sanctions regime against NK, and beg for shells. They're not firing North Korean shells because their own stockpiles are overflowing.

We also see it in the Iranian missile deal. They exhausted their missile stockpile and are now down to firing at the rate of production. The war on the electrical grid that we saw last year with nightly attacks is gone, now we go weeks without a missile salvo as Russia slowly rebuilds supplies in order to get enough to wipe out a children's hospital. Most recently they're selling their Soviet tech inheritance to Iran in order to get access to Iranian missiles. Given the Soviet history as a world leader in the field of rocketry this is not a good sign.

We also see it in the canceled and delayed arms sales to India.

Hell, this video shows a Russian 1930s design howitzer from WW2 being destroyed on the front lines.

The pattern is clear, Russia does not have capability to sustain this war with new production. They're using 70 year old tanks because they do not have reserves of newer tanks. They're using North Korean ammo because they do not have remaining stockpiles of Russian ammo. They're using Iranian missiles because they do not have reserves of Russian missiles. They're canceling Indian export contracts because they do not have surplus capacity to meet those contracts and the production that does exist is being routed to Ukraine.

This war cannot be sustained at the current intensity by Russia for another ten years. It's simply not possible. Hell, you're spx, you're the one guy who should understand what it means to go allin on a 2 base tank push. You don't care that you're going to mine out your nat in one minute if you'll control the gateways in 30 seconds. You know what it means to gamble that they'll lose before you do.

If Russia doesn’t win soon then their best case scenario is that the war will settle into a lower intensity state as stockpiles are fully exhausted and production places a cap on consumption. If the west remains firm in their commitments then in a few years there will be a gap between Russian production and western resupply that will lead to a Ukrainian victory.