First of all 40 times longer

There is always a bit of unemployment, due to people switching jobs.

Sign up bonuses are hitting above $30k right now, with pretty good pay and death bonus. Everybody willing to join the war, even for money probably sign up. So they have to force people, which leads to men fleeing the country.

Russia has been a country growing due to migrants. However due to the war propaganda being more and more far right, that means the government has to act on it. So they crack down on migrants, while lacking workers.

Russia has massive financial problems right now, while secondary sanctions hit foreign trade. That means more workers are needed, as Russia can no longer buy as many foreign goods.

However looking at casualties is a good metric to see, how much danger Russia will be in the future. Together with migration problems, this is very likely shrinking their future population by 10% or more, compared to never having launched the full scale invasion.

No worries the Russian government is already solving the butter situation. They just started importing butter from the UAE.

https://www.interfax.ru/russia/989968

Prune602 unfortunatly on Twitter writes up on the Russian economy on a regular bases. Here is a pretty decent thread on inflation: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1841884096655720630.html

Russia has 29.57million men between 20-50. So 700k are 2.37% casulties of that group. That is using Russian demographic statistics, which are probably wrong, due to people leaving Russia on mass.

That they will be used as standard infantry. If they would be guards or non combat they would get worse gear. As specialized soldiers, they would get tanks, artillery or whatever. Also it is Russian gear and not North Korean.

In other words they will be used for human wave attacks.

When the war started pretty much every European military placed some massive orders. So new production mostly did not go to Ukraine. But a lot of weapons are domestic and built in a large quantity. Also not everything from the stockpiles was send to Ukraine. That is just too risky.

So long enough to scale up production and use the EUs large economy.

Europe has quite a bit in place to defend itself without the US. Something like a million soldiers with some pretty good equipment and training. There are issues, but the EU could defend itself fairly well without the US. It is just that having the most powerfull military behind you makes things a lot easier. The problem is that this makes things easier and the US has a massive intresst in looking strong(Taiwan for example).

US presidential election

Sort of, but Switzerland is not going to sell you spare parts, ammunition and so forth when you are at war.

Also Switzerland as a neutral country can choose to supply weapons to both sites.

This is not a tank, but an anti aircraft system design to shoot down drones, missiles and sometimes other aircraft. The Russians claim it to be the best in the world.

https://index.minfin.com.ua/en/russian-invading/casualties/

Tank losses this month are higher then most months of 2023. That picked up a lot in October of 2023, which was the peak and then started to slowly drop. So this can just mean massive human wave attacks.

This is a war of attrition. Since about two years neither site has really taken anything really important. The key metric for that type of war is at which point the losses of men and material can not be meet anymore. Obviously Western aid is crucial for Ukraine, but so is Russia’s economy for Russia.

At this point breaking Russia’s economy is probably Ukraine’s most likely path to victory. We already saw Russian fighters march against Moscow after all.

It is probably both. Worse equipment and a lot of attacks before the US presidential election. If Trump wins, then Putin wants to be in as strong of a negotiating position as possible. Ukraine is probably very happy to let Russia take the losses and give them a bit of land for that.

They believe that Russia is inherintly Christian and especially Moscow as the third Rome. So as the battle of armagedon happens, they want to arm Russia, as to defend the holy city of Moscow against satan and his demons. For that they need a lot of weapons and especially nukes, as demons are obviously powerfull. Clearly they are also needed to fight the satanic West, approaching the holy city of Moscow via Ukraine.

And they are serious.

You can look at the thread. The initial one got a lot of replies from a “Vladimir Putin” saying “You should kill yourself NOW!”. The Git commit is even worse, with the a lot of insults. Not what usually happens on that kind of places, not that they are always kind and lovely.

The only reason this matters, is to put more pressure on those countries. After the invitation the next step is the all members must sign the Accession Protocol, which when all have signed would make Ukraine a member. Since those seven countries do not want Ukraine to become a NATO member right now, since that would mean war with Russia, they do not agree on sending the invitation to not be insulted by Ukraine all day long for not ratifying the Accession Protocol. This way it is all rumors and I gurantee you there are more then seven NATO members not wanting a war with Russia.

Really common sense and to be expected right now.

Like not risking his lifelyhood to fight US and EU sanctions against a genocidal regime?

Because there are both US and EU laws preventing code from countries deemed a threat. Torvalds is paid by the Ameircan Linux Foundation, which has to work under US law and he himself is an EU citizen. Also a lot of other developers are from those countries and if they do not comply, they could get into some pretty bad legal trouble.

So it pretty much boils down to kick out the Russians or kick out all US and EU citizens and well we see Linus choice.

If it is a PR stunt it is dumb. Putin needing troops from another country to win the war is a sign of weakness.

Russia is hardly a deeply Christian country. 8% of Russians go to church on a regular bases. In the US it is 41%. The Soviet Union was hard on religion. There are believers, but most Russians are just members of the church, but really do not care too much.Also North Korea does not care that much. They send soldiers to Syria and Syria is much more religious and Iran who is deeply involved in this even more so.