Topic: Russia's economy is 'imploding' on export decline, economists claim - page 3. (Read 3923 times)

If you look at it, the United States is spending very little effort and money in the Russian war against Ukraine, helping Ukraine now, compared to the assistance that the United States provided to the USSR in the war against Nazi Germany. Moreover, the majority of the funds that the United States allocates to help Ukraine - at least 60% - remain in America itself. They are being spent in particular on weapons production, which has already led to the greatest expansion of the American defense industry in several decades. Thus, from February 2022 to December 2023, the United States allocated at least $44 billion exclusively for military assistance to Ukraine - without taking into account other components of support for Kyiv. According to the Pentagon, $27 billion (that is, more than 61% of the amount) remained in the United States and was distributed among major American arms suppliers and manufacturers in 37 of the 50 US states.
https://nv.ua/world/countries/novoe-oruzhie-baydena-dlya-ukrainy-pochemu-dve-treti-pomoshchi-ostayutsya-v-ssha-novosti-ukrainy-50372533.html

By allocating only a few percent of its GDP to Ukraine, the United States, through the hands of Ukrainians, significantly weakens its potential enemy without directly fighting with it, without losing its soldiers on the battlefield and without the destruction of its military and civilian infrastructure accompanying the war. Russia, on the contrary, is suffering colossal losses in all directions and will emerge from this war, which it itself started, significantly weakened and set back many decades in economic terms.

It's always interesting to see these old topics and the statements everyone including yourself made and how much of it was right and how much was wrong. Like the "Russian economy imploding" or the "F-16 being sent to Ukraine", neither of which happened to this day!

The difference between this war and the last one is that here US is also paying a dire price, and Europe (US main and soon only remaining ally) is paying an even heavier price. In other words prolonging the war would hurt them as well as Russia.

As for Russian economy, I have to say they've managed to control the situation and grow over the past 2 years very well. However there are serious issues that I see:
One of the reasons why Russian economy grew was because they expanded their military industries and are now producing much larger number of weapons. That means a lot of people went to these new jobs and that is good at first sight because that's increased employment and people are making money. However, this is still not jobs that would help the society and the country in the long run.
In other words that's not exactly a healthy economy even though there is a nice GDP growth.

I can say the same criticism about US economy as well. A lot of it is coming from "arms dealers" that are increasing their production similar to Russians to feed the wars US regime starts. That's an even bigger and more expensive industry compared to the Russian's and it's just as unhealthy.

Two years after the discussions in the topic was made, Russia is still standing, probably it still has the resources to continue its war against Ukraine for longer, BUT what would be the cost after the war? Will it be the same as what the history books tell us with the Soviet Union? The United States probably has made a controlled move to keep sending resources to Ukraine and continue draining Russia slowly.

Recently, Ukraine’s “low-level, low-quality air defense systems” have been causing significant damage to Russian planes and other aircraft, and missile systems, in turn, are actively knocking out the aggressor’s air defenses, and this is especially noticeable in the occupied Crimea Peninsula.

Thus, on the night of June 10, the Ukrainian Defense Forces struck Russian anti-aircraft missile systems in different areas of the temporarily occupied Crimea. According to the Ukrainian Armed Forces, Ukrainian defenders successfully attacked the S-400 anti-aircraft missile division in the Dzhankoy area. They also hit two S-300 anti-aircraft missile battalions near Chernomorskoye and Yevpatoria. Moreover, it is worth emphasizing that not a single Ukrainian missile was intercepted by Russian air defense.

After this, the command of the Russian army “recommends” that military personnel working with air defense systems in temporarily occupied Crimea take their families from the peninsula to the military cities of the Southern Military District. In parallel with this, the occupiers themselves are transporting the installations to the Belgorod region. Apparently, the Russian occupiers have begun to come to terms with the fact that they will not hold Crimea.
https://glavred.info/ukraine/rossiyskaya-pvo-ne-sbila-ni-odnoy-rakety-vsu-porazili-zhirnuyu-cel-v-krymu-10571846.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7nm7QPcJ_w
This former United States Marine Corps intelligence officer has some ugly truths that you may not like to hear...

Ukraine has at least six Patriot systems at its disposal. Two of them were previously supplied by the USA, two by the Netherlands and already two by Germany. And they repel Russian missile attacks quite well. No matter how many times Russia launched its missiles at Kyiv, even the latest “daggers” and “zircons,” it was still unable to break through the air defense. Ukraine has requested seven more such systems, including for the protection of Kharkov and Odessa, which Russia has recently been strenuously trying to destroy. The military leadership of Ukraine believes that this is the minimum that will help cover the sky over Ukraine.

The basis of Russian air defense is the S-300 and S-400 air defense systems. According to their stated characteristics, they should shoot down all Western-style missiles.
The contract value of one division of four vehicles of the S-400 anti-aircraft missile system is about 625 million dollars (based on a deal between Turkey and Russia: 2.5 billion dollars for 4 divisions), or 59 billion rubles. The S-300 air defense system, accordingly, costs a little less.
If Ukraine spent a dozen missiles at Cape Tarkhankut, then their cost will be no more than 20 million dollars and this is much less than the cost of the destroyed four S-300 and S-400 vehicles, the approximate cost of which is hundreds of millions of dollars.

At the same time, the missile used in Patriot, the MIM-104, costs about $3 million, and the cost of the ATACMS missile ranges from one to two million dollars. For comparison: the price of the S-300 anti-aircraft guided missile is at least $2 million. The price of the Kh-47M2 Kinzhal missile is $10 million. And Russia spends them mainly on shelling populated areas of Ukraine.

Once again your comparison is weird like the F-16 case from last year.

A handful of the weakest American air defense batteries (if it is the whole system and not just its missiles) is nowhere near enough to solve Ukraine's air defense problem. We are talking about a country that is about 600,000 km² after all.
Even 10 full batteries are not even enough to protect a single airbase!

Also you are contradicting yourself here.
Regardless of the reliability of the story about Cape Tarkhankut, you concluded that using a lot of very expensive short range tactical ballistic missiles (each worth at least $1.47 million) to destroy an unknown number of S-300/400 systems means "Russian air defense is very vulnerable".
At the same time you claimed that the handful of Patriots solved Ukraine's air defense considering how we know during the Saudi-US invasion of Yemen, the Yemeni forces regularly destroyed Patriot batteries using the ultra cheap Shahed-136 drones each worth $10k-$20k!

This is if we assume that Ukraine will hide the received F-16 aircraft from Russian missiles. Ukraine and their allies are aware of such risks and therefore are preparing to solve such a problem in a comprehensive manner. This means that before the F-16 is delivered to Ukraine, there will be a significant improvement in its air defense in order to cover airfields from Russian missiles. In the near future, 6 - 7 Petriot systems may arrive in Ukraine, which can solve this problem.

But Russia is also not doing well with air defense. This is evidenced by recent events at the occupied Cape Tarkhankut, where Russia immediately lost four air defense systems - three S-300 and one S-400. Previously, they were attacked by ATACMS missiles, which this vaunted air defense simply could not shoot down.

https://www.mv.org.ua/amp/news/276591-poterjany_sistemy_pvo_pogibli_11_voennyh_vsu_pricelno_udarili_po_mysu_tarhankut_v_krymu.html

Russian weapons turned out to be very vulnerable against high-precision Western ones, and countries around the world are therefore abandoning Russian weapons and buying Western ones. Even countries of the former USSR. Why do you think Kazakhstan sold its 117 combat aircraft at auction at a price of less than 20 thousand dollars per aircraft and what aircraft will they buy there in this case?

https://www.unian.net/weapons/voyna-v-ukraine-ssha-priobreli-81-boevoy-samolet-sovetskih-vremen-u-soyuznika-rf-12619707.html

You are absolutely right! Not only language barrier and inability to reach decent levels of flying in shorter periods of time/training but mainly just the lack of pilots. Most of the Ukrainian pilots were Russian-trained and flew Russian-built planes. Unfortunately, most of them are already dead. The remaining pilots have very poor level of English as you precisely pointed out. As a result, some time ago it was announced by a Ukrainian news outlet that there are only 6 pilots who could proceed with training abroad! 6 pilots/planes certainly doesn't sound like a gamechanger!  

Yeah, that's another factor to consider.

On one hand we have Russia that still has a large number of air-defenses which include high quality and long range radars and anti-air missiles alongside a large air-force with modern aircrafts with pilots flying them who have been trained for a long time under favorable conditions.

On the other hand we have Ukraine that has lost most of its air-defense and basically has a handful of low tier, low quality air defenses with lower range radars and anti-air missiles, alongside a small number of old/used aircrafts flown by pilots who have had little training under bad conditions.

For example @Argoo talks about "dogfight". That is easier said than done. Even the so called expert American pilots with years of training and most sophisticated systems at their disposal are not capable of performing decent dogfights. Not much is expected of a Ukrainian pilot with little training abroad (language barrier) on a Western system they are not even familiar with.

Another serious issue that may be overlooked is overhaul. Ukrainians may be able to fix a Russian/Soviet made aircraft since they've had them before (eg. Sukhoi and MiG) but they neither have the infrastructure nor the know-how to fix a Western aircraft such as F-16. Any small issue in an F-16 means they'll have to ship it back abroad (possibly to US itself) for Lockheed Martin to fix that issue.
That's not a sustainable air-force that can make any change.

Lest we forget the Abrams tanks...
This is why I said too little and too late...

My guess most of them will be destroyed on the ground before even being able to become airborne. Russian intelligence has improved A LOT since the beginning of the war and they are now being able to locate and destroy targets like HIMARS, Patriot systems, foreign mercenary camps etc even far away from the frontline.

Airports/airfields are such an easy target for Russian missiles. You can't hide an airfield or build a new one secretly.

In any case, for most Ukrainian pilots the first flight is also going to be the last... 

Interesting how this shows what I said years ago about the American scam to artificially keep US economy alive while ruining Europe's (force them to "donate" their expired weapons to Ukraine and "buy" new ones from US).

In any case, I'm afraid this is too little and too late.

Yes, that would be interesting since it depends on a lot of factors such as
- the pilots of those F16's, how much training did they have and at what quality,
- what kind of air-to-air missiles these F16's are going to come with and how many,
- how can they play into the current air dominance Russia has,
- and so on...

My guess is all these fighter jets would do is to only knock Russia down from having air dominance to having air superiority. And that's best case scenario.

Denmark is giving Ukraine all its F-16 fighters: they should be provided this summer. This was stated by the Ambassador of Denmark to Ukraine Ole Egberg Mikkelsen. “There will definitely be planes for Ukraine. This is our entire F-16 fleet, which is now being retired because we are getting a new generation of aircraft - the F-35. No need to worry. The F-16s will be delivered as we promised,” said Ole Egberg Mikkelsen.
https://uatv.ua/daniya-otdast-ukraine-ves-svoj-park-istrebitelej-f-16-podrobnosti/

Since Denmark is going to transfer its entire fleet of F-16s to Ukraine, it is hardly worth considering that they are all old models. Denmark began receiving F-16s in January 1980. The country first ordered 58 aircraft, and in the mid-80s - 12 more, which came to replace the most worn-out aircraft of the first batch. This order was completed approximately in the late 80s of the 20th century.

  The media claim that all F-16 aircraft of the Netherlands and Denmark were modernized from the mid-90s to the mid-2000s under the Mid-Life Update (MLU) program. The fighters were also regularly maintained to extend their service life. In the F-16 aircraft modernized under the MLU program, the radar station was replaced with AN/APG-66(V)2 with a target detection range of up to 110 km. To use high-precision weapons on the fighter, the ability to mount Lantrin or Litening type containers was added. The on-board computer, on-board display equipment, electronic warfare, navigation and communications systems, and low-altitude flights were updated.
https://tsn.ua/ru/svit/kakuyu-versiyu-f-16-peredadut-ukraine-daniya-i-niderlandy-ocenki-ekspertov-2394970.html

The F-16 MLU version is a full-fledged multi-role fighter that can conduct dogfights at ranges of more than 100 km and use a wide range of precision weapons. Soon we will have the opportunity to evaluate these aircraft in combat with Russian fighters, which has never happened before, especially on such a scale.

 

Of course, in a country that is a pathetic copy of Nazi Germany, where ""the special operation is going according to plan", "in 3 weeks "Ukraine will fall" because "the second army of the world, the great Russia, and the whole world will freeze without our gas", there have already been 2 mobilizations, the operation lasts for almost 2 years, and at the front, for lack of "cannon fodder" they take criminals, pedophiles, rapists, murderers, thieves, and with hysterics try to throw the advancing AFU, the fall draft - not for the war in Ukraine ! 

It is very funny to watch you trying, in vain, to deceive yourself )))) And it is very stupid to twist information - I wrote that they will recruit expendables and cannon fodder for the draft, you squeal - "you are lying", give proof of my information, but then make up a pathetic, stupid story that it is not for war 
Even Sakhalin units in Russia have already been transferred from their permanent home and are fighting in Ukraine, the Far East is provided with combat-ready units and reserves at 7-10% of the planned.....

But okay, once again you've been laughed at, let's get back to the successes of the terrorist country And you are going to check again, and you are going to come up with pathetic stupid excuses again

Remember - if Putin says "there will be no mobilization" - it means there will be mobilization, if the General Staff says "no one will go to SVO" - it means they will all die there. Russia is a country built on total lies and deception of the population ! This is also a fact


- The government will "put under the knife" all key health care projects to pay for the war.  The Russian government is sequestering spending on all key medical development projects to pay for the growing "bill" for the war with Ukraine, which by the end of the first two years will exceed 10 trillion rubles, and by the end of the third year may exceed 20 trillion rubles.

In 2024, the federal treasury spending on the national project "Health Care" will be cut by 10% - from 321.3 to 289.9 billion rubles, according to the explanatory note to the budget law, which was submitted to the State Duma on Friday.

- "Everything for the front": Russia will spend in 24y on defense almost a third of the Russian budget.
and this news complements it perfectly:
- Russian authorities have classified 30% of the budget expenditures for the 24th year

Total - about 60% of the budget will be burned in the already lost war ...

- While the authorities are reporting about overcoming the crisis and economic growth, Rosstat recorded that industry has slipped into recession. August was the third month of production decline, if seasonal and calendar factors are eliminated: in June-August it amounted to 0.2%, 0.1% and 0.3%, the statistical service cites data. Experts, depending on their models, also interpret Rosstat's data in such a way that industrial growth has run out of steam and has even been replaced by a decline, if not a recession.


For the rest of you, I recommend reading the article about "Russia's fairy-tale economy and budget" https://www.moscowtimes.ru/2023/09/28/rezhim-pokazivaet-byudzhetnie-fokusi-no-finansi-raspolzayutsya-pod-gruzom-voennih-trat-a108318.

OMG, it's unbelievable but everything this guy is posting is a lie. Everything. By googling the latest headline you provided (no source mentioned as always) it's easy to find this:


Source: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russias-putin-signs-decree-autumn-military-conscription-2023-09-29/

So it turns out it's a routine conscription and the conscripts are not going to Ukraine. Who could have thought? It's a lie again.  

Meanwhile, the support for Ukraine is fading day by day:



As you can see, if people were in charge not the governments, Ukraine wouldn't receive any support at all most probably. In particular, only 24% support the purchase and supply of military equipment to Ukraine!

All is good, Slava Ukraini!  

1. you can easily check any fact I have given you. Which is to be expected, I have never been able to do with your fantasies

2.Judging by the people I saw in the rf army in 2022, in the so-called "second army of the world" - they recruit ONLY mentally distant and moral degenerates there:) I don't understand why you don't defend the "brown Russian world" yet
But... you will soon have a great chance "Russia: Vladimir Putin signed a decree on conscription of 130 thousand people into the Russian army".

There is a huge assumption in your post. You are assuming that the F-16s that Ukraine is supposed to receive are the improved versions. However, from what I can tell this assumption may not be correct since what is being sent is the old versions with little to no improvement.

For example two of the batches that Ukraine may receive in the future are coming from Denmark and Netherlands. Both of these countries have purchased majority of their F-16s in the early 80's and some small numbers in the 90's; meaning most of what they are going to send to Ukraine is the old versions (A and B variants).

As for the lifespan, these old aircrafts have only gone through certain small upgrades for example one of them is what Lockheed-Martin refers to as the "MLU package" which Denmark paid for and only performs routine tests for fatigue, cracks, etc. and fixes some to increase the lifespan. It is like taking your 50 year old car to the shop to increase its lifespan for another decade!

As for the missiles, the only missiles that these countries have purchased (like the ones that RDAF owns) are medium range like the air-to-air missiles such as AM-110 that has a range of 30 miles (48 km), the air-to-ground missiles such as AGM-65 that has a range of 0.6-10 miles (1-16 km).

I couldn't find any reliable information about the radars installed in these aircrafts so I can't comment on that. But considering the rest, specifically the short range of their missiles, I wouldn't count on it to be anything "modern".

The problem is actually much deeper than that ... If you think the problem is Putin, I'm sorry, but you're wrong. The problem is the Nazi regime of Russia and the support of Nazism and terror against the developed world, and civilization in general, by the majority of the Russian population. As a resident of Ukraine - believe me, it is not Putin who kills civilians in Ukraine and destroys cities, it is just ordinary, typical, residents of Russia, who simply do not hate the whole world.

Therefore, there is no need for any signatures, Russia, as the center of today's world destabilization, new Nazism, and terrorism, including economic terrorism, must cease to exist in its current state.  The ideal solution is the division of russia into several independent republics, with temporary external rule, with total demilitarization, and with obligations to pay reparations for many decades, to ALL those who suffered from the soviet and russian power.

Oh, you're still here? You need to defend your motherland in Donbas! I've heard they need more fighters ASAP! Stop trolling from the safety of your home, join your comrades on the front lines. And remember good news for you: now they're accepting retarded people as well!   

Anyways, getting back to the topic: your laughable claims are not supported by anything. No sources, no proof, nothing. Somehow, I'm not surprised. Stop spreading BS and lies. Please.

A bit of positive news from Russia Smiley

- VTB head predicts the dollar at 250 rubles in the transition to the Chinese model of the currency market
Russia's transition to the Chinese model of the currency market with the introduction of two ruble exchange rates will lead to a sharp decline in the domestic currency, said VTB CEO Andrei Kostin. "If we introduce two ruble exchange rates, we will have one at 150 and the other at 250, that's for sure," Kostin said at the International Banking Forum in Sochi.

- "Gazprom" reported a record in the history of gas production collapse. At the end of the first half of the year, Gazprom's production amounted to 179.45 billion cubic meters, the company said in its quarterly report. Compared to the same period of 2022, the volumes fell by 25%, and if compared to the pre-war period - by almost a third: in January-June 2021, Gazprom produced 260.8 billion cubic meters. Never in the three decades of its history has the world's largest gas company reduced production so rapidly.

- Budget expenditures for Putin's maintenance will be increased by 20%. The maintenance of Russian President Vladimir Putin in the next three years will cost Russian taxpayers 74.7 billion rubles. This amount for the "functioning" of the head of state the government has laid down in the draft federal budget for 2024-26, which was submitted to the State Duma on Friday.

- Russia faces a shortage of black bread. Rye of the first, second and third classes will make up about 97% of the entire harvest, but 59% of this volume will be of the third class, which is a poor quality indicator

- Russian farmers are under the threat of mass bankruptcies after the withdrawal of foreign grain traders. Monopolization of the grain market following the departure of foreign players who left Russia after the outbreak of war in Ukraine has brought thousands of farms to the brink of bankruptcy.
Grain traders are buying grain below the cost of production and this is destroying the economy of farms, a member of the State Duma committee for agrarian issues, Sergey Lisovsky, has said.