Just to say it, a job in the defence industry means you will not be drafted to the front line. If you can not leave Russia for some reason and want to avoid to fight, it is by far the best realistic option. So just imagine the personal shortages of companies outside the defence industry.

First of all the entire area is mostly cut off already. The Snarkost river, which flows into the Seim is cutting the Russians off south of Korenvo. The Ukranins control those bridges.

Blowing up the bridges creates a dillema for Russia. They can fight for the land and probably have high losses or they withdraw their soldiers and give Ukraine a stronger defensive line. The Seim is a fairly large river, so a good position for Ukraine and it shortens the line they have to defend. At the same time Ukraine does not have endless resources in the region as well. So allowing the Russians to withdraw is an option.

Especially if Ukraine plans another attack it would be a good choice. Ukraine has something like 100Leopard1, which have hardly seen combat and thousands of new recruits, which have recieved training. We have so far not seen those units. Many front line units in Donetzk are also complainign that the general staff is withdrawing assets. Kursk is a few thousand men, so not something they would notice. We also know that Ukraine has been attacking Crimea for some time. So maybe we see another offensive in the south soon. But all of that is just speculation.

The existing front lines are hundrets of km away. When you advance you have to move your supply line, air defence, artillery and so forth forward as well. If you move too deep, then it becomes easy for the enemy to target valueable assets, which should be a bit behind the front line. That is what Russia failed to do in the opening months of the war. They advanced a lot and Ukraine could just target air defence, artillery, tanks from behind, blow up or take supplie and so forth.

This would not have worked. The Russians are not that incapable.

I did not know that and changed the link.

Russia still has a large airforce, the navy outside the Black Sea has also not been hit and the nukes also still work. All of that is with an army, which is clearly able to fight a large scale war. Obviously they are so far failing to take a country with a quarter of the Russian population, but they are clearly able to fight.

What this does do is destroy the massive Soviet era weapons stockpile, it hurts the Russian economy and kills a lot of the willing fighting age men. If Putin is removed and Russia and the war ends, chance are that Russia ends up in a huge economic crisis, with a lot more of its talent leaving the country, massive cuts in military spending and the demographic crisis becoming even worse. It probably means a lot of infighting, maybe even a civil war, but certainly a lot of crime. However Russia as an entity will survive this and will remain a threat to Europe, as long as its culture does not change.

The last point is probably a big one. Scholz SPD is in real trouble making the 5% hurdle in both states, which would be a disaster for him.

By who? The budget would mean as much money for Ukraine in 2025 as Poland or France have send so far in total. That is not including EU contributions. Also there is about 3billion worth in Russian money, which goes to Ukraine from Germany. Makes the right ones pay.

The current budget allocation is about as high as the one in the 2024 budget was initially. They just added further spending over the year. Th other part is using Russian money instead. The real reason this is the current state, is that they want to get the budget passed as quickly as possible and the debt brake means that any funding for Ukraine has to be balanced with a cut in social spending. Obviously that is not popular.

It is and it is actually even worse for Russia, as it is not just Chinese, but also Central Asian banks. That makes migrating to Russia for work even worse for them. Russia already has labor shortages, so this will bite badly.

They are pretty much all mostly government owned. Especially the big ones. The CCP tells them which industries they are supposed to lend to. However they are allowed to choose the companies and also get to do some independent business, if that makes money.

The problem is that Russia is a small fish on the international stage, but the US and EU are massive. All Chinese banks have ties to them and rather not receive secondary sanctions.

Most have not been silent. They mostly said that Ukraine is allowed to use Western made weapons in Russia including Kursk. Idk what the Russians are talking about.

Russia still pays the transit fees to Ukraine.

Thats about $250k

Compressor stations…

4-5 days until 600k is mindblowing. Russia is really loosing population quickly right now.

The entire situation is really akward. This sums up the best current guess rather well:

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1823898586922295622.html

This makes sense. Russia very likely will try to downplay the refugee crisis. Hence the best move is to move refugees from Kursk and Belgorod into the occupied territories. That turns them properly Russian, makes the refugee crisis look smaller as most Russians will not meet refugees from Kursk and creates a massive problem for Ukraine.

The gas line goes through Ukraine proper. Ukraine had the ability to destroy it for the entire war and did choose not to. So clearly not the reason they went into Russia.

That is probably one of the reasons the others are maybe:

• force Russia to redeploy troops from the front further south
• force Russia to guard the entire border seriously, hence using more soldiers
• make Putin look weak within Russia and abroad(this has a lot of consequences, mostly good for Ukraine
• take prisoners for exchange

The thing is that the value is in the communities and not in the old content. So most likely the mods would just post we move to a new instance and a lot of users would follow. We just saw that on the German speakin lemmy instance feddit.de, which was abandoned and now most of the users and communities moved to feddit.org, which is already one of the larger ones.

What lemmy really needs is the ability to easily move accounts and communities. Mastodon has that for users already.