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.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 month ago (1 children)

All of them are not russian but still a large majority if I got my information correct. Still, combine that with over a million young people just leaving russia, a ruble in free fall, a "war time economy", inflation flirting with 30% (higher for food) and the central bank kicking up rates to a historically 21% high while promising that it won't actually help... and yeah everything is going according to plan for this "3 day special operation".

I know who's gonna go down in history on the losers side.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

Even after increasing interest rates 3 times from 16% to 21% over a few months, the value of the Ruble is still declining!
I haven't been able to find much info on their inflation though, I've had to kind of extrapolate that, but if it's really higher than 30% for food, there must be a lot of Russian families that feel that badly. Hopefully that will help cool the Russians support for the war.
IMO it's unlikely that inflation is lower than 15%, which will already be a problem for many Russians, and will only get worse with Putins current economic policies.

I'd be interested to know where you get info on inflation in Russia?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Thanks for the twitter free link 👍, Interesting read. Despite examples on single items that are higher, I think 30% is a bit on the high end, but it's good to see people debunk the official propaganda.

I found the butter situation mostly confirming my own estimate.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/russia-wartime-economy-butter-price-inflation-1.7371742

But even this article on a single issue doesn't state the size of the package:

Reuters reporters found shopping bills showed the price of a pack of Brest-Litovsk high-grade butter in Moscow has risen by 34 per cent since the start of the year to 239.96 roubles ($3.41 Cdn).

Searching further I found that the brand is generally sold in either 120 or 180 gram packages.
So that doesn't help much except here we generally used 250 gram but many have shrinked it to 200g, so Russia may suffer some shrinkflation too?
But the claim is that butter has officially increased 25.7%, but according to Reuter price checks it's 34%. But butter is supposed to be in the high end.

For sure inflation is nipping away the value of Russian wages. And it's weird to read about Russians that are puzzled about why prices are increasing? But maybe they don't dare say what they are thinking.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

Yes and also Turkey and Iran. Most is supposed to come from Turkey.

The interesting thing is that allegedly this is caused by the unstable economic situation in Russia, it's simply too risky to invest in production.
And as long as that is true, the Russian industrial output will keep shrinking, making the economy even worse.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

You are right in calling me out, I can obviously be wrong. Or just overly optimistic :-)

Most of my information about the russian economy comes from different youtube channels, the food inflation being higher than the 'close to 30% general inflation' came, IIRC, from "Joeblogs" yt.

If you have better sources I'm interested.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

Apart from general economic information, which has to be filtered for propaganda, I don't have much.
But there has been pretty thorough reporting of the butter situation, like this article:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/russia-wartime-economy-butter-price-inflation-1.7371742

The central bank forecast 8.5% inflation for the year, but that seems unrealistic. But they can politically freeze some prices for instance on fuel and electricity. But they also dictate "free market" prices more widely now, something they've done to keep cost for the war machine down. This may dampen inflation, but instead is likely cause shortages. It's hard to do that for food though, because shortages there is as bad or probably worse than high prices. So that may explain why inflation on food is higher than average.

@[email protected] posted a very interesting link to a debate on twitter on inflation:
threadreaderapp.com/thread/1841884096655720630.html

[–] doo 5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

While this might sound like ruzzia can continue like this 50 times longer, the reality is quite different. Let's have a look. https://tradingeconomics.com/russia/unemployment-rate

Their unemployment rate hit the historic low in September 2023. Yes, they still have 1.8 million unemployed, but since the number stayed the same while there's a demand for human force, those are actually likely unemployable ones.

Before the war they had roughly double of that amount of unemployed ones.

So looks like

They already employed everybody they could
They already sent to war (and lost) everyone who wasn't bringing much value

Add to that about quarter a million (assuming only 25% are men of that age) of who left (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_emigration_during_the_Russian_invasion_of_Ukraine)

So yeah, they only lost 2% of potential soldiers, but it appears that already since a year ago they lost all "spare" men and every single one they scrape now is a) likely not fit for military b) was involved in military economy

Yes, they can continue like this for a while, but the cost of each new soldier will be bigger and bigger, the quality and equipment lower and lower. And the system will snap way before all of them are "expended". Ukraine says summer next year ( https://www.kyivpost.com/post/39020 ) given all this I tend to believe that forecast.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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.

[–] doo 6 points 1 month ago

Indeed, the point is that despite a "small" percentage, it's not 50 times, nor 40 times, but at best 0.5 times longer. Which is still too much damage to Ukraine, but we still can win.