this post was submitted on 16 Feb 2024
89 points (96.8% liked)

Europe

8324 readers
1 users here now

News/Interesting Stories/Beautiful Pictures from Europe 🇪🇺

(Current banner: Thunder mountain, Germany, 🇩🇪 ) Feel free to post submissions for banner pictures

Rules

(This list is obviously incomplete, but it will get expanded when necessary)

  1. Be nice to each other (e.g. No direct insults against each other);
  2. No racism, antisemitism, dehumanisation of minorities or glorification of National Socialism allowed;
  3. No posts linking to mis-information funded by foreign states or billionaires.

Also check out [email protected]

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
top 29 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 9 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

There is no limit to what you can achieve with an infinite amount of expendable labor. Russia shows this all to well.

The EU defence sector needs to be propped up.. more 2A7's.. more 155mm, more CV90, Taurus, storm shadow, glsdb, more, more, more. Contracts for production should include capacity for production, especially with munitions.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago

This is the best summary I could come up with:


Total defence spending has risen to an estimated 7.5% of Russia’s GDP, supply chains have been redesigned to secure many key inputs and evade sanctions, and factories producing ammunition, vehicles and equipment are running around the clock, often on mandatory 12-hour shifts with double overtime, in order to sustain the Russian war machine for the foreseeable future.

Early in 2023, the Russian government transferred more than a dozen plants, including several gunpowder factories, to the state conglomerate Rostec in order to modernise and streamline production of artillery shells and other key elements in the war effort, such as military vehicles.

“The war has led to an unprecedented redistribution of wealth, with the poorer classes profiting from government spending on the military-industrial complex,” said Denis Volkov, the director of the Levada Center, a polling and sociological research firm in Moscow.

Putin is trying to finance the war, maintain social spending and avoid runaway inflation all at once, in what Alexandra Prokopenko, a Carnegie endowment scholar, calls an “impossible trilemma”.

Those numbers, along with reactivated armoured personnel carriers and infantry fighting vehicles, meant Russia would “be able to sustain its assault on Ukraine at current attrition rates for another two to three years, and maybe even longer”, the group said.

“Today in Russia practically all military-industrial enterprises with additional state orders are working according to this schedule,” Andrei Chekmenyov, the head of the Russian Union of Industrial Workers told the Novye Izvestia newspaper.


The original article contains 1,429 words, the summary contains 241 words. Saved 83%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

[–] [email protected] -3 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

War is good for business. The military industrial complex is making bank on this shit.

If anybody is curious, here is an article from 2014 when the ideological fronts weren't as extreme as they are now. Everything was laid out already 10 years ago, and articles keep saying "nobody saw this coming" but all was perfectly predictable back then. And that means it was avoidable with a sensible diplomatic compromise: https://www.vox.com/2014/9/3/18088560/ukraine-everything-you-need-to-know

But in the current situation Russia has no reason to negotiate or give back the land they occupy because they are basically getting what they want already.

This war, the refugees, the austerity coming on the heels of the massive costs, the increasing wealth inequality, all of this is a gift for fascists in Europe.

And no, you can't attack Russia, they have nukes.

[–] HenriVolney 5 points 10 months ago

So we better let them bully everybody in Europe and kiss their ass, amirit?