The pastures considered to be greener are rapidly wilting, of course, but if those folks fail to udnerstand it, it’s their problem. And when it comes to rebuilding, Russia wouldn’t invest a brass farthing in Donbas even before 24/02.
Every country the “socialists” (communists) ran was turned into the economic equivalent of a banana republic without bananas.
There is an old Soviet joke: what will happen if communism is established in the Sahara desert? In a few years, there will be a shortage of sand.
Peter wrote:
Nobody will do business with Russia again unless they can’t avoid it.
Doesn’t China trade with Russia? As a teenager I loved to watch StarTrek and there were the ‘Ferengi’ a species that were very keen on doing business no matter what. They had these ‘directives’ they used. One of them was ‘peace is good for business’ followed by ‘war is good for business’. They remind me of the Chinese.
Sure; the 3rd World will always trade with Russia, plus anyone who wants to beat up the Imperialist Capitalist West 
But the big business is with the developed world, and that will take a huge chunk out of Russia’s revenues.
China also has to be quite careful to not p1ss off America, because sanctions would hit it extremely hard. Of course it is also true that nobody wants to sanction China because we needs their cheap manufacturing But this is an area where nobody wants to go… China has Taiwan and now knows what will happen if they mess with that.
As long as Russia’s raw materials make it to the global market then I guess Russia won’t be hit that hard. Unless you consider thousands of dead a serious hit, but Russia does not value human life that much. I’ll guess this shitshow will continue for a while.
Sure; Russia will always find ways to sell stuff, via 3rd parties. Same as the USSR always managed to obtain Western technology, via the embassy in Vienna and then to Moscow via the “diplomatic bag”.
You just can’t do it for really high volumes.
This seems a good cause to donate to. I’ve just done mine. Drones are the most amazing gamechanger in this war.
Cool, you get a piece of SU-34 when you donate more then 1.000,00 American shillings.
“China also has to be quite careful to not p1ss off America, because sanctions would hit it extremely hard.”
Double meaning? Sanctions would hit US (and UK) hard. China has replaced the US as the imain manufacturing nation for civilian stuff.
Yes, which is why the West is very unlikely to impose sanctions on China, but at the same time China doesn’t want to risk it. It is a kind of “mutually assured destruction”
China is already looking at losing a lot of business as a gradual process, as a result of a) their continuous price increases and b) the fairly rapid descent, in the last few years, of much of their “business community” into utterly disreputable business practices. I have just extracted an injection moulding tool from there (after some quite obscene extortion payoffs) after the price of the product reached the sort of level one pays in the UK.
If China wants to support Russia (and it certainly does, being an ideological enemy of the West, and “your enemy is my friend”, etc) it will do it in a low profile manner. OTOH there are plenty of countries much closer which quite overtly support Russia, under the banner of “neutrality” and thus blocking arms sales (or even just permissions for resale of stuff they made decades earlier) which nobody can or will do anything about
One thing which surprised me is how many cruise missiles Ukraine is able to shoot down. Since they came out in the 1980s, these things were sold as impossible to stop. But Ukraine is able to shoot down most if not all of them, in any area where they have air defences (which obviously is only small areas of the country).
Peter wrote:
But Ukraine is able to shoot down most if not all of them, in any area where they have air defences (which obviously is only small areas of the country).
You need an AWACS (at the right spot) to detect low flying stuff in general. It will also detect marine vessels. That low flying stuff could be stealthy though, making it much harder. Just about anything flying directly into a (modern) ground to air defense system will be shot down if it’s not flying too high. We are not talking manpads here reliant on human intervention for targeting and targeting acquisition, but proper air defense systems.
Peter wrote:
If China wants to support Russia (and it certainly does, being an ideological enemy of the West, and “your enemy is my friend”, etc) it will do it in a low profile manner.
Well…. China now refuses entry for aircraft “confiscated” by Russia.
