"Sale!!! For the first 3 people's republics that decide to leave Russia, 5% off on reparations payments."
Current massive bombardment of objects in the Belgorod and Kursk areas of Russia (note: Russia, not occupied Ukraine) is not just an enormous embarrassment to Russia's regime, it also shows Russia's total military exhaustion/bankruptcy. They literally do not have enough reserves to defend their own territory, much less to advance in occupied Ukraine. Another interesting nuance in this - Prigozhin is threatening that his own private army is about to move in to Belgorod, explicitly, in his words, "without any invitation". The government's legitimacy relies on absolute monopoly on organized violence. When some warlord's troops conduct military operations on your territory and you "eat it", that's a loss of legitimacy for the government. Unequivocally.
When you look at daily statistics, the weaponry count destroyed is usually very high each day, along with personell, Ukraine with the assistance from the West target their fighting infrastructure. The Russians ability to conduct offense is slowly but surely eroding away. The one thing which seems to lag is the quantity of marine vessels, either they are not targetting or perhaps not counting / devulging. The way it's going another year or two and Russia will have lost all ability to stage a war, hence why it is smart not to call a peace treaty with Russia. Except for shipping.
The sanctions are, and are working. Russians can barely manufacture a couple of dozen tanks a month. Very few artillery pieces. It takes very high precision machines to do so, and they were all German and Japanese. And cannot be maintained or bought again.
Putin's Russia Putin’s exploits as KGB ‘super spy’ likely an exaggeration, investigation finds By James Kilner June 4, 2023 https://www.smh.com.au/world/europe...tion-investigation-finds-20230604-p5ddsa.html Edinburgh: Vladimir Putin was not a Soviet super spy in East Germany in the 1980s but a plodding pen-pusher eager to please his superiors, an investigation has found. Germany’s Spiegel magazine investigated Putin’s murky past on the suspicion that stories of his exploits as a KGB agent were exaggerated. Vladimir Putin, pictured in 2000 when he was acting president, built his reputation as a hardliner following a 16-year career with the KGB.Credit: AP Instead of conducting vital missions to hold back the forces of democracy, Spiegel said that Putin was focused on “banal” administrative work during his KGB posting to Dresden, “endlessly sorting through travel applications for West German relatives or searching for potential informants among foreign students”. Putin was a 32-year-old officer when he was sent to Dresden in 1985, a tense time with the Kremlin’s grip over its vassal states fracturing. KGB officers were tasked with supporting East Germany’s Stasi secret police. Although the mission ultimately failed with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union two years later, stories of Putin’s alleged valour have become legend. Perhaps the most famous is how in December 1989 he single-handedly faced down protesters planning to storm the KGB headquarters. A young Vladimir Putin, in a screenshot from documentary series Once Upon A Time in Londongrad. ‘Facts and fiction sometimes blur’ However, this probably didn’t happen, the magazine reported. “According to one version [of the story], a single small man stood at the entrance to the nearby Stasi headquarters and watched the spectacle from a safe distance,” Spiegel said. “It cannot be proved that the current Russian president was even there.” Spiegel also said that witnesses quoted widely on Putin’s other alleged KGB heroics could not be trusted. A story about Putin helping anarchists in West Germany plot assassinations was based on testimonies from a serial liar with a criminal record, Spiegel said. Another story of how he had groomed a German neo-Nazi leader into an informant was based on interviews with a former Stasi agent who has admitted that he embellished his statements. In fact, there was nothing in the Stasi archives to suggest Putin was anything other than risk-averse, the magazine said. “Facts and fiction sometimes seem to blur,” Spiegel said. “Today’s Russian president was probably not a top agent.” The Telegraph, London
He was definitely a mediocrity in EVERYTHING he attempted. His (well deserved) nickname in Russia was always "моль" - "moth". Yeltsin, for some weird reason, in his decline, decided to elevate this nothing to replace him. And that is when the megalomania started.
Let's see how things are going in Russia. Here is a glimpse of the future for Moscow. ‘Everything Changed’: The War Arrives on Russians’ Doorstep https://news.yahoo.com/everything-changed-war-arrives-russians-141153997.html
Pardon me, I see what’s happening in the US, waaaay worse looting, remember BLM riots? And that shit goes on across America every single day.