This is a slight worry, a bit of a step up from the Russian troops Ukraine has been flighting:-
At least Ukraine should be prepared, and has good intelligence.
This looks like another play for the media back home. The Russians may have been able to bring up some supply in the last few days, but it would be impossible for them to compile assault level supplies under these circumstances. At best they only have enough supplies for an advance. (Assault level supply is for an al out effort to take a major objective, advance level supply is enough supply to take some ground and move your troops a bit forward.)
They are going up against a well dug in and prepared enemy who likely has no supply problems and is playing defense very close to their homes and into the largest city in the country that has now been turned into a fortification. The Russians have also completely failed to surround the city, which means the Ukrainians are getting regular resupply. Fighting with your back against the wall like the Ukrainians are doing is the best possible conditions for strong force cohesion.
The Germans put Leningrad into a siege fairly early in the war and never were able to break through even when the Wehrmacht was quite strong. Putin was born there and his parents survived the siege. You'd think he'd understand the mindset of the defenders.
The conditions in Kyiv are vastly better than Leningrad's were.
It seems a Ukrainian rocket battery (i.e. unguided Grads, both sides have these) hit the Russian patrol vessel yesterday night, in the Black Sea. The video at night shows the attack, followed by a subsequent secondary explosion on the ship (i.e. something got hit). The daytime pictures suggests it is still afloat but on fire. The ship will likely have been 5-10 miles offshore, certainly no more than 15-miles.
This shows that the Ukrainians still have a functioning sensor-to-shooter system operating on some of the Black Sea coast, including the ability to do target identification (i.e. they didn't just hit some random merchant vessel). It is actually quite impressive to hit such a vessel with such a weapon, this requires good teamwork.
This is the sort of thing that makes an amphibious task force wary of closing a coastline, might be why the Russians are still at sea. I think those ~5,000 troops are pretty much the only uncommitted troop reserves the Russian have left.
en.wikipedia.org
(Re whether it was a TB2 drone or a helicopter that hit the artillery battery, I don't know. I have seen a variety of different suggestions on the net in different voiceovers etc. I simply cannot see evidence in the photos/videos to be sure. My personal suspicion is a drone but it could be a helicopter, indeed possibly the one that was lost).
(1.7 million refugees have left Ukraine so far. The UK has granted them 300 visas so far. Shameful.)
That's amazing shooting. The Grad is basically a modernized WW II Katyusha rocket launcher. They are not precision weapons.
Some of your points are interesting, some overdone.
One example: retirees are not a net drain on any economy. Their expenditures are very different from young families, but not necessarily lower. Check out expenditures on, say, medical services, cruises, RV, financial services, to name a few categories. Wealth distribution among retirees is typically higher for retirees than for other populations although income levels tend to be lower. The US, specifically, is deeply distorted now by the last few years of rapidly disproportionate stock market gains and rising real property prices. Both of these are certainly not permanent characteristics.
The issue that IS serious in an aging populace is that in numerous countries the population is shrinking because reproduction is below the replacement rate. THAT is the problem, not retirees. That makes immigration from more areas of prolific reproduction, policies to encourage reproduction and advances in automation necessary to avoid economic stagnation. Some countries do all of those things, some do none of them.
There were a few other points that oversimplify or distort actual facts. The China description is so over-the-top simplistic and distorted that it actually clouds real problems for China. For Russia blaming everything on Putin is rather like blaming Hitler for all of European WWII, when the WWI rigid reparations rules destroyed the odds of German healthy recovery. It is also akin to blaming Trump or Biden for everything wrong with the USA at the moment. All those names made huge mistakes, some egregious, some with clear nefarious intent. Clear reality shows these people and their times did not happen without large social and economic upheaval to provide openings for dysfunctional governance.
Bluntly, happenings in the world are strongly influenced by outsized personalities, for good or bad. The personalities through, are creatures of their times.
People desperately need to study history in order to avoid repeating historical mistakes.
I don't blame all the problems in Russia on Putin. When the Soviets collapsed organized crime moved in and Putin basically became the crime boss. The entire management of the country is corrupt to the core. But this war is completely sitting on Putin's shoulders. The various leaks coming out of the Kremlin made it clear that the military and FSB were either kept in the dark, or if they did know, they thought it was a nutty idea.
The video I was commenting on had other issues facing China that I also agree with. Retirees in, I think, every developed country get some sort of government pension and state paid medical care they either do not pay for at all or only pay a nominal amount for. An area where even the United States is as socialist as the rest of the developed world. The working population pay for the retirees' pensions and medical care with their taxes. The guy being interviewed in the video touches on this, but the effects it has on the overall economy has been covered in a lot of depth in other places. I can't find the sources right now, it was years ago I read a more in depth piece about it.
Some retirees can spend money on luxuries, but they don't tend to be buying larger houses, extra food, diapers, children's clothes and all the other things people of child bearing age buy. Most people over about age 52 are more concerned about saving money than spending it. Those who are wealthy might be buying a second yacht, but most middle and lower class over 52s are economizing. I've seen multiple economists comment on this phenomenon and it's fairly universal in industrialized countries. The interviewee in the video mentions it in passing.
If each generation is the same size and the old age pension program is working correctly, the working population pays for the retirees and the strain on the economy is not that great and is not that noticeable. But if a smaller generation follows a large one when it retires, the economy goes wobbly for a while until the older generation can get offset by a younger generation spending. That's either through old age attrition, or a larger young generation coming of age.
Even though it's not popular most white countries with low birth rates have opened their doors to non-white immigration in the last couple of decades. This is to prevent hitting that economic cliff when the older whites start retiring and their kids and grand kids don't number enough to pay their pensions without taking a bigger bite of their paychecks.
The sanctions and reparations from WW I did leave the Germans feeling resentful, but much of Europe and especially central and eastern Europe in the 20s and 30s had a battle going on between 3 political forces: pro-democracy people, communists, and nationalist authoritarians. The pro-democracy types initially got control in Germany and established the Weimar Republic, but the battles between the nationalists and communists consumed all the political oxygen until the nationalists took control.
Today much of the world is still mired in a political dichotomy, but one of the tried from the 20s and 30s is pretty much dead (communism). Now the battles are between the authoritarian nationalists and the pro-democracy people. Some nationalists have gotten elected in some democracies and those countries have been wobbling. Though the world is getting a shining picture right now of what happens when an authoritarian nationalist decides to destroy the world order for reasons that are still unknown.
nationalinterest.org
www.theguardian.com
metro.co.uk
www.linkedin.com
