My parents don’t understand why I am still so angry about #brexit. They don’t see the scale of damage, what has been taken from us, and especially what the younger generation will never know. All in the names of hubris, foreign influence, populism, and xenophobia.

I feel the same incandescent anger today as on the day it was announced.

#eu #europeanunion #ukpolitics

🦅🔥 In a short period, 145 enemy reconnaissance UAVs were shot down, among them:

▪️Zala - 45;
▪️Orlan - 15;
▪️Supercam - 17.

💪 The work of 1129th Bilotserkivska anti-aircraft missile regiment.

Someone asked under an exceptionally genocidal video from some #Russia expert - “why they want so much to destroy people who mean no harm to them”? The exprt called to leave a “burned out desert on the place of #Ukraine”. I think all the responses that focus on morality or “Putin being savage” miss the point completely.

Russian savagery has rational grounds - each day Ukraine develops economically outside of Russian zone of influence makes it harder to sustain the Russian archaic, feudal socioeconomic model. The problem is of course that Russian economic model is unsustainable, and it has dramatic consequences for how both systems operate. Each day Ukraine was left alone without Russian meddling, it was able to execute its potential and grow. But for Russia it works the opposite - each day countries in Russian “zone of influence” were left alone to grow, Moscow was losing, specifically because their model of growth is based on colonial and parasitic principles (a political scientists would probably use a “political arbitrage” euphemism here).

Kremlin saw how it worked for Poland, Czechia, Slovakia or Romania, whose GDP per capita skyrocketed after they left Eastern Bloc. But Russia firstly had a tax on their profits, in the form of hydrocarbon sales, which provided not only financial income but also a political leverage when they threatened with “closing the tap”. Secondly, these countries are too distant from Russia culturally to give any food for thought to the actual Russians in Russia. The latter do understand that say Poland is “different” and can therefore live in a democratic society with low income disparities. Russians, in their minds, cannot, and requires a “tough hand” of authoritarianism.

The threat for Kremlin is that Ukraine at the same time was always perceived by Russians as “same country” so a huge economic disparity seen just across the border could be too much for them to bear. Russians would (and did) wonder why “same people” living just across the border can have modern, excuse me, toilets and sewage networks, not to mention all the more sophisticated civilisation institutions that Russia is still missing. For Kremlin therefore it’s better to see Ukraine turned into burned wasteland, because this would allow them to sustain their abusive model.

And we know this because this is precisely what they’ve done to Chechnya in 2000’s, to Syria in 2010’s (and much earlier to Circassia in 1800’s).

Their attacks, still mostly hybrid and rarely kinetic, on EU right now clearly indicate that they perceive EU socio-economic model as a threat to themselves, which is kind of obvious if you look at decreasing use of hydrocarbons (which make majority of Russian budget incomes) and general focus on internal well-being.

In case Ukraine is “secured” (read: erased as a potentially competing economic role model), it’s rather obvious that they will turn their attention to EU.

From their point of view, both Ukraine and EU are existential threats to “Russian way of living”.

Objectively, of course, it’s Russian way of living that poses an existential threat to others due to its exploitative and expansionist nature.

I very much hope people in the EU would finally understand this…

Latest Defence Intelligence update on the situation in Ukraine – 02 March 2024.

#Ukraine #Russia #UK #IntelligenceUpdate