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Where were they 12 years ago? And 4 years ago? Ah, yes, they wanted a quick adventure โ 20 mins in and out. Welp... Fuck them.
Don't you remember the repressions against anyone opposed to the war? Showing a blank piece of paper got you thrown into prison. What do you expect a normal person to do?
https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/russia-demonstrator-blank-sign-protest_uk_622f1769e4b02961583dd743
Something like they did in 1917 I guess? The oppression wasn't any lighter back then.
But I guess most russians have grown soft in the same way Putin has claimed happened to europeans. Always reflection with these guys.
They need a vacation
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XSB2dxskVog&pp=ygUTcmljayBtb3J0eSB2YWNhdGlvbg%3D%3D
In their defence it's a heavily controlled state where speaking out can literally land you in the gulag. Doesn't mean things are peachy, and I'm sure a fair few people are just drinking the coolaid, but it's something to consider.
When USSR ended, Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus were in very similar situation, politically and economically. Belarus got Lukashenko from the very beginning, he immediately bought off police and squashed all dissent. Ukraine had a wannabe dictator Yanukovich, bur kicked him out.
Russia got a big window of opportunity between Yeltsin and Putin, they could totally do their own Maidan, plus storming Kremlin is a historical Russian tradition.
No one cared.
They got a taste of Europe and civilized world, the young people got tech jobs with lots of money. Instead of fixing their own government, they mostly emigrated, and now formed a diaspora instead of learning the language and blabbering about mysterious Russian soul and wanking on WW2 photos.
One of Putin's fears is that Ukraine showed a clear scenario how to depose a dictator.
You know that somewhat famous story of the bridge being stolen?
Yeah, post Soviet Russia was a smash and grab dreamscape. If you could take it and keep it without getting shot, it became yours. A lot of oligarchs got started then. A lot more wannabes died in the process.
I don't know that story, actually, but I am intrigued now
A taste of civilized world? Russia is civilization now and has been for many thousands of years.
Not when you are forced to use dial-up internet when all your online friends had Ethernet or optic cable for years. That was the state of civilization between '90s and 2000.
Okay so by civilization we mean slightly more modern technology? That's fine, I just got a bit ticked off because Europeans have a very long-lasting tradition to label everyone they don't like as backwards savages, and it came off that way to me.
Harsh but true.
Heavily controlled state that kills or imprisons political opponents, and disappears or imprisons protesters even for holding a blank white paper on the streets. Russia has the same issue USA does. It's a gigantic country with spread out cities, with most money going to Moscow and St. Petersburg. It's extremely difficult to organize effective protests. Especially now that their internet is more walled off than the Great Firewall of China. It's one thing to have centralized, effective protests in smaller countries where driving to the capital is a couple of hours.
When the war started, there where those in Russia that did protest the war. You could see them getting picked up and dragged away.
I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of them are young and spent their teenage years fearing their inevitable turn in the meat-grinder. I also wouldn't be surprised if those most on-board with the war already had their turn to fight and didn't make it back home.
Though the page does say it was a "phone poll," and if the youth in Russia are as averse to strange phone calls as many in the rest of the world, I'll stand corrected.
Also, the ones making the decisions to fight these wars are not the ones fighting.
It would help if those who start a war are required to spend a portion of their time at the front lines. See how fast these boomers walk back their armies.
Not sure about that though. For a large portion of the (european) middle ages it was common and even expected from rulers to fight in battle. It's not like that was an exceptionally peaceful time (nor was it exceptionally warlike though). Yet it should be mentioned that high ranking combatants like kings, knights and other nobles could expect to be captured and ransomed instead of being killed. But still, it was a risk and many a ruler were killed in battle.
The critical issue is that they weren't expected to fight "in the trenches" as it were, on foot in the front lines. They fought from horseback in the heavy cavalry that had the power of terror on their side because a thundering tide of heavy horse hoofbeats rolling towards you is kinda very fucking scary to the primitive part of the human brain.
They also typically wore heavier armour, funded from the surplus they forced the peasants to create, which was far more effective for survivability. The difference between a thick piece of laminated cloth, a shirt of interlinking metal rings that stops blades and slows spears and a metal sheet that movies never do justice to is staggering (as in: getting stabbed with a spear might leave you staggering instead of bleeding out, if the mail shirt held an converted the momentum into blunt trauma, or not wounded at all if it glanced off the curved metal sheet).
So between their battlefield role being half psychological and designed to shatter cohesion (rather than direct combat only) and their far more expensive, but far superior protective equipment, battle wasn't nearly as scary for them. The "ransomed instead of killed" is just a cherry on top.
The fact that many did get killed in battle speaks to the volume of battles that took place. They weren't as devastating in the pre-modern era, partially because guns massively increase lethality, partially because mass mobilisation wasn't as easy. But given that fortune in battle is a great and clearly visible way to demonstrate divine favour, kings wanting to show that god was on their side had a good motivation to find reasons to wage war.
Besides, once battle begins, there isn't a whole lot a commander of patchwork armies without modern communication can do. They don't have aerial reconnaissance to give them a bird's eye view of the battle, troop positions are harder to assess with the naked eye and getting messages out to the people doing the fighting is much slower if you need to first send a messenger to tell your duke what to to, who then has to despatch messengers to his own vassals and by the time the order trickles down and people get moving, whatever situation you might not have seen right in the first place, or maybe only spotted late in its development, might have shifted anyway and your order would be useless.
So might as well join battle, test that whole "God protects me" deal and trust the armour to make god's work easier.
In a modern context, sending the people starting wars to fight with the infantry might have a different effect, but it also would be quite different in nature. Imagine feeding Trump MREs! The pampered cunt would choke and starve... Actually, that sounds like a better idea the longer I think about it. You wouldn't even need war for it.
Well, yeah, but those were different times altogether