Anton Gerashchenko on Bluesky story about a strike at a nuclear plant with documentation:
https://bsky.app/profile/antongerashchenko.bsky.social/post/3m56ndvbujs2i
The post contains video from the situation.
As I’ve been posting many times before, many workers in Russia are behind on payments. People working in factories being 3 months behind is not uncommon.
Anna from Ukraine explains the situation here. She is a good source IMO, because her English is excellent, and being Ukrainian she understands Russian, and makes frequent news updates about the Ukrainian war from various perspectives.
Anna Danylchuk:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6EQ0ubmsIk
Inside Russia on youtube was first to report on the Russian population beginning to have had enough to a degree they are actually beginning to complain:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EoR5_bJywWQ
I’ve claimed before I don’t think Putin will last through the winter, and I see this as the first signs that the Russian people is about to have had enough.
The story reported by Anna and Gerashchenko tells that the workers are at least 2 months behind on wages, they were promised transportation to work, something that is important because of the lack of fuel, and public transport becoming unreliable. But they do not get the promised transportation. They were also promised 1 hot meal per day, but do not receive that either.
Finally in their homes, they are out of water and heat.
This is the economic and infrastructure collapse many have predicted was inevitable, that is now beginning to really show. And it isn’t even really winter yet!
PS: The moderators removed my previous post with false accusations, so here it is posted again according to their demands.
I hope you’re right, but I don’t believe in anything other than using force against the russians.
That would mean going beyond our current attacks with drones and locally produces missiles and doing at least 50-100 ballistic missile strikes against the russians per week. This is just one example; a similar comprehensive approach would need to be applied in multiple areas.
Beyond that, we would need to arm freedom fighters in occupied nations to allow both utilization of senior collaborators, but also anti-air system to bring down russian planes and a bombing program to disrupt russian logistics.
Atacks on the enemy has long been known to force their resolve to fight on. finding a useful target for missles is hard. Not that there isn’t a use for hundreds but that they are not as useful as many think.
Seems to me that Russia is already unable to handle the current level of attacks. But of course if the attacks on Russia were escalated, the end of the war would come sooner.
From your thumbs to god’s DMs, let’s hope so. I’m convinced peace without full regime change is impossible
I agree, Those 2 are connected, because Putin knows he won’t survive politically if he ends this war at a point where Russia has gained almost nothing, at extreme cost to the country.
And for Putin, not surviving politically is probably the same as simply not surviving.
On one hand, yes. OTOH, if there’s one thing the Russian state has proven itself capable of doing is shambling on zombie-fashion when people in functioning countries and economies would expect it to have collapsed. It’s as if the things we take for granted as the underpinnings of a state/economy/society have only ever been Potemkin-village-style decoration in Russia (“see, we have parliaments and stock markets and safety standards and celebrity tabloids and brunch bars with fashionable decor, just like you!”), while the real load-bearing elements buried beneath them are something far older and grimmer.
Beside the point, but; Why would stock market be neccessary or expected for a civilization? They are more of a unfortunate side-effect of america’s turbo-capitalism. Unfortunate, because it raised the broken, greedy, narciccistic individuals currently in power.
Soviet Russia didn’t need one. Look how belligerent they got after the stock market was introduced!
Neither are celebrity tabloids or brunch bars (or pop music or fashion boutiques or bike lanes or football leagues or a lot of other things), but people in the west look at these things as signifiers of modernity and familiarity. The Russians are just like us because they also pay for car insurance and play Clash Of Clans on their phones.
The Russian economy was already strained by the war and sanctions. But now the Russian economy is outright collapsing. Ukraine’s attacks and sanctions have cut Russian oil exports in half compared to the beginning of the war, and in the same time the price has dropped to half.
That means that oil exports are only worth a fourth now compared to the beginning of the war!
But it is not only oil, it is EVERYTHING!Russian oligarchs overall are estimated to have lost about half their net worth!:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Russian_billionairesAs shown in my original post, Russian companies are now at a point where they can’t pay workers, transportation is failing, and some people can’t even get food reliably.
There were recent stories about how Russians in certain regions wouldn’t have power or water or heat due to “planned” maintenance. Except this is not possibly planned maintenance, because that is ALWAYS done in the summertime!
Russia is out of options to cover the deficits in creative ways. From now on they will have almost immediate effect, and old deficits will catch up too, and the whole thing will probably collapse over the next 3-6 months, or earlier if the Russian people decide they’ve had enough.
I really, really, really hope so. But we’ve seen so many “tomorrow guys, it’ll all come crashing down tomorrow” that we’ve become quite numb to them.
Still, definitely rooting for this.
But we’ve seen so many “tomorrow guys, it’ll all come crashing down tomorrow” that we’ve become quite numb to them.
This kind of thing goes on very slowly until it doesn’t. Collapse of Soviet Union back in the day had various events for several years contributing to the eventual total collapse but the final stage (or whatever you want to call it) took only few months. Obviously situation today is very different than back in the 90’s, but it gives at least some perspective on what might be expected.
I don’t have any idea how close the total collapse is today and I’m not sure anyone really has, but cracks are starting to show and assuming things progress like they’ve been for the last couple of years it seems like pace is definetly increasing.
There were people writing “the Russia’s economy will collapse very soon”, but there were already in 2023 also many who corrected that, saying that “no, it will not happen that soon. It will happen around the end of 2025 or beginning of 2026”. Currently it looks like the Economy will survive until around mid to end of 2026, but that’s only 6 months of error in a forecast made almost three years in advance.
For example the system where private banks in the Russia have been forced to give the so called “preferential loans” to weapons manufacturers had not been taken into account when calculating how much money the Russia has available.
I don’t think tomorrow is what most have claimed, but maybe “any time now”, which has kind of been true for the past year.
The signs have been clear for a couple of years now, that the Russian economy can’t handle the war effort against Ukraine in the long run. But the time scale is very hard to predict, if not outright impossible. But in the beginning we knew that when the war chest Putin had saved up was dry, it would only be a matter of time before the Russian economy would see a steep downturn, those early predictions have come true.
But if for instance we get an extremely mild winter, Russia might actually push through it this year too.
But the way it looks, the infrastructure is collapsing, one aspect is that Russia commonly has centralized heating plants, that supply hot water to apartments. These are often based on waste heat from electricity production. And we known in many areas they are behind on maintenance of those, which potentially can leave people without both electricity and heat.
How bad this goes is hard to predict, but we are seeing problems already, despite we are only just out of maintenance season!
The Russian economy, infrastructure and population have been stretched beyond their limits for some time now, the real question is when the parts begin to snap.
I am pretty certain this winter will do it to a big enough degree on the economy and infrastructure for the population to snap too.
The story from the power plant where the workers strike is an example of it. Remember this is GRU (KGB) country, workers don’t complain unless they have really really serious reasons to do so. If you complain you risk going to prison, and going to prison is almost like a death sentence in Russia.
The Russian people will suffer, that’s a given. But will they do anything about it?
They only need to stop going to the front. Currently most of soldiers are real volunteers who are in it for the money.
Once the money stops flowing, there won’t be many soldiers volunteering.
That’s when the Russia will be in serious trouble with its war efforts.I think they will. Russia has had revolutions 2 times before.
As they say, third time is the charm. 😀
