I keep writing this here and there, so I’ll reiterate it here.
When the Soviet war in Afghanistan ended, some 70 000 absolutely mental soldiers returned straight from the front, and there were another 400 000 or so that had been rotated away from frontline duty and were a bit less of lunatics but doing bad all the same. Those 70 000 + 400 000 were too much for the Soviet Union of 300 million people.

One of the most important causes for Soviet Union’s collapse were those Afghan veterans who were accustomed to extremely violent way of doing things. The crazy years of 1990’s and the famously violent Russian mafia were a result of those 500-ish thousand madmen having been freed to roam the Soviet Union and later the Russia. All that instability eventually led to the total economical collapse of 1998.

So… Now there are some 700 000 soldiers more or less on the front, and another 700 000 doing other military duties. Those 700 000 + 700 000 will have quite an effect on the Russia of 140 million people. Once the war ends, ten times as many lunatics will return to the Russia of only 140 million as returned to USSR of 300 million. That will be absolute carnage and the 1990’s will look like a walk in a park compared to what’s coming up.

This is already unavoidable, but if the Russia is victorious, it can still avoid being ripped completely apart by that carnage. That’s the main reason the Russia cannot end the war. It will wage the war ad infinitum, unless made physically unable to continue. And if they some day cannot get any more soldiers, then that’ll finally the physical barrier they’ve been looking for.

I’d like to add: Almost all Russians think the same as Putin regarding what is a number of casualties that will be too much. To the question “what is a number of casualities that makes you think the war is a bad thing instead something that hurts but will bring glory?”, their answer is: “There is no such number. Our leader will [read: should] only stop once we reach victory!”

But, they do care about a certain other thing: a number of casualties exists that will be too much for people to want to let their children be forced to the front.

They will not stop supporting the war no matter what the casualties, but they will stop going to the front once the casualities have reached their target number. And that will of course end the war.

Also, there’s another relevant number: How many percents of your salary is bread allowed to cost before you start opposing the war. This has to do with the death toll, because the more deaths, the more salary must paid to each soldier, and the more the other industries have to increase their salaries in order to remain in competition for the workforce.

For your information:

This community is operated on a server operated by a Finn and physically located in Germany. You are using lemmy.ca, but this community, ukraine@sopuli.xyz is not on lemmy.ca, but on sopuli.xyz, a whole different site on a different server in a different country :) Sopuli is a server operated by a Finnish person, and physically located in a country known as Germany.

Also, you were talking with supersquirrel, who is using this network through sopuli.xyz (which coincidentally happens to be the same instance this community is running on). Supersquirrel is not touching lemmy.ca in any way. The two server computers, those of Lemmy.ca and sopuli.xyz, tell each other what new comments have appeared, and then show each other’s comments.

I am very happy that your canadianness happens to be partaking in this conversation, because you’ve good plenty of knowledge and very good argumentational skills.

And, the Latvian language test is hilariously easy. I have learned Latvian and listened to the test material.

In listening comprehension you hear a phone call to a bus station. The worker answering articulates more clearly than anybody ever would.

And then the multiple choice question is:
Where did the caller call?

• His workplace
• Bus station
• A clothes shop

(I don’t remember the other two variants, but the point stands: the question was super easy to answer)

And then, you need to write the first verse of Latvia’s anthem, in Latvian. That means having to learn a series if sounds as horribly long as 28 words.

The only way to fail that test is to have a strong principle not to want to learn Latvian or wanting to NOT know the anthem’s lyrics.

There are a few more exercises, but all of them are identically ridiculously easy.

It’s made so that russophiles will be unable to make themselves fill the test and everyone else will pass with flying colours.

It’s the only exam I’ve ever seen where you need to make an effort in order to fail.

Thank you!

The Ukrainian system of names basically functions this way: If your name is Oleh Melnyk and you want to call your newborn child Nastia, what gets written in the documents is Anastasiia. Then, people will call that Nastia this way:

• If they have to be very formal, they call her Anastasiia Olehivna (this is the father’s first name with a suffix)
• If they have to be formal, they call her Anastasiia Melnyk (this is Nastia’s family name)
• If they have to be somewhat formal, they call her Anastasiia
• If they have to be informal, they call her Nastia

Every Anastasiia is always called Nastia by most people around her. And every Nastia has “Anastasiia” as their name in their official documents. Nastia’s parents will never* call her Anastasiia. Not even when telling their friends what their newborn’s name is. They will say “Look, this is our Nastia!”

The same applies to basically all other names as well. There are lists online for what name corresponds with which nickname and there is no simple pattern that you can reliably use to automatically turn a name’s informal form into a formal form of the name or vice versa. For foreign names, -chka is a very common solution. When I lived in Ukraine, I would have ended up being Tuuchka, which is kind of funny because it means a small cute cloudlet, but people found that weird and just had to resort to always using my name as in documents, which made them feel kind of uncomfortable. If they cannot distinguish between whether the form they use is a formal or an informal one, their brain breaks a little.

Oh, and when I call my wife’s phone from an unknown number, she answers with “Anastasiia <Familyname>”, but if I give her my phone and she knows she’s talking to a friend of mine without knowing precisely whom, her first words in the phone are “Nastia <Familyname>”. And no, her father’s name is not Oleh. Nor Melnyk. I just took those names randomly. Melnyk is the most common family name over there.

*) Never, except when they are super angry at her for some seriously bad mischief. Then they shout ANASTASIIA MELNYK, and she knows she in trouble. And if it’s “ANASTASIIA OLEHIVNA, come here NOW!” then it means she immediately knows she’s been caught after all for having killed her sibling three years ago, or something like that. And similarly, if they want to be just generally stern and not angry (although: almost angry), they can go with just “Anastasiia. Come here. Now.”

I cannot get that to work. I tried this link: https://piefed.europe.pub/post/35873 . And no. Nothing.

The US instituted a mandatory draft to fight that war.

But that was an offensive war, and most countries don’t do those.

Finland was much much safer before.

Depends on how you define “to be safe”. The Russia had declared that its goal is to return the borders of the Russian empire. That sounded a bit scary, but we shrugged it off, because it would require a war and that would hurt the Russia so much that such a war would be idiocy and therefore will not happen.

In case you don’t know where the borders of the Russian Empire were, they included for example these:

• Finland
• Estonia
• Latvia
• Lithuania
• half of Poland
• Ukraine
• Moldova

The Russia has declared that it wants to make all of those countries part of the Russian Federation.

So, we were not in danger, because the Russia would not be stupid enough to begin a war in Ukraine or in Finland, as it was clear that it would hurt the Russia’s economy more than it could ever be of use to it. The Finnish defence doctrine was based on the concept of credible defence. We were told in school that “they can attack us and they could most likely even take over all of Finland, but our army is able to incur such big losses to them that they will not want to do that.”
But then, it turned out that the Russia does not care about losses.

So, we found out two things:

• the Russia is really interested in acting to its declarations. They are not just empty words as we had assumed
• the Russia does not care about losses – therefore the doctrine of credible defence does not protect from the Russia

You can say that we were not in danger because we didn’t know that we are in danger. And in some way that’s true. But, once we found out that we are in danger, then, well, we were.
Since the doctrine of credible defence went down the drain, meaning that Finland effectively did not have a defence that is able to protect it, what else than joining NATO do you suggest we should have done to gain a level of defence capability able to keep the Russia out of Finland? Name one other option that we had.

Your idea that the Russia has a right to defend itself by preemptively taking over Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, half of Poland, Ukraine, and Moldova is, well… It would be impolite saying what it makes you look like.

EDIT: And of course this is relevant: In January 2022 the support for joining NATO was around 35 %. No “let’s join NATO” propaganda had been made at all, but in May 2022 the support for joining NATO was around 80 %. The only thing that caused this was that people around Finland saw that what we had been taught about the Russia in our schools was crap. It was part of the school curriculum to make sure every Finn knows that the Russia is not going to attack us, with an explanation of why not. And it seemed to make sense. And everyone had that in their heads. And then… We saw what the Russia is doing in Ukraine, and it was clear from that alone that shit, we are fucked! That meant, 80 % of the people decided they wanted a new kind of safety against the Russia.
Maybe you can say that they told that in our schools for about 40 years just so that in 2025 Finland could join NATO. But… Well, you know.
In May 2022 you could go to any bar to talk with random people and it would be clear that the assumption was “we are joining NATO. There is no other option.” There was no real dialogue about it, because basically everybody was of the same opinion. For the abovementioned reasons.

Is this really an air alarm?

At least in Finland all air alarm devices are tested on the first Monday of each month. They only run one wave if it, and do that prolonged. The last seconds of the test sound pretty much like this.

I don’t think we could implement your suggestion. Our wartime maximum strength is about 700 000 soldiers and our population is around 5 600 000. That means, in wartime, one out of 8 inhabitants will be in different forms of military service. There’s no way we could pay an adequate salary for that many soldiers. And, that number is still a third less than how many soldiers Ukraine has, and Ukraine is just barely able to keep the Russia from advancing.

I’m not sure why you’re taking Vietnam war as an example, as it’s an offensive war and for example Finland has no plans to do anything like that.

Our military – numbers are public.

Yes, but the speed at which one can recruit soldiers in an emergency is not public.

maintaining offensive and diminishment operations

This is irrelevant, because most countries do not have any offensive operations to maintain in the first place.

You may not know what the phrase “proxy war” means, because in this context it’s rather insulting. And I do not think you meant to insult me or others. But do tell, why and how would Finland wage an offensive war?

Yeah, this is getting a bit off topic, but you’re making wild claims that would really need some clarification.

You could directly vote against being sent to die. You might not care about a ski hill funding request.

Uh, people choose when they are 18 whether they want to go to civil service or army. If they choose army, they will obviously be drafted if the Russia ever attacks, unless they have later had themselves removed from the drafting lists. To make a decision on how many soldiers we’ll need for the defence is actually an extremely good example of what kind of decisions absolutely cannot be made by a broad public vote. You need a military person relaying secret strategical information to the Ministers of Parliament. It cannot be relayed to all 5.6 million people without compromising the information. If such an amount of people knows about our military strategy, so does the Russia.

So, at least for that kind of decisions something else must be at place. Maybe there could be a restricted set of representatives that are allowed to vote in case we are attacked and you could then choose which one of those will handle your vote in this precise case – before they have talked with the military specialists.

There is no concept of a parliament majority leader being able to block a proposal from being voted on.

I didn’t get what this is referring to. Is it some Canadian or US-American concept? I’d be happy if you could elaborate a bit!

You can change your delegation after disappointment with vote on an issue, and can choose to not delegate your vote on a mandatory military draft proposal.

I am already able to change my delegation after disappointment. Luckily I’ve never had to exercise that right. Also, another thing that flew far over my head: why is an exception specifically regarding mandatory military drafting important?

There was a very interesting tool/game someone made in Finland. You got shown the same problems the actualy Ministers of Parliament have to vote on, and all attachments that are available for public.

The idea was that it shows that direct democracy can work just fine.

I spent an evening trying to make my mind on whether I want to support expanding a ski centre in Lapland or not. Both sides had very good arguments! In the end I ended up thinking “Damn, this is a huge amount of work! If there was a system like this in place in Finland, I’d definitely want to outsource my part. I’d find someone that thinks more or less the same way as I do and I’d pay them to do the research and use my vote. It would make sense that people would sell that service to several citizens at once, bringing down the cost per person. I would not want to spend several hours each day researching something like ski centres 800 km away from my home – yet if only few do and vote, then the result is really random. So, I would definitely want someone to represent me.”

And then I figured that “damn, this is actually the system we have right now!”

These are all about mann…sorry, orced airplanes.

But I’m not really sure what they’d do with a drone. In reality, if a drone was to fly here, it would be coming from Ukraine and going to some place around Murmansk, having veered off course because of EW, so it might make sense to just follow it and see if it gets back towards its own course. And shoot it down only if it heads for a city.

Well… The Russia has moved from heavy tanks to lighter assault vehicles, then to cars and are now down to motorbikes. Horses are coming next, and maybe they assume Ukraine will do the same as they?

Of course, on Lemmy things also depend on your instance. I got banned fromba group by a mod that is at the same time a lemmy.ml admin for mentioning that China is putting Uyghyrs to concentration camps.

On lemmy.ml you can get banned for things you wouldn’t get elsewhere. The solution for that is to join a group for the same theme but hosted on another instance. I’m in three communities hosted on .ml, because their alternatives are not active enough. But, of course I always prefer the non-.ml alternative when available.

My kids’ first electronic device was an android tablet for playing Ekapeli.

Then my phone for pretty much the same.

And now the bigger one is playing Minecraft on my desktop computer. (So that they would get fluent in using a mouse and develop their eye-hand-coördination. But they don’t know that 🤫)

Geroyam slava!

(Or, in Ukrainian instead of Russian:
Slava Ukraini
and
Heroiam slava!)

My understanding is that Ukrainians are extremely aware that Putin does not accept anything less than what amounts to Ukrainian surrender. They understand that the “negotiations” are purely a charade that Putin plays only because if he said aloud that he will fight until Ukraine is under Moscow’s rule, the west would flood Ukraine with weapons.

Because they understand this, they don’t really have an opinion on peace negotiations, as they don’t think there are peace negotiations at all. Just like a movie theatre showing Saving Private Ryan doesn’t mean there’s World War 2 going on in that cinema, a group of people acting that there is a peace negotiation doesn’t mean there is one.

So, the Ukrainian sentiments are those of a people who know there’s a war and that there will be a war until one day the west understands Putin’s goals and floods Ukraine with weapons and support in the way it could have done any day already for over three years and could do today or tomorrow, but will probably wait at least until 2026 first.

Absolutely! But I don’t think Putin truly gets this. His only sources of information are extremely biased.

Remember, he does not use the Internet. For anything. Ever. Everything he knows comes from his aides, and he has punished all aides that said something in contradiction with what the other, lying, aides said. Basically ridding himself of anyone halfways honest.