Remix clone Hacker News

> Like, is Russia reserving its soliders on the Western front for NATO reasons rather than just using everything against Ukraine?

The Russian government is treading a fine line domestically. For most Russians, the war is a not relevant to them. They do not want to fight, which is why when it became clear Russia wasn't going to have a quick victory, there was one quick and dirty mobilization that mostly sucked up people from the outer regions, in particular ethnic minorities. Russia is also dealing with acute labour shortages because of a variety of factors, including bad demographics, at least a million people leaving the country, and demand from arms manufacturers. This is why you hear about military contracts being as high as 50x the average yearly salary.

This is why there are North Koreans fighting; there was already a program that essentially sends North Koreans to work in parts of Russia as essentially slave labour that the NK govn't gets the money for. This was just an extension of that, with the added bonus for the North Koreans that they will get their first exposure to combat in decades. There are probably a few hundred Chinese soldiers (as well as people from a host of other countries) that are in it for the money, too.

▲

dylan604 9 days ago | parent [-]

From all of this, it doesn't really seem like they would be much of a threat to NATO. Except for the nukes. As far as traditional forces, there seems to be a disconnect between the fear of vs the credible threat. Or I'm just grossly misjudging things and it's a good example of why I'm not involved in any threat assessment type of position. Underestimate your opponent at your own peril type of thing

	▲	hylaride 8 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Russia isn't a conventional threat to all of NATO, but it can and does bring an enormous amount of artillery to grind away weaker enemies. The big risk is to the Baltic states. They've only got a small border with a friendly country (Poland). If Belarus allows Russian use of it's land, it'd be harder to defend.
	▲	thephyber 9 days ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Russia isn’t much of a threat outside of its own railway system. The soviets build their military logistics around rail as the primary mode of transport. This is why UA being able to hit the exit rail depots where RU was massing equipment was so effective at stopping the RU advance (coupled with UA’s innovative use of drones to attack road-based supply lines). NATO makes use of rail, but also has LOTS of varied mobility for delivery of logistics. In this way, NATO can shut down an invasion by RU by attacking the rail system, with both conventional and cyber weapons. The only counterexamples I can find are where the RU contractors do large scale ware for junta/warlords like in Syria and multiple countries in the Sahara. But they aren’t fighting a large modern army there — mostly insurgencies and militias.
	▲	ethbr1 9 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		When you're willing to bankrupt your country, have internal industrial capacity at scale, and retool your industry for wartime production... any country is dangerous. The only thing that will remove Russia as a credible threat is breaking its economy and/or aligning security guarantees with its neighbors to preclude invasion.