This is really important as Russia has to convert its refineries back to winter diesel. That happens every year, so the diesel does not become a solid below -5C. For that the refineries have to be shut down for a bit. So Russia has not done it to avoid shortages. Obviously it also takes time to transport the diesel to the petrol stations. Winter is coming.

At the same time hitting data centres seems like a good idea to cause a bank run.

It is the Ukrainian Ministry of Defence.

https://mod.gov.ua/en/news/total-russian-combat-losses-in-ukraine-as-of-october-13-2026

It is just crazy to think that Ukraine used to have a population slightly lower than France or Italy and today it is below Poland and shrinking faster. Obviously the refugees might return, but many soldiers will not. In Russia this will probably end up in a similar fashion.

Is defending your country not a “traditional value”? Just asking…

Refugee status and it also just weakens Russia, when well educated young Russians leave the country. The EU is an obvious destination and obviously they need visas to enter. Also Russia has had a mobilization, which did end up with Russians being forced to fight in Ukraine. Somebody fleeing from that can be considered a refugee.

implement proportional representation.

Actually not the case. France, Italy, Greece, Hungary and Lithuania do not have it either.

This is a different sort of counting then the Ukrainian numbers posted here sometimes. Meduza only counts Russian losses(so no North Korean or other non Russians) and more importantly verifies all of them individually from public sources. This takes a long time so some deaths are not recorded for months and also probably means they miss quite a few deaths. As such these figures are the lowest reasonable floor for any realistic guess. The Ukrainian figures are probably the upper bound. At least historically enemy losses were overestimate in past conflicts.

That being said this also shows a lot of other interesting things. So well worth a read.

The 1.76million wounded seems to be the official Republic of China number. No idea how good Wikipedia is on this, but according to them they also had 1,319,958 killed and 130,116 missing for 3,211,409 total casualties. During the Japanese invasion all factions in the civil war agreed to fight the Japanese rather then keep the war going. So this is roughly it in military losses. Not to mention the millions of civilian losses. Imperial Japan was extremely brutal(and not just in China). Something which is unfortunately often ignored in the West.

However China also had more then three times more people then Russia has today. So this is pretty bad.

And this is a huge reason Russia is not going to have a revolution soon.

Erdogan and Israel are nearly shooting at each other in Syria. Obviously Greece is thrilled about that. Add to that oil and gas fields in the Med, where Israel and Greece have joined forces to keep out the Turks and you have a pretty good idea why Greece likes Israel so much.

Those are for a single day. They are also the official numbers from the Ukrainian military, so probably an upper limit to actual losses.

Russia borrows at 16% annually and the US at 4.9%. That rate is probably higher for Russia, since they could not place bonds for 16% in the last bond auctions.

People care about round number. Russians are people too.

So over 1.5Million casualties…

Why would Germany buy Gripen? They are part of Eurofighter, which is about as good as Gripen. Especially if you are worried about the US not delivering parts. After all the Gripens engine and a lot of other parts are from the US. Eurofighter can be build without US parts.

So by buying F-35 Germany gets a nuclear capable stealth fighter. We have seen how they were able to operate over Russian made air defence system without too much of a problem in Venezuela and Iran.

Russian military deaths in WWI were about a third of what they had in WWII. It is hard to be specific, as it ended up in a revolution with the Soviet Union being created. The Soviet Afghan war, which was part of what ended the Soviet Union had significantly lower causalities then that.

If Russia ends its war against Ukraine, then the attacks and sanctions hurting Russian energy export would end. Maybe push for that then.

Which includes WW2, when the US had about the same population as Russia has today. This is honestly insane.

This is another problem for Russias Starlink alternative.

According to a survey carried out in 2025 in the EU, more than 60% of low-value products inspected did not comply with European requirements or safety standards.

That is the difference. If you buy it from an EU based retailer, they will have imported something like a shipping container filled with the same type of product. So you need to basically check for that product once, if it is dangerous or whatever. If you get a bunch of very different products coming in via parcels, that can easily be 1000x more checks being required, which is basically impossible to do.

This is not about punishing China, but to make sure that Chinese sellers are actually following EU laws, when selling their products in the EU.