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.

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.”

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.

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?

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.

“European education standard”?

That doesn’t actually exist.

Putin’s plan is still that Yanuk could be put to govern Ukraine. That was the original plan of February 2022. Probably not a main plan anymore, but one door he wants to retain open.

Dunno. I think adding “the” in front of it is enough. Around summer 2023 I saw some high-ranking orc (Peskov? Medvedev? Cannot remember) using “the Ukraine” in a social media post on Twitter or Telehlam or whatever, in order to emulate using the Russian preposition “na”. The high-ranking orc figured using “the” in front of Ukraine’s name is insulting and thinks that it somehow shows Ukraine as a region instead of being a full-fledged country, so I took heed of the example and started saying “the Russia”.

I’m not sure if it really conveys the notion that the Russia is an artificial creation that is a weird product of Mongolian corruption mixed with stealing the name of the people living in the country behind the Russia’s southwestern border and claiming some of that other nation’s inventions as the Russia’s own… At least the common reader probably doesn’t get it.

But, Kremlin considers it an insult to add “the” in front of a country’s name, and this is the one thing where you can trust what Kremlin says 🤠

So, capital letter it is, because using a lowercase one would alter the Finnish grammar more than it alters the Ukrainian or English grammar, and I am not able to write it one way in one language and another way in another. But there’s always the “the”, as requested by Kremlin.

(BTW, between 2014 and 2022 the Russia was working actively to get the west to use the article “the” in front if Ukraine’s name. What has happened is that it works as a fantastic marker for recognizing who has been accidentally accepting information from Russian propaganda sources!)

Depends.

In my mother tongue “Englanti” means “England” and “englanti” means “English [language]” (and “englantilainen” means “English [thing or person]”)
If I write the name of the Russia with a lowercase letter, it gets confused with the Russian language. “A factory was bombed by the Russian language” is such a bonkers phrase to say that I prefer just using the uppercase letter. And then my brain has it difficult talking about the Russia with a lowercase letter in other languages either.

Could be something like that for A_norny_mousse, as well. Being from feddit.org, their mother tongue is likely to be German, and there they have something similar. Because for example “spielen” means “to play” and “Spielen” means “the playing”, and because any verb can be converted to a noun that way, in the German Language you write all Nouns with a capital Letter. In speaking you can hear them from the pronounciation, but in writing you need the caps. If you write “russland” instead of “Russland”, you end up turning that word into a verb. Or maybe an adjective. Anyway, something else than a noun.

It would be very interesting to know where he’s from in Ukraine. Or, more precisely, where he’s been living between 2014 and 2022. If they spent all that time in the city of Donetsk or in Simferopol, “he is Ukrainian” means a very different thing than if he has lived that time in Poltava or L’viv.

There are many people in the occupied areas that have Ukrainian passports but are loyal to the Russia.

Economy.

Economy will keep this conflict from freezing. The Russia’s economy is spiralling downwards, possibly unrecoverably. That country will go bankrupt. Inflation is eating people’s savings in terms of how many grams of bread you can buy with your salary. That will make people discontent.

And also, the Russian soldier is in it almost purely for the money. That means, the money paid to the soldiers must rise at least at the same pace as inflation. Which, in one hand, means that the government needs to pay more and more, and in the other hand that there will be more inflation because companies have to compete with the soldiers’ salaries in order to get any workforce at all. Eventually the only way the Russia can pay those exponentially increasing salaries for its soldiers will be by printing money.

And when you print money, you end up with hyperinflation. And when the Russia gets that far, it’s over with the war. Any Russian will understand at that point that retaining control over territories in Ukraine is less important than having an economy. USA can slow down the collapse of the Russia’s economy, but it cannot prevent it. If EU joins in with USA, then yes, the Russia’s economy can survive. But USA will be the only western country siding with the Russia, so the Russia is a dead man walking. Being the biggest economy in the world, the EU has a lot of say in this.

I wouldn’t call it a frozen conflict if it has an end that is known to arrive.

There’s plenty of dried area on Dnipro’s right bank as well.

Putin does understand English very well, though. He will speak only through an interpreter, but doesn’t need it for understanding what others say.

One reason he uses an interpreter is that while the interpreter is translating, he has extra time for formulating his answer, as he doesn’t need to actually listen to the interpreter.

Why does the Russia use Orlans in Tatarstan?