He tried to crackdown on them and push them aside. If you're allowed to u-turn on all your election pleadges mid-term it isn't a democracy either, because people aren't getting what they voted for.
Negotiations fail all the time. Once again, the response to that is not a coup. Coups only happen in unstable or non-democracies.
It's costing the US and NATO hardly anything relative to their GDP.
You are not looking at the whole picture. It will accrue over time. Especially when talking about many years, followed by many more years of pointless reconstruction.
The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) is an independent, nonpartisan member organization, think tank, and publisher.
www.cfr.org
That's a lot and just the beginning.
The war is also emptying out Ukraine, as refugees end up settling outside the country, so that's an additional burden. Given enough time, many Ukrainians won't return. And if Russia takes everything to the east of the river, Ukraine's post-war population would end up less than 10 million, a significantly diminished threat.
Also, take a look at the Russian national budget, it's increased from 16T in 2018 to almost 30T in 2023. In 5 years, we could very well see it cross 45T, if not 60T. If we assume their defence budget doubles to 10T or $125B, then they can equal the combined US and EU's defence capex all on their own. The West will have to spend upwards of $3T just to match the Russian budget, never mind the Chinese one. Can the West double its defence budget in 5 years? And what if the Russian defence budget doubles again in 5 more years?
Look at their expenditure in economy and welfare. In 2018, it was about 7-8T rubles. But in 2023, it's about 14T rubles. Apparently, as per Western media, more money for defence means less money for everything else, spectacularly failing in their understanding of the concept of growth.
Surrendering to the inevitablity of such circumstances, the US wanted to eliminate Russia as a threat by destroying their economy by pushing Russia to to war thereby creating the excuse to apply the most draconian sanctions the world's even seen. So, yeah, that worked very well. In a lapse of judgement, the West forgot for a moment that there are other people living on the planet and that helped diversify Russia's market instead. On top of that, the Russians will come out of the war as the most combat-experienced army on the planet. Putin's obviously gonna fix a majority of the problems post-war, a problem that was best left to reveal itself in a bigger war than this one.
And, to make matters worse, the people in the West are yet to wake up to the problem their govts have created. So more purse tightening to look forward to.
en.wikipedia.org
