ATTRITION: Russia Runs Out of Russians
February 15, 2024: The Russian invasion of Ukraine in early 2022 led to yet another exodus of Russians from Russia. This continued migration has caused labor shortages, disruptions in production and declines in economic growth. Few people from industrialized nations want to come to Russia, so Russia is importing workers from poor East Asian and South Asian countries or regions.
History regularly repeats the fact that going to war brings with it unexpected costs. Russia didn’t expect its invasion of Ukraine to cost so much. This began with Russian leaders convincing themselves that Ukrainian resistance would not be a problem and would be over quickly. Many Russian government and military officials knew otherwise but the senior decision makers dismissed such pessimistic assessments. To make matters worse, Russian leader Vladimir Putin is determined to wear down Ukrainian resistance despite heavy Russian losses. The Russian plan includes reducing Russian casualties by continuing to spend heavily on weapons, munitions, and missile attacks on Ukrainian economic targets.
Russia has coped with most of Western economic sanctions and convinced the Russian population that the war effort is for the defense of Russia against NATO aggression. Russia can afford this war because they have an annual GDP of over two trillion dollars and the ability to increase annual defense spending to over $100 billion. That’s up from $86 billion in 2022 and $66 billion in 2021. A decade ago, annual defense spending was $20 billion. This is tolerated by Russian taxpayers because, before 2022, the military threat was hypothetical. That changed in 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine as part of an effort to protect Russia from purported inevitable NATO aggression. All that makes no sense to most Westerners, but Ukrainians understood as did NATO’s East European members, especially Poland and the Baltic States.
https://www.strategypage.com/htmw/htatrit/articles/20240215.aspx
