BTR-82A light tank seems quite popular due to good mobility, heavy firepower, amphibious ability, fast road speed.
Yes this is a pretty good upgrade. For the type of vehicle it is. Compared with older vehicles they replaced two lower power engines for a single high power one. They added splinter nets inside. And the new turret which allows high elevation of the gun is also really nice.
They are replacing older vehicles with this upgrade. And they are doing it at a pretty fast clip.
EU can do a lot worse (and more stupid too) than the current level of support to Ukraine.
No-fly zones, heavy armament, air planes ect. Even direct intervention.
They would risk getting hit with tactical nukes in that case. You can't do a no-fly zone over Ukraine without hundreds of aircraft. They would have to pool those. And then the Russians would hit their concentration areas.
How granular is the gas infrastructure between Russia and Europe? Can Russia actually turn off the gas to specific countries while supplying it to others?
The Russians can cut the amount of gas that goes to the pipe by that amount. The EU spent quite a lot of money making gas pipelines reversible, so a lot of it can be switched around. But not 100%. And you can't pipe what you don't have.
Man, the U.S. sure is an energy hog
The US switched from coal and oil to natural gas for electricity generation in the 1990s. And yes they use a lot of energy.
I wonder how long it would take to have a new gasline up and pumping at China speed?
The time it seems to take is like 4 years to build a pipeline from start of construction to first gas. Then at least 2 years or more to ramp up the gas flow through the pipe.
The "Power of Siberia" started construction in 2017, and started pumping into China in 2019. Give and take a few months, I guess 3 years? They already announced "Power of Siberia II", when Putin was attending the Winter Olympics, IIRC.
Power of Siberia 2, which was approved, is a gas connection from Sakhalin to the same entry point into China as Power of Siberia.
The big one will be Soyuz Vostok (which confusingly they used to call Power of Siberia 2). They have already surveyed the route and Gazprom paid a contractor to make the detailed construction project just this month. This pipeline will go from Yamal to Northern China through Mongolia. This is a big boost for Mongolia too which is highly dependent on coal for energy generation and has really harsh weather. Their capital has huge amounts of air pollution.
Russia doesn't have an industrial base that is geared towards becoming high-income. Putin has consciously steered the country towards "maximum resilience" for almost a full decade now, trying to derisk the economy and creating "Fortress Russia". The price paid was slow growth in exchange for building a country that is (almost) sanctions proof.
Given Russia's resource base the "fast growth" would be extracting and processing resources to sell abroad. Which is what they already do. If it was not for the military Russia would have little high tech industry. Just look at Australia. They can't even make cars. Or Canada. Where is it's high tech industry? Countries which develop a high tech industry do this because they need to pay for the energy with something. And that has to be high value add industries. Luxuries or high tech or something like that. Countries with resources can use those to get what they need. I think for Russia's economy to grow they would have had to improve labor productivity. But that is hard to do in a country which is basically a freezer with huge distances to cover. And had they done that now they would be screwed with the cut of their semiconductor imports.
That gives Russia tremendous survivability, but it ensures that it will remain stuck in the slow lane for the foreseeable future. China can help somewhat, but it is unrealistic to expect every single private Chinese firm to sacrifice the much more lucrative Western markets for a country whose economy is smaller than Italy's. It will be a balancing act for Beijing, and Russia will have to accept that it won't get everything it wants from China as part of that balancing act.
I get what you mean. But thinking their economy is smaller than Italy's is really shortsighted. You are comparing it in GDP USD terms. The ruble has been depressed in value ever since 2014. In GDP PPP it is around the size of Germany.
