Putin beordrar styrkor att gå in i Ukraina - INVASION NU (2022-02-24)

Above all else, the Russian state has to financially support the families of fallen soldiers in perpetuity. Many of the wounded (to say nothing of the dead) will permanently be out of the workforce, and even those who return to it will require lifelong mental and physical health care. And the numbers of dead or wounded servicemembers will only worsen the negative demographic trends in Russia. These challenges will grow larger as the war continues and the bodies pile up.

one-time payments would equate to 900 billion rubles for wounded personnel and at least 1.4 trillion for families of the dead, 2.3 trillion rubles total. This equates to 6 percent of the 2024 budget, a truly staggering amount that will continue to climb.

Holding aside the staggering costs of treating veterans in Russia, there are also significant capacity issues that the Russians are woefully ill equipped to deal with. The number of hospitals in Russia has declined roughly 20 percent since 2012, and there are only 10 veterans’ hospitals in the country. The only one that focuses on psychological rehabilitation has just 32 beds.

Traumatized veterans who do not receive care can be expected to have vastly lower employment rates and lean much more heavily on government benefits, further weakening the Russian economy in the decades to come.

While we focused our discussion on the costs of post-traumatic stress disorder in terms of cost of care and lower productivity, there are plentiful cases of other negative effects. For example, up to 60 percent of Soviet veterans of the Afghan war suffered from alcoholism or drug addiction in November 1989. The Serbsky Center estimated in 2003 that 70 percent of veterans from the two Chechen Wars had some form of post-traumatic stress disorder. By the mid-2000s, about 100,000 veterans of “local wars” (primarily Chechnya) were in prison. Using budgetary data taken from Russian journalists, the state would be spending 10 billion rubles a year jailing local war veterans.

Antony Blinken säger att leverans av luftförsvarssystem till Ukraina är högsta prioritet. Men det är bara en del av Natos stödpaket. Blinken säger att F-16-stridsflygplan för närvarande överförs till Ukraina och kommer att vara i tjänst i Ukraina redan i sommar.

För Blinkens mil är det fallet. Natos mål är ett självständigt Ukraina som står på egna ben militärt, demokratiskt och ekonomiskt.
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Blinken välkomnar att EU har banat väg för ett ukrainskt medlemskap. Ett steg närmare Nato är också rätt sätt att stärka Ukraina.

Alla allierade är medvetna om hybridattacker, som är avsiktliga försök av Ryssland att försvaga västvärlden. Blinkens misslyckande kommer inte att fungera, och Nato är redo att möta utmaningarna.