>I think its actually very dangerous for Russia as a state right now. Showing this much weakness might motivate some neighbors. Especially China, they could run through the country all the way to Barents sea without breaking a sweat.

To which I say: Russia has ~half of the world's nuclear arsenal. (The US has ~half, the rest of the nuclear states are mere footnotes by # of nukes, relying on the fact that no one really needs more than about a dozen).

> Russia has ~half of the world's nuclear arsenal

If this is the state of their conventional military, it raises questions about the state of their nuclear deterrent.

In any case, if China wanted Siberian resources, fomenting a breakaway region would be cleaner than invading.

>If this is the state of their conventional military, it raises questions about the state of their nuclear deterrent.

A scary fucking thought. i.e. some of them will stay in silos, but others will be partially airworthy.

>In any case, if China wanted Siberian resources, fomenting a breakaway region would be cleaner than invading.

This would result in a nuclear exchange.

> This would result in a nuclear exchange

Possibly. But the exchange would occur on Russian soil. China is more than capable of covertly supporting separatists. Hell, it might not even have to. Just prime the pump and then let the West take over.

or they would just nuke chinese cities?

> Especially China, they could run through the country all the way to Barents sea without breaking a sweat.

The thing is though, is there any reason to believe the PLA would be in a much different shape? The last wars the Chinese fought in were decades ago, and the performance was pretty poor. So we don't have any real world idea of how that army would perform - it could suffer from poor morale, stupid tactics, lack of coordination, no logistics, or it could be superbly trained with great equipment.

Soldiers stealing fuel to sell is a decades old Russian soldier tradition

In some branches of psychology, they use term "apoptosis" as a metaphor for widespread self-destruction [1], because such a collapse in social teamwork appears to almost perfectly mirror programmed cell death - as if social collapse of one society to allow the takeover of another more "fit" society is built in to our inherent social or genetic code. Historically speaking, showing such weakness would lead to mass genocide, leadership takeover, cultural changes, and other unpalatable war crimes. We don't need to be brutal cavemen anymore, but feels we're enabling Russia to torture itself indefinitely while not letting it completely collapse and rebuild a more fair society, because they have nuclear weapons and it would be the incorrect opinion to acknowledge and fix Russia's failures as a state, society, culture, military, and economic structure? Why can't we read the writing on the wall and fix the world's number 1 danger - the apoptosis of Russia?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayq2WTOIOAQ&t=2964s

Fix it how? Russia has been unstable for well over a century

> Its easy - imagine massive, gargantuan corruption.

Well, it's not as if the US military industrial complex has nothing of that?

I think the problem isn't corruption alone, but the combination of corruption and all the corrupt trying hard to put their own eggs elsewhere than Russia's basket. Working with a corrupt authoritarian leader can be profitable, but you really want to have a plan B for when SHtF.

US corrupt elites have the luxury problem that if their wealth and power isn't secure in the US, it probably isn't very secure anywhere else either. So they have to take just a little care not shit where they eat (too much), and maybe sponsor a few museums and stuff, robber baron style.

I think you underestimate the extent of corruption in Russia. The US doesn't even come remotely close. You can look up corruption indexes, Russia is near most corrupt, US somewhere in the bottom quartile iirc. A quick example from my industry - roughly 1/3 of the ~USD $3 billion spent on the new Russian spaceport is unaccounted for (stolen). I assure you that's many orders of magnitude worse than the contracts in play at Cape Canaveral.

A good (extremely depressing) film to watch is "Leviathan" (2014).

First, I was mostly thinking about historical corruption in the US, i.e. in the age of Robber Barons, which was really incredibly bad.

I agree there's probably less of the "money just unaccounted for" type of corruption in the US (though it does happen, especially in connection with wars and intelligence agencies), and certainly less petty bribes. But that may just be a symptom of more organized corruption, so that it isn't necessary to let to many lower instances have a cut. In short, there may be more legal ways to divert public trust to private gain, so that the petty sort is just pointlessly risky.

If you had lived in a country that is corrupt at all levels of industry, government, and business you would know that the US is practically pure as driven snow. In the US there is relatively plenty money to go around and even the poor typically live better than in a lot of countries "average standard of living) (barring the poorest 5% or so). I have lived in such a country for a few years and it. is. everywhere. -Everyone- wants a bribe or kickback.

China won’t invade anyone. They haven’t had any battles in a long time. They can just take over with soft power since Russia is in a extremely weak position in a few months.

> China won’t invade anyone

Except Hong Kong (and the "expansion" of the South China Sea).

A policing operation in one of their “own” cities against unarmed people and dumping a bunch of land into the sea/intimidating fishermen. Like I said they don’t have any combat ready troops. It’s basically all LARPing with a big budget. Which we should all be glad about.