Day 1,382 of the most pointless war in history?

Wednesday-Thursday blog

My rough calculation suggests that we are now on about 1,382 days since Russia’s February 24 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Just to put that into context, WWI lasted 1,562 days and WWII 2,194 days. So Putin’s war with Ukraine is likely to last as long as the whole of WWI.

Let’s look at what Putin has gained from close to 4 years of war.

The land area of Russia is 17.1 km2. The land area of Ukraine is 604,628 km2. So Russia is about 28 times larger than Ukraine. Russia has captured about 20% of Ukraine – say about 120,000 km2. So, after almost four years of slaughter, Russia has increased its land area by a pathetic 0.7%.

The popuation density of Russia is 8.5 people per km2. For Ukraine it’s about 70 people per km2, for the EU it’s about 109 people per km2 and for the UK it’s about 287 people per km2. Moreover, the population of Russia is declining from about 145 million in 2000 to less than 130 million now due to low birth rates and low life expectancy:

Russia’s birth rate is around 1.5 children per woman (the replacement rate is usually considered to be 2.1 children per woman). Moreover, before the Ukraine invasion Russian life expectancy was about 73 years compared to 81.7 years in the EU and around 81 years in the UK.

Meanwhile, China is slowly but surely taking over huge swathes of Russia’s Far East by buying up Russia’s resources and moving Chinese workers into Russia. China is also changing the names of Russian cities in Russia’s Far East on maps to the original Chinese names before they were ceded to Russia.

Conclusion: Russia is a massive underpopulated country with huge resources and a declining population which has spent almost four years fighting a war with probably 250,000+ dead Russians and another 700,000+ seriously injured to expand its territory by well under 1% while actually losing territory to China.

This is truly madness. Our rulers keep on blethering about peace talks. But Putin cannot risk peace. He is so deep into his ‘two-week’ (four-year) invasion of Ukraine, he can never back down. There can only be peace when the leading Russian multi-billionaire klepto-oligarchs, decide that continuing this war is no longer in their financial interests, throw Putin out and move to reintegrate Russia with the West.

The readers’ comments are the best bit

The video below claims to show a Ukrainian underwater drone blowing up a Russian submarine in a Russian port. In the readers’ comments, one reader wrote “I wonder who is going to explain what has happened to Putin”. Another reader suggested: “Comrade Putin, I have some great news, one of our submarines has destroyed a Ukrainian underwater drone”. Thank heavens for the British sense of humour!