They just took over all the franchises of the Multinational corporations based before the sanctions and ran them on their own ie. McDonalds, Starbucks etc.. Had to restart a lot of domestic light industry for ubiquitous products they were used to importing ie. generic pharma, spare parts, tools, components, fast fashion, ag-imports etc... They even had their own financial structure rebuilt with their own payment processors, credit cards, new banking overtures to China etc...
now i don't want you to get the wrong idea from this. putin and jinping have spent years and billions and billions of their own currency to have an emergency option in place. russia's economy may not be completely in the mud, but it's certainly not as strong as it could have been without those sanctions in place. the contexts involved here are very important.
Will there ever come a day where we have the balls to give the same verbal smackdown to Israel and Bibi? Hopium?
You and I both know how they'll "take on" 69 men at once.
Biden told Putin that he could have a spoonful of invasion and that in part has led to Trump putting in effort to gut the deep state and he doesn't want American blood and treasure to go into fighting for Ukraine, so if you're American that's basically what happened.
Sweden is getting to invade Ram Ranch.
If they're talking about US forces stationed in Norway I'm pretty certain they are there as part of efforts with NATO.
You're mostly right, but it's still better than the sorry state of our neighbors (looking at krautland first and foremost)
I was online friends with a Bundeswehr officer-corps guy and played slavjank games with him. Germany has high technology, but was far more interested in making it for export and not use it themselves, and until a year or two back they were entirely uninterested in spending any significant money at all. He told me the rifles they used for gunning qualifications were 10-year old pieces of shit that had a huge MOA from wear and it was physically impossible to get great scores on even if you had perfect aim because they literally didn't have anything better to use. Even with their newfound militarism, you don't completely retool an army in a year. You don't even do it in five or ten if you're not personally at war, let alone shake off all the rust.
Refuse to fuel US submarines? Nigger, you're a petroleum company, these are nuclear submarines. You don't fuel them anyway. At best, you might provide some for the diesel backup generators.
That's not entirely fair. Even in the US military, most of its personnel are support staff. You have about 3 to 5 people in support roles for every 1 soldier whose role is to fight in a front line capacity. These aren't bullshit roles, either. You need cooks, mechanics, medical staff, intelligence officers, truck drivers, and even HVAC technicians.
My cope is that the Irish troops ironically get far more experience being the UNs dogs and being literally the only competent units there that don't rape everything on 2 legs. The Irish Rangers also win a lot of marksmen plaudits when they do wargames with other militaries. : ( They only started boarding drug trafficking ships in 2023 in our waters to good success. 157 million euro of cocaine was seized after a hostile boarding action of a cargo hauler. Their "special reconnaissance vehicles" when they were deplyed in Chad, East Timor, Angola, Mali, Somalia or the Congo were just Ford pick-ups with a shitload of guns on it lmao. Lot's of Cu Chulainn and Fianna warrior-band LARPing apparently.
