[vkou]

> If responding to this would mean nuclear armageddon, then what is Russia doing by attacking NATO in this way?

Doing low-stakes trial runs of its capability for sabotage in a future conflict.

The reason it can do this against NATO is because NATO has non-war means to tit-for-tat punish Russia for this sort of behaviour. Those means are called sanctions, and there could always be more of them.

NATO does not do much of the converse, because Russia has very few non-war ways to punish NATO. NATO would really not like Russia's tit-for-tat response, which is why it prefers to fight arms-length proxy wars, instead.

[ivan_gammel]

>because NATO has non-war means to tit-for-tat punish Russia for this sort of behaviour. Those means are called sanctions, and there could always be more of them.

Except that they don't really work well against Russia, if you ask anyone in those small and formerly depressive Russian cities where property prices are currently rising. Parallel imports and proxy exports do magic, bureaucrats in the financial block of the government handle monetary policy extremely well, China is helpful and half of the world simply does not care or directly benefits from this war.

[vkou]

So all it took to unfuck the Russian economy is for it to be subjected to sanctions and import/export restrictions? Weird, countries rarely tend to prosper under those circumstances.

I thought that the crooks in charge were running it into the ground for the past ~33 years, I didn't realize that this was all it took to get them to start managing the country well.

> if you ask anyone in those small and formerly depressive Russian cities where property prices are currently rising.

Not sure which properties you're talking about, most of the Soviet construction in my home town is - quite literally - falling apart, with no motivation or economic capacity, or money to repair, rebuild, or replace any of it.

Sure, you can inflate property values to whatever amount you want, if you start printing money to finance a war, but that doesn't on its own result in economic prosperity. You actually need to make stuff, and Russian industry has lost the ability to do that decades ago.

[ivan_gammel]

> I thought that the crooks in charge were running it into the ground for the past ~33 years, I didn't realize that this was all it took to get them to start managing the country well.

You are completely misunderstanding modern Russian economy. The “Running into the ground” part ended 20 years ago. Organized crime was contained, necessary reforms were mostly done, entrepreneurial culture emerged, they started developing industrial policy and digitalization. Old Soviet industry and monocities around it were dying, true, but whole new sectors emerged and they are damn good. Banking and telecoms, hospitality, IT and e-commerce to name a few. Even industry is not completely dead, on the contrary: whole new automotive clusters have grown with increasing localization of components etc. One very good indicator of the shape of industry is the current output of military industrial complex: they scaled it incredibly fast and currently outperform the entire EU on a number of positions. This means that not just some factories are working but their entire supply chain is ok. This is the part of Russia that actually prospers and has been growing for a while now.

> Sure, you can inflate property values to whatever amount you want, if you start printing money to finance a war, but that doesn't on its own result in economic prosperity

The thing is, they don’t print money. Their head of central bank is one of the most competent professionals in Europe if not the entire world. What is happening now is redistribution: oil money going into the pockets of the poor people, a family member of which has signed the contract and went to war. No wonder the war feels “justified” for them: they have never seen this kind of money before and they spend it. Just for example take the small town Mtsensk. Since the start of the war property prices there increased by 50%. Old Soviet panel building is still a big upgrade for those who were used to go outside to the toilet. This is another part of Russia, forgotten and abandoned for a while, which won a lottery ticket while supplying the war with cannon fodder.

Both parts exist and when counted on average, negate each other. Omitting one of them is oversimplifying.