Cait the Proud Trans Woman on Nostr: 5/10 And so the war continued, no movement at all on the front lines, just endless ...

5/10

And so the war continued, no movement at all on the front lines, just endless meat-assaults by the Russians that tried to overwhelm the local troop concentrations with sheer numbers of targets, thinking some of them surely had to get through and damage the defenders. Ukraine calmly defended, retreating when absolutely necessary, preserving their forces as much as possible.

The strikes behind the lines got farther and farther behind the lines. The supply lines for Russian were now becoming unwieldy. And where Putin had tried desperately to insulate the Russian public from the war, here it was showing up on their doorsteps. Closer and closer to the industrial heartland.

Then a shift: the Ukrainians start hitting oil infrastructure. This meant they’d knock down a refinery, then a different one hundreds of km away, forcing the Russian engineering repair teams to be constantly on the move, catching up with the ongoing damage by Ukrainian strikes.

Supplies for those repairs began to dwindle, as the sanctions bit harder. Slowly, the Russian capacity to refine oil began to collapse. Recently, as much as 40% of the refining capacity was offline at once. That has two effects on Russia.

1) They can't refine oil for the whole domestic economy as much as they need.

2) Since the Ukrainians were also hitting export facilities, they couldn't as easily sell their oil, the only real method they had left of bringing in currency they could buy sanctions-busting equipment with.

The war has been extremely expensive for Russia. It has nearly wiped out their foreign currency reserves (built up by Putin over several years), and they're now financing the war by selling "bonds" to Russian banks, which are not allowed to refuse to buy them.

These bonds are being priced right now at 16% interest and up. That's a HUGE number.