Russia, the world's second most powerful military, versus Ukraine, ranked at the
number 22 spot. It's a military of 850,000 versus Ukraine's 200,000- a force overmatch that should
spell easy victory for Russia. So why is the Russian invasion of Ukraine going so poorly?
But first, what does Russia even want in Ukraine to begin with?
It's important to understand that this is not Russia's war, it is Vladimir Putin's war.
For Putin, restoring the old Soviet bloc has been a dream since he saw the Soviet Union
crumble around him in the late 80s and early 90s. It's not just a matter of pride though,
Putin sees relations with the West as a zero-sum game. In other words,
there can be only one winner, and in his mind it must be him and Russia.
Initially, Putin drew closer to the West as Russia signed cooperation agreements with NATO.
For a while it looked like the old hostilities between NATO and Russia were over, and a new
future together was possible. However, as he was cozying up to the West, he was busy
undermining it by using his intelligence services to influence Western democracies,
as we saw during the 2016 US presidential election
where US security services confirmed that Russia was attempting to influence American voters.
Ukraine's wish to join NATO though would place yet another NATO country on his doorstep,
something that amounts to a strategic disaster for Russia. Having been the victim of many
invasions throughout history, Russia worked hard to create a buffer between itself and
the west for decades after World War II. Today, most of that work has been undone,
and Russia's potential adversaries now sit on its northwestern flank. In case of war, if Ukraine
joined the alliance it would allow NATO access straight into the soft underbelly of Russia.
Ukraine joining NATO is simply unacceptable to Putin, and in his mind it is vital for
Russia's national security that Ukraine be friendly to Russia- or at least
unfriendly to the West. Ukraine's growing desire for NATO membership thus represented
a significant threat to Putin's goals of keeping NATO away, and its perceived weakness gave him a
chance to put the former Soviet republic back into Russia's sphere of influence.
He just needed to topple the national government and install a new one friendly to his interests.
The seeds of today's invasion began with protests launched in 2013 after the Ukrainian
national government rejected the signing of the European Union-Ukraine Association Agreement,
which was meant to establish a pathway to EU membership, in favor of closer ties with Russia
and the Eurasian Economic Union. Many in Ukraine saw this as Moscow influencing Ukrainian policy
and a revolution swept across the nation. However, not all of Ukraine wanted closer ties to the West,
leading to the breakaway republics of Donetsk and Luhansk. In response to a
call for help from the Ukrainian president shortly after he was removed from power,
Russia annexed Crimea and sent aid to separatists fighting Ukrainian national forces.
Rather than deter the new Ukrainian government from joining NATO and the EU though, this only
created a sense of urgency for Ukraine- joining the EU and NATO was seen as a matter of national
security, and given Russia's invasion, the fear was well grounded. After rebuffing his
threats if they should draw closer to the West, Putin saw invasion as his only option.
So what's gone wrong with the Russian invasion?
Any good military operation starts with clearly defined goals- and here is where Putin's invasion
met with its first strategic disaster. In multiple speeches, Putin made it clear
that this was a 'special military operation', tasked with “de-nazifying Ukraine” and ending
a genocide of Russian speaking people. This is not just blatantly false, as the thought of a Jew
who's family died in the Holocaust leading a Nazi government is ridiculous in the extreme, but also
not valid strategic goals. Generals need clear objectives so they can make plans to achieve them.
By all accounts, Russia's invasion lacked said objectives. While removing Volodymyr 'the Iron
Joker' Zelensky from power was always a goal for Russia's armed forces, how exactly to do that and
when was not clearly delineated. Should Zelensky be simply toppled, his government neutralized
and rendered ineffective via exile, or should Zelensky and any supporters be arrested or killed?
While it's still difficult to get an accurate picture of what has been going on behind the
scenes in the Kremlin, we know that the Russian army seemed unclear of these two questions.
At the start of the invasion, forces from Belarus began a march towards Kyiv,
while a full assault in the east aimed to push Ukraine's defenders back.
Yet significant air power was not given to those forces advancing on Kyiv, slowing the advance down
to a crawl. Meanwhile, Russian forces elsewhere seemed set on a strategy of conquering Ukraine
piece by piece by defeating enemy forces in place and securing territory as they advanced. This was
not a war with the goal of removing Ukraine's government, but rather a war of conquest.
The lack of clear, well-defined objectives led to the Russian military getting bogged down
early and quickly, as it seemed to fight anywhere it discovered Ukrainian troops, as opposed to
quickly moving to secure strategic objectives. This type of war heavily favors the defender,
as it leaves them in complete control of when and where battles take place. However, it cost Russia
something even more important: time. The longer that Zelensky remained safely out of Russian
hands, the longer he had to influence the world- something he did with stunning effectiveness.
Each day that passed Zelensky was able to rally more and more supporters from
across the international community, leading to the fastest and most severe
sanctions imposed on a nation in modern history. Zelensky's defiance of Putin
also emboldened NATO and other countries to provide direct military aid to Ukraine,
even leading to such unbelievable moves as the EU supplying the Ukrainian air force with
fighter jets. Before the invasion, the US and its partners believed the shipping of such significant
war material would only serve to provoke Russia into greater aggression, and was unthinkable.
However, as Zelensky managed to turn global opinion against Putin, and the Russian military
mired itself in pointless fighting, opinion amongst the US and partners quickly changed.
Eventually Putin realized his grave error, and at last clear instructions seemed to be
given to his commanders: neutralize Zelensky and seize major cities at all costs. Suddenly
Russian forces changed tactics, and they were no longer bogging themselves down fighting
Ukrainian defenders where they encountered them- now they were bypassing entire Ukrainian positions
to rush to secure major cities. Even more importantly, the push for Kyiv began in earnest,
with hundreds of vehicles and thousands of troops in reserve poured straight into the fight for Kyiv
in a bid to overwhelm the city's defenders. As of the writing of this script the massive
Russian advance on Kyiv seems to be halted due to supply problems though.
Not relying only on conventional forces though, there's evidence that Putin has
dispatched special forces kill squads to eliminate Zelensky,
and Kyiv has been locked down as the hunt for infiltrators continues. Russian
electronic warfare assets sniff through signals coming in and out of the Ukrainian capital,
with the goal of pinpointing Zelensky’s exact location for an airstrike. Zelesnky is finally
a wanted man- but killing him now will not undo Putin's major strategic blunder; Russian troops
called Zelensky a clown before the invasion, but now his own troops call him the Iron Joker, and
the Iron Joker has already defeated Putin on the world stage by rallying it against him. Killing
Zelensky now will only turn him into a martyr and a rallying point for Ukraine's defenders.
Had Russia acted swiftly to take Kyiv and neutralize Zelensky, something its conventional
forces should have been capable of within days of the invasion, Putin may not have suffered as
badly on the global stage as he has. The longer this invasion drags on, the worse it gets for
Putin's Russia, as the world turns its back on every facet of Russian business and culture.
As new intelligence has revealed though, Putin didn't just fail at setting strategic goals for
his military- he actually didn't even let most of his military leadership know about the invasion
beforehand. While they were certainly aware of the buildup of troops along the border with Ukraine,
even his most senior generals were blindsided by the order to invade. Putin had kept his plan
to invade Ukraine so close to his chest that only a small group of individuals
very close to him ever knew. Without foreknowledge of the coming invasion,
Russia's generals had no way of drawing up battle plans and being prepared to prosecute
Putin's orders. Instead, they were forced to improvise on the run, a recipe for disaster.
The fact that most of the invasion troops were pulled from across the entire Russian nation
also meant that once hostilities began, there was no time to coordinate and integrate chains
of command. We've seen plenty of evidence that the Russian military
has been in-fighting amongst itself, and even engaging in full-blown arguments over radio.
With no overarching strategy, or chain of command, Putin’s army is disorganized and ineffective.
Putin's second pre-invasion disaster was a stunning intelligence failure
that ranks amongst the worst in world history.
Putin told his troops that they would be greeted as liberators by Ukraine's large number of Russian
speakers- in fact his entire battle plan relied on his troops being seen as liberating the country,
not invading it. Thus Russia's invasion force was by design smaller than required-
even with all of his reserves committed, Putin’s forces in Ukraine are simply not
enough to pacify a country that does not want Russians on their soil.
As Russian troops poured into Ukraine, they weren't met with flowers as promised,
they were met with Javelins and molotov cocktails. Even in the most pro-Russian parts of Ukraine's
east the people have continued to rise up against what they see as occupiers and invaders. This has
not just severely slowed the advance, but bogged Russian troops down in pacification operations.
Troop-to-task analysis, or the analysis of how many troops are required to achieve a certain
task, is notoriously unreliable- but even by the most optimistic of estimates, Putin's invasion
force was not up for the task of pacifying a nation that did not welcome them as liberators.
American analysts estimate that a successful counterinsurgency requires at minimum a
20:1000 ratio of troops- 20 troops for every 1,000 civilians. This is merely an estimate, but even by
this number the Russians would need 340,000 troops to successfully neutralize a Ukrainian insurgency.
Russia though has poured 150,000 troops into its attempt to seize Ukraine, roughly a third of total
Russian ground combatants. While it will almost certainly prove to be sufficient for
neutralizing Ukraine's military and installing a puppet regime, it is completely insufficient
for actually controlling the country. Without immediately pouring more troops into the conflict,
all Russia has succeeded in doing is ensuring that Ukraine becomes its own version of America's and
the Soviet Union's Afghanistan- only much deadlier for its interests and troops both.
There are signs that Russia is looking to fix this mistake,
and by the time you see this video those plans may have been put into effect.
As of the writing of this script, rumors amongst the global intelligence community is that Russia
is planning on instituting a draft to draw up the necessary troop numbers to neutralize Ukraine.
Whether this is true or not, what is true is that as Russia's forces currently stand,
achieving any sort of strategic success in Ukraine is currently impossible.
Russia's next biggest pre-invasion failure was a logistical one.
Before the invasion actually took place, Putin famously said that he was drawing down some
of his forces to de escalate tensions. The world breathed a collective sigh of relief-
maybe there wouldn't be an invasion after all. But just days later, Putin ordered
his forces into action. Was he simply trying to lower Ukraine's, and the world's, guard?
Not quite. According to Western intelligence, Putin's claim of drawing down forces was actually
so his forces could do something that should have warned him the Russian military wasn't
ready for invasion. As Putin moved his timetable for invasion along, an estimated up to 20% of
his combat vehicles were in disrepair. The claim of drawing down forces was instead a
ruse to allow his military to tow broken down vehicles away from staging areas for repairs.
This has been substantiated by media who have visited both the Russian/Ukraine
and Belarus/Ukraine border since the invasion,
and discovered dozens of broken down vehicles left behind in the process of being towed or repaired.
With the Russian military suffering from sanctions for years, and a stagnant economy back home,
it's no surprise that so much Russian firepower was inoperable, but the sheer scale of broken down
equipment on the eve of full combat is shocking compared to a modern military such as the United
States- which the Russian military theoretically is supposed to fight and win against.
But this isn't where Russia's logistics problem end. As the invasion unfolded,
Russian troops made slow but steady progress into Ukraine- and then suddenly stopped altogether for
a few days. To the world's surprise, entire units had simply run out of fuel, ammunition,
or food, and vehicles were abandoned by the dozens across Ukraine. How could this happen?
As has been famously noted before, the Russian military has always had a problem with logistics.
Compared with the United States, Russian units operate with up to 75% fewer logistics personnel,
perhaps reflecting Cold War era mentality that units were not believed to be survivable in a
nuclear battlefield and would thus be destroyed or rendered combat ineffective long before
significant resupply was necessary. It may also simply be due to poor military planning,
and a completely unrealistic expectation that heavy fighting would be sporadic and rare.
Whatever the reason, Russian units began to run into supply problems by the third day of
the invasion, further setting back their ability to make the quick strategic gains
necessary to circumvent mounting international outrage. Even worse, it left them at the mercy
of Ukrainian air attack and lighting raids, with hundreds of Russian vehicles destroyed.
Bottlenecks caused by stuck vehicles also gave the Ukrainian armed forces an opportunity to launch
devastating raids, and to resupply themselves by pillaging the remains.
But even as supply problems began to sort themselves out, a lack of Russian
logistics led to massive traffic jams and further delay of critical objectives
such as the taking of Kyiv. The famous column of vehicles attacking Kyiv stretched for up
to 60 kilometers at one point, snarled up in the world's largest traffic jam. Meanwhile,
Kyiv's defenders used the time to equip civilians and build defenses.
Logistics may not be as glamorous as infantry, artillery, or tanks,
but without good logistics a modern army can't win.
Force structure though was yet another of Russia's biggest mistakes.
Details on the composition of Russian military units are hard to discern,
given that such things are valuable military secrets. It's been widely reported however that
a large number of Russian soldiers invading Ukraine are conscripts,
and we know that approximately 200,000 of Russia's nearly 1 million strong military are conscripts.
Conscription in Russia is a mandatory 12 month service period for males aged 18-27. While Russia
has made great strides in creating a professional, all-volunteer fighting force such as the US,
it still relies heavily on conscripts- and even 1/4th of its elite Spetsnatz units are made of
conscripts. But the problem with conscripts, as Ukraine has highlighted, are numerous.
First, conscripts with such short service terms means that they will lack the skills and training
of a professional soldier with multiple years under his or her belt. Pitting Russia's conscript
force against Ukraine's mostly professional force is a bad idea with predictable results.
Secondly though, conscripts have notoriously low morale and will to fight,
as opposed to a professional soldier who has chosen to take up arms. This has never been
clearer than in the way that Russia's army has faced massive insubordination, surrender, and
outright sabotage of their own equipment to avoid fighting. While the Russian army remains intact,
many units of soldiers have surrendered themselves- even to unarmed civilians-
in order to avoid fighting, and US intelligence reports that Russian soldiers have taken to
punching holes in their own gas tanks to avoid having to move to the front. Intercepted radio
communications have shown Russian soldiers refusing orders from central command,
and even outright arguments and insults between units have been logged.
Russian forces are increasingly showing themselves to be unprofessional,
poorly trained, and with cripplingly low morale.
Such low morale has made Russian units highly susceptible to Ukrainian influence campaigns,
which have had great results in inducing Russian soldiers to surrender outright or fight poorly.
Morale may be the reason why it appears that Ukraine's military is punching way above its
weight class in defense of their nation- as opposed to most Russian troops, Ukrainian forces
are highly motivated to defend their country, something the Kremlin severely underestimated.
Fueling Russia's morale problems is not just conscription though, but two other key factors.
The first is the fact that many soldiers have claimed they had no idea they were invading
until hours before the invasion began. Kept in the dark by their commanders, young Russian soldiers
are increasingly reporting after being captured that they believed they were out on maneuvers,
or at most being sent for peacekeeping operations within the separatist regions.
Then right as the invasion began the truth was revealed, resulting in shock and fear.
The second reason though is because many Russian troops invading Ukraine today
simply don't see the Ukrainians as enemies. Sharing a common heritage,
Ukrainians and Russians have traditionally been brothers and sisters, and waging war against
Ukraine has been hugely unpopular not just back home in Russia, but amongst its own military.
Russian morale has been at critical levels for days now, but supply problems have only
made it worse. The failure of high profile operations such as the dual
airborne assaults against Kyiv in first days of war have only made morale problems worse.
Russia's next mistakes begin with the invasion itself.
Ukraine is waging an influence war directly against the Russian military and civilian
population both. Russia, long-feared as a master of hybrid warfare which
combines military operations with information manipulation, has proven to be absolutely inept
in managing this conflict. The Kremlin has ceded the entire narrative of this conflict to Ukraine,
which has exploited social media in ways Russia could never have dreamt of. For years,
Russian disinformation lowered Ukrainian morale in regions bordering the separatist enclaves,
and now Ukraine has turned this tactic back around on Russia- and taken it ten steps further.
Quickly connecting to the world via multiple social media apps, Ukraine has flooded the
world with images of the invasion, often taken from the front lines themselves. The images have
revealed the brutality of Russia's assault, and quickly turned global anger against it.
Russia meanwhile has proven completely inept in managing the narrative of the conflict,
and today has zero influence in how the conflict is perceived by the world- granting Ukraine an
incalculable strategic victory that has resulted in the outpouring of support in the form of combat
arms, humanitarian aid, intelligence sharing, and all the resulting economic punitive measures
taken against Russia, its companies, leadership, military, and oligarchs.
Unable to shape a global narrative, Russia has instead attempted to control the narrative at
home. Russian state media has banned independent reporting on Ukraine, claiming that outlets such
as echo of moscow are disseminating dangerous disinformation to attack public morale.
On Russian state tv, the conflict is still being portrayed as a 'special military operation',
and not an invasion. Casualty figures have also been carefully released slowly
over time so as not to make the Russian people aware of the scale of this military disaster.
To raise support at home, Russian media instead paints the crippling economic sanctions against it
as aggression from the West, led naturally by the great satan itself, the United States.
But many Russian people still get their news independently,
leading to massive protests that as of one week into the war,
number at thousands across every city in Russia. Older generations though who get
their news primarily from their televisions and radios still believe the Kremlin narrative about
anti-nazi operations and western belligerence. Sadly, recent reports coming from Russia suggest
that the Kremlin has begun massive efforts to block internet access to outside news sources.
But the Kremlin can't stop Ukrainian forces from giving captured Russian
soldiers a chance to call home- not just a humanitarian measure,
but a carefully calculated ploy to destroy Russian morale back home.
News of the invasion is now reaching directly into Russian homes through the calls of loved ones,
and Ukrainian influence campaigns have been so devastating to Russia's war effort
that now Russian combat troops are having their smart phones confiscated before going into battle.
Russia's next opening-day mistake was failing to properly utilize its massive advantage in
striking power. Before the United States initiated a coalition invasion of Iraq in
the first Gulf War, it first undertook a 'shock and awe' 100 hour air campaign
with round-the-clock attacks on Iraqi radar, air defenses, communications nodes, government
buildings, and other militarily important targets. The US's air campaign was so incredibly effective,
that ground forces took only 4 days to defeat the Iraqi army.
While the US enjoyed the benefit of having a large coalition of nations to assist it, it was
still facing one of the world's most formidable militaries at the time, with one of the world's
best air defense networks. By comparison, Russia is facing an opponent with an air force a fraction
the size of Russia's own and largely cold-war era air defenses. There is simply no excuse for
the shockingly poor performance of Russia's strike forces- except a lack of commitment.
Rather than commit overwhelming air power, Russia instead chose to limit its use of air and missile
strikes- likely to reduce public outrage. This is because unlike the United States,
Russia has a relatively small inventory of smart weapons, and sanctions have severely
hurt its ability to procure more. As one Russian general famously said,
“We have great firepower, we just don't always know what we're shooting at”.
With a lack of precision weapons, Russia was unable to neutralize Ukraine's air defenses and
command and control networks with the few number of planes and attack helicopters it alloted to
the task at the opening of the conflict. This is puzzling, because many predicted- this channel
included- that Russia would initially commit large amounts of its air force in the softening up of
Ukraine's defenses, before returning most of that air power to its regional security requirements.
However, one explanation may be Putin's attempt to frame this to both his own citizens and
the world as a small-scale military action, not a full-scale invasion.
Rather than destroy Ukraine's ability to defend itself from air attack and communicate with its
forces, Russia instead undertook only limited strikes, and sent its forces in to fight a ground
war against an enemy still able to communicate and conduct long-range surveillance. Incredibly,
Ukraine's air force wasn't just outright destroyed at the start of the fighting,
but has continued to undertake limited sorties even a week after hostilities started.
It seems though that as the ground war becomes a painful grind, Russia is rethinking its limited
use of air power and missile strikes, and over the last 48 hours as of the writing of this script,
has intensified attacks against both military and civilian targets.
Putin's next invasion mistake was failing to utilize the various arms of his military properly.
It can be tempting to look at the shockingly poor performance of Russia's military
today and claim that Russia is an inept and weak military power- but while the invasion has
shown that there does in fact exist a rotten core within the Russian military machine,
it's also important to understand that to date the Russian military has not been fighting the way it
trains. Russia has made little use of its combined arms capabilities in fighting the war in Ukraine,
likely because Putin still hopes to sell this invasion to his own people- now that
the world isn't buying it- as a small-scale military action and not a full-blown war,
which is exactly what it has turned into. Moving large amounts of aircraft and other
support platforms to the front will break any illusion about this invasion being nothing
more than a fast, clean small-scale operation rather than an actual war.
However, Putin's military has still made critical strategic errors that ended in a
disastrous opening day for the invasion. Russia's much-vaunted airborne infantry,
allegedly the most elite of Russia's military forces, met with immediate disaster as they
failed to take two different air fields outside of Kyiv on the opening day of the conflict.
After successfully dropping on their objectives, they repelled an initial assault to recapture the
air fields, but were completely unprepared to hold out against Ukraine's mechanized forces.
Details are still sketchy, but it appears that Russia made the same
mistake the Allies made in Operation Market Garden back in World War II,
as they deployed airborne assaults too deep behind enemy lines. As happened to the allies in World
War II, Russian ground forces today were unable to break through Ukraine's defenders to link up
with the lightly armed airborne assaults and reinforce them with heavy combat vehicles.
Incredibly, it seemed that Russia believed it could simply fly reinforcements straight into
the air fields after they were captured, using its logistics fleet to move heavy armor and artillery
directly to the site of the air assaults. Whether this was pure hubris from Russia
as it severely underestimated Ukraine's military capabilities, or a critical lack of intelligence
which led the Russians to believe the Ukrainians didn't have the firepower
around Kyiv to retake the LZs remains unknown. What is known is that without proper support,
not even Russia's famous paratroopers, the pride and joy of its armed forces, could hold against
Ukrainian defenders and were eliminated in a massive opening day disaster for Russia.
Perhaps Russia's greatest mistake in this entire campaign though was severely underestimating the
world's resolve. In preparation for this conflict, Russia had built up over $600 billion in reserves
to be used specifically to counteract the effects of sanctions against its economy. However, Russia
never dreamt that the world would move so quickly and thoroughly to punish it over its invasion of
Ukraine. The removal of most of Russia's banks from the SWIFT international payment system
has already caused one bank to file for insolvency, and the banning of Russian aircraft
from most of Europe and North America's air space is threatening the survival of its airlines.
Punishing sanctions have also targeted Putin, his oligarch supporters, and his cabinet members
directly, with Russian billionaires losing an estimated $80 billion in wealth one week into
the invasion. The blocking of Russian state-run propaganda outlets Russia Today and Sputnik across
Europe and North America have led these two massive media outlets to shutter their doors
in the affected regions, with thousands laid off here in the United States and Canada alone.
The infamous Nord Stream 2 pipeline has also been formally axed for good,
killing one of Russia's most lucrative energy deals with Europe.
But what's shocking about the extreme measures undertaken by the world is
that they hurt not just Russia, but the very nations and companies exacting them- and yet
the West has shown it is willing to hurt itself to shut down Russian aggression,
something Vladimir Putin could never have predicted. German energy prices are set to
dramatically increase as it cuts off its deals with Russia, and yet the German government has
been willing to shoulder the costs in order to punish Putin. Whereas once the west was
fragmented and beset by infighting over how to handle its relations with Russia,
this invasion of Ukraine has unified the world to a point no one could have foreseen.
Putin's invasion has even led to calls from within Finland and Sweden for membership in NATO,
a stunning turn of events from two nations who have maintained traditional neutrality between
NATO and Russia. The Finns themselves likely remember the infamous Winter War of 1939,
when the Soviet Union invaded and the neutral nation found itself fighting alone
against a superior power. With such an upset of the status quo,
it's not surprising the two traditionally neutral powers have seriously discussed joining NATO,
and Putin's threats warning them against the idea is likely only to further encourage them to join.
Russia it seems is only capable of one failed invasion at a time, and invading
Finland or Sweden is indubitably going to trigger a military response from the West.
About the only way that the invasion has been to Russia's advantage has been in its relationship
with China, as China has opened up trade with Russia to make up for the impact of sanctions.
The two pariah states have been drawing closer ties, though at best they still remain
'frienemies'. China's unwillingness to condemn the invasion of Ukraine however is costing even it,
as it finds itself increasingly isolated on the international stage.
The fact that China has not been shy about its ambitions to conduct its own invasion of Taiwan
has placed extra scrutiny on the Chinese Communist Party. With deepened ties to Russia,
its neighbors are now themselves eagerly eyeing closer ties to the United States,
fearful of Chinese aggression despite its claims that it “respects all nation's sovereignty”.
It's hard to imagine a worst planned military campaign, and Putin's invasion of Ukraine will
surely go down as one of the greatest military fiascoes in history. As it stands, Russia has
just launched a war that will take years to resolve if it chooses to continue prosecuting it,
as the Ukrainian people prove themselves capable and willing of waging an ongoing war against their
occupiers. As the Russian economy continues to be savaged by international sanctions,
and Putin finds himself increasingly isolated politically within his own country,
his decision to invade Ukraine may spell the end of his political reign,
and the end of Russia as a major economic and military power.
Now go check out What Are The Chances Of World War III, or click this other video instead!