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Just because it seems relevant; here's a graphic from Visual Capitalist of world-wide defence budgets... you might be interested or you might not....
I'll leave you to draw your own conclusions about what this might all mean.
@ChrisMayLA6 Huh. So UK+France has a bigger defence budget than Russia? That's ... interesting. I didn't realise we were even in the same order of magnitude as Russia.
They're being quite lairy for someone in that position, aren't they.
@PoliceStateUK @ChrisMayLA6 if you are interrested in that, you might like https://youtu.be/7giYIisLuaA budget size is not the whole story, purchasing power parity and available techs also play a large role, but europe is probably in quite a better spot than people assume.
edit: and yeah, russia does a lot of damage compared to its budget, but the others are not really trying, too.
@tshirtman @PoliceStateUK @ChrisMayLA6
Europe’s defence budgets are used inefficiently and separately; no real comparison with the US centralised defence budget.
@iChas I was comparing two European budgets to the Russian budget - USA not relevant here.
(Unless they want to ally with Russia against Europe, which is currently looking disturbingly likely, admittedly.)
@PoliceStateUK, my understanding is that the most important metric is "purchasing power parity" - e.g. US$1 buys a lot less defence when spent in the USA or EU than it does when spent in Russia.
By that metric, I have heard that Russia is currently outspending the EU (though a quick look online suggests this is contentious -- there are graphs all over the place!)
@PoliceStateUK @ChrisMayLA6 #Poland's Donald Tusk reminded us of that today:
> "Listen to how it sounds: 500 million Europeans ask 300 million Americans to protect them from 140 million Russians. If you can count, then count on yourself!" Tusk emphasized.
@ericj @PoliceStateUK @ChrisMayLA6 If Europe could get its act together, I believe it could crush Russia relatively easily. Russia is a nuclear power but then so are France and the UK. What the Ukraine situation has demonstrated is how dire Russia’s military is. And it is even weaker now. If the US joins forces with Russia, Europe will have a problem.
@PoliceStateUK @ChrisMayLA6
And when you look at GDP, they are much smaller than the UK and France for that matter. Their GDP is less than Canada’s and not much larger than Australia’s even. So they have to be stretching things to the limit.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal)
yes, the only thing keeping the Russian military going, I wold think, is that Russia is now organised as a war state....
@ChrisMayLA6 @railmaps @PoliceStateUK
from one of the best French specialist of Russia:
https://colinlebedev.fr/2025/02/14/le-cout-de-la-paix-pour-la-russie/