Vladimir Putin has ordered the conscription of another 133,000 soldiers to aid his war in Ukraine.

The 18-to-30 year olds will be called up between tomorrow and December 31, but parents have raised fear that the untrained conscripts will be thrust straight into ‘hot’ border regions close to the war zone.

The figure is higher than the same draft last year when Putin recruited 130,000, and in spring when he drafted another 150,000.

The Russian regime is facing an increasing backlash over use of conscripts close to the war zone in defiance of an earlier Putin promise to parents that he would not put recruits in harm’s way.

  • TranscendentalEmpire
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    3 hours ago

    Right now Brent Crude is just 71.28. Oil prices are going down.

    Yes, and as soon as it gets cold oil the price of oil will rise once again. It’s not like countries are divesting from fossil fuels any time soon.

    Additionally Russia does not have the technical ability to fix all of the refineries that Ukraine has been blowing up nor do they have the ability to fix all of the upstream production problems being created.

    Russia isn’t a technologically deprived nation, and they have one of the largest oil producing and refining operations in the world. They may not be able to repair the damages with imported parts as they would have 5 years ago, but refining tech isn’t exactly a new science, or particularly complicated.

    Productions of raw products is dropping fast](https://ycharts.com/indicators/russia_crude_oil_production)and those declines are going to both continue and accelerate.

    If you examine that chart for the year it seems bad, but if you just click on the scale of 5 years, it’s pretty much just average. The important thing to look at is exports, which have been rapidly increasing.

    O&G is not going to be propping up Russia’s economy for much longer.

    I think that’s a bit optimistic given that the West is hesitant to actually enforce the embargo, and are equally hesitant to divest from the fossil fuel sector.

    We just don’t have the spine to actually give an ultimatum of “you can do business with the US, or you can do business with Russia” to countries like India or China. That would be putting the interest of the nation and democracy in general, before the interest of private profit.