How War in Ukraine is Destroying Russia

This video is made possible by the Curiosity Stream and the Nebula. Watch another new full video accompanying this one in my ongoing modern conflict series covering the second phase of the Russian invasion of Ukraine along with 18 other full episodes with more than six. hours of combined content covering more than a dozen other major conflicts of the 21st century, which you can access by signing up for the Curiosity Stream Nebula package for less than $15 a year at Curiositystream.com Real-Life Apartment Vladimir Putin's Choice Invading Ukraine more than eight months ago is leading not only to the destruction of Ukraine but to the destruction of Russia itself;

Tens of thousands of people on both sides have already lost their lives in this conflict and that is in addition to the more than seven and a half million Ukrainians who have left their country as refugees and the more than one million Russians who have left theirs. as exiles on September 21 Putin announced Russia's first wartime mobilization of men since World War II, a call for at least three hundred thousand national men to be drafted and sent to the front lines in Ukraine to fight and potentially die within hours of that announcement, prices for flights to anywhere outside Russia skyrocketed to unprecedented incursions as hundreds of thousands of Russian men suddenly became desperate to leave their country and escape, but they had and continue to Having very limited escape options for months before, almost all countries in Europe and North America had blocked their airspace to all Russian flights and almost all airlines based in Europe have also closed their flights to Russia at the moment.

At the time of Putin's mobilization announcement, there were only two European-based airlines operating flights to Russia: Air Serbia from Belgrade and Turkish Airlines from Istanbul. For any Russian fleeing the country by commercial plane to Europe, these were the only two options to choose from. and so their prices temporarily skyrocketed to more than 9,000 euros for a one-way economy fare ticket from Moscow, which is more than half the average annual salary of ordinary Russians, most ordinary Russians simply do not They could afford such a high price to fly. to Europe to escape, but it became increasingly difficult to escape also by land at the end of September Poland Lithuania Latvia Estonia and even Finland had taken the unprecedented step of completely closing their land borders and Russia was denying entry to anyone with citizenship Russian for any reason, even if they had valid visas, that meant that overland travel to Europe was also virtually impossible for Russians fleeing the country unless, of course, they wanted to book it through the active War Zone in Ukraine. , the only possible land route to Europe for the escaping Russians.

What remains at the time of this video's production is across the very narrow strip of Norway in the far northwest of the country. Norway has not yet closed its small border here with Russia and the E-105 highway leading to it past Mermansk continues. remain open for now, but for the majority of Russians fleeing the consequences of this war, the Norwegian route is thousands of kilometers away from them and difficult and expensive to reach; At the same time, it is estimated that 70 percent of Russian citizens do not even possess a passport that is required for international trips like this and that means that for the majority of Russians who want to flee the country the only really good options are the south and the former Soviet countries of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Georgia and Armenia, where they can still enter without visas and some even without passports as members of the Eurasian Economic Union, basically the Russian version of the European Union.

Russians entering Kazakhstan, Kerdesan and Armenia retain the right to live and work within them, making them the cheapest countries for Russians to escape to. As a result, satellite images taken on September 25 show a huge traffic jam of desperate Russian vehicles trying to cross the border into Georgia, potentially up to 30 kilometers or 19 miles similarly. You can see the tones of Russians and cars trying to enter Kazakhstan. In video clips that stretch almost as far as the eye can see, hundreds of thousands of Russians have already arrived in these four countries and more are descending all the time, but they aren't the only places Russians are escaping to in one particular country.

Desperate and daring case: two Russian men who evaded the draft acquired a ship in the remote Far Eastern town of Egg Vacana and sailed almost 500 kilometers across the Bering Sea to the American town of Gamble on the island of St. Lawrence, Alaska, where they immediately requested asylum and were flown to Anchorage by US officials to process many more who could not escape or leave for any reason began Googling how to break their own arms or limbs just to avoid the draft The day after Putin's mobilization announcement the term how to break your arm at home became the top search trend on Google in Russia in total just a month after Putin's announcement of partial military mobilization in Russia, more than 700,000 people, most of them young men of military age, have fled the country to somewhere else abroad.

More than double the number of men Putin announced he planned to recruit. This is in addition to the more than 500,000 Russians who had already left the country before the mobilization was announced, people of all kinds, from YouTubers, journalists to political refuge. refugees fearful of 15-year prison sentences for opposing online warfare, millionaires fearful of losing their assets in the West, tech workers fearful of losing their Western jobs along with many others, meaning at least 1.2 million Russians have left the country since the invasion. Ukraine began to represent the largest exodus of Russians from the country in history since the October Revolution of 1917 and the rise to power of the Bolsheviks, and that's not even to say anything about the unknown number of Russian men murdered and maimed for life In Ukraine, there are already at least 70 to 80,000 dead and wounded, according to U.S. estimates, and the loss of life in Ukraine is likely very similar, making it the deadliest war seen in Europe in generations. since 1945 and all this loss of people whether due to war or migration.

It is only exacerbating what was already arguably Russia and Ukraine's biggest problem before the war: their populations were already in terminal decline for decades and this war is only making that problem much worse; It could get so bad that in 20 years we may not even recognize Russia or Ukraine as countries in the same way we see them today and they may not even exist as we know them anymore, let me explain a little bit what I mean, this on the left is the population pyramid of Russia, while this on the right is the population pyramid of Ukraine.

These graphs are essentially a snapshot of the populations of both countries revealing the number of people of all ages and genders and they both look very similar, which is bad. At the top of each one you can see these gaps. In people in their 70s, the World War II generation that suffered the deaths of tens of millions of people in both countries to be born a child anywhere in the Soviet Union in 1923 was perhaps the worst time, place and gender to have been born in most of humanity. history 3.4 million children were born in the Soviet Union that year and by the time these 3.4 million children were 23 years old at the end of 1946, more than two-thirds of them would have already died from being born male in the Soviet Union.

In 1923, you had less than a one in three chance of surviving past the age of 23. The loss and loss of so many young people like this throughout the 1930s and 1940s meant that many young people at that time, both in Ukraine and Russia, were never able to have children and that meant that the children they never had they just didn't exist around 20 years later, when they usually also had children of their own, causing a population shock or echo of the lost generation of WWII around here in the middle. until the late 1960s which reduced their population equivalent to generation to the Zoomers and to any generation that is being born. now they will be called have arrived almost precisely at times of other major national crises that only exacerbate their problems for the populations of both countries.

In 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed just as the second echo of the lost generation of World War II began with a collapse in the Soviet Union. The era of state services and structures saw a skyrocketing rate of alcoholism, opioid use, suicide, crime, and HIV AIDS that affected the populations of Ukraine and Russia alike for years and caused life expectancy to decline. of each, especially that of men, plummeted in the mid-1990s. And by the early 2000s, the life expectancy of Russian and Ukrainian men alike was 17 years less than that of men in Western Europe and 13 years lower than that of their female counterparts (they were almost on par with men in Afghanistan and many sub-Saharan African nations despite being in La Paz and, at the same time, migration rates to the abroad after the collapse of the Iron Curtain and communism exploded as millions of Ukrainians and Russians sought better opportunities for themselves and their families abroad, in the west, and simultaneously death and migration rates were skyrocketing.

In the 1990s, the number of births to replace them was plummeting, a situation that continues to this day. Ukrainian women, even before the invasion, only had an average of 1.16 children each, the second lowest birth rate in the world, just behind South Korea and well. well below the natural population replacement level of 2.1 births per woman and, unlike many Western countries that compensate for their own low birth rates with high levels of immigration, Ukraine has had a negative net migration rate for decades, with many more people dropping out each year. As a result of all these factors, Ukraine's population has literally declined every year since 1993.

From a peak of almost 52 million people just at the end of the Cold War to just over 41 million immediately before of the Cold War. The invasion, if you also take into account the two and a half million people in Crimea who were lost to the Russians in 2014 overall, represents a drop of almost 20 percent of the Ukrainian population in just 30 years and the situation of Russia is not much better plagued. With largely the same social and medical problems as Ukraine following the Soviet collapse in the 30 years since 1992, Russia has only seen three years of population growth between 2013 and 2015.

While every two years has been nothing but a decline continues with a current birth rate of 1.5 children per woman overall and a slightly positive immigration rate of people coming mainly from Central Asia. Russians have been losing people at a slower rate than Ukraine, but they have still been losing people and the official birth figures for all of Russia are also quite misleading because Russia is a multi-ethnic country and ethnic Russians themselves have far fewer children. than their ethnic minorities. This is a map of all the oblasts, republics and provinces of Russia colored and numbered by birth rate seen a decade ago in 2012 and this is a map of all the various ethnic groups of Russia and, as you can see, the regions with Higher birth rates overlap almost identically with the regions of Russia's various ethnic minorities, such as in Briaria Saka Tuva Dagestan, Chechnya, the North Caucasus and Tatarstan, many of these ethnically distinct regions of Russia already enjoy a high degree of autonomy from the central government in Moscow and almost operate as quasi-independent countries and some of them, such as Chechnya and Dagestan, have fought bloody wars of independence from Russia in very recent history that failed but may not fail again anymore. that the population of Russians continues to decline while the populations of these groups continue to rise, they may demand more autonomy from Moscow or even independence once again and if one of them ever succeeds in the future, such as Chechnya, it could trigger an effect cascading of more and more internal republics also declaring their independence and leading to disillusionment or even collapse throughout the Russian Federation and while that may seem unlikely at the moment, remember that Russia has been an Empiremultiethnic for centuries and has already collapsed twice in the previous century in 1917 and again in 1991, there is no guarantee with its demographic crisis and its serious war in Ukraine that it will not or cannot happen again at some point in time. this century, except even with the capture of Crimea from Ukraine.

In 2014, that theoretically added two and a half million people to Russia. Russia's total population today remains smaller than before the collapse of the Soviet Union by almost a million people, which was not helped at all by the pandemic years. 19 in 2020 and 2021 alone due to excess deaths from covid-19 in a still very low birth and migration rate, the Russian population lost 1.7 million people, the largest loss of people ever experienced in Russia in peacetime and the biggest overall loss since the second world. war and now in 2022, with the outbreak of the largest war seen in Russian Ukraine since World War II, this demographic problem for both that has been going on for the last 30 years is now only going to get much worse than it was .

In Ukraine, at least 7.6 million people have evacuated the country and become refugees since the invasion began, meaning that almost one in five pre-invasion Ukrainians left the country in less than eight months, which represents a population loss similar to that experienced by Ukraine during 30 years between the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Russian invasion itself and implies that at this moment there are only around 33 and a half million Ukrainians left in the country, almost 20 million less than there were immediately after the Soviet collapse and, of course, that is without mentioning the unknown numbers of Ukrainians. soldiers and civilians alike who have lost their lives or been seriously injured since the invasion began, which is almost certainly a very large number ranging from tens to hundreds of thousands.

Ukraine will never be the same after this war is over, even if they push. all the way to Final Victory, and while the raw numbers of Russian exiles leaving the country are nowhere near as large or catastrophic as those of refugees from Ukraine, they are still pretty bad for Russia's internal demographics, remember that the vast majority of the 1.2 million Russians who have left the country Those who have already left so far are highly educated or young, and especially young men before the invasion. Russia had around 33 million young men between the ages of 16 and 49 who, in theory, could be capable of military service and it is conservatively estimated that around 800,000 of those men have since left the country and at least Another 70,000 have been killed or wounded in Ukraine so far, representing almost three percent of Russia's total supply of men under the age of 49 who will no longer contribute to the economy or military until the war in Ukraine continues. crawling and casualties continue to decline.

Putin will be forced to call up more recruits and recruits to replace the losses and that means more and more men of draft age will leave the country to escape and stop him. Preventing them from leaving Russia will eventually leave them no choice but to close their borders completely like during the Soviet era and dramatically increase repression and surveillance in their countries, which will lead to people becoming even more desperate to leave and escape. as Russia descends further and further. more on the authoritarianism and even totalitarianism of the past Russia has already lost more people this year than in any other year since World War II, breaking its own record that was set last year in 2021, how many more will it lose in Ukraine?

They will lose when the war ends and will either of the two with historically low birth and migration rates be able to recover? I don't know the answer to any of those questions, but it seems that Putin is using the invasion of Ukraine. To try to expand Russia's population and solve some of its own country's problems, within days of ordering mobilization on September 30, Russia unilaterally announced its annexations of four Ukrainian provinces: Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaparesia and its son, which together represent about 15 percent of Ukraine's total territory and the largest annexation or land conquest seen in Europe since World War II, only one other country in the world has so far recognized these Russian annexations as legitimate North Korea , which I guess is not surprising and despite declaring it as Russian territory, the Russians themselves only occupy parts of it. of each of them, with the Ukrainian military still controlling large sections of each, including the capital of Zaparizedia explosion, but by declaring these territories as integral parts of Russia, Putin has given himself the legal ability to deploy newly recruited recruits in them to fight under Russian law.

Conscripts cannot legally be sent to fight wars abroad and can only be used to defend Russia's territorial integrity, so now that Russia has declared these oblasts part of Russia, the hundreds of thousands of men being conscripted They can now be legally sent there. To fight the Ukrainians and annex them is to steal some 9 million civilians from Ukraine and forcibly add them to Russia, which in Putin's opinion may be enough to replace the people his country is losing due to the casualties and exiles, but that, of course, assumes that Ukraine, increasingly supplied with weapons from the West, will not simply recapture them and take all those people back, which remains a possible, if not even plausible, scenario.

Of course, there are other reasons and explanations behind Putin's decision to invade Ukraine and escalate. The conflict has moved away from Ukraine's newly discovered oil and gas reserves to Russia's own desire to expand its territory toward closer borders. defensible geographically, but regardless of Putin's justifications, the war in Ukraine is so far among the darkest chapters in 21st century history and is partly a consequence of Russia's own internal demographic crisis that has been going on for decades. , but unfortunately if I produced videos covering the war itself on YouTube with all the details of what is really happening on the ground and why it is happening, the disturbing violent and controversial details of discussing an ongoing catastrophic war, which caused the videos will be demonetized and age restricted, something I completely understand and frankly agree with.

I don't think ads should be shown alongside suffering and tragedy but ultimately it means that YouTube's algorithm would not promote these videos for you due to their age restriction and that means you would simply never see them here and that's why that i created another full video to accompany this one in my ongoing modern conflict series that i uploaded directly to nebula. Titled The Russian Invasion of Ukraine Phase Two, this episode covers what appears to be the second phase of the Russian invasion which takes place immediately after my first episode on this conflict that I posted last month which covers the first phase of the invasion and why the Russian army failed in its initial Blitzkrieg and goal of capturing the Ukrainian capital kyiv, this second episode I produced for the ongoing Ukrainian War covers how the Russian and Ukrainian armies entered a long, grueling stalemate for months and then how the Ukrainians managed to defy all the odds and fight back.

The Russians recaptured thousands of square miles of their occupied territory in days and built on the momentum that led Putin to announce his country's military mobilization just last month. As you've probably already heard, Nebula is home to tons of exclusive ad-free content like my complete modern conflict series with another 18 full episodes containing over six hours of combined bonus content that you can watch right now covering recent major wars and conflicts that will help you stay up to date on what's happening in our world and why, from this video covering Russia's previous invasion of Georgia in 2008 to this one covering the ongoing Chinese genocide against the Uighur people in Xinjiang, this one covering Russia's military intervention in the Syrian Civil War and many others, I'm releasing new episodes of modern conflicts exclusively for nebula every month and of course the reason all of these videos are only available on nebula in the first place is because they would never work here on YouTube and could never be viewed here because of the way that this site works in relation to recent highly controversial and sensitive events, but on the other hand, nebula is a totally different platform without an algorithm and without ads, it is just a platform about excellent and unique content created by excellent and independent educational creators with a lot from other exclusive exclusive projects from other creators that you probably already know, like the incredible World War II real engineering series, Battle of Britain and D-Day Logistics, multi-hour documentaries from Wendover Productions and much more , the best way to gain access. to nebula and all of this awesome exclusive content is definitely obtained through the awesome curios and nebula bundle, and at its current retail price, it's less than 15 a year to get full access to both, and curios has some awesome stuff that you definitely You will also enjoy watching this documentary called Putin and the Oligarchs, a 43-minute documentary that explains in incredible depth where Vladimir Putin's regime in Russia came from and how it continues to operate and wage war in Ukraine, which will give you a lot of of context behind what is happening right now.

I really can't recommend it enough and I really don't know of a better deal that exists anywhere in streaming. You get two streaming sites, both with content you'll actually watch and everything. for less than $15 a year at the current retail price, but what's even more, signing up will help countless independent educational creators beyond real-life history, so be sure to do so by clicking the button here on your screen right now, which will take you directly to curiositystream.com, sign up for Florida real life or by following the link below in the description and as always, thank you so much for watching.