The funny thing with the GFM Steyr is that it is not even a large business. In 2021, its revenue was estimated at only 32,5 million euros. In 2022, it rose to 69,8 million (for obvious reasons). Yet, the Russian artillery industry is critically dependent upon this single company
First, the existing park of GFM Steyr machines requires a steady supply of parts and expendables to keep them running. Consider this one single SXP-55 radial forging machine operating at the Motovilikha Plants, a major artillery & MLRS producer
In April 2023, they purchased the following expendables for their GFM SXP-55 machine. This list gives an idea of:
1. Structure 2. Quantity
of supplies required to keep the stock forging the artillery & tank barrels running. You need details from the original Austrian producer
Second, you need GFM assistance to expand the production capacity. For example, Uralvagonzavod (the only Russian tank producer) is planning to launch a new GFM Steyr radial forging machine in March 2024
Why do you allow Austrians to keep building the Russian military machine?
1. A small (!) Austrian business plays a major role in keeping the Russian artillery industry afloat
2. Russian capacity to forge artillery & tank barrels relies on the GFM machines purchased in Soviet & Putin's times
3. GFM keeps supplying expendables & machines to Russia
Why don't you:
1. Protest at their HQ at Steyr? 2. Question their management, starting from their President & CEO Michael Kralowetz? 3. Contact the Austrian & EU authorities regarding why the GFM Steyr is still capable of supplying & expanding the Russian artillery industry?
This war is an artillery war. Every GFM shipment = your soldiers being torn into pieces. The Ukrainian civil society must take initiative and pressure the GFM Steyr to cease its shipments to the Russian military industry & its proxies
Small company -> easy to pressure
Do it
Here you can read more details & background for how a small Austrian business ended up as a major supplier of major military industrial complexes over the globe
Growing up in Russia in the 1990s, I used to put America on a pedestal. It was not so much a conscious decision, as the admission of an objective fact of reality. It was the country of future, the country thinking about the future, and marching into the future.
And nothing reflected this better than the seething hatred it got from Russia, a country stuck in the past, whose imagination was fully preoccupied with the injuries of yesterday, and the phantasies of terrible revenge, usually in the form of nuclear strike.
Which, of course, projected weakness rather than strength
We will make a huuuuuuge bomb, and drop it onto your heads, and turn you into the radioactive dust, and you will die in agony, and we will be laughing and clapping our hands
Fake jobs are completely normal & totally natural. The reason is: nobody understands what is happening and most certainly does not understand why. Like people, including the upper management have some idea of what is happening in an organisation, and this idea is usually wrong.
As they do not know and cannot know causal relations between the input and output, they just try to increase some sort of input, in a hope for a better output, but they do not really know which input to increase.
Insiders with deep & specific knowledge, on the other hand, may have a more clear & definite idea of what is happening, and even certain, non zero degree of understanding of causal links between the input and output
I have recently read someone comparing Trump’s tariffs with collectivisation in the USSR. I think it is an interesting comparison. I don’t think it is exactly the same thing of course. But I indeed think that Stalin’s collectivisation offers an interesting metaphor, a perspective to think about
But let’s make a crash intro first
1. The thing you need to understand about the 1920s USSR is that it was an oligarchic regime. It was not strictly speaking, an autocracy. It was a power of few grandees, of the roughly equal rank.
2. Although Joseph Stalin established himself as the single most influential grandee by 1925, that did not make him a dictator. He was simply the most important guy out there. Otherwise, he was just one of a few. He was not yet the God Emperor he would become later.
The great delusion about popular revolts is that they are provoked by bad conditions of life, and burst out when they exacerbate. Nothing can be further from truth. For the most part, popular revolts do not happen when things get worse. They occur when things turn for the better
This may sound paradoxical and yet, may be easy to explain. When the things had been really, really, really bad, the masses were too weak, to scared and too depressed to even think of raising their head. If they beared any grudges and grievances, they beared them in silence.
When things turn for the better, that is when the people see a chance to restore their pride and agency, and to take revenge for all the past grudges, and all the past fear. As a result, a turn for the better not so much pacifies the population as emboldens and radicalises it.
The first thing to understand about the Russian-Ukrainian war is that Russia did not plan a war. And it, most certainly, did not plan the protracted hostilities of the kind we are seeing today
This entire war is the regime change gone wrong.
Russia did not want a protracted war (no one does). It wanted to replace the government in Kyiv, put Ukraine under control and closely integrate it with Russia
(Operation Danube style)
One thing to understand is that Russia viewed Ukraine as a considerable asset. From the Russian perspective, it was a large and populous country populated by what was (again, from the Russian perspective) effectively the same people. Assimilatable, integratable, recruitable