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September 2026: The world today, as seen by one Polish guy

522 points · 391 comments · marjancek

jakozaur · 1790761035 · focus · HN ↗
I'm Polish, but this is such a pessimistic, overdramatic take. The visualisations are impressive, but you're living in Poland's golden age. See this Hacker News story with 1,000+ upvotes: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48062117">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48062117
The war in Ukraine is a tragedy, but it has proved that Russia is weak. The price shock will speed up the transition to renewables, and Iran is losing its grip on Hormuz. So many of the other issues are solvable.
It's easy to be a pessimist, but there's a bright future ahead of us.
1. tejohnso · 1790770682 · focus · HN ↗
  > it has proved that Russia is weak.
  How? Russia is successfully fighting the entirety of NATO on a front that it is continually pushing further west, with about 20% of Ukraine now lost. If anything NATO and the promise of US security is what has been shown to be weak. And I don't think the idea of US/Western superiority is ever going to come back to what it was given what has happened in the Ukraine and Iran theaters in recent past.
  1. sobellian · 1790772161 · focus · HN ↗
    I am curious how Russian people feel about this propaganda line that they're fighting NATO. It's obviously nonsense, along the lines of "war is peace." Russia borders NATO and there is no front there. Russia invaded a non-NATO country and immediately bogged down against an army that does not fight according to NATO doctrine. I have to believe this is something the average Russian realizes.
    specproc · 1790773556 · focus · HN ↗
    Not Russian, but spent a lot of time out east.
    Russia is reflexively anti-NATO as NATO is reflexively anti-Russia.
    NATO is an alliance that was created in opposition to the Soviet Union. NATO has absorbed parts of the former Soviet Union.
    Western companies pillaged Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union. Rightly or wrongly, Putin owes a lot of his original popularity to dealing with the aftermath.
    Russia, rightly or wrongly, sees colour revolutions as intelligence operations, and territorial conquest.
    Russia cannot accept NATO forces on its borders.
    NATO is providing decisive material, political, logistical, financial and intelligence support to Ukraine, precisely to bog it down and drain it.
    These are all pretty normal perspectives for most Russians. They're arguably pretty based, and not necessarily a product of internal propaganda campaigns.
    The thing that westerners don't get about Russia, and the reason we're stuck in this Godforsaken conflict, is that we personalise things around Putin. We think that if Putin dies, everything will magically improve.
    The decision to invade was Putin's, but the rationale goes much deeper and will outlast him.
    sobellian · 1790786346 · focus · HN ↗
    I'm not going to say that NATO materiel has had zero effect but I think what Russians (at least those in power) really can't reckon with is that their initial invasion got stopped by Ukrainian AD, artillery, armor, and soldiers operating on the same Cold War stockpiles and doctrine as they did. The single most valuable intervention from NATO was simply alerting Ukraine that Russia was about to invade, allowing the Ukrainians to disperse their units.
    Russia committed to too many (and often poorly chosen) lines of advance and did not have a plan to keep their units adequately supplied and moving on the approach to Kiev. This meant even in the opening month of the invasion, their plan went south almost immediately and you had infamous miles-long traffic jams on the roads leading south. Their SEAD didn't work. Their soldiers were not told ahead of time that they were invading Ukraine. They didn't want to mobilize ahead of time, so they didn't amass enough forces. Against a large country like Ukraine you don't need to invent a NATO bogeyman to understand why the initial offensive failed. Credit to Ukraine, they did not allow a defeatist narrative to take hold and fought.

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