Middle Earth is not just a fantasy but a good analogy for the pharmaceutical software industry. Now accepting this, one can only assume that the company I work for, Ateb, is the Shire, which I guess would make me a hobbit. So here we go, upon a slightly altered history of Middle Earth, where the Shire, no longer just a peaceful little farming nation, has imperial ambitions…although rather misplaced imperial ambitions.

The main issues that will be addressed here will be: 1. Marginal Cost versus Marginal Returns in the development of the project and the financing of the company, 2. Make or Buy for the tools and sub modules, 3. the concept of Sunk Costs.

Previously in the history of Middle Earth, there were several major and minor software producers (nations) who created software solutions for the pharmacies and their corporate offices. Though all offered some amount of satisfaction, all had major draw backs and none addressed the entirety of the process. Ateb…err the Shire, was one such company.

As the market began to mature, a company called NDC, we shall call it Mordor, was formed. It’s stated goal was to buy up all of the various other developers and their software (rings) and in the darkness bind them (with an arching software solution to bridge all of the others)…a marriage that just would not be. So it sent out its software wraiths and captured all the other companies with the exception of another giant TechRX and the tiny Ateb Shire.

Now NDC’s plan to combine all the various platforms failed miserably and the billion dollar giant has been spinning its wheels for the better part of three years. Thus the fires of Mordor are no threat to the other survivors. TechRX has been equally frustrated. Unable to beat Mordor, and throwing some thirty or so million dollars at the project with no success and a majorly faulty design.

Now the Shire was a $12 million revenue company in 2001, when our story truly begins. It existed quietly in a niche it had created for itself implementing IVR and Signature Capture solutions. But the Elders of the Shire, ever watching for a new opportunity to grow, fell under the sway of an evil creature called Golem and its obsession with “Precious” a software package that would conquer the whole of Middle Earth and become the monopoly position for all pharmacies. Golem snuck in and whispered delusions of “Precious” to the Elders until their obsession grew and grew and they embarked upon the ambitious and extremely risky proposition to build “Precious”.

The whole of the Shire was to be gambled upon the creation of “Precious” and the future revenue streams that and Golem promised.

Here we come to the first of our three issues: Marginal Cost vs. Marginal Revenues and future revenue streams. The Elders of the Shire, in their lust to drive forward, failed to do an accurate Cost Analysis. After all, every hobbit knows that a dollar today is worth more then a dollar tomorrow. But Golem had blinded them and the decision to go ahead was made.

The Elders’ Cost Analysis was severely limited and faulty in scope, as if avoiding a serious examination of the costs of development so as to avoid finding a reason not to pursue the desired course. The cost analysis came to $7 million for development, ignoring that the two giant rivals had both spent over $30 million and failed. This figure was taken as acceptable regardless of the fact that the Shire’s whole revenue streams were only $12 million to begin with. Furthermore, the analysis failed to properly predict all the needed functionality of making a program that would cover everything from storing customers and drugs to processing transactions and making reports, something that is of vastly larger scale especially when one must consider that there is also a regulatory and changing power of the FDA and of 50 individual states and that this software would have to balance for companies in many states with many different sets of regulations for different member stores. They also failed to predict the lack of expertise within the Shire, thus believing that the Shire’s citizens were capable of things that they had not the training for. Debts that would be incurred would be balance and put off as long as possible for the future that would recover everything. All this was betted against future income streams. Thus, the Shire marched forth to meet destiny.

It was not long before it began to stumble. Costs piled up quickly, much quicker then expected or anticipated and direction was lacking. The attack was everywhere and nowhere. It quickly became obvious that the Shire lacked processes for development of such an ambitious project as “Precious” and the conquest of the market. So the Elders decided to bring in a new king to run the show, and thus a CEO was hired. The hired CEO brought allies, Computer Horizon Consultants, for whom he had previously been a high ranking lord. To cement the new relationship, CHC loaned the Shire $900,000 in gold for the march forward, this and the workers of CHC would help co-develop the project for a share of the conquests, equivalent to their inputs. That and CHC was guaranteed to get its invested monies whether “Precious” was developed or not.

So once more the Shire marched forward and “Precious” again seemed within reach. As it did so, it came to point number two: To make the tools the Shire would require or to buy them from other realms? While the Elders of the Shire had no problems with bringing in new immigrants to help the Shire in its efforts, they were unceasingly stingy with the funding of tools and training. They decided to make as many of their own tools as they could, which in turn drove up production costs and pushed back the dead lines.

The few tools the Elders did decide to pay for were of the cheapest variety and caused many more new problems. But since they had already invested some amount for them and failed to understand the concepts of Sunk Costs (more on point three later), they sank even more funds and efforts on patches and work arounds. Thus instead of paying a larger sum upfront for quality tools, more funds and time were instead wasted with self-development and cheap, defective purchases.

But the march continued and CHC was the chosen ally of the Shire, but CHC turned out to be a not so trustworthy ally. Indeed, their contributions to the code were questionable at best, their promise to bring in sound development processes failed to materialize, but their $3.5 million bill was all too real. The king of CHC was eventually brought down in a coup for embezzlement and the alliance dissolved over night. The new leadership of CHC demanded the repayment of the debt or to also become elders of the Shire and to gain 20% ownership. This of course was denied out of hand. The matter of debt is still in court.

These predicaments did not, however, phase the new king. Nor did the fact that CHC’s new leaders were hostile to him. Instead he fell ever more under the sway of Golem and the dream of “Precious”. To fortify his visions of grandeur, the CFO, whom the king had brought in, created fantastic revenue predictions. The Shire was to grow from a $12 million revenue company in 2002 to a $25 million revenue company in 2003 to a predicted $50 million company in 2004. This despite the fact that revenues for 2003 were only $15 million by the end of September and costs had surmounted to a whooping $19 million, almost all paid by debt financing and leveraging.

The king and elders were, however, forced to revaluate the costs of “Precious” and the target was moved to $14 million, double the original price tag and the due date was moved back by half a year, though many hobbits were now suspecting that all of this was still extremely wishful thinking. The Shire as a whole was now heavily weighed down and moral was anything but improving, but once again the concept of Sunk Costs was ignored and the drive forward continued. The Shire as a whole had only four Elders who owned the whole of it. Though the majority of the hobbits were vested, in truth this meant nothing since the Shire was privately owned. This made the avoidance of Sunk Costs even harder to comprehend since no vast body of stock holders had to be answered too. The Elders firmly believed that the present suffering would be justified by the future gains. Just enough capital was still being brought in to keep things operational.

The goal now became one of cutting costs. So first came the lay offs. Almost a third of the Shire’s citizens were driven out, many with key talents that would later have to be replaced. A new drive to find new allies was begun. Word came of a mystical land across the sea that could do work for pennies on the dollar: India. Since everyone else was heading that way, the Elders decided to also charge forward and in less then a month, the Shire had formed a strategic new alliance with the realm of Naus.

This new alliance was not fully thought through. Not only did it cause much heart ache amongst the surviving citizens of the Shire, enough so that several decided to emigrate, but it was also badly timed. The strategic alliance brought in 20 Naus software engineers at a time when the whole of the “Precious” framework was being redesigned. As such, there was precious little for them to do, so they sat idling but still collecting monies. Naus did contribute talented BAs but this more a side benefit then the actual initial plan.

About this time, another development accord, the drive for domination and the creation of “Precious” was to be given a great boost in terms of monies. From the lands of Shadow Capital, a delegation of Venture Capitalists arrived to negotiate with the King.

What quickly followed was an attempted coup and counter-coup, which resulted in the firings of the King, his CFO and the head of Marketing. It would seem that the Venture Capitalist’s demand for giving monies was that the chief of the Elders not only leave the company but give up all share in the Shire. The king decided this was a good idea and began the process of removing the Chief Elder and replacing him with someone he wanted to bring in. Once the other Elders found out, they moved quickly to counter act this and after a brief war council deposed the King and several of his hand picked men.

Thus, though the elders were able to preserve their positions in the Shire, the Shire was denied the needed capital for “Precious”. Some investment was brought in from other perspective users of the software, enough to keep the angry creditors sedate. But this was only a stop gap.

On top of this, to make up for all the losses of personal during the earlier layoffs, new people were brought in. But these were pharmacy experts, who would be needed when and if “Precious” was developed, for the distribution phase, not developers who were critical for the project that was less then a third created. Too, the pharmacy experts were twice as expensive as the developers.

So here we are, the Shire inching along towards a far off and elusive goal of “Precious” ever beyond its reach. Leadership is desperately trying to find financing source to reach it’s goal and keep the howling packs of creditors at bay, and the average hobbit, the average Ateb employee, looking on in futility and frustration.

But could this have been avoided? Could this situation still be saved? Yes and possibly yes. The economic concept of Sunk Costs screams loudly here, but in truth it is only partially the answer. Those who have recently invested in “Precious” did so with the agreement of gaining equity in the Shire if their investment falls through. This was the quick and dirty way to get them to risk their monies. So to cut losses would mean for the Elders a major loss of power in their Shire. But having spoken with several almost a year ago, everyone admitted that “Precious” was a mistake to begin with. Then why? Why all this trouble in the first place of continuing to through money and time at a project that was obviously far beyond the Shire’s capabilities?

Next was the issue of tools. Early on, a concise enough study should have been made to figure out just what processes and development needs would or rationally could be expected in this fiasco. Though, of course, all such things carry within them hidden dangers, many of the issues of tools were foreseen and though expert hobbits continually called on the acquisition of key tools, the leadership’s in ability or non desire to spend the needed monies on the needed instruments has had very dire results. While giving all the needed resources to its sales teams and sending members on very expensive convention trips, it was unwilling to spend several thousand dollars on licensing tools for design and architecturing.

In truth though, this whole mess should have been avoided. The Elders were so blind as to believe that future predicted revenue streams could justify ruinous expenses in the present. This is a kin to heavy gambling. While companies are expected to take risks in the pursuit of profits, it is quite one thing to take a calculated risk whose failure while hurting the company will in no way endanger its very well being and another thing to go on half research and vast assumptions and bet the future of not only the firm but the employment of almost one hundred people on a dream far from reality. The mistakes of TechRX were also repeated early on, though to the Shire’s credit, they did recognize that the infrastructure being used was fault and moved away from it, but not before spending half a year on this false start. More research might have shown why TechRX was still spinning its wheels. In truth, more research was the call of the day. There was little danger of someone else seizing the opportunity since absolutely no other company was willing to move into this field with the failure of NDC and TechRX. Ateb could have safely stood idol for a few more months while researching the true costs and opportunities and then carefully deciding whether the market risk was worth it or not. Instead, leadership characteristically ran blindly forward, the same way they did with the CHC partnership, the Naus partnership, the layoffs and most other decisions.

In this writers personal opinion, the chances are not good. Weight of costs are pilling up and the pressure is already severe. It will be interesting to see the outcome.

For most Westerners, we Russians are a mystery wrapped up in an enigma, to quote the late Churchill. Westerners seem to fall into one of two camps, on the one hand they see us as the same as they are, because we are white, often blond or redheaded and light eyed. To this they are greatly disappointed, as we are still a separate civilization and thus think differently. This difference often comes out in various subtleties.

The other camp tends to look at us as some unfathomable and uncivilized mongoloid race to be distrusted, feared and taught how to live properly like “civilized” peoples. To this end, again, they are often shocked and to some degree disappointed or maybe relieved to be absolutely wrong.

So now you find yourself going into a meeting, a meeting where on the other side of the table sit Russians. What to expect? Will this be civilized? A fist fight? A drinking fest?

So, for the novice, here are some basic rules for anyone meeting with anyone in Russia. Follow these few ground rules you should be fine:

1. Timeliness

While Russians are not as prompt as Germans, Russians are rather prompt. Not rather prompt like say Italians or Spaniards or Greeks, where the parties may show up 15 or 20 or even 50 minutes late, apologize and go on. Russians may be 5 minutes late, or they may be early and already awaiting your arrival. If the meeting is between two very disparate parties, such as a journalist and a governor or CEO of a large company, the party of import may show up 10-15 minutes late. This is done as a power play, to show one’s importance. However, even this is far from the rule. I have met many a corporate CEO, who was on time and ready, especially since I was on the client side.

So being 5 minutes late is ok, but I would definitely not make a habit of it. If you are going to be significantly late because of events outside of your control: traffic jam, car breakdown, alien abduction, it is appropriate to call the other party and inform them of such. Anything later than 5 minutes, without a good excuse, will be seen on a spectrum from “unprofessional” to “insult”.

A side note on this, if during the meeting you agree to set due dates or deadlines for some document or action, be sure to accomplish it by the agreed upon date. This in turn leads us to the second point: Meeting Minutes.

2. Meeting Minutes

Be prepared for the fact that everything during the meeting will be set down in writing in the Minutes of Meeting and not meeting due dates is a major blow to one’s credibility and reliability in Russia.

Depending on who is taking the notes, this could be in minute detail or in general terms. However, all agreed upon actions, responsible parties and due dates will be set down in detail. Additionally, the other party will not let you leave without reading and signing the Meeting Minutes.

While this document does not carry any judicial character, it is you commitment and as such, ignoring what is agreed upon will be seen as very negative and untrustworthy and trust is the number one commodity in Russia.

3. Inclusiveness

This does not mean the same thing as the Western Woke term of inclusivity. This literally means making sure everyone is participating. If someone is a helper/assistant of a prime personality, that person will be in an acknowledged subordinate role but that does not mean that that person is left out of the meeting.

A few rules of thumb: It is considered very rude to turn your back on someone while continuing your conversation with another person in the group...one to remember for non-Russians who have no such issues. For this reason, Russians tend to naturally stand in circles when in groups, and the bigger the group, the bigger the circle, to make sure everyone is included.

Another no-no is turning to your co-workers, and beginning a conversation in a different language not shared by everyone. Sure, if that person does not understand the common language of the meeting, it is ok to do, however, when the case is that that person does understand, the conversation will be seen as something shady, done behind the backs of others, even as it is being done under the nose of everyone. It is considered very rude. If the need arises to have such a discussion, request some time alone, a break from the meeting and maybe a separate room to do so in.

4. Emotions

Russians are emotional, much much more than the stiff upper lip of the English or the blank faces of the Germans. However, and this is a very big “however”, while getting into an emotionally “hot” discussion happens, one should never over do it and better yet, never allow it to happen. When the signs of a pending conflict are evident, someone should step in and cool everyone off or declare a break. Never get personal and never ever ever throw a temper tantrum and walk out. Yes, these types of theatrics are common for southern Europeans and are seen not only as unimpressive, unprofessional but also as extremely childish and unstable. In other words, the personality of a person that should be avoided. Khrushchev beating his shoe at the UN did not impress most Russians. Most people looked upon him as a hick.

I had an Italian EPC project manager who would do this. He and because of him, our company, had zero respect from the other side who had to beg him to return. This is viewed especially unmanly and childish.

If you actually degrade to insults, never, never insult someone’s mother, wife or children, or God, especially the first one. That will probably lead to a physical confrontation and will more than likely end your business dealings for good, no matter the monies involved.

5. Shaking Hands

Do, definitely do and not just with your direct other, but with everyone and anyone who enters the room before the start and after the meeting has started. It does not matter the rank of the person, whether he is the boss or an underling, this honour is shown to everyone. After the very Obligatory handshake, you may hand out or receive business cards individually.

Equally, when leaving, shake everyone’s hand. Walking by some person who stops to talk to someone in your party? Shake his hand. And make it a firm hand shake. Additionally, women shake hands also, so not to shake the hand of a woman is a grave insult, unless you of course kiss it. No most women will not take that as an insult, quite the opposite.

6. Stand up when important parties enter.

If you are already seated, and your opposites come in, stand up and shake their hands. If a very senior person enters, especially one who is aged, stand up. What if a woman enters the room to join the meeting? Get up and show respect, as if it was a senior person, and since 42% of Russian executives are women (twice that of the progressive West) it just may be. Additionally, if there are no more seats, surrender yours to the woman or the aged person. This rule also goes for public transport, especially if the woman is pregnant or has small children.

7. Bargain Hard

Russians expect a bargain and will adjust initial proposals in expectations that there will be bargaining and serious bargaining. Russian price negotiations used to be described as something between a mugging and a bar fight. It has gotten a bit more civilized but....I remember fighting a supplier over each 0.01$ of a price on forgings...ok we finally agreed to limit it to just full round dollars or we would never get our negotiations done and dinner and drinks were awaiting us. I pulled out a 15% savings from the already low prices which saved us several million dollars.

Most Westerners expect to bargain for 2-3-5% and would be shocked to get to 8-10% on a discount discussion. In Russia, think big. It is not uncommon for the counter offer to be 30% lower, a good starting position. Then the haggling begins.

8. Everything is possible.

Russian engineers, metallurgists, and technical people tend to be rather conservative. Never take the initial “NO IT CANT BE DONE” as the final answer. If the junior or secondary management says no, go straight to the senior leadership, where every decision is possible. If they say “yes” it will be yes. Thus, getting the buy in of the senior figures is of utmost importance.

Equally, since the culture is conservative, remain cool and use your persuasion skills to sell the idea, either by its merits or by its profitability. Be prepared to explain in detail to the technical people, why what you want.

9. The Number Two.

The number two is often as important as the number one, this is the trusted figure and the one that usually resolves issues. Figure out who the trusted lieutenant of the general director is. Russian chain of commands are linier except for that special lieutenant who has the ear of the boss and his authority to do what needs to be done.

10. Meetings must come to some decisions.

In a Russian mind, why else are you in a meeting, if not to find a solution to some quandary? The obvious exception is an introductory meeting. There is no concept in Russian culture to meet just to meet and blab. That is the jurisdiction of social meeting, not business meetings. A business meeting will normally have a set goal and an agenda to follow, but definitely a set goal. This is where the Meeting Minutes come in.

Many southern peoples like to have meetings for the sake of meetings and no decisions are reached, this is very infuriating to Russians. This will be seen as unprofessional and a waste of people’s time.

11. The After Meeting

If you are invited to a dinner event after the meeting, several rules will change. You can come 15-20 minutes late, fashionably late. You should dress the same as your hosts. Discussions will normally be about families, life experiences. The host, your partner from across the table, wants to get to know you better. They want to know whom they are really dealing with, the person behind the business card and title.

To that end, be relaxed, but not so relaxed you become a drunken slobber. Now, drinking will be part of the issue, this, however does not mean binge drinking, unless your host is doing it himself. The worst thing possible is when a westerner can not hold his liquor and winds up getting trashed when Russians are not. No, being trashed is not the end goal of most Russian evenings. Russian drinking rates have been in steep decline over the past decades.

As you can see, Russians are not some barbaric race of half civilized steppe peoples. Russian civilization is very conservative and has certain red lines that should be followed and not crossed to keep a meeting civil and productive.

Good luck.

I am going to say a few things that may shock you, but bare with me and we shall explore my hypothesis. Germany is an artificial entity that is actually two if not more countries under the umbrella of one.

Let us begin with a short history lesson. Germany was unified by Bismarck and King, later Kaiser, Wilhelm I of Prussia, through two orchestrated wars: the Prussian-Austrian war and then the Franco-Prussian war. Both resulted in Prussian victories, with most of the dozens of Germanic states as its allies, which in the end allowed it to form the German Confederacy, which very quickly turned into German Empire. Wilhelm, through all this, was a very unwilling participant. He was surrounded by liberal intelligencia who did not want war or empire, but Bismarck maneuvered and played him with great skill. Thus was born the German unified state in 1883 and it died in 1945, 62 years and two world wars later.

Germany, by the grace of Yeltsin and his liberal elites, was reunified once more in 1990, under various verbal and informal promises from the United States. No one actually asked the East German government, they were presented with a fate accompli. In Russian this is called: They married me off without me. So Germany became one again in 1990 and has stayed so to now 2025, in total 97 years out of the past 142 and never before that.

However, while Germany may have the same unified boundaries, it is not a unified state and the results of last week’s elections have shown the truth hiding behind the empty smiles and yet emptier eyes and minds of the Berlin elites.

As we look at the results of the voting by county in each Bundensland, we see that almost the entirety of former East Germany voted for the AfD, with the exception of the Berlin and suburb of Berlin bubble. The rest of Germany, with a few minor exceptions, went first and foremost to the CDU. Equally, when we review the data for the 18-24 age category, we see that 21% voted AfD while 27% voted Das Linke (leftist extreme socialist) party. But upon further more in-depth inspection, we see that the majority of those in that age category voting AfD were in former eastern Germany and the majority of that age category voting Das Linke was in Western Germany.

But the differences go much deeper than at first viewed. Let us begin with a short over view of the situation over the past thirty years of German “unification”. To call this a unification is of course absurd, this is more akin to a hostile corporate take over, when the owners of the raided entity sell out without even bothering to inform the acting management. The employees of the victim company rarely benefit from such a deal and in this case, the East Germans were no exception.

There had always been cultural differences between the Prussian-Saxonians and their western cousins, not to mention the Bavarians, many of whom do not even consider themselves Germans but a different Germanic ethnicity. While previously to 1945, the eastern mentality dominated over the rest of Germany, since 1990 it has been the western mentality that was forced on the East Germans.

To say that the East Germans have prospered is also a lie. Many of their companies were gutted and closed, few of their scientists, intellectuals or managers were given any chances or places in the west dominated power structure. Effectively, they and now their children were disenfranchised. To add to this effect, many of the Russian Germans who immigrated to Germany in the 90s and 00s were also landing in Eastern Germany and finding that the system the now fully liberalized Berlin was creating made them and even lesser sort of German and behind in importance to the waves of foreign immigrants that Berlin was flooding the country with.

This has created a lot of friction between the two sides of this equation and is showing Germany for the absolutely divided and unequal society, to the Germans themselves, that it is. The One Big German Family is a lie, a dystopian lie based on censorship and a parliamentary republican system that guarantees that elections have minimal results in upsetting the grip the power elites have on the country.

Closing factories, sky rocketing prices on electricity and heating as well as food, fuel and everything else, crushing taxes have hit east Germany disproportionally hard. Watching their needs ignored and the results that the second largest party of Germany, AfD that disproportionally represents them, totally ignored and exiled from the halls of power, will only anger the people even more.

The almost instant restart of import of Afghan “refugees” to replace the German population is but one more slap in their collective faces.

Considering that Herr Merz is a warhawk set on escalating tensions with Russia up to and including war, and that the east Germans will be demanded to fight in that said war, regardless of their warm feelings and often familial ties to Russian, may be that one pill to big to swallow.

That the Berlin globalist elites, representing Blackrock, Gaia worship, insane globalism and other Germany destroying ideologies, are absolutely tone deaf to the eastern Germans may finally spark a situation not unsimilar to that in Ukraine in 2014. If and or when Berlin begins a draft and a full drive to war, they may quickly find themselves in a total national crisis boiling toward internal civil unrest and collapse.

Either way, the results of these elections will have devastating results for the eastern Germans and for Germany as a whole and lays low the notion of one Germany and one German nation.

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In all armed conflicts, some since the dawn of time, lies and propaganda have played key roles in selling the conflict, motivating the participants and embellishing or burying the results. However, possibly no conflict up to its time has been built upon or maintained by so many lies as the conflict in Ukraine.

For those expecting this to be some kind of analysis of the “unprovoked” Russian invasion and the millions of dead Russians and destroyed Russian economy, I fear a major moral collapse is in order.

In this review, I will not go into the reasons behind this conflict, though from the Western understanding, everything the average westerner knows or thinks he knows of this conflict is based upon layers of lies and fantasy, made capable only by ignoring the self evident but not convenient truths of the origins of this conflict and its western backed participants. Yes, in a word, one can answer the question from the Western stand point “Are we the baddies?” in the affirmative.

Now for the conflict itself. The average Western dweller is inundated by several key lines of propaganda:

1. Ukraine is winning on the battlefield and Russia is suffering massive casualties while Ukraine has lost almost no one.

2. The conflict is at a standstill while Ukraine is regaining land.

3. The Russian economy is on the brink of collapse.

4. Russia is a full wartime economy and cannot do more.

5. The Russian people are broken and want Putin to end the conflict.

6. Russian refineries are destroyed, there is no fuel and the crops are rotting in the ground.

It is the aim of this article to work its way through these six points and disprove these lies. Let us begin.

1. The Myth of the Ukrainian victory and the massive Russian losses.

It is undeniable, of course, that Russia is taking casualties, but rarely has a modern conflict been as lopsided as the one raging in Ukraine. When the word lopsided is used, in this context, it is not in the sense that the West has presented it as: millions of Russian dead and only thirty or forty thousand dead Ukrainians.

This does, however, play well into the Western myth that the Russian army does not care about casualties and just throws people away, that is, buries its enemies in its own corpses. The stereotype is not new, but has been used for hundreds of years in its attempts to demonize Russians as some non-human or subhuman “Other”.

Reality, of course, has been anything but and any review of it shows as much. An example is the Battle of Borodino, 1812, the combined European armies under Napoleon, suffered 40-50,000 dead and wounded, source dependent, against a Russian loss of 39-45,000 dead and wounded. Or WW1, for example against the Austro-Hungarians, where at the Battle of Galicia the Russian army lost 230,000 casualties against the Austrian 400,000 (which includes 100,000 POWs). Or the Brusilov Breakthrough that amounted to 500,000 Russian casualties but inflicted 1,5 million on the Austrians.

World War Two became the poster child for such propaganda and came closest to reality, in the first year of the war, where the Soviet Union took horrific casualties trying to hold back the combined armies of Hitler’s New European Order. It is estimated that the Soviet Union lost somewhere in the neighborhood of 9 million soldiers from 1941-1945. The majority of those losses were in 1941, with well over 4,5 million killed, three million of which were murdered or starved to death by the Nazis in POW camps in the winter of 1941-42. As the conflict continued, losses reversed. One must remember that the Soviet Union was not fighting just Nazi Germany, but a coalition that included Fins, Hungarians, Slovaks, Romanians, Italians, Croatians, western Ukrainians, Bosniacs, Scandinavians (the SS 11^th Norland division), the Spanish Blue Division and even the remains of the French SS Charlemagne division.

Losses of the pan-European army, the latest to invade Russia, were also quite impressive: 4.3 million dead Germans, 500k Hungarians, 600k Romanians, 90k Italians, 86k Finns, 6.7k Slovaks, 12k Croats, 14k Spanish and thousands of others such as the French, western Ukrainians, Bosnians and so on. So not counting the Soviet losses from murdered POWs the two sides carried very similar losses in battlefield conditions, both near 6 million.

Why go over these historic moments? This is done to demonstrate that the stereotype that the Western audiences have been primed with: Russians are animals that do not care about their losses, is simply a lie and a lie that more than holds in this case.

Through different moments in this conflict Russia has inflicted severe casualties on the Ukrainian/NATO forces. At times the ratios have gone up as high as 10 to 1, but with the flooding in of drones, are maintained closer to 4-5:1. That is 4-5 killed Ukrainians and NATO/other Mercs for every killed Russian.

There are several reasons for this: the propensity of American and British generals to “play games” with the Ukrainian soldiers and throw them away on attacks they would never dare envision with soldiers of their own nations. The second is of the Ukrainians themselves using older or unfit men pulled from the streets in meat wave attacks. Russia also has full aviation and artillery dominance and is now on par with FPV drones. In a war of attrition, that is slow advance coupled with massive destruction of enemy positions, has led to a situation where a Ukrainian “drone wall” is the only hope of forestalling defeat.

Various videos of Ukrainian war cemeteries, especially videos from the air, support these massive one sided losses.

2. The Conflict is at a Stand Still

This also is an obvious lie. While the conflict is moving slowly, for several reasons: drones, Russian military avoiding excess casualties, and the attrition war against the EU political and economic base, the front is moving and has been moving almost on a constant bases.

The key point of the war of attrition is not land grabs but extermination of the opposing side’s army. This of course lends itself to the Western propaganda which ignore and shuns the topics of the enormous casualties that Ukraine is suffering and instead focuses only on the slow, incremental movement forward. That for each forced step back the Ukrainian/NATO side is paying in rivers of their own blood is a subject that is strictly verboten.

Even the during the body transfers, the uncomfortable truth comes out that one of the reasons why the Ukrainians give back so few corpses, often in the range of 30-50 for every 1000 of theirs is the simple fact that the Russian army is advancing.

This summer we have found ourselves at several breaking points. The two key ones is the Slavensk-Krimotorks-Druzhinka agglomeration, the last three fortified defense cities on the Donbass front. These last desperate line faces a three front attack: direct Russian advancement, a pincer heading into Slavensk and Druzhinka and a spur pushing north behind Druzhinka and Krimotorsk. Behind this line there are no more lines to fall back on, only open fields and isolated villages. No place for the Ukrainian army to make a stand, except on the far banks of the Dnieper.

The second key development is the present storming of Orehov, the last fortified line in central Zaporozhe. The town is 1/3^rd in Russian hands, physically 60% surrounded and tactically, that is, by heavy artillery, aviation and drones, fully surrounded. Once this operation is finished, there are only 30km that separate the Russian forces from Zaporozhe city and no Ukrainian lines in the way.

There are also advancements and fighting in Dobropolia DNR, near Sumy and all of NE Kharkov province. Every day 1-4 settlements are liberated by the Russian army.

3. The Russian Economy is on the Brink of Collapse.

This is of course a lie that has been repeated monthly by the Western press since at least 1999, when a big exclusive came out in Time Magazine. No matter what happens, Russia, who by Purchasing Power Parity, is the 4^th largest economy globably and the biggest in Europe, is always labelled as on the edge of collapse.

Of course, this conflict can push no other line. As a matter of fact the latest numbers show a 1.5% growth rate. The growth rate is low, all things considered, but that is mostly the fault of the endless machinations of the Central Bank, which equally managed to turn a 4% growth rate to 1.2% in 2025, by starving the economy of funds through extremely high rates: 20%+.

4. Russia is a full wartime economy and cannot do more

This point flows quite well with point 4. Anyone visiting present day Russia will note that the Russian economy is anything but on a wartime footing. Military spending accounts for 6.5-7% of GDP. War time economies normally fall in the range of 30-50%+. The Russian economy has become much more geared towards military production but is not dominated by it.

This often sited lie can be pushed by those who do not realize the actual size of the Russian economy. Russia by Purchasing Power Parity is the fourth largest economy in the world and the largest economy of Europe. It is also the fourth largest manufacturing base in the world and one that is being further rapidly expanded.

Russia is not only self sufficient in raw resources and energy goods but has the capacity to process them into needed end products and what it lacks it can purchase freely from China. Russia also has the agricultural base to feed itself and almost a third of the world, with over one million hectares of prime agricultural land still fallow.

5. The Russian people are broken and want Putin to end the conflict.

While it is quite true that the majority of the Russian people did not want this conflict and would want this conflict to end, one must be careful to understand how “ending” it is framed by the majority of the population. The majority want to see a full military capitulation of the Ukrainian state and a hard line approach towards NATO.

Every NATO sponsored and backed terrorist attack only increases enrollment in the military as more and more of the population feel the exstestential threat to be real and or wish to have revenge upon western forces for the murder of Russian civilians.

The demands of the Russian people is for escalation in the conflict to crush the Ukrainian and NATO threat and the government has actually found itself in a position of holding those demands off.

6. Russian refineries are destroyed, there is no fuel and the crops are rotting in the ground.

This oft-repeated fallacy has become a yearly mantra of the Western “free” press, one repeating in unison.

Over the last few years, this has been primarily repeated during August but in 2026 it was moved up to the June. The strike last year that were taughted to destroy up to have destroyed up to 40% of Russian refining capability were then admitted to by Reuters to have only lowered refining by 3%. This year’s strikes have been more damaging but have still been in a relatively contained format.

While there were issues with oil production and distribution, targeting of civilian fuel trucks, the difficulties did not at any point create a crisis point in the Russian economy. Since then, the pressure on the Russian economy has steadily receded.

Over all, Russia has continued to demonstrate a greater resilience and adaptation rate to Western strikes and escalations than was thought possible by the West and has continued to show that it is capable of escalating in return. A prime example of this is the closing of the Ukrainian ports and their destruction. While facing difficulties, the Russian people and the Russian economy are giving no actual signals that they will break or veer away from the set course. It is time for the member states of the collective West to look realistically at the nation they have chosen as their enemy and come to terms of what a prolonged conflict would inflict upon themselves.