What Russia Really Thinks about Its Chances in the War

Russia held its annual end-of-the-year townhall meeting. Although much of the discussion featured the standard claims of Russian strength, one topic of conversation does provide new insight. Today, we look at reconstruction going on inside of Mariupol, what that says about Russia's expectations regarding the expected outcome of the war, and why it provides meaningful context where most other public declarations do not.

0:00 Putin's End of the Year Townhall
1:50 Reconstruction in Mariupol
3:23 Why This Is Different than Cheap Talk
6:06 What Russia Thinks versus What Might Actually Be True

The appearance of U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) visual information does not imply or constitute DoD endorsement.

By Ukrinform:

[Gametheory]

Experimented with a completely different editing style for this video. Let me know what you think!

[SliverHell]

I thought I was having a seizure in the first 2 minutes

[vicmo]

1:41 please don't do that again, I was panicking thinking there was something wrong with my phone 😂🤣

[吳家任-yo]

Oh, but roads, schools, and hospitals already existed in Mariupol before Russians came and destroyed everything.

[WynnofThule]

Holy shit, William Spaniel turned into a medicine commercial

Side effects may include a strong compulsion to draw lines on maps

[counter-terrordoge]

The side effects at the end of a pharmaceutical ad:

[jimtalbott]

Two things I’ll be watching initially: oil prices, and the Russian Inflation rate. Honorable mention to the exchange rate.

[ashcarrier]

I think it was noticed that Russia saying that ATACMS and Storm Shadow use on Russian soil would be intolerable was a tacit admission that even they know Crimea and eastern Ukraine is NOT Russian soil.

[I_Went_Outside]

Mariupol was obliterated in that month. Building here and there is drop in sea

[anadin]

The Mariupol building was shown to be pure facade.
It was a block of construction purely like a showroom.

[karlgrimm]

Old people might remember “Baghdad Bob” the Iraqi who kept saying everything was fine while his country was being destroyed.

[arau]

I recall seeing a detailed video showing that the "rebuilt" areas shown in Mariupol Ukraine back a year or more ago were not much more than facades designed to give the impression of a rebuilt city area.

[GojiMet]

Russia: Everything is going fine.
Soooo fine, we are actually increasing our submarine fleet at no cost to the taxpayer, keeping our gas supply all to ourselves, efficiently reallocating troops abroad to our special military operation, and giving oil and plane-crash cleanup jobs to our local population.

[yesanton]

In Mariupol they invest only in one street where they can produce propaganda on

[Exigentable]

i slowed it down and listened to the summary out of pure spite. Try .25 if youre as stubborn as I am.

[digilyd]

The rebuilding of Mariupol appears to be about hiding the bodies so that they will never be discovered, that is why it has happened so swiftly.

[SianaGearz]

I disagree.

Yes investments in Mariupol, but they aren't nearly enough to actually rebuild a destroyed city; and in turn they may be seen as diverted from the corresponding projects within Russia proper, because it's been suffering from quality housing and infrastructure shortage for the entirety of its modern existence, and it's gotten nominally worse with people gaining means to actually acquire a home from payouts to the soldiers and the families of the fallen. The advantage of building out Mariupol as opposed to say Arkhangelsk, Nizhny Novgorod or Yekaterinburg is that russians would be re-populating the city replacing Ukrainians many of whom haven't survived or had to flee and making it less likely for the city to be successfully re-integrated into Ukraine.

[toastbrti]

Me watching this video at 2.5x speed hearing him suddenly start casting ancient spells

[spxram]

Completely agree to the conclusion. In other words: Russian only respects the language of raw power.

They have demonstrated a million times that their respect for their own signatures is worth nothing. They even let their "allies" fall - like Assad. This also should be a lesson to all the regimes in the CSTO, Iran and North Korea.

[Tormentality]

So thankful my great grandparents got outta there. Stalin started hell and it never ended there. Can't believe the people there are still so subdued and obedient to the rich.