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Its not looking good..
(thelemmy.club)
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this post was submitted on 05 Feb 2026
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The EU has a much larger GDP and a significantly higher defense budget than Russia (about 457 billion USD vs. 146 billion USD in 2024). While its industry is more fragmented, it can be rapidly scaled up when needed as demonstrated in Ukraine. and the comparison to russia also lacks because the EU doesn't consider the current situation as active war. However, compared to the US and China, the EU still lags behind their global projections. Although Russia has increased its arms production in recent years, it is suffering from sanctions and material losses in the Ukraine conflict, which limits its military capabilities. Overall, the EU is economically and industrially stronger than Russia, but still trails the US and China in a global comparison. Since there is a noticable shift of power in the world the EU started to focus more on China and India as trading partners and leave the US who traditionally were European allies.
The EU is far more financialized, in terms of gross industrial output the EU is behind the Russian Federation. This is a holdover from their soviet legacy. In terms of real production, Russia succeeds, despite lower GDP, because money stretches much farther in Russia. 1 million USD worth of Russian goods gets you a lot more than 1 million USD in European goods, to make things simple.
Europe could make up the gap, but it is so dominated by finance capital and energy dependency that this makes it incredibly difficult without adopting socialism.
This is false. The EU is financially stronger than Russia, largely thanks to modern neoimperialism in Africa, but industrially is far behind.
Correct, the EU is being demoted from imperial vassal to periphery, and since it would take devastating losses in open conflict with a major power without US backing it has to seek other allies.
Ridiculous Russia have zero people, they’ve lost 2m in manpower. They have a lot of land but in every measure they are less powerful than the EU. They are economically the size of Spain. The EU contains Spain and it’s not even the largest economy. Russian propaganda much?
How many times has Russia supposedly been about to collapse? You'd think after the dozenth, people would learn
Russia has collapsed a bunch in history. Their conquering isolationist history is a failed strategy.
"In history" lol ok, now how many times has the Russian Federation been predicted to collapse in Ukraine, and how many times has it.
Who is they? Everyone in Russia? Who are you talking about, you weird nationalist?
You're confusing finances with raw industrial power. An 8 USD big mac in Switzerland isn't 3 times better than a 2.54 USD big mac in Indonesia.
What the EU doesn’t have, at least in the short/medium term, is energy. That industrial base needs (a lot of) energy. Russia was able to supply this cheaply, while the US is charging an arm and a leg. Of course in the long run, renewables can help keep that energy production local, but that means developing closer ties with China. And right now the US is trying to throw up walls to prevent other countries from accessing China’s renewable energy products.
The EU does indeed have a significantly larger potential industrial base than Russia. But that also requires coordination, intentional action, and long-term planning. So far the EU hasn’t seemed capable of doing these things but who knows, maybe Trump has been the wake-up call Europeans need.
I also hope Trump has shown Europeans that the US is the bigger threat to European sovereignty than Russia. And this will be true after Trump is gone, it’s not a one-time thing (Biden did things hostile to European sovereignty but that goes under the radar because he was more supportive of Ukraine). But yeah, if the EU makes some coordinated effort to build military defenses, they shouldn’t have a problem protecting their sovereignty against Russia. And that assumes Russia wants to try and military conquer parts of Europe, which I do not believe but even if I did, a more robust, domestic EU military would be enough to prevent an attack even if that was Russia’s intention.
The US is Europe’s fake friend - with or without Trump - and it frustrates me to no end that Europeans can’t see it.
What’s deeply ironic about this situation is that one of the main reasons the EU has remained distant to Russia is the US. Cold war was between US and Russia. More recently US opposed Nord Stream 2. Now US suddenly is friendly to Russia and EU are running around like headless chicken because they made it their own identity to be hostile to Russia. There haven been people suggesting that while indeed Russia is antidemocratic etc. one can still try to carefully cooperate, because it happens to be a neighbor and it makes sense strategically. Who knows, maybe in the process one could positively influence Russia, it doesn’t have to be always the other way. But these people are instantly called Russian assets and demonized. And it’s not like this kind of reasoning was the real issue anyway, as in the meantime you see western democracies happily collaborating e.g. with Turkey or Saudi Arabia. The Ukraine war complicates things though. Aside of the humanitarian and economic tragedy, it’s a diplomatic disaster, as it makes Russia look quite hostile to Europe, whether they actually „want to continue“ beyond Ukraine or not.