Buryatia

They come from, uh, economically disadvantaged regions.

Just to give you the scale, uh, if you're an average male in Moscow, y- uh, your chances of dying in this war are 30 times less than chances of an average man from Buryatia region.

That's in, uh, eastern Siberia.

So the, this discrepancy, the difference is so big, 30 times.

I mean, they're in a different stratosphere, and they, they [scoffs] they have nothing in common with the rest of the people in the country.

Uh, then you have the guys out in, you know, let's say in, in Buryatia, who in this war die at a rate that's 65 times more likely to die in the war than are those who are coming from Moscow.

So obviously, there's a huge gulf between those two.

Just a average working class guy or poor guy in Moscow is far better off than a guy in Buryatia.

But then you have, you know, these other separations in the population that make it more distinguished.

Now, where it breaks down is where...

And well, actually, one of the things the government has always tried to do was create this sense of what it is to be Russian.

Buryatia, they're not ethnically Russian.

40,000 fathers, sons, and brothers killed or maimed every single 30-day cycle.

Again, we have to look at World War I, and if you remember the British situation when the whole villages were drafted into a single group in Britain... well what scars did that leave but this is something similar except for the whole region of Buryatia specifically and many other places because Moscow has been spared as much as possible there are dead towns and dead cities all over the place in Russia right now places where no one will ever live again because they're out of all this situation and well if in Ukraine they're being bombed by the enemy then what's the point of it in Russia What's the point? And where does this actually go? See, when you take out the ruler and measure this progress on the map, measure the progress of this horrible price that was paid for ambitions of an aging dictator, if you look at this sacrifice of the equivalent of several mid-sized Russian cities in manpower and emptying out the Soviet-era deep storage bases in Siberia and dragging out the tanks that were built when Brezhnev was in office, hollowing out your economy and everything, and then you look at the map.

The line, in total, has moved by a distance you could cover on a decent morning jog.

This is a level of tactical and strategic bankruptcy that almost defies human comprehension.

Zoom into the regions and the pattern sharpens.

Recruitment hubs like Buryatia were reshaped by war.

Defense hubs like Tardistan and Udmurtia were propped up by state orders.

This is not a healthy economy.

So tell you what, let me introduce you to Lake Baikal.

So Lake Baikal lies in southeastern Siberia at the meeting point of Irkutsk to the west and north and the Republic of Buryatia to the east and the south.

So you can get into the western and southern ends of the lake from Irkutsk and then north.

at least Vyanka is about an hour away by road, and Ulan-Ude, and I suppose I don't need to tell you about all these.