Bottled Diplomacy:
Poland will not be able to pay for Starlink for Ukraine due to Polish President Nawrocki's veto of the law on assistance to Ukrainian refugees, - the country's Minister of Digitalization.
Source.
Russia’s war economy has created a new middle class in poor regions - and it won't allow Putin to end the war, Telegraph.
Contract soldiers earn up to $90k a year vs local wages of $8k. Defence factories run 3 shifts a day, wages in metalworking have grown by 78% since 2021.
conomists call it “deathonomics”: Putin turned idle workers and jobless men into cannon fodder and channelled their wages and death payouts into local economies.
Families once on the margins now buy apartments in regional cities.
Families of dead soldiers receive up to $120k in payouts + gifts from officials – anything from fridges to meat grinders.
For many households in Tuva, Altai, and the North Caucasus, war deaths bring more money than years of regular work.
Poor industrial towns that never recovered after 1991 are now booming. War factories making munitions and uniforms hire thousands.
New cafés, gyms, and salons open. Families with war money travel inside Russia, boosting domestic tourism.
The Kremlin reserver a 50,000-seat quota in 2025 for soldiers and their children to enter universities without competition. Nearly 15,000 enrolled in 2024, up from 8,000 in 2023.
But peace would undo it. Hundreds of thousands of veterans would return to low-wage towns and spend their savings within months.
The result could be a “social disaster” like Germany in the 1920s, when embittered veterans destabilised politics.
Source.
