If you look at his comments they are basically all shilling for Russia apart from one on Rust. The most recent being "what took him so long" on Putin raising defence spending to a third of Russia's budget.
I'm not sure that's really what you are supposed to do on HN? Also you might think Russia could find something better to do that spending all their money and tens of thousands of their men on trying to kill the neighbours and steal their land. It's not even really profitable these days.
Actually it can be more profitable than you might think. It turns out the resources that Putin's forces are sitting on are both quite valuable and strategically significant:
Though the war was launched primarily for ideological reasons, it's safe to assume that the plunder aspect factored into whatever deranged cost-benefit analysis he made at the time.
Maybe but Russia is not exactly short on natural resources and does seem like it could do with more manpower which it's depleting both through war deaths and young people leaving.
Also the war is apparently costing ~500m-1bn per day and looks like dragging on into another Afghanistan like situation.
I think the thing started a bit because Putin was reading 19th century books on invasions and similar during covid lockdown and imperial invasion used to kind of make sense back then - I'm a Brit and we had quite an empire. But now when the economy is dominated by tech I'm not sure it pays.
It's not that his country was short on resources. But it seems likely that he simply calculated that the cost of the invasion would be more than offset by the gain in resources.
No doubt the manpower (and financial) costs have been much higher than expected. But it seems that his country's tolerance thresholds on these dimensions have turned out to be significantly higher than he was expecting at the outset, also.
But now when the economy is dominated by tech I'm not sure it pays.
Right - for modern empires, which dominate primarily through their economic, technological and cultural prowess (and which have grown tired of slaughtering their own peoples in mass numbers for speculative geopolitical gain), it doesn't make sense at all.
But Putin knows his empire can't compete on any of those fronts. And since he has comparatively few restrictions on the number of his people's lives he can throw down the drain for the sake of his various projects - we can see how the 19th century model starts to seem all the more appealing to him.
I'm not sure that's really what you are supposed to do on HN? Also you might think Russia could find something better to do that spending all their money and tens of thousands of their men on trying to kill the neighbours and steal their land. It's not even really profitable these days.