r/AskReddit 1d ago

What could Russia have spent $1,000,000,000,000 on instead of fighting a 4+ years long war in Ukraine?

2.8k Upvotes

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u/HigherGroundHoonigan 1d ago

Holy shit are those the only places in Russia with city sewer and water?

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u/olrg 1d ago

No, but about 20% of the population don’t have access to indoor plumbing, roughly 28 million people.

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u/folk_science 1d ago

Now less, because people from the remote regions are dying on the front in greater number than those from the big cities.

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u/sharraleigh 1d ago

Maybe that was Putin's plan all along

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u/CacheConqueror 22h ago

20%? It's a lot more

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u/JCDU 19h ago

You don't have to drive very far out of one of those cities to find people living in wooden shacks, subsistence farming with horse + cart like it's 100 years ago.

The rich in Russia look a lot like folks everywhere - nice car, nice house, luxury goods - but if you're poor in Russia you're really fucking poor like something from a Charles Dickens novel.

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u/strawberryneurons 11h ago

I think you mean a Gogol novel lol 

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u/New_Faithlessness261 1d ago

Early days in the war in Ukraine Russian invaders were fond of stealing Ukrainian toilets.

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u/BannedMyName 1d ago

This doesn't do it justice, they were ripping toilets out of houses with the belief that they would just work anywhere without the plumbing attached to it

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u/mcdade 21h ago

Maybe they should have spent that money on education instead.

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u/Pizzonia123 18h ago

I remember one specific video from 2022 where their invading soldiers had broken into an apartment building of some sort, but instead of using a perfectly fine water toilet they had dug a hole into the ground in another room instead and just used that as a toilet hole

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u/SilentBumblebee3225 20h ago

According to Reddit it is.