I also know both Russians and Ukrainians. The sane Russians with at least some wealth have mostly left Russia, for good. The ones I know who have stayed (or returned!) are nutjobs; I'm not concerned about the wealthier Russians who haven't left. And as for the poor ones, if they want to live the onus is on them to do something useful like sabotage to make their country lose faster. It's not that hard.

We should not sacrifice the lives of Ukrainians – and quite possibly ourselves in the future – for the sake of Russians.

The fact is, you do in fact win wars by killing the other side more efficiently. WW2 was won because far more Germans and Japanese died than westerners. We were damn good at killing them, to the point where they simply surrendered essentially unconditionally.

Zero anything that relates to Harris and “communist totalitarian” but everything that points to Trump wanting to be a fascist dictator. It’s not even close.

Zoom into anything Trump does and says and you will see the obvious picture in front of you.

The supermajority of Russians who are dying volunteered in exchange for (by Russian standards) large amounts of money; Russia has not resorted to large scale mobilization yet and it's illegal in Russia to send conscripts to Ukraine. The Russians fighting are psychopaths who thought it would be fun, and profitable, to kill off Ukrainians. That's probably a big part of why they fight in such wasteful ways: their commanders don't give a shit whether the men fighting live or die. They're just meat to them. And the Russians fighting don't give a shit about the people around them: they just want to avoid dying long enough to collect their financial reward.

Not all cultures or people are equal. That's leftist "defund the police" type nonsense.

Objectively seen, at any front of war, it is some brotherhood against an other brotherhood. Every soldier is there first and foremost to make sure his close friends are fine. They fight for their brothers in war. There is no basic differentiation, when you would sit in a Russian front or the ukrainian front.

So to have very effective ways for them to resign without losses is maby a very strong weapon. And then document those surrender to and push it through as many media services as possible to make sure this footage reaches russian soldiers.

I highly doubt this makes any financial sense.

The marginal cost to kill or seriously wound a Russian is probably something like $50k; the _entire war_ has only cost ~$250k per Russian casualty in direct military spending, and that includes lots of pricey defensive spending like anti-air defense. Ukraine has constantly been short on things like drones and ammo that could easily be purchased if only more funds were available.

I _highly_ doubt the French government is spending less than $50k per Russian. There's a ton of work that needs to be done to vet defecting Russian soldiers given the high chance they're infiltrators, and every failure is incredibly costly. That's on top of ordinary refugee expenses like welfare and other social support, which cost thousands per year.

Just spend the money on weapons and focus on killing Russians efficiently. The ones who are deserting were probably not effective soldiers anyway.