Ukraine vs Russia: the war our players voted for, and what the numbers say about both sides

Ukraine declared war on Russia at 17:57 this evening. It is the second country war CoinRepublik has ever seen, and the first one an entire nation had to vote for. It closes at 17:57 tomorrow, so if you have ever wanted to watch a war decided in real time, this is your window. I have spent the evening in the war logs and the voting records. Here is what is actually happening, on both sides. HOW UKRAINE GOT THE VOTES This is the part almost nobody will notice, and it is the most interesting thing in the whole file. A law in a public country needs ten distinct voters. Not ten yes votes - ten people who show up at all. Below that there is no quorum and the law dies no matter how popular it was. Above it, the yes side needs 51 percent of the voting power, and voting power is your town population, not your name. Ukraine has lost laws to that rule twice. On 5 July, a proposal to raise the referral bonus drew 3 voters. It scored 329 for, zero against. Not one citizen opposed it. Rejected. On 17 July, a proposal to raise the building upgrade bonus drew 6 voters. 311 for, zero against. Rejected again. The text attached to it opened with "Шановна громадо!" - dear community - and asked for a little relief for the people who were building and developing, "поки в нас в реалі несеться все в ...". While in real life everything is going to. He never finished the sentence. Six people voted. It failed anyway. Two laws, 640 points of support, zero opposition, both dead on turnout. Then something changed. On 23 July Ukraine put twelve voters on a bonus law and it passed. Later the same day, sixteen on a resource law. On 24 July, seventeen - the highest turnout in the country's history - on Jorjgvara's proposal to buy Elite troops. That one is worth reading, because the argument was not patriotic, it was actuarial: nobody wants to hand ten percent of everything they produce to an occupier, and an army is also a way to fill the treasury. It passed 623 to nothing. And on 25 July, the declaration itself. Target Russia. The entire explanatory text was two words: "Саме час." It's time. Fifteen voters. 486 for, 77 against. Look hard at that last number, because it is the only one of its kind. Every other law Ukraine has ever passed was unanimous. This is the first proposal in the country's history that anybody voted against - lsmad and radik, 77 points between them - and it is also the first one that mattered enough to bring people to the ballot at all. That is the real finding here. Ukraine did not win this vote by becoming more united. Its unanimous free-money laws died at 3 and 6 voters. The war passed because war is the first thing that got fifteen people to log in and click. Turnout, not consensus, is what governs a country in this game. It is not a bad description of the other kind of politics either. Russia, for the record, has never passed a law. It has never proposed one. There is no Russian parliament here, no war budget, no mobilisation order. There are players who logged in this evening and found their country at war. THE TWO COMMUNITIES Ukraine: 369 citizens, 82 active in the last 24 hours, 180 in the last week. Russia: 142 citizens, 23 active in the last 24 hours, 61 in the last week. Ukraine is 2.6 times larger and 3.5 times more active by the day. If you know anything at all about those two countries outside this browser tab, that ratio runs firmly the wrong way, and it is the first thing that makes this war strange to look at. But per head, Russia is not being outfought. Three Ukrainians have committed troops out of 82 active citizens. Two Russians have committed out of 23. Russia's mobilisation rate is more than double Ukraine's. It simply has far fewer people to mobilise. A small awake community and a large sleepy one are much closer than the headline numbers suggest, and that is true of every country on this map, not only these two. Money reverses the picture again. Russia's treasury holds 0.2 GOLD and has not spent a coin of it. Ukraine's holds 0.0059 - about a thirty-fourth as much - because the declaration cost 0.1 GOLD and Ukraine escrowed another 0.015 on top as a bonus pool for its own soldiers. Ukraine emptied the state to start this. Russia is sitting on the deeper reserve and has so far done nothing with it. THE FRONT, RIGHT NOW The line belongs to Russia. Four Defense troops from onnuri and redwingfm are dug in - 2,000 defence points - and nothing has touched them yet. Marching towards them: 55 Ukrainian soldiers in 17 separate columns, 43,300 attack points. First contact is at 22:42 tonight, when a single one of Jorjgvara's Special operations troops arrives four hours ahead of everything else. It loses - 1,000 attack against 2,000 defence - but the engine charges the winner casualties in proportion to whatever it beat, so that one soldier drags half the Russian line down with him. On stacks that small the rounding will probably take three of the four. Five minutes later the next five Special operations troops arrive against whatever is still standing, and from then until midnight OleksandrMLT's waves land every few minutes. THE COLUMN THAT WILL MISS ITS OWN WAR Here is the detail I cannot stop looking at. Ukraine's heaviest punch was 18 Assault troops - 15 from Jorjgvara, 3 from OleksandrMLT - 9,000 attack points, 21 percent of everything Ukraine committed to this war. Assault troops move at 100 km/h. The engine measures a march between real country centroids, and Russia's centroid is nowhere near the Ukrainian border: it is at 60N 100E, deep in Siberia, closer to Krasnoyarsk than to anything else. That makes the march 4,343 km. At 100 km/h that is 43 hours. The war lasts 24. Those 18 soldiers arrive on the 28th, roughly 20 hours after the final bell, and the engine will mark them dead without them ever having seen an enemy. A fifth of Ukraine's army is going to spend this entire war on a road and then die on it. Anyone who remembers a certain 60 kilometre armoured column sitting motionless north of Kyiv in 2022 will recognise the shape of that mistake exactly: your slowest vehicle sets your speed, and distance is a weapon nobody has to fire. Russia has the mirror image of that problem, which is to say it does not have it. Defenders are already home. Home distance is zero, so a Russian reinforcement reaches the front in sixty seconds flat. Russia still has 4 Special operations troops and 2 Defense troops sitting idle in its towns - 5,000 defence points it can drop onto the line one minute before the bell, at any moment it chooses. Ukraine's fastest possible reinforcement needs four hours and twenty minutes. THE ALLIES Two of the soldiers marching on Russia are not Ukrainian. They belong to NeneOne, who plays out of Spain, and they have been walking since 18:09 across 6,933 km of map. Nobody asked him to. He is not even being paid for it: Ukraine's 0.015 GOLD bonus pool only covers the first 15,000 attack points to land, and by the time the Spaniard reaches the front at 01:05 that money will have been gone for hours. A foreigner crossing most of the world to fight for free in somebody else's war is the most true-to-life thing on this battlefield. Russia has a friend too. heh133 sent three troops from Iran, and he sent them fast - inside half an hour of the war opening. The map punished him anyway. Iran sits 4,623 km out, and two of his three stacks are on slow legs, so they arrive on the 28th alongside Ukraine's doomed convoy. Exactly one Iranian Rapid intervention trooper gets there in time, worth 100 defence points against 34,300 attack. He did everything right except check the clock. And now the part that decides this war, if anything still can. If allies actually turned up - the way they do in the real world, in numbers and on time - the arithmetic breaks completely. Iran has 335 citizens and 42 of them were online today. That is very nearly Ukraine's entire active population, sitting one country away from a fight it has already picked a side in. Twenty Iranians sending one Special operations trooper each is 20,000 defence points. Their rapid units cover the distance in nine hours, and there are twenty-two hours left on the clock. Russia does not need to out-produce Ukraine. It has no chance of doing that. It needs to make one phone call. That is the whole lesson of this war and, uncomfortably, of the other one: a small country with a big friend is not a small country. Spain worked that out this evening. Iran has twenty-two hours to. WHAT UKRAINE ACTUALLY WINS If Ukrainian troops are still holding that line at 17:57 tomorrow, Russian territory flips, 5 percent of the Russian treasury transfers across, every occupied Russian citizen starts paying 10 percent of their income into Ukraine's budget, and the survivors garrison Russia for 100 days. Five percent of 0.2 GOLD is 0.01 GOLD. Ukraine spent 0.115 GOLD to open this war. Measured strictly at the treasury, the winner of this war loses money on the day and needs a long quiet occupation just to break even. Fifteen citizens voted on it. I would bet that not one of them did that arithmetic first. Nobody ever does. WHERE IT STANDS 34,300 attack points will reach the line in time. 2,100 defence points will be there to meet them. Sixteen to one. Russia has twenty-two hours, six soldiers in reserve, a sixty-second march, twenty-three awake citizens and one ally with forty-two. That is not nothing. It is not much. One last thing, and I mean it plainly. This is a game, those flags are only flags, and the thing those two names refer to outside this tab is not a game and is not funny. Fight your war here. Be decent to the people on the other side of it. The Wars page is under Army. It ends at 17:57 tomorrow.