Thanks, good one. The current Russian economy is a shell of its former self. Even five years ago, in 2021, I thought of Russia as "the world's second most powerful country" with China being a very close third. Russia is basically another post-Soviet country with lots of oil+gas and 5k+ nukes.

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krior 3 hours ago | parent [-]

> another post-Soviet country

Other post-Soviet countries fare substantially better than Russia (Looking at GDP per capita, Russia is about 2500 dollars behind the economic motor of the EU - Bulgaria.)

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rvnx 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Must be a misunderstanding

1) Post-soviet countries are doing amazingly well (Poland, Baltics, etc) and very fast growing + healthy (low criminality, etc)

2) The "Russia is weak" thing; it is vastly exaggerated because it is 4 years that we hear that "Russia is on the verge of collapse" but they still manage to handle a very high intensity war against the whole West almost alone.

3) China is not a country lagging behind others at all. It is said in some schoolbooks but it is a big lie that is 0% true now.

	▲	justapassenger 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> 2) The "Russia is weak" thing; it is vastly exaggerated because it is 4 years that we hear that "Russia is on the verge of collapse" but they still manage to handle a very high intensity war against the whole West almost alone. It's nearly impossible to bankrupt huge country like Russia. Unless there's civil unrest (or west grows balls to throw enough of resources to move the needle), they can continue the war for decades. What Russia is doing is each week borrowing more and more from the future and screwing up next generations on a huge scale by destroying it's non-military industrial base, isolating economy from the world and killing hundreds of thousands of young man who could've spent decades contributing to the economy/demographics.