Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was at a wedding in Yerevan last week and got to talk to a lot of Russians. It's clear the country has collapsed already - it's going to act fine on life support for another five years, but it's already hollow. The best knowledge workers left. The birthrate has fallen through the floor. There's no future.
Never underestimate the Russian people's ability to suffer.
Sources differ (Rosstat is very very questionable), but consensus is that there were 145 million people in Russia in 2022, and this year there are only 143 million. That trend line is devastating and unrecoverable, especially with the rate of decline increasing.
There are also now 8+ million Ukrainian refugees. I think that's the main reason they invaded, frankly - to move the mostly ethnically Russian population from eastern Ukraine into Russia. If you didn't count them, they'd be well under 140 million.
Russia's trading - they're killing off their prison population and the less talented/connected of their young men, and losing emigrants, and getting Ukrainian refugees. It would have been a good trade for them, if it had actually been a short war. But at this point, it's killed their future.