Russia's economy has entered the death zone

> NATO wants to put missiles on their doorstep.

No they didn't. Joining NATO was never really on the table for Ukraine, because by the time there was political willpower, Russia had already created enough territorial disputes to prevent it from even being a hypothetical possibility. Not only was Ukraine never close to being in NATO, but you talk of "putting missiles" somewhere, which is like five steps further than that.

If they cared so much about NATO, you'd think they would've done something in 2004, no? When all the Baltic states were added into NATO, putting their borders 100km away from St. Petersburg and about as far from Moscow as Ukraine's borders are? And yet nothing happened...

Nothing was happening between NATO and Ukraine before full-scale war started. Russia could've kept the situation as it was indefinitely. They chose to go to war not because they were desperate and terrified of something, but because they thought they could win the war really easily.

Then when their war led to Finland joining NATO, Russia's official response was to look mildly displeased and forget about it soon after. Because they never cared about those borders. Those borders were close to them for close to 20 years then.

> US state department had been plotting the Zelensky revolution

The "Zelensky revolution"? The one where Zelenskyy suddenly hopped off the stage and became a US-backed revolutionary leader? Not knowing that he was elected a full government change after the revolution, all the way in 2019, shows that you know nothing of Ukrainian politics despite being so confident about it.

There's a weird consensus between Americans who really love and really hate their country that the US has its hands in all the cookie jars, and that nothing in the world can happen without America's involvement. Ukraine has a student protest that snowballs out of control due to escalations, resulting in the country preferring democratic countries over the bright future of becoming a Belarus-like slave state? Must have been the US. Sure, this definitely was something the US liked a lot, but the connections to it are a lot more tenuous than things the US did meddle in. Stop trying to pretend that Ukrainians have no agency and are just a cardboard cutout with Uncle Sam standing behind it. The US has a lot of power, and it has access to lots of variables they can tweak to try and influence the situation, but the primary parties here are Russia and Ukraine.

Russians weren't happy about that either, but they were too weak to do anything other than complain. Now they are strong enough to retaliate. George Kennan was absolutely gutted by how stupid that expansion was[1].

> Stop trying to pretend that Ukrainians have no agency and are just a cardboard cutout with Uncle Sam standing behind it.

90%+ of mankind does what the signals (radio/newspaper/television/movies/music/textbooks/social media) tell them to do. Money controls the signals. Our Epstein class controls the money (global reserve currency). At least it used to. Ukrainians get the "fell for it" award. Only way to survive this onslaught is to block the outside signals the way the Iranians or the Chinese do. Europeans are slow, because they are only beginning to figure this out.

Their war would have been over before it began if it weren't for the funds and equipment we have furnished.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_F._Kennan#Opposition_to...

The main focus is on GDP growth, which indeed has been reported as decent - maybe a bit of a wobble recently but no more.

So, first of all, that number is kind of unverifiable. Hostile journalists have been silenced, independent institutions shattered or kicked out. Their GDP number might be accurate, but might also be inflated, and we'd never know. Russia is notorious for manipulating information for propaganda reasons and frankly I can't see why they wouldn't inflate their GDP prints. China was far more open when people were questioning its GDP and even then it was tea leaf prophecies.

Moreover, with Putin's (and incidentally Trump's) approach of never retreating and always doubling down, I'd expect Russia would act like it's business as usual until pretty much the day it collapses. As with the Titan sub, there will be some awkward creaking sounds then in one instant it will all go.

For the final straw, even if the GDP number is 100% right, increasingly it is driven by military spending. GDP is essentially the sum total of money spent in a country. And Russia is increasingly spending that money not on healthcare, schools, police, infrastructure and investments, and instead on military hardware being sent straight to be destroyed in Ukraine. You can do this for a little bit but, as the article points out, not forever, and mere GDP growth is not much of a sign of a strong economy.

There's just so much we don't know: if the GDP is real, what Russian gold reserves look like (apparently raided - but how much?), how their oil companies are holding up having siphoned every last Rouble meant for maintenance off to cash. Russia also lost something like an estimated 1.25M men. If for a back-of-the-envelope we assume half of Russia's prewar population is participating in labour force, that's almost 2% of the workforce permanently lost. And their loss rate ain't dropping.

EDIT some more caveats:

- GDP captures the official economy. It is unclear what the impact on the unofficial economy is, I can imagine larger than on the regular economy (but could make the opposite argument too).

- Even if Russia is not fudhing the final number, the incentives on individual surveyed subjects align with those of pumping GDP, especially in time of crisis - lower costs, higher income.