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Moving borders through war comes at a tremendous humanitarian cost and is rarely justified from a utilitarian point of view.
Putin's system of government (with oligarch allies controlling key national industries) is much less conductive to human thriving than liberal democracy.
Nobody in NATO wants to risk WW3 over Ukraine. Sending in US troops after Putin had attacked in 2022 would predictably have let to NATO troops shooting at Russian troops, which would have carried a high risk of turning into WW3. To the degree that NATO can make security guarantees to Ukraine (e.g. in the form of membership) without immediately starting WW3, I think it is prudent that we should -- given that our defensive alliance has become a lot less obsolete than previously thought, we obviously would want the one country whose military has experience fighting the aggressor in it.
Perhaps, but perhaps not. It could also be that the outcome of an occupation would be akin to The Troubles, or the resistance to Putin might turn to asymmetric warfare instead. Putin is not going to win the hearts and minds of the current generations of Ukrainians, and it is in the geostrategic interest of Europe to bind as many of his troops within Ukraine as we can, so we would likely support separatists with explosives and the like.
Hmm. I think I agree directionally, but I am not sure the gap between Russia and a sort of Average Homogenized Liberal Democracy (if you will) is staggeringly vast.
A look at a few indices, just by Googling around (so buyer beware, you place your mental model in the world in the hands of the Google algo here!)
In short, it seems to me that Russia is behind, say, the United States in GDP per capita, but it seems fairly competitive with post-Soviet liberal democracies in GDP. It severely lags in happiness (although again perhaps that is a non-objective measure, but the suicides are not). Over the long term, however, their outlook is better than many (although perhaps not all) of their liberal democratic peers, with competitive birth rates, manageable debt, and at least some of their populace willing to engage in violence on behalf of their country. This data also suggests that liberal democracies can have a horrific failure mode in South Korea, where Happiness Index scores are nearly as low and suicides nearly as high as Russia, but the debt is higher and the TFR is cripplingly low.
I think, as an American, I would probably rather live in most any of these liberal democracies I've mentioned than Russia. If I had to choose where to be reincarnated a native, I might rank Russia above South Korea.
I would argue that liberal democracies also have a big advantage in R&D, and that in general technological progress is required for human thriving. In my world model, slavery and feudalism did not stop because people saw the light and decided that they were immoral, but because technological progress moved the equilibrium solution away from them.
While the USSR certainly made significant contributions to science, my general feeling is that Putin's Russia does not focus on selling high tech to the world, but rather natural resources. Basically, you can make your buddies boss of the natural oil companies, and they will extract revenue and have your back. However, if you were to put your buddies in charge of Google, that would likely result in smaller companies eating their lunch. It takes a special kind of person to run a successful tech company, not just some goon. This in turn makes innovative companies a power base which can not be easily controlled, so most autocrats do without them.
I realize that China is a counter-example: a country which performs cutting-edge research while also being totalitarian. But at least as far as tech companies go, they do have a problem with billionaire tech bros and strip them of their companies sometimes when they become to powerful for the CCP to tolerate.
I would say that Russian tech is quite successful for their position. It's obviously hampered by lawlessness, economic isolation and brain drain, but it did win the competition with American analogues in their own country, which you can't say of any other European IT sector. And it happened before government bans.
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Not as big an advantage as you'd think, hearing Westerners talk about how backwards the USSR was during the Cold War (while in real life the Soviets, while behind in many areas, still repeatedly lapped the West in important defense technology).
This suggests that an optimal amount of technological progress is required for [greater] human thriving, not that continuing technological progress necessarily correlates to greater human thriving. It seems possible that, say, vaccines, clean water, electricity, fission power, fertilizer are all massive wins for human flourishing and that things we have discovered since either have diminishing or negative returns. And of course this would track what I believe we see in the West (or at least in the States), that happiness has leveled off or even decreased over the past fifty years.
I'm not sure this is true (if I had to guess, there is something of a pendulum effect overall, as we develop the means to mitigate the prior mistakes we made) but I don't think it's right that there is inevitably a direct and linear progression between human flourishing and access to technology.
Russia's military equipment, which they export relatively successfully, counts as high tech, I think.
Perhaps, but the Soviets seemed fairly good at recognizing talent (see a guy named Mikhail Kalashnikov) and channeling it in productive directions. I have no strong opinions about if Putin's Russia does this or if they are handicapped by the dynamics you mention. However, you seem to miss that, if you're an oligarch, you have no objections to a special kind of person running the tech company, you just want the profits. Which is really the same dynamic that happens in American capitalism (tech founders or leaders do not necessarily reap most of the profit from their own companies).
Well so far it seems like a lot of examples we have of totalitarian states were actually pretty good at scientific research. The Soviet Union held their own. Nazi Germany obviously is the ur-example (to an exaggerated degree) of a totalitarian country that was quite capable of scientific research, in many ways ahead of its peers. The Japanese lagged behind, and I think the Italians did too, but the Japanese started on the back foot and still managed some impressive accomplishments (and I do not think the Italians ever managed to be quite as totalitarian as the Nazis or of course the Soviets). You can even go back a little bit further to the Civil War and watch an agrarian confederacy with feudal characteristics out-innovate their industrial neighbor in naval warfare (despite, or perhaps because of, comparatively little inherited expertise in the matter).
You can chalk the North Koreans up as a pretty un-innovative totalitarian regime, I suppose.
I think perhaps it is worth considering if scientific gains flow from wealth and industrial or information power and that liberal democracies might have an advantage there (especially with wealth, Communists were notoriously good at literacy education but not so much at generating prosperity). You can map this pretty accurately into the past 100 years: the United States, British Empire, and Germany were probably the industrial front-runners in World War Two [with the Russians having lots of mass but not yet as much sophistication] and then with the Soviet Union and United States were the frontrunners and that's where all the progress was made and now China and the US seem to be the frontrunners because they are the wealthiest and most industrialized (and now) informationalized.
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