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All true, but Russia always looks like this, and it didn't stop them being a global superpower.
As Napoleon used to say "quantity has a quality all its own". Russia is the national avatar of that sentiment.
Yeah, but these aren't the days where survival for a political entity means throwing literal bodies into a figurative meat grinder in order to beat off the Germans. Being a power of any note means having and spending a lot of resources that don't necessarily draw breath or need to take bathroom breaks. This is harder when, as outlined above, your society is a low-trust omnishambles that not only chronically fucks up, but keeps doing so because it refuses to acknowledge that there are problems and instead chooses to deflect the blame on its outgroups.
I think we've all seen that video.
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