They may have had the potential to be a superpower, but it's apparent that they never had the leadership to conduct as one. Those inside the Kremlin bought into their own bullshit and thought of themselves as a superpower, not realising the machine within is operating on unlubricated, old, broken, and missing parts.
This seems to be a common theme with countries that feed a superiority narrative to their people and other nations.
Oh, they were a superpower as the USSR. Propping up friendly governments, supplying coups, ratfucking around where more blatant impositions wouldn't be tolerated. It was just built on a house of cards and when it imploded it imploded big.
Oh, we have the military superpower. We're constantly putting it on display. We're basically a giant weapons and war factory. When we go down, it won't come from the outside (except in the form of cyber attacks and misinformation campaigns).
Though I could see it in a few decades. Russia was a powerful body full of rot. We're a powerful body with an infection. If the authoritarians win, they'll replace competent people in key positions with unqualified party-loyal yes men, and that will start the rot.
It seems to me that people keep begging on Ukraine. How about Russia was all of that and a bag of chips but Ukraine was developed for decades of Soviet rule to be a troop sponge where wave after wave of nato troops die and die and die keeping Russia safe.
Ukraine was made to be a rock on which superior armies dash themselves on until they break apart.
After seeing how NATO advised the Ukrainian counter attack to go I’m certain Russia would be in Poland by now if NATO was on the ground.
Your mindset is based on the shallowness of an acute modern opinion that disregards history as much as it does immediate reality and humanism.
Or, to put it simply; you have as much growing up to do as you do learning the basics—at least to contribute in this forum.
You're new to this. Your opinion matters, but isn't valuable. It seems valuable to you now, but isn't to others. That's your first step forward to knowledge.
The North Koreans must feel like the Paradis Eldians felt in AoT when they discovered the outside world was at least 100 years in the future technology and society wise
They just use more meat when adequate equipment lacks. See golfcarts, motorcycle attacks instead of using a bmp or some infantry fighting vehicle for example. No protection means higher losses. Also their tanks are older and older.
The sanctions help with making new hi-tech, and upgrading old stuff, what they do is just refurbishing old tanks and btrs (and building a handfull of each each month) but they're scraping the bottom of the soviet stockpile as we're speaking.
Maybe they will run out a month from now, we'll see.
I despise putin and his decades of corruption and violence and corruption but in case of ukraine he comes out as a saint compared to what israelis have done over last 1 year and with the support of so called pillars of democracy.
its difficult to give a fuck about ukraine when our weapons and tax dollars are used to murder kids and burn civilians in hospital alive.
Whataboutism is for those who do not know how to shit post. We are here to shit post or at least, throw a little shit at each other, tossing questions and comments in a bouncing, cow-filled cyclone of chaos and irony.