The way I see it is: Russia (and China) have economies that are based on commodities and manufacturing whereas most of the west has hollowed out their economies by “offshoring” manufacturing and bloating the professional managerial classes. Western economies are bullshit smoke and mirror fantasies based on stupid financial instruments and full of absolute bullshit jobs. Because of this, the Russians have more capacity to manufacture weapons than NATO countries do, and they’re not going to lack anything else because of their close relationship with China. The Russians seem to never run out of artillery shells whereas there have been shortages already on the Ukrainian side. America has already sent more than the annual military budget of Russia in less than a year to Ukraine in military aid, and NATO is basically depleting their inventories to send their armouries over to them and they seem to just be getting blown up steadily. The Russians are killing far far more than they’re losing, and the Ukrainian/NATO leadership seems to just be using soldiers as literal cannon fodder. Basically, I’ve started to suspect that we in the west might be a paper tiger, and not even our leaders realize it (although Russia and China are clueing in it seems). Everybody cites the fact that Russia’s GDP is smaller than many individual U.S. states, but if the majority of the GDP is generated by bullshit like selling ads on websites and re-selling subprime mortgages maybe the real meaningful disparity is smaller than anyone assumes. I’ve been accused of “parroting Russian propaganda” before but I just watch The Duran, Brian Berletic, Glenn Diesen, Jimmy Dore, the Greyzone, Redacted, Gonzalo Lira, Jackson Hinkle, Scott Ritter, Douglas MacArthur and stuff like that where I hear stuff like this. None of that stuff seems like propaganda, but the stuff you see in the mainstream media DOES. Ghost of Kiev was reported in western media. The idea that Russia is subtly seeding alternative media with propaganda through relatively small YouTubers seems silly when the WaPo is crowing about the Ghost of Kiev lol.