this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2023
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Nah, not second best. That's probably just Americans that still haven't registered that the Soviet Union is gone. Generally there was an awareness that the glory days of the USSR was gone and that Russia's small economy could only maintain a crude army.
However, people didn't think that it was THIS bad. This is bad even for Russia's military budget, where one can only assume that there was a lot of corruption on all levels to produce the state of the army at the start of the war. And of course, with things like this, it just got worse by the day.
i mean the budget is not the determining factor here. The russian economy is able to support a strong military, since they have a lot of resources and can produce a lot of shit by themselves. So even if the budget is low nominally it should suffice. Also Russia had a fairly good GDP per capita, far exceeding that of Ukraine and on par with many EU countries.
The issues are corruption, nepotism, lack of career chances for dedicated people and so on.
Russia ditched communism for capitalism, and yachts, and stuff.
One might even say corporatism, given their direct rulers are the billionaires who came out on top in the rush to scavenge the corpse of the USSR.