clip the wings of the oligarchy,

"Pandora Papers Reveal Offshore Holdings of Ukrainian President and his Inner Circle"

Like seriously, you're arguing that Ukraine's liberal democracy is somehow better than Russia, when the point of liberal democracies under late capitalism is to strip all the copper out of the walls (privatize, austeritize, union-bust), everywhere, all the time.

I expect you to have minimal technical literacy to put the link URL in archive.

The truth is that there is no actual evidence to indicate that Russian economy is struggling in any way.

a) investing in a war you’re losing is GDP flushed down the drain

That certainly explains why Europe is in a deep recession now and why US economy is looking shaky.

b) they’re cut off from any advanced technology at even half-way reasonable prices

Once you look at a map you'll realize that Russia shares a huge border with China where all the advanced technology is produced nowadays. Trade between Russia and China has shot up to over 200 billion this year.

c) massive brain drain

Very little evidence for that actually happening, the article you linked is written by the same people who claimed Russia was a gas station with nukes, and that Russian economy was going to collapse months after western sanctions were imposed. If you haven't figured out that you've been lied to yet, that really says a lot about you.

d) report of very excessive inflation when it comes to food.

Russia has very low food inflation and happens to be one of the major food producers globally. Once again, the fact that you think Russia has food inflation says volumes.

But all that is rather besides the point. Russia, alongside with Ukraine, did a lot of stuff wrong in the 90s. Look at Estonia or e.g. Czechs (if you want to keep it among Slavs) on how to do it… nah, not right, but definitely better.

We're now seeing Russia having made it through two years of being cut off from the western economy, and doing well for itself. Meanwhile, countries like Estonia and Czech republic aren't doing so hot. And frankly, it's completely absurd to compare a country the size of Russia to a country like Estonia.

Ukraine then managed to turn around, develop an actual civil society and clip the wings of the oligarchy, Russia didn’t.

That's complete and utter horseshit. Ukraine turned into the most corrupt country in Europe, and things have only kept getting worse. Ukraine started as a big industrial power after USSR collapsed, and now it's been robbed entirely of anything of value.

There’s plenty of family ties between Russia and Ukraine, if Russians see that Ukraine can escape the yoke of the kleptocrats then they could start to believe that they, too, can do that.

What people in Russia see is that under west's leadership Ukraine managed to become worse than Russia. All that did was convince people in Russia that the west was going to fuck them over exactly the same way they fucked Ukraine over.