I don’t doubt that, I just keep seeing the Russians are done articles, yet they keep fighting and we keep sending in more money and weapons to Ukraine. So truth being the 1st casualty of war and man do we have a lot of casualties!
“I just keep seeing the Russians are done articles, yet they keep fighting”
It is an enormous undertaking. In some respects, it is the WWIII that we prepared for during the Cold War (in slow motion, and without some of the worst parts). Cities have been destroyed, and millions of people displaced. The Russians alone have fired more than ten million Artillery rounds, and they have made the Ukraine the most heavily mined place on Earth.
By several measures, the Russians had the largest stocks of (some types) of military gear on Earth (like those many tank hulls in their old boneyards).
But their resources are not unlimited, and they continue to race toward those limits at an historic rate.
Among those limits, are finance. Although a lot depends on the price of oil (a wild card), they are on track to exhaust their war chest of financial reserves (including gold reserves) around Christmas. As that approaches, and after, they will have to print more money, tax more, and cut other spending. They can become like North Korea, and continue fighting for years, but their relative combat power, standard of living and political freedom would have to decline dramatically.
Putin has driven Russia off a cliff, in terms of the lives of the Russian people. He has likely squandered a generation’s worth of improvement in the standard of living, in the last year and a half.