Regarding Putin.
My belief is that while he is an ex KGB guy and who really knows his motives, Putin took the job to save Mother Russia.
She was very ill. Her male population was alcoholic. Her women picked up the slack and worked themselves to the bone. They ceased having kids.The former party members stole all the assets and wealth and just squandered it. The west came in and offered and provided all sorts of stuff and it was stolen by the oligarchs. Mother Russia remained very ill
Putin to this day may not be able to save her. He sells oil but not much else. He flaunts his weapons that are the only other product he makes that is worth a damn. He shows off his air planes. He parades weapons in use in Syria. He is being a salesman displaying his wares. He spends precious money in Syria prohibiting GCC pipelines to Europe
Putin’s Russia has a smaller population than the single Indonesian island of Java, His economy is smaller than Canada and just a bit larger than Australia. And get this. The Russian economy is smaller than South Korea. The Russians seem to lack the intellectual capacity to work and create anything worth a damn.
Putin is in fact failing his main job......... saving Mother Russia
I remember one of the Soviet dissidents at CPAC ‘78 or ‘79 said that the GNP of the USSR was meaningless ... It was a Gross National Lie. He said the Soviet Union’s top-down “economic planning” was not comparable to Western nations because they kept a war economy.
Another dissident said that what God put in the ground is what keeps their economy afloat: oil, natural gas, gold, coal, iron, etc.