After the USSR fell, their economy collapsed. They didn’t have a pot to piss in.
They couldn’t maintain their nuclear arsenal. We were paying their nuclear scientist’s salaries to keep them from going to Iran.
If we had wanted to “conquer” Russia, there were about ten years in the 90s when they couldn’t have stopped us.
“ If we had wanted to “conquer” Russia, there were about ten years in the 90s when they couldn’t have stopped us.”
Instead, we sent them some intelligencia from our elite Ivy League universities. Russia ended up with each citizen getting a piece of paper worth a tiny percentage of the formally state owned utilities, for example. Most people just sold the paper for an even smaller amount. Instead of having the socialist heaven that the US intelligencia envisioned, Russia ended up with a few billionaire oligarchs and the rest of the people still poor.