“The driving issue is that Russia is in a demographic collapse.”
What data is it based on?
That has been common knowledge since the fall of communism but here is just one of the many articles on it...
https://warsawinstitute.org/russian-population-declines-rapidly-kremlin-faces-demographic-crisis/
For some reason I am unable to copy and paste links on my phone. Google Russian demographic decline. Along with the the plethora of articles there is occasional, “hey, it’s there but the significance is overstated” article. But even those present terrible sounding data. Also, go to youtube and type Peter Zeihan and Russia. He’s a former intel analyst.