Adam Reyes90 said:Russia is going to be struggling for years because of those sanctions. But hey, they'll still have their military might, which honestly makes them even more prone to acting out unpredictably. Since Europe is basically cutting Russia off, they’re gonna fall way behind Asian nations and the USA. They'll just be a slightly smaller loser than Russia itself.
Honestly, because of this, Russia has been pushed backward in a way they can't undo, and there’s just no coming back from it. Even if we look at the sanctions as just hitting their main source of wealth—and you know the European Union is inevitably going to jump on board too—that alone is a massive blow.
But man, this goes way deeper than your run-of-the-mill sanctions; we are talking about total, permanent isolation here. The West is done, they just don't want anything to do with these people anymore. And when you cut those ties, it means Russia isn't ever going to transform into a democratic society; instead, they're stuck being nothing more than a mafia-style military state, permanently trapped in a cycle of corruption, poverty, and teetering on the edge of humanitarian disasters, all while being totally dependent on their big brother in China. Looking back, the last 20 years will probably be remembered as this incredible, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity where they could have used their massive resource exports—during that unprecedented era of openness toward the West—to finally break free from those endless cycles of decay, internal instability, and being left behind. They had the chance to modernize, and they blew it.
It's gone forever.
But hey, I guess if nothing else, at least they'll have cheap blondes, unless the Chinese decide to swoop in and take all of that too.