So much westoid cope as they struggle to come to terms with reality. Half of this is acceptance, but the other half is still in denial. Leading to this article to be a contradictory incoherent mess because they can't give up entirely on the fabricated narratives they have been sold since 2022.

Meanwhile, Putin sees himself holding the cards, a view Trump has publicly endorsed. Economic sanctions, which since January the US has quietly eased on Russian financial transactions, are nowhere near tough enough to make the Kremlin quit.

The west made Russia the most sanctioned nation on Earth and in history. They leveraged all of their sanction power and overstepped legalistic lines that made even their own capitalists and regulators balk, unprecedented actions like seizing the reserves and cutting off SWIFT. None of this worked, they tried it for 3 years and it failed. Russia's economy still grew and they just had workarounds for everything. They still think turning up the sanction dial will do anything when it clearly doesn't, and can't get past it. They are obsessed with sanctions for some reason.

Mercenaries fill the yawning holes in Russian ranks made by casualties. Meanwhile the Ukrainians struggle to recruit. Many of their young people have fled abroad to escape the front lines.

The hole in the Russian ranks is "yawning" from the massive casualties supposedly inflicted on the Russians, yet somehow it's the Ukrainian side with manpower issues. They supposedly fixed this with "mercenaries" even though at this point in the war, the entire thing is completely handled by the Russian Armed Forces. The roles of the DPR, LPR and Wagner groups has been fulfilled and they basically don't exist as meaningful forces on the battlefront anymore. How Russia is able to fight the entire thing with the RAF directly while taking "massive casualties" is never explained. Ukraine running out of people is talked about as a logistic problem, but it's never acknowledged that this means hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians are dead.

The country would thus eventually become a failed state, over which Putin can secure hegemony. He has already achieved this with neighboring Belarus, and is on his way to gaining control of Georgia and Moldova.

How is Belarus a "failed state"? It has the highest quality of life and life expectancy in all of post-soviet nations. It's literally the most succesful post-soviet state, not a failed one. Russia and Belarus are both massively more successful states than Georgia or Ukraine, which when run by western aligned cronies became corrupt shitholes and the worst post-soviet nations in terms of statistics like life expectancy, suicide, crime, poverty, etc. The west is living in bizarro world where being pro-NATO is automatically being a "successful democracy" despite any other indicators.

Putin is a man with an obsession: to rebuild the Russian empire, the old Soviet Union; to revive what he, and a dismaying number of his people, see as their national greatness. The bigger picture is that Russia is extending its foreign influence while the US is in headlong retreat from overseas commitments.

Wait so is Putin appealing to nationalists at home who want to rebuild an empire? Or to foreign nations? How Russia's "imperialist ambitions" leads to it becoming internationally more popular is not explained. These people have never seriously listened to a thing Putin has said in a speech or statement in their lives.

This article is basically unreadable. Just lie after lie after lie.