Most Russians would disagree with you. The worst time (economically) for the vast majority of people was peak friendliness with the West under Yeltsin. Economically Russia was actually doing very well just before 2022.
Sure but that was right after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Takes some time and Putin himself was outwardly more cooperative with the West back in the day.
Also in the USA congress makes the budget but the president always gets blame or credit for the economy(it's more complicated sure, but it all falls on the POTUS).
Economically significant part of Russian population is doing quite well right now, thanks to generous military spending. Inequality dropped, working class is earning the money they have never seen before. Nevertheless I do not think this would in any way imply that they want to be in a state of war forever.
My point was that Russia is a large extremely natural resource rich country. It has a lot of culture and a lot of people. It would be much better off exporting goods to the west instead of continuing the Cold War.
It should in theory be able to export much more than just energy products to the west. America has a virtually infinite appetite for consumption and labor costs in Russia are quite low due to different standards of living.
The problem of course is infrastructure rot and corruption have gutted much of the non Muskovy areas of the Russian federation. It’s a pipe dream that will never happen, but it would be a wonderful world where Russia is actually friendly with the west and loses their imperial ambitions.
>The problem of course is infrastructure rot and corruption have gutted much of the non Muskovy areas of the Russian federation.
Export infrastructure is in a very good shape (e.g. railroads, which are used for export of coal, grain etc, pipelines and container terminals) and there’s plenty of new manufacturing capacity there across the country. Russia does have industrial policy for import substitution since 2000s and managed to localize some production, so this is not really a problem.
The real problem is the shortage of labor, the unemployment is already very low there. Just like in USA and Europe it is partially solved by the immigration from Global South, in this case from Central Asia. But this also means that skilled labor is not super-cheap. Russia can be a strong partner on some markets (energy, aerospace, IT) and can bring a lot of value in entrepreneurial culture and customer service (unknown to the West, but superior to anywhere else in Europe).
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