Putin never took care of innovation and intellectual growth in his country. You won’t find Silicon Valley in Russia. Although vast in size, its economy is not bigger than Italy’s. Putin’s economy is based on pocket-filling on gas and oil while not doing much else actually. Now, Russia is one of the main oil and gas sources and also one of the major granaries of the world. So, sitting on top of an ocean of energy and food, Putin sees his chances to rule the planet. There are ex-soviet countries that border with Russia that also sell oil and gas. Putin allows that, provided that their pipeline runs through Russia, keeping Putin in charge of energy supply. A thorn in his eye is Ukraine which also has vast oil and gas reserves and also is one of the major grain producers in the world. Ukraine could directly sell oil and gas to the West through a direct pipeline that doesn’t run through Russia. Major oil companies were already drilling in Ukraine's eastern part, making it a potential competitor to Putin. So, Putin does what any mafia Boss would do, he kills his competition to maintain his monopoly. For that reason, he needs to grab Ukraine’s eastern energy-rich part. And regarding grain, Putin just has to grab Ukraine’s coastline so that no Russian or Ukraine grain will ever be shipped and sold to the world without his permission. And there you go, Putin, emperor of energy and food. He started his strategy in 2014 and will continue doing so till he got the world in his pocket. Right now, he is expanding his empire to the developing countries, you know, that major part of the world that is less rich than we are. Whoever becomes Putin's little friend (read servant), will receive energy and food from him. And they have to in order not to die of hunger. Putin’s policy is clearly not about fighting Naziism in Ukraine or about annexing the Russian-speaking part to mother Russia. This is about Putin ruling the planet under his dictatorship: Obey or die of poverty! Even the US, although self-supporting in energy and food, will not escape poverty due to Putin’s power, the first signs already showing up. He is a tumor ruining the democratic part of the world. Now, the old Soviet Union was also dangerous with nukes, but they were poor, as their communistic system didn’t allow their economy to grow. And we in the West were smart enough to keep them poor, so they sort of limbed along all those years. But since the fall of the iron curtain, we have invested trillions in them and Europe has made itself dependent on Russian energy. Today’s Russia is powerful and a thousand times more dangerous than the old Soviet Union.
When I was a Forestry major in college, we were taught that if Russia modernized its timber industry to a similar level as the US, they could fund their entire nations economy on timber exports from Siberia. Supposedly theres a shitton of valuable metal and oil up there too, like several Alaskas worth. ...they also taught us that the world was gonna run out of oil by, like ten years so, so idk.
