If this was your first reply, I'd be stunned that you can think that a country chock full of natural resources, that is also the largest country by land mass in the world, who also happens to be the country with the most nuclear weapons, who has also been made to a US adversary over the last 15 years (thanks to US policy) is NOT relevant.
The US birthrate has been been dropping for decades. Does that make us irrelevant. Of course not, we've still got the biggest armed forces, most financial leverage, and by 2 orders of magnitude the most foreign military bases of any country in the world.
Russia has a weak military... compared to whom? The US, Poland, and the UK have been pouring billions into Ukraine since 2014. Ukraine had the biggest standing army (IIRC ~250k) in Europe at the beginning of 2022. Since Russia's invasion the US, UK, Poland, Germany, France, and a host of smaller NATO nations has been pouring another $100,000,000,000 into Ukraine, including - as we now have confirmed through leaks - boots on the ground for at least the US and UK....and Russia is still winning.
Slowly but surely Russia is grinding Ukraine down. A war of attrition that Russia - to all appearances - can maintain indefinitely. The US/NATO has been ramping up the weapons sent to Ukraine every couple of months since Russia's invasion. Stingers, Javelins, HIMARS, etc. Every weapons is going to be "a game changer" and turn the tide against Russia. Every time there are a couple of weeks or a month of better results, followed by Russia regaining their slow initiative.
My point about lithium is that while we are moving as a species far too slowly towards renewable energy, when we do, Russia and their partners in China and India have the necessary raw materials to produce batteries without reliance on the west.
Again regarding GDP. If you take out of the US the huge financial, insurance and entertainment sectors which produce large sums and no tangible goods, the US looks much weaker than it is. Russia produces goods where there is virtually no elasticity in demand. You can skip the latest Spiderman movie. You can NOT do a a stock buyback. The real economy will continue along just fine. Ask the EU, particularly Germany, how we're doing without Russian gas and oil. There are people in the streets over that.
Apropos: The Baltic states are anti-Russian. Eastern Europe (I'm right next door with my wife's entire family in CZ) including Chechia, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, and VERY important Turkiye, are definitely NOT in the US / NATO boat regarding Ukraine. They say this war has nothing to do with the European public. For just one example, there were 70,000 on the streets of Prague - already last September - protesting the war, calling for an end to Russian sanctions.
Again I see your response in the light of what is in the US MSM, not what is going on Europe. I was in the US last week and saw for myself that the news you get is there is massively different than what we get here in Europe.
