Like any western educated child of the Cold War, I believed that Russia was a bogeyman that had been defeated in the Cold War and was weak.

It only took a short stopover to Moscow on the way to Thailand 5 years ago to make me realise that this was wrong.

So your views are based on very superficial impressions. That's what I thought. You fell for the front that Moscow is. Russia is not Moscow. Its rural areas and small towns and most of its regional capitals are deteriorating. A quarter of the Russian population lives in homes not connected to a sewer network.

The truth is that Russia is the world's last undefeated Empire.

Russia was pretty soundly defeated in the Cold War. It lost its sphere of influence in Eastern Central Europe to the massive relief of the peoples living there. All of the Soviet socialist republics became independent states. The Baltics are in NATO and the EU. Russia's counterpart to NATO, CSTO is disintegrating as Russia is no longer able to protect its members against attack. China is moving in on Russia's former sphere of influence in Central Asia.

Moscow is an ancient Imperial Capital.

Since about 540 years ago. That's roughly when Muscovy became free of the Mongol yoke, which regrettably has left its sinister mark on Russia in many ways.

If you have to be a fan of some non-Western imperial power, then become a fan of China. Beijing is an actual ancient imperial capital. Better yet, don't be a fan of imperialism at all but root for India, a democratic and decentralized giant of a country.

The Russian Empire is almost 1000 years old.

You don't even have the basics right. Muscovy became free of the Chingisid yoke in 1480. It then started copying their brutal behavior and crushed Novgorod, which was the last democratic state East Slavic people have ever built until modern Ukraine. The rule of Ivan the Terrible was sheer sadism.

It has the world's largest land mass.

Most of it is uninhabited, unreachable by roads or railways and economically worthless.

It has immense natural resources and manufacturing capability.

Russia's natural resources are great but very expensive to develop owing to extreme distances and a lack of infrastructure.

It has more nuclear weapons than any other country.

Meaningless since the other nuclear powers are perfectly capable of destroying the world multiple times over as well.

It is the only country currently deploying hypersonic weapons (which are unstoppable carrier killers and bunker busters).

So much is made out of this singular wunderwaffe as it is the only thing Russia has going for it.

It defeated the strongest and (previously) most successful armies that have ever existed (Napoleon and the Nazis).

The Soviet Union did, not Russia and Russians alone. Do not dismiss the sacrifice made by Ukrainians, Belarusians and all the rest of the Soviet peoples. Russia made up of only a half of the population of the Soviet Union in 1991.

The US did not defeat Russia in the Cold War.

Capitalism it defeated Communism, a fundamentally flawed ideology that had infected Russia.

The Soviet economy was insufficient to pay for the arms race against the US. That's what took it down.

Now Russia has recovered from this infection and is taking back control over those nearby areas which have been part of the Russian Empire for centuries.

Russia is actually losing influence in its near abroad. The CSTO is dead, for example, because Russia has turned out to be incapable of fulfilling its obligations as a member state due to its botched invasion of Ukraine.

Many of those areas (like eastern Ukraine) have significant populations of ethnic Russian people.

There is exactly one area where Russia has been gaining ground since February 24 2022 and that is eastern Ukraine. The people in eastern Ukraine must be overjoyed at Putin having brought full-scale war and devastation to their home regions in 2022.

This may not be nice, but it is the nature of the world.

It is certainly the nature of the Russian world.

Many in the West consider that the only countries allowed to invade other countries with impunity are America and its allies.

There are many people with many opinions. Two million people in the UK took to the streets in 2003 when GWB's ill-considered invasion of Iraq was imminent.

Thus Russian behaviour is a gross violation of the "global rules based order" and Putin = Hitler.

When it comes to whataboutism that really takes the cake. Speaking of Hitler, the stuff Russian propagandists say about Ukrainians is usually what precedes genocide. Anyone who supports Russia in its effort at erasing Ukraine as a state and Ukrainians as nation, has totally lost their moral compass.

The Western "sanctions" against Russia and its citizens, which have included freezing Russia's gold and foreign currency reserves held in the West, as well as outright theft the assets of private citizens who were guilty by alleged association with Putin, have backfired.

For Russia, the sanctions spell many problems starting from a budget deficit. Russia is cut off from the international bond market and when the national welfare fund is spent, there is no way out of the deficits but money printing and rampant inflation.

They have catalysed a global rebellion against the US dominated world order.

Russia, China, India, Brazil, Saudi Arabia and the entire Global South have united against the USA and its allies because they no longer trust the US dollar based financial system which has been weaponised against Russia. They rightly fear that the same thing could happen to them and so they are taking steps to neutralise the weapon.

The dollar is not so easily replaced due to its massive liquidity and deep integration in the global financial system.

The BRICS + Global South are creating new international financial systems and new trade routes that are immune to US sanctions. They are transacting in currencies other than the USD.

If the US quits patrolling the world's oceans, the security of global shipping will deteriorate and the world will become more disconnected than until now. BRICS (an equivalent of G7) is too disjointed and has way too little internal trade to become a cohesive force in the near future if ever.

The inevitable result will be a dramatic diminishment of US power and potentially US sovereign debt default and national bankruptcy.

Be careful what you wish for.

Just as in 1989 the world changed dramatically in a very short period, today it is happening again, and Russia is at the center of it.

Russia? How about China? Out of the two, China's economic importance is 10x that of Russia. In any Russo-Chinese partnership, Russia is the junior partner now.

The worst thing you can do is arrogantly underestimate your opponent. Such hubris presages a fall. The ancients knew this and it is no different today.

That is exactly what this popular disparagement of Russia as a gas station with nukes represents: fatal hubris.

You clearly do not grasp the difference between the power of the Soviet Union and the power of today's Russia. Russia is still capable of causing a lot of harm but it is not the superpower the Soviet Union was.