We are three years in, Russia is using North Koreans who are ineffectual, and the Norks are being killed by the Russians and their officers when they are wounded, Russians are riding bicycles and golf carts into assaults, they still haven’t kicked the Ukrainians out of Kursk, and the Ukrainians are getting better and better at taking out irreplaceable Russian energy infrastructure deeper and deeper inside of Russia proper.. Russia is relying on North Korea for a lot of ammo, and they and Iran just lost their biggest ally in the Middle East, that they couldn’t militarily protect.
If Putin could fully mobilize, he would have by now. The raiding of a few night clubs and the drunk tanks in Moscow and St. Pete’s ain’t going to do it,
China has been extremely cautious about not running into Western sanctions. What Russia is getting is all they will get. It’s why North Korea and Iran are really the only two countries supplying weapons in large quantities.
Zeihan has not been watching Russian state TV where threatening to nuke European capitols is a weekly event. Actual use of nukes will mean China gets involved in a narrative way, as they have told Putin “no”.
This is how you know it’s a Zeihan video (not saying he’s right or wrong),
Russia has already tried to influence elections in other nations, their spies have killed Russians in European countries, lots of their spies have been caught in said countries, they have deliberately tried to cut communications in the Baltic multiple times, they’ve been doing the cyber warfare thing long before 2022, they’ve already committed enough war crimes that thousands of their soldiers should hang, they won’t use chemical weapons (again, it gets China involved against them).
If Putin truly had the resources that he could call upon to make serious gains, he would have done so by now. Trading 100,000 Russians for a small village and a few kilometers on a map over 6 months might have sustainable in 1944, but it’s not now.