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EU - UK vs. Russia

Ukraine as the "trial" case?

Russia has a smaller economy than Italy. They have an disproportionally large military compared to their size, but this is running much closer to what they can sustain than European countries, which run a disproportionally small military.

To add to that, Russia's economy hasn't expanded much in real terms in the last 30 years. They've expended vast natural resources to slightly more than tread water.

Russia's GDP in the late 1980s was around half a trillion dollars. Today it's around $1.3 trillion. Accounting for even a small amount of annual inflation, they've grown the economy by perhaps 20% to 30% over 30 years. And that's coming from an extremely backwards Communist system.

>Russia's economy hasn't expanded much in real terms in the last 30 years

Russian GDP has dropped since 2014 due to sanctions. If you look at prior to sanctions, growth is more impressive.

From [1]:

GDP (USD billion) 1990 2014 --------------------------------- UK 1093 2999 India 317 2035 Russia 517 2064

Recent growth is much stronger [2] [3].

[1] https://www.google.com.au/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f...

[2] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-russia-gdp/russias-gdp-gr...

[3] https://www.focus-economics.com/countries/russia/news/gdp/ec...

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