And yes, it is not considered a desirable workplace among locals due to rather low salaries and predominantly well-aged equipment. Moreover, Antonov suffered from breaking it's supply chain in 2014. Apart from that, everything's absolutely great! Obviously, it is not the Golden Age of Antonov's assembly, nor it's development, nor anything else, but it happened so I live 1 block away from Antonov design bureau and every morning I see quite impressive flow of employees heading in there. I mean, of course, except the shutdown period and it's just my personal 'seems quite impressive'.
PS English is not my native, so it may be clunky or poorly readable)
If Ukraine falls, EU will have big problems.
If Ukraine falls, Russian tanks will be withing zero kilometres from EU border, and four states who are only relatively recent NATO members, without much weight in the NATO block.
Add to these that all four of those states are far from being 100% reliable, with clepto-political elites who are very similar to ones who switched sides to Russia in the Ukraine conflict.
The nightmare scenarios is of course if Poland gives in. Then, you will only have 300-500km of very flat land, and good roads in between them, and Berlin, Vienna, Prague, Dresden, Nuremberg, Munich, and ability to cut off the Eastern route around alps.
Russia has 8 times the population of Syria, and people can't live on a big part of its territory without artificial heating (and thus fuel supplies; your heating bill is pretty much a live or die price in a lot of places there,) or completely reliant for on long range freight for essential supplies.
The state kept control of the military. Troops were orderly demobilised.
The criminality was comparatively low in comparison to Putin's years. The state-mafia fusion came long after the years immediately following the collapse.
The same is for much of the industry, much of it has failed over nineties, and not immediately after.
The remnants of state economy at least managed to keep supplies going. Utilities in cities on "life support" were failing, but otherwise kept working at any cost.
If Russia will fail today, the collapse will be much less gradual, and this time, there will be a civil war, and warlordism, and famine, and mass humanitarian catastrophy.