The popular narrative is that the West is in absolute economic shambles, on the brink of starvation and collapse into darkness, and going rapidly bankrupt due to the war in Ukraine. Everyone in the West is stupid, gay, or stupid and gay. We are just lying here, wasting away, waiting to be eaten, by the Great Brown Bear.
According to this narrative, the Russian economy is strong. Russia has endless amounts of money, resources, women dropping babies like Hänsel and Gretl dropped breadcrumbs, and a parade of young, intelligent men joyfully marching off to the western front. Russia, you see, can wage perpetual war without Russian citizens even noticing. Russian is the One, True Christian Utopia, rather than the one we misguided Catholics thought would only be attained in Heaven.
How needs the Second Coming, when you can have a Perpetual President, instead?
This is a very easy polarity to propagate because if you ask anyone in the West if the West is collapsing, they will always and everywhere say, "Yes, absolutely. Everything is fucked up and bullshit. We're all gonna die. We all need to run for our lives. And WWIII is just around the corner." (It's been around the corner since WWII, it's merely a question of which corner but I digress...)
If you ask anyone in Russia or pro-Russian -- including many Westerners, who are trying very hard to "look cool and hip", as being pro-Russian is the new Che Guevara t-shirt -- if Russia is collapsing, they will always and everywhere say, "No, that's ridiculous." They don't know why it is ridiculous, but they know that it must be, because of reasons. Also, Putin looks great bare-chested and has a string of hot wives, concubines, girlfriends, etc. So there!
That, alone, should tell you something. Think about that, for one minute. That is the same precise, illogical and glaring dichotomy we saw, right before the Soviet Union suddenly collapsed.
To put both of these narratives into more perspective: Russia has a GDP smaller than Italy.
It has persistent high inflation, record-breaking rates of deaths of despair, its extraction industry is being strangled by sanctions, it consumes almost all its arms production, and it pays eye-watering interest rates because nobody wants to loan to it or invest in it. And now it's selling off its gold reserves.
Stick a fork in Russia, as I think it is done.