(January 14, 2021 at 7:00 am)BrianSoddingBoru4 Wrote: This is news? Russia (in per capita terms) has always been a desperately poor country, while Eastern Europe gets a lot of assistance from the west.
Boru
It is rather overstating the case to say Russia is a “desperately” poor country. Russia is at the top end of middle income countries.
Also, population, size, location, level of certain key technologies, and degree of industrialization in key areas has a lot more to do with a country’s capacity to wage war than a factor of 2 difference in GDP per capita.