That’s the feature of free societies. They’re perceived more as being more corrupt than autocracies because they’re much more transparent. I’m not saying that Rs and Ds are not corrupt, but it’s child’s play compared to the vast majority of other countries.
This is an example of how a low probability outcome is now considered “inevitable”. The almost complete consensus nine months ago was that the “spectacularly corrupt country” would fold in 72 hours and that the Russian juggernaut was unstoppable. The US Embassy in Kyiv burned all their papers before the invasion expecting the country to be run over in a matter of hours.
And all that is thank to Ukrainian resolve against overwhelming odds and tens and tens of thousands of deaths they’ve incurred so far and are still incurring.
If the Russians actually did pull it off they’d get around 40 million people to turn into a North Korea-style colony that would be a source of cannon fodder either for Chechen ISIS or Wagner’s neo-Nazis. And the Russian establishment would become even more delusional, believing that they’re unstoppable, proving that high risk strategies work and that the West was depraved and weak. Remember these aren’t barefoot Yemeni tribes that can be subjected to “world policing” these people still have operational nukes. And you’d basically tell them that aggressive belligerency pays off.
In the fever pitch run up to the invasion of Ukraine, they pretty much laid out their plans - “Russian borders never end”. They actually believed MAGAs and FOX that the US Army now consists of fat, gender fluid liberal arts majors and that they could be cowed into submission by nuclear sabre rattling and bizarre demands and outlandish threats (ironically, the strategy worked on Silicon Valley VCs)
This is a government billboard in Russia. It translates into “Alaska is ours”, per state media the penultimate on the list of Russian ancestral lands to be “recovered” after Ukraine.
