It seems to me you overestimate Russia's military and economic potential.
Discussion
Exactly. Both are fake.
It's a common mistake to confuse possession of nuclear weapons with being a superpower. Nuclear technologies are becoming more and more commoditized, and proliferation efforts seem to be struggling with this fact. Humanity may soon end up with 2x countries with nuclear weapons. However, this would not mean that there would be 2x superpowers, or even just powers. Look at the DPRK or Pakistan, how powerful are they?
North Korea has performed quite well in the war against the UN.
Has it?
Yes, and if this keeps up, the DPRK will outlive the UN.
No it hasn't, it ended up as a shithole that survives on foreign aid, all their militaristic chestbeating is just to get some aid in exchange for calming down, it's literally like a child in the mall screaming to get a lollipop
this is a propaganda-fed oversimplified childish view of the situation
sadly it's not far from what most us politicians think
Then what is the "real" situation?
Assessing economic developments in North Korea is extremely difficult. The country has not published any regular national account statistics since the 1960s or any budget information since the early 1980s. Almost all the Korean, English, French, and German literature on the matter is extremely anti DPRK biased (for obvious reasons). I'd send you a Chinese paper but you can't read Chinese. Here is one of the less biased, recent, English pieces as a starting point. In it you'll find a more vibrant economy than you want to believe:
here's a start:
Well, presumably their welfare is at the level of Cambodia.
I'm not talking about nukes. I'm talking about rate of production of artillery, hypersonic missiles, submarine weapons, anti-satellite technology, etc. Russia has been on a war footing for longer while the West just fed their old weaponry to Ukraine not feeling an immediate pressure to ramp up production in preparation for a world war.
You westerns overestimate russian industrial complex and its pity state. The reality is that it's kind of a walking dead. The real issue is nukes, that is the only thing that prevents Russia from being fucked really hard.
Russia produces more artillery in 4 days than France produces all year.
I mean sure the Russian army may well be in the Top 10, and the Russian economy is stronger than we all thought, but none of that is even close to the US. This is a fighter of a completely different weight class and it is simply impossible to seriously consider Russia as a threat to the US.
You are right of course. Compared to America, Russia isn't even close.
https://www.globalfirepower.com/ gives a lot of detailed statistics and shows Russia is a lot higher even than I thought.
Various rating systems cannot objectively reflect reality, but, of course, the Russian army is one of the best. Another thing is that in the case of Ukraine it shows itself very strangely, for example, it was obvious to everyone that it was necessary to destroy communications and the energy system of Ukraine, but the fact that the Russian army does it badly suggests some political games behind the screen of a military conflict.
Or, alternatively, with a good army, the Russian command is terribly incompetent.
Even both can be true at the same time.
That'll be because Russia is currently under wartime economy and France is not, that's not a very useful comparison.
I think it is useful.
Economies can not just switch into wartime economies on a dime. It takes a lot of time and a hell of a lot of changes to occur before a spike in demand flows back into a spike in production. And any spike in demand in Western Europe will be noticed by Russia and met with a spike in demand by Russia. It might be very hard to catch up.
Now I think US production of weapons is pretty high, and the US is making moves to increase and distribute wartime production. They just brought Japan onboard to make jet fighters.
Russia has hypersonic missiles that work. The US doesn't have that. Russia has status-6 sub weapon that can take out an entire carrier fleet (some say a coastal city with nuke but I don't think that was the purpose). Russia is far more advanced in operating in the polar region.
Didn't they lose a third of their black sea naval fleet? How's the polar region going to help with that?
Oh no, you are right, they absolutely are losing in the Black Sea. There is no defense against drones on the surface of the water, during chop, at night, coming in packs. I don't think any country has a defense against that yet. It's a very interesting time from a war-technical point of view.
That would depend on what you consider working, several of them were shot down by the patriot system in Ukraine and the patriots there aren't even the latest version of the system, I'm by no means claiming that those missiles are useless or something, but they are not the wunderwaffe the Russians claim it is