I'd agree that Russia's demographics are dire. Acquiring new Russians as a war goal is interesting, something I was unaware of - although it was clear they'd been stealing children. Any numbers on how many Ukranian adult refugees are actually staying in Russia? I've been seeing numbers around 50K, which is far short of 2M, which might be the number of people who've gone through Russian exfiltration camps.

In any case, we don't have a single political issue coming up, but multiple ones - unless the RF remains whole, which is looking less likely by the day.

I'm not a political analyst, just someone with decent reading comprehension who's read a good bit of history - and has been following the news. I watched the USSR collapse, saw that the West had a chance to eventually have a partner in a democratic Russia - and then 9/11 happened and we completely took our eyes off the ball. I'd rank that as the second worst thing that came out of 9/11, the worst being our moves towards becoming security states in response.

Thanks for the response!