Russia - threadbanned users in OP

Oh they do crow about wins on their side, but the confiscation of most Russian soldier's phones going in means they're relying on either their TikTok Czechens or embedded Russian press. The Ukrainians have been winning the information side from the get go. What with freer citizens, soldiers, non Ukrainians living there and the rest of the world's press. I didn't see the Russian forces confiscating phones as particularly sinister as armies would be naturally and understandably cautious about giving away intel because some muppet on the frontlines was updating to telegram in realtime and of course the Russian need to clamp down on information they don't control(the sinister part).

Well the Russians faced big problems there. Big being the operative word. Ukraine is a huge nation. Russian supply logistics are not built for external wars the way the US' are. Would NATO have gained air superiority by now? Bloody right they would have and within the first month, but it wouldn't have been a complete walk in the park even for them because of the sheer scale of the country.

Russia buggered up their puzzlingly stupid drive for Kyiv, but finally seem to be learning some lessons and "closer to home" in the East have made gains in taking large tracts of land. Keeping them is another matter, but there is little doubt they've taken them. They currently hold the "independent republics" and the land corridor to Crimea. If you overlay Ukraine on a map of the US.

You get an idea of the size of the place and in that map they've taken New York city, Washington DC, New Jersey, Delaware, and a goodly chunk of Virgina. From what I"ve been reading they do hold air superiority or close to it in those areas, it's at the edges of those areas and the rest of the country they don't.

That Ukraine is able to keep the Russian air force on tenterhooks is a testament to their skills, tactics and bravery. They have ground to air kit and more is getting in but they're vastly outnumbered and in air to air engagements the Ukrainians are facing more advanced aircraft and more advanced missile systems. EG the Ukrainian air to air missiles aren't fire and forget. You need to keep the target painted by radar until it hits. That leaves the firing aircraft very vulnerable. The Russian systems can lock on, fire and then get the feck out of Dodge and let the missile do its thing. While it's not a patch on the US and European kit the Russians also have much more over the horizon, or at least at a distance missile capabilities. As I say the fact that Ukraine denies Russian air superiority over the majority of Ukrainian airspace is an incredible feat.

And yeah, doubling down on Israel on the antisemitism stuff is through the looking glass unreal on a few levels.

Without the fall of Constantinople it's quite likely Russia wouldn't be the Russia it became or is today. Byzantine influence went west into Europe, but also and more so into the north and Russia, where Moscow inherited/gave itself the title of the "Third Rome" and the ruler became Caesar/Czar/Tzar. Even the two headed eagle of Russia is a Roman/Byzantine symbol. The god botherer stuff is also a schism of the old Eastern and Western Roman world. It's one reason why the crusaders sacked Constantinople. That centuries old rivalry and seeing them as different was still in play.

So why did Europe become a "beautiful garden" and Russia for the most part didn't? Well the Mongols invading Russia didn't help, but mostly it was because Europe was a collection of competing nation states, who inherited both Greek and Roman classical thought, Russia was more influenced by the Greek, but was more northern in temperament and it was an empire and empires are very prone to inward thinking and stagnation. Peter the Great tried to look outward and did, but that had been resisted, not least by the Church. Europe also moved away from feudal society and gained more and more social mobility(particularly after the Black Death) and the Reformation sped things up. Russia clung onto feudalism, kept serfdom legal until the middle of the 19th century and social mobility was much less in play and had no Reformation to shake the old ways up.

In essence the Russian empire stayed pickled somewhere in the 14th century, European nations didn't.