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I think this comes down to the neoliberal obsession with GDP. It completely obfuscates strategic importance and control. It's the sort of myopic focus that allowed us to outsource critical infrastructure to China, and then we got bent over when COVID hit. Because to the neoliberal, if number goes up, who cares who controls a thing? Money is power, not actual physical possession of a strategic resource... right?
Ukraine is the breadbasket of Europe. It's coast are Russia's only warm water port. It's an important strategic buffer between Russia and keeping their enemies less than 2 hours away from their capital. How "poor" Ukraine is, however shitty their stock market is doing, however bad their GDP is changes none of those fundamentals.
Russia itself was mocked as being a third world country with a gas station. That hasn't exactly aged well.
Have you ever interacted with russian citizens outside the moscow and st. petersburg elite? They are poor as shit. Russia is a 3rd world country, this whole war has been an embarrassment. They can't even take over the poorest country in europe.
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It was mocked as a gas station with nukes. Nobody ever said Russia couldn't be dangerous if it wanted to.
My recollection is that one person mocked Russia as being a gas station, and a second person mocked the first saying it was a gas station with nukes.
Sadly my memory has rotted to the point where I can't recollect whether it was Obama directly who was person one, or a surrogate/policy expert of his. Likewise I can't recall if person two was Romney/McCain or other person in their orbit.
Alas.
"Russia is a gas station masquerading as a country" was McCain's version. I'm finding claims that it was Romney who turned that into "gas station with nukes", though not particularly mocking of McCain, and that Obama's contribution to Putin's seething was to call Russia "a regional power".
Although, apparently this sort of metaphor is way way older than that. "Upper Volta with rockets" was the phrase coined (possibly by a British journalist) in the 80s, updating the German "Congo with Rockets" from the 70s and "Genghis Khan with a hydrogen bomb" from the 50s, and all of this dates back as far as a sentiment from the 1850s, popularized by Tolstoy after Emperor Alexander III's counter-reforms in the 1880s,
"It was not without reason that Herzen spoke of how terrible Genghis Khan would have been with telegraphs, with railways, with journalism. This is exactly what has happened in our country."
Research by Russia Today, so they make it clear from the title onward that these are all variants on "a lazy Russophobic slur", but frankly I'm still impressed they didn't kill the article outright.
It was actually coined by Chancellor Helmut Schmidt.
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