i mean the budget is not the determining factor here. The russian economy is able to support a strong military, since they have a lot of resources and can produce a lot of shit by themselves. So even if the budget is low nominally it should suffice. Also Russia had a fairly good GDP per capita, far exceeding that of Ukraine and on par with many EU countries.

The issues are corruption, nepotism, lack of career chances for dedicated people and so on.

Russia ditched communism for capitalism, and yachts, and stuff.

Russia's military budget in size is sufficient for anything Russia would need defense-wise (and even aggression-wise, TBF) to a full extent. It's just that most of the money was being stolen through all these years. It's rotten to the bone.

About glory days - USSR's military was really something "second best" somewhere in the 50s, when it was a system built for some actual overarching doctrine.

With every year passing Soviet bureaucracy was more and more entangling itself into a knot of financing and prestige and cabinet power struggles, so by 80s it would have like 4-8 simultaneously produced and operated models of tanks, with similar technology and details etc, but similar wouldn't mean interchangeable, in fact there would be almost no interchangeable details between them. It was similar in any other area. Standardization (which Commies love to present as planned economy's advantage) was a farce.

The bureaucratic system responsible for every part of the system would fight tooth and nail for some external benefits and provide some external service, soldiers and students would be used on harvest campaigns and housing construction, and the main purpose would be cemented, never reevaluated (I mean, everything changes in 5 years in real world in any area, and the Soviet doctrine has not evolved much between Korea and Afghanistan), and in fact lost.

Which is why, say, Soviet personnel carriers wouldn't protect against anything. Their purpose was to move fast, be amphibious, be hermetic, be cheap to produce. Cause the plan was that after all the boom-boom stops in the Global Thermonuclear War, one would need to move infantry over burnt irradiated land, fast.

It really was in planning and function a bit like the Galactic Empire, be it the Azimov's one or the Star Wars one.

If I were as morally bankrupt as Putin I would be selling them left and right to the highest bidder

I mean, most countries do that in various ways. There are two differences for Russia in that matter.

1. They actually had a lot of Soviet weapons still around. Like, in quantity Russia was playing in the big leagues. The issue was just, of course, that a lot of it was unusable and got worse over the years with lacking maintenance and with technology getting more and more obsolete. Nevertheless, Russia had certainly a lot of arms and vehicles.

2. The Soviet Union was quite powerful and the image has still stuck with people and Russia did its best with parades and all to pretend that the glory is still with Russia. I put a bit of that blame also on American media repeating the image of the powerful Soviet Union as a dangerous adversary.

The war in Ukraine made it clearer than ever that Russia is only a shadow of what the Soviet Union once was in power projection.

I don't think anyone considers them not to be incredibly dangerous. But in terms of logistics, organization, strategy, and leadership they have proven to be nothing like they were imagined.

I am no expert but my understanding is that plain old artillery is the main tool being used in this conflict, and that's like how long have people been shooting cannons at one another? If you have 20x as much artillery as your more competent opponent you're still very dangerous.

I wish Ukraine the best vs the invaders and I think they will prevail, but there is no doubt the cost will be high.

Well they don't seem to be that strong to me.

Tfw your defensive line gets breached 530 days into your 3 day offensive.

The russians that are smart enough to innovate left Russia because of Putin. These are the leftovers.

Bloodthirsty, horrendous doesn't mean strong. You can be a bad person and still be a useless soldier.