DCSaints_Fan said

I'm sure they're aware of all of this, at least the ones with any intelligence. However, the question is what can/will they do about it. As a Russian citizen, if you don't like how things are, your options 1) leave 2) actively oppose the Putin regime 3) just go along with things as they are. Those who want to take option 1, have pretty much already done so. 2) will likely end you in jail (if you're lucky) or dead. 3) is simply the path of least resistance.

And even if Putin is deposed somehow, would that really improve things? As the collapse of the Soviet Union demonstrated, simply making nice with the West and allowing foreign investment, etc. doesn't guarantee anything, indeed it can make things worse.

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At the beginning of the year, Rosstat disclosed the last population census (experts have many questions about it, but it is the only data we have), which was carried out in 2021, before the war. According to the data, about 13% of the population – approximately 19 million people – refused to indicate the source of the income on which they live, in line with estimates of the size of the shadow economy. Another 45% (about 58 million) said they lived on their salaries. A third noted among their sources of income social payments from the state, i.e. pensions and benefits. This is more than 42 million people. Moreover, for 31 million of them, social payments were their main source of income. If you add about 30 million dependents here (including minors), the balance is no longer in favor of workers.

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the current structure of the Russian economy. Workers are different: there are those who produce things and provide the budget with taxes have to support not only children and pensioners, and there are deputies, officials, the army, law enforcement and many more state employees, including spies and propagandists. According to the RANEPA Laboratory for the Analysis of Institutions and Financial Markets, the share of public administration in GDP in 2000-20 more than doubled, from 7.1% to 14.6%, while the public sector as a whole surpassed 50% of the Russian economy in 2018. The war has meant not only a multifold increase in military spending and defense orders, but also an acute shortage of labor in the economy. After the start of the mobilization, a number of Russia’s regions were forced to announce “labor mobilization,” sending college and university students to operate machines and run offices.

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