Name any political, cultural, economic, literature, sports achievement in last 30 years to come out of Russia. That's right Internet trolls which are an evolution on kgbs psyops
Sure, and Nginx as well. JetBrains are in Eastern Europe, Nginx is sold to West, wonder why?
Or you can list graphene - a really nice, to say mildly, achievement. Guess why it wasn't announced from Russia but from UK?
Russia is being seriously held back by the autocracy. The whole world suffers to a degree, which explains animosity... Of course Russia suffers the most, but such things are hard to change. Ukraine and Belarus going the long and troublesome road now, while we here keep disagreements about good and evil.
> Name any political, cultural, economic, literature, sports achievement in last 30 years to come out of Russia.
Russia remains prominent in the literary world. Contemporary authors like Sorokin and Ulitskaya are widely translated into other languages. If anything Russia's decline in those other respects makes its authors more competitive internationally, because "Novelist X captures the gritty reality of an oppressive state" has been since the Soviet era a dependable angle to market books to foreign readers.
And IntelliJ IDEA of course, which I think many HN visitors are using in one form or another. This still doesn't change the original point that Putin regime has been very damaging to Russia.
jetbrains is a russian company with russian owners. The very fact they (similarly to wargaming of belarus) etablished venues in czech, cyprus etc, were:
1. to whitewash 'russia' label from they brand
2. to avoid potential economic sanctions (esp. post 2014 and Crimea)
3. tax evasion (yeah, cyprus is hq, truly like egshell apple/google ireleand is not for tax evasion)
4. able to recruit some westerners which were needed for sales/marketing to out-of-russia markets (skills, local market, local connections).
to make it clear: I consider both products really good, and both companies successfull and well managed on a worldwide scale. They success can be also measured by the very fact that you fell prey to their marketing strategy 'we're not russian company'. they are.
Was it more or less damaging then the tire-pyre disaster that the country went through in the 90s, prior to him taking power?
That's when my family left, and while my remaining relatives have soured against Putin in recent years (Funny how that happened... They were all for him, right up until ~2017, or so), nobody feels nostalgic for the 90s.
Let's not whitewash history. The Russian public has only recently started souring on him. The brain drain didn't start because of him - it started 28 years ago, as soon as the borders were opened.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kotlin_(programming_language)