[lazide]

It depends entirely on what you mean by ‘strength’, and ‘better’. Russia is ramping up its military industrial complex like no one’s business, for instance.

Manufacturing in general, actually.

Something which had essentially collapsed previously. Also, mining and other resource extraction - they’re necessarily rebuilding domestic production and becoming more independent.

[dh2022]

Well, yeah, sure, they are building lots of shitty weapons. Meanwhile they cannot take over an adversary a third of its size. About resource extraction - the West stopped giving Russia extraction technology. Which means Russia is coasting on what they had up to 2022. Meaning in a few years Russia will do what it did in the 70s: over-extract its most productive fields. To see how that movie ended read Gaidar's Collapse of an Empire.