RusAD

Nah. The accurate depiction would be like this:

Republican on top: "I drillled the hole!" Democrat beside him: "If you vote for me, I'll plug the hole!"

Voters and non-voters together at the bottom actively solving the problem. Non-voters: "I don't want to vote for this lazy ass" Voters: "Noooo, please vote, or else Republican will drill more holes!"

(BTW I think you should vote to prevent more holes from being drilled. But Democrats don't do enough. Biden was a president for almost a whole term now. Did he ensure basic human rights for trans people and trans kids specifically nationwide? Did he ensure basic human rights of pregnant women nationwide? Did he ensure the safety of doctors performing reproductive care? Did he penalize Israel for committing genocide? Did he enforce proper accountability for police discriminating against minorities (or, in that case, for any wrongdoings)? Doesn't look like it to me. He did cap insulin prices for some, which is nice and a step in the right direction, but yeah, far from enough)

Yep, near Saratov, around 700km south-east from Moscow.

I also live in Russia, and in my experience certain VPNs just get blocked by the ISP. Like, I just can't connect to certain VPNs, the connection either gets stuck in an infinine loop or fails with an error. But some other VPNs still work without any problems.

Plus, since the beginning of this month, it's prohibited to promote/advertise "means to avoid blocked internet resources", i.e. proxies/VPNs/etc, so it can be called "partially restricted"

Nonono, they'll statically raise prices and will sometimes offer "discounts" to the price the item is now

Have you contacted ANY Russian anti-war group before making that comment? Vesna, Media Partizans, Voice of Reason movement, Freedom movement, Resistance movement, Rospartizan, BOAK, The Black Bridge, Freedom of Russia Legion, Feminists Against War, or any of the others?

Not 1000 protesters. 1000 DETAINED protesters. And during the same day the protests happened all over the country. I may have not been entirely clear in my comment, but you could've at least checked the Wikipedia.

Since the start of the war until 6 March [2022] nearly 13,000 have been detained.

And it's nearly impossible to calculate how many actially participated and escaped before getting detained. And that was before the mobilization, that was when only the professional military was involved. After the mobilization the protests reignited.

And what exactly do you mean by "Russians aren't passively resisting"?

What do you mean "Finally"? The protests in Russia started on 24th of February 2022. Over 1000 protesters were detained just in Moscow that day alone. And the protests continued after that.

The problem is, these protests achieved nothing, they only resulted in fines (which undoubtedly went to funding the war), protesters being beaten, detained and some even got a criminal charge. So the protests died down because continuing them only fueled the regime more. Some people shifted to solitary picketing, some started doing online activism, some started sabotaging the railways and burning down enlistment centers, some left the country altogether and some, undoubtedly, just gave up.

I meant that these things aren't as noticeable from outside of the country. Like, foreign news outlets probably won't report on it much. Plus, eggs are more of an exception because of sudden shortage and prices rising rapidly. For most of the other goods the price grows more gradually and isn't as obvious. Like in that metaphor about slowly boiling a frog.

Another problem that is noticeable from inside the country (at least by those affected by it) is that certain medications are vanishing from the pharmacies because they are no longer imported and they were never produced locally, or the local production is insufficient to meet the needs. I don't know the full list, but the stock of ADHD meds is definitely low, and I've heard from friends that they had to switch to a different antidepressant due to shortages.

Uhhh, yes. It was 3am when I wrote this, so my brain probably farted hard

Adding to all the reasons already listed, Russia isn't striving. For example, right now there is a number of towns and cities experiencing outages in central heating (with houses designed around central heating so basically no other option to heat their appartments) while the weather dips to -20°C (around -4°F). All because the centralized boiler facilities weren't properly maintained due to the lack of money (or, to be more precise, due to money being diverted towards the war).

There are other signs, like plains malfunctioning and flights getting delayed because some component broke and cannot be replaced due to sanctions, and they happen more and more often. Also the less noticeable stuff like prices of common goods increasing by a factor of two in the last couple of years while salaries barely increased at all.

So yeah, Russia is keeping itself afloat, but it isn't thriving at all

If there's nothing wrong with people losing jobs, then go on, resign from your job. Be the change you want to see in this world.

And I think Blizzard of Oz is a reference to Wizard of Oz which predated Ozzy for quite a bit