Not to take away from your accurate point about oil, but I think it's silly to say the "we're still in the cold war" crowd were out of touch in this of all threads.
The cold war view is sophomoric in my opinion because this Russia-Ukraine situation is more of a proxy war between the US and China. In the cold war, Russia was the real geopolitical adversary. In this one, they are more of a geopolitical nuisance and a puppet for a foreign state who wants to test the limits of US capabilities and doctrine in a foreign war like this.
Russia is no longer the big bad guy it used to be. Before the war, they had a crumbling economy the size of Italy's.
What evidence have you seen that this was somehow instigated by China, and not Russian ethnic nationalism/imperialism for its own sake? Remember that this started well before 2022. This is a recap and prescient analysis from 2014: https://www.fpri.org/article/2014/05/putins-greater-novoross...
And you can see a premature declaration of victory along similar lines from the Russian state media, which was then taken down when Ukraine did not in fact fold in three days: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-60562240. You can see the archive.org capture of the original article linked there if you wish to see the primary source.
Yes, their GDP is weak (nevertheless, Russia persists). No, it doesn't make any sense if you look at it through a normal Western lens, which is why there was widespread disbelief that Russia was to imminently invade Ukraine. But, as the saying goes, "Russia can't be understood by the mind alone"
