> Declare everybody that disagrees with you as a Russian bot and, lo and behold, apparently the only people that disagree with you are Russian bots
No, I mean actual Russian bots, either paid far rights politicians or online paid accounts. That's the kind of people left talking about sanctions, everybody else moved on to other subjects a long time ago.
It used to be a hot debate in 2022 / 2023, we're way past that now and the public opinion moved on.
> Macron is at 16% and Merz has hit a truly impressive 10%. They've defined their leadership by their foreign policy, so what other conclusion can one draw?
No they haven't, as for France, which I know very well, almost nobody cares about foreign politics on election day.
What's making Macron unpopular is the local debt, ineffective spending, retirement policies, reaction to local events (such as student protests right now), voters don't really care about Russia.
> And Russia is going to collapse after the war if somebody doesn't give them $300 billion, a small fraction of their GDP
GDP isn't government budget. And I was making a low ball estimate yeah, maybe they need 800 billions, I don't know. What I do now is that they dug themselves into a very deep hole and Ukraine is a very poor country (especially now) which is never going to help them make that back.
> The small nation is already having significant manpower issues, while the large one has yet to even turn to general mobilization. Again, how is a victory supposed to come out of this?
I don't know a single war in history which ended because they had literally no men to throw at it.
Russia to me looks to be in a similar position as Germany in 1917, they still had men to throw at the war (and were even making territory gains!) but the country was collapsing due to the weight of the war, forcing them to stop.