Russia has been spending all gains in economy on military for the last 15 years. Ability of local businessmen to quickly find new trading partners in Asia is one of the primary reasons Russian economy did not collapsed under suctions and the war.

It's thanks to oil, gas and minerals exports they have managed to keep the russian economy going. Not thanks to entrepreneurship or some russian made products. They also stole a lot of western companies and their assets.

West imposes sanctions forcing business to divest and leave Russia -> Russia "stole". That's some next-level reasoning there.

I wouldn't be so snarky when your own reasoning leaves out a key part of the series of events there..

When the government said businesses must be locally owned, of course the bandits with money (aka oligarchs) saw the opportunity and suddenly became company-owners left and right. I guess it's "the West"'s fault that they created space for the bandits to move in (and not Putin's fault that he forced "the West" to sanction the country because of invasion). If we go further up the "cause and effect" chain it must be NATO's fault for expanding into East Europe. ;) .. but why wouldn't Eastern European countries want to join NATO, considering their large neighbor to the East still have imperialistic dreams.

You can’t take the GDP in US$ for comparison, given the sanctions and all. PPP is a better means.

I do not know about entrepreneurship, but I do know that a Russian’s average purchase power is significantly higher than what you might expect from just looking at the GDP

It might be true that we can’t compare gdp between Russia and other countries, but even if so, wouldn’t we see a growth in GDP over time (ie comparing Russia to itself)?

"This would surprise me just because its GDP is smaller than Italy's"

GDP to US dollar is only works IF your export and import is only traded with US dollar which doesn't to be the case since Russia is trade with Brics partner that bypass all sanction and not using US dollar