Yes, indeed, so the parallel with Germany seems even more fitting.
In some aspects yes, and in other - quite important ones - no.
The obvious parallels with interwar Germany you have covered: national humiliation, a plunge into poverty, a search for a new national idea, a tilt towards autocracy, etc.
But in terms of its ability to prosecute long and painful wars they could not be more different.
Once Germany failed to take the oil fields of the Caucasus and then lost the Romanian oil fields, the war was as good as done. It was a wild gamble by Hitler to secure the necessities for a 1,000 year Reich, and it failed.
Russia has internal resources that Germany never had - pretty much the entire periodic table of elements.
Russia is not lead by inflexible ideologues, but wily bourgeois opportunists, who surprise the West at every step with sanctions busting through shadow tanker fleets, cryptocurrency capital transfers, and shrewd diplomacy. All this, aided by an entire generation of Russian intellectuals educated and trained by the West.
Russia has the world's largest nuclear arsenal.
China, India, Brazil, South Africa, Indonesia, etc are quite a bit more useful as allies than Imperial Japan.
Russia still has almost twice the population of Germany, and on top of that has other pools of manpower it can draw on - including Central Asians, Africans, and South Americans.
So I think Russia deserves its own category.
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In other news, the West is starting to catch on that Zelensky is quite unpopular in Ukraine. Surprise!
Quote from Politico:
" And though seen as a lionhearted wartime leader overseas, his inspirational rhetoric and spellbinding oratory capturing the hearts of audiences from Washington to London and Brussels to Warsaw, Zelenskyy's popularity has been steadily declining in his own country. Ukrainians have always been more skeptical of him."
