Your first link says "With a score under 5, Russian Federation has a level of hunger that is low."

The current situation with Russia and China seems caused by them becoming prosperous. In the 1960s in China and 1990s in Russia they were broke. Now they have money they can afford to put it into their militaries and try to attack the neighbours.

I'm reminded of the KAL cartoon on Russia https://www.economist.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1424,quality=8... That was from 2014. Already Russia is heading to the next panel in the cycle.

Russia is a massive grain producer and exporter. One of their biggest health issues right now is obesity (from those cheap grains) with 60% of the adult population overweight, and growing. Furthermore, obesity has actually been an issue for their recruiting effort (there's a lot of running in war).

I would wager that states such as Russia and others misallocate resources, which in turn reduces productivity. Worse yet, some of the policy prescriptions stated above would further misallocate scarce resources and reduce productivity. Scarcity doom becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy. This outcome is used to rationalize further economic intervention and the cycle compounds upon itself.

To be explicitly clear, the US granting largess to tech companies for datacenters also counts as a misallocation in my view.

Have you tried opening the links? They show Russia at developed country level in terms of food insecurity (score <5, they don't differentiate at those levels; this is a level mostly shown for EU countries); and a percentage of population below the international poverty line of 0.0% (vs, as an example, 1.8 % in Romania). This isn't great — being in the poverty briefs at all is not indicative of prosperity — but your terrification should probably come from elsewhere.

Russia is run by the mob. The country has no real dominant industry beyond its natural resources. Are they really a good example?