That might be a necessary condition, but definitely not a sufficient one to be considered a superpower. Simple thought experiment, "completely erasing" the US as you suggest would render the Earth unpleasant to live on, for a while, for all inhabitants.
yes, that's why they remain a superpower. If you have the ability to make life on earth extremely unpleasant for all of humanity, that's super power status. Even just having nuclear weapons isn't enough for that- you need large numbers of fusion bombs -- which Russia has, and the US has, and no one else does.
No, this is just not correct. Being a superpower requires, at a minimum, being able to win a conventional war with a state lacking nuclear weapons. The reason for that is that nuclear weapons cannot actually be used in practice. They can only serve as a deterrent to not be attacked.
They seems to have some highly suicidal tendencies and really don’t mind massive casualties these days (e.g. 5x more Russian died in Ukraine in just 2 years than during the entire 10 year long Soviet war in Afghanistan).
So one has to double whether they live in the same reality as most people in the west which makes them pretty scary and unpredictable
> the approach of just overwhelming Ukraine with relentless numbers could be effective
Is unclear at this moment. It only matters how much of this 34M/150M people are in an accurate age/sex to fight. Putin wouldn't survive a move to force massively women to enlist in the army, and Russia had yet a demographics problem. One million of youngsters exiled and are unavailable to became hamburgers.
Also Russia is trying to kill anybody in that 35M of people but Ukraine mostly fight only the Russian soldiers. I bet that each Ukrainian soldier had killed yet more than five Russian soldiers at the current meatwave ratio.
