This is the best summary I could come up with:

A few weeks earlier, Mr. Putin was warmly received in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, where he was greeted with a 21-gun salute and fighter jets overhead trailing smoke in the red, white and blue of Russia’s flag.

“What Western leaders conspicuously haven’t done is level with their publics about the enduring nature of the threat from an emboldened, revisionist Russia,” Eugene Rumer and Andrew S. Weiss of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace wrote in November in an essay for The Wall Street Journal accusing the West of “magical thinking” about Mr. Putin’s plight.

He met in New York last month with António Guterres, the secretary general of the United Nations — which Russia’s foreign ministry advertised in a news release that showed the two men shaking hands.

North Korea is sending ballistic missiles for use in Ukraine, Iran continues to ship drones and China, while refraining from exporting arms to Russia, is allowing equipment that civilians and the military can use to get into Moscow’s hands.

Nearby countries like Armenia and Turkey, a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, have not joined the U.S. sanctions regime, and private companies there import microchips and other items for re-export to Russia.

Western sanctions and business boycotts have certainly affected daily life in Russia, though in many cases through inconveniences like the loss of Apple Pay and Instagram — not enough to foment popular unrest or change Mr. Putin’s behavior.

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