I mean everything. Not just more experienced but expanded and entirely reorganized. Structurally it is almost an entirely different military. Before it was organized as a peacetime military.

They had practically no drones integrated into either their units or their doctrine before, now they have dedicated drone units and an increasingly sophisticated doctrine of integrating them at every level of combat. They have developed an entire state led drone industrial sector that is, as we can see from the frequency and size of the drone strike waves, not just larger than Ukraine’s but also very innovative.

They have restarted and modernized many old military industrial facilities that had been unused for decades. Their production is many times higher than before the war. Their stockpiles rather than dwindling have been growing in practically every kind of equipment and ammunition.

Old equipment that would otherwise have been decommissioned has been refurbished and used up while stockpiles of newer equipment have been growing. Missile technology as well as interception technology has also rapidly advanced as Russia learned how to counter Western missile systems. Also entirely new Russian weapons systems exist now that didn’t exist before.

The overall size of their military in terms of manpower has at least doubled, and all this from volunteers, not even proper mobilization, and they are much better equipped and better led than before. The overall defense industrial sector is more efficient and less corrupt as the conflict has forced them to clean house and a number of corrupt officials have been arrested and tried.

This isn’t so say that they don’t still have major problems to sort out and things to improve, or that the conflict hasn’t been painful, but overall it is incomparably stronger military than it was before the conflict (which is not unusual historically, as the USSR also emerged from WW2 militarily much stronger despite the immense loss and destruction). NATO is not.

NATO, and not just in Ukraine but also with the conflicts the US has had to supply in the Middle East, has greatly depleted its arsenals and has been largely unable to ramp up production. The privatized military industrial complex is extremely slow to expand when there is no clear profit motive and operates with huge amounts of waste, spending sometimes ten times what a state led defense sector like Russia’s spends to produce the same things.

The US is busy trying to keep its own arsenals from emptying while Europe is dysfunctional and with the rising energy costs entirely unable to fulfill its absurdly ambitious plans. Also there is a ton of graft and just outright running off with the money and never actually delivering when it comes to private Ukrainian or Ukraine-related contractors (usually all with personal ties to the Kiev junta who get kickbacks from all this corruption).

Ukraine’s own defense industry that it inherited from the Soviet Union is now largely destroyed and they are almost entirely reliant on being supplied by Europe and the US. Domestically the main thing they have left are small, dispersed drone production workshops hidden in apartments so Russia can’t target them with missile strikes like they do the big industrial factories.

Air defenses are severely depleted and the US has stopped deliveries because they need them against Iran, so Ukraine is now practically unable to intercept the vast majority of what Russia fires at them. And this is with Europe having given them virtually everything they could scrounge up. Not to mention the fact that their entire government and army runs on money “loaned” to them by the EU.

And of course Ukraine’s manpower is severely depleted and what they do have is of increasingly low quality: old, poorly trained, poorly motivated. Where in 2022 Ukraine outnumbered the Russians at least two or three to one, now Russia actually outnumbers Ukraine. This is particularly shocking since Russia only relies on volunteers and Ukraine is forcibly mobilizing practically every able bodied adult male they can drag off the streets.

It is hard to say what the casualty ratios are but the mutual exchanges of bodies and prisoners are consistently in Russia’s favor by at least ten to one. Of course that is also a result of Russia controlling the battlefield and Ukraine being particularly uninterested in collecting or even documenting its own casualties (to avoid bad PR and also avoid paying the families) but nonetheless it is indicative of favorable ratios for Russia.

Russia keeps advancing despite Ukraine constantly throwing more and more bodies into the trenches to prevent PR-damaging breakthroughs (Ukraine is particularly sensitive to PR since it relies on perception of “holding out” to get a constant stream of money and military equipment from the West). Ukraine tends to hold out to the last for every position, which also favors Russia in maximizing the casualty imbalance by creating cauldrons that are hard to reinforce or resupply without casualties.

Now Ukrainian front lines are increasingly porous, manned by very few actual soldiers, and are mostly being held by drones, which despite being very useful and able to slow down smaller scale advances, are not a replacement for real combined arms warfare and actual boots on the ground. Drones can be countered by EW and overwhelmed by a continuous dispersed assault that bypasses a poorly manned frontline and disrupts the drone teams.

Russia has also developed a doctrine of using cheap but plentiful and by now very accurate glide bombs to systematically dismantle Ukrainian fortified positions over longer periods of time, minimizing Russian casualties, which they are able to do because Ukraine has practically no air force and depleted AD.

Ukraine is also totally reliant on the US and its satellites for ISR, targeting and communications where Russia has actually increased its own military satellite coverage since the war began.

Overall the Russian military is stronger now not just compared to Ukraine but compared to NATO as a whole than it was in 2022.

And a very similar thing happened with the economy. The sanctions forced them to rapidly adapt and develop import substitution while reorienting away from the West and toward the much more dynamic and growing Asian economies. Here there also are a lot of problems, mainly because Russia’s current government refuses to let go of its liberal economic brainworms and go back to the state led approach, but at least a lot of avenues by which wealth was being extracted out of Russia and taken by the West have been closed off.