Mate, you've already explained it succinctly, but there is just one point in there that I would like to elaborate more upon and provide more info.
Anyone who believes that Russia surviving and recovering from the literal hellhole it was in the 90s just through "2000s high fuel prices" has no idea, I repeat, NO FUCKING IDEA of what Russia was like at that period and what the Great Satan imposed (((Shock Therapy))) had caused.
The death rate was HIGHER than the birth rate. There were more abortions per year than there were live births. It was as bad, if not worse, than the American Great Depression.
Bank managers had to order thugs to break people's legs for unpaid debts, people would drive their motorcycles after drinking 2 bottles of vodka, murders were common, parents used to go without much food so that they could feed their children at one point.
Post USSR Russia was ready to welcome America and the west, but all that did was open the country to being exploited and robbed.
Imagine that you're an average Soviet worker in the late 80s. Maybe there are already some shortages, but you have a stable job, the full gamut of social protections and a sense of stability. You have a home, a dacha, two kids growing up. The TV shows wholesome stuff about harvests and the latest scientific achievements. If only you knew how bad things were going to get.
Then suddenly overnight the USSR "collapses". You are told to invest your suddenly worthless ruble savings into privatization vouchers. You have no idea how doing business in capitalism works, so you end up investing into a pyramid scheme and losing everything. Your factory gets closed up and its equipment sold to the West because it was "unprofitable" - nothing is anymore except oil, everything that isn't bolted down is getting lifted and sold to the West for a pittance.
You end up collecting bottles for a living. Your underage daughter starts skipping school to prostitute herself to support her family, but ends up spending everything on drugs. Your son gets shot in a gang war. The TV is crime reports 24/7 because that's what gets people glued to screens. Sometimes it's charlatans offering to charge your water with positive energy. Sometimes it's your leadership openly licking American boots, talking about how the USSR was evil and totalitarian, and saying how good it is that we're "good friends with the US now".
You end up having to rely on subsistence farming on your dacha in order to simply not to starve to death. Your apartment in the city gets taken by the mafia and eventually you just freeze to death on your dacha.
That, without exaggeration, was the fate of millions of Russians who didn't "fit into the market". That is an actual quote by the leading ideologue of privatization, Anatoli Chubays, by the way. "So what if 30 millions or whatever die out? They didn't fit into the market."
It was Hell on Earth. It's one of the greatest humanitarian catastrophes and episodes of human suffering in history. We can't even comprehend the enormity of horror back then. Nothing but Chechnya and crime on the TV. Fathers became smugglers. Mothers came home bruised, robbed, possibly raped frequently.
Grandmothers having nervous breakdowns because they are the only family member with a stable job with the state and single-handedly provided for half a dozen people. Everything is filthy, the ground is littered with used heroin syringes, streets are filled with people peddling random goods in makeshift "markets" just to survive.
And all of that was in the latter half of the 90s when everything was slowly getting better due to the above-mentioned growing oil prices. The earlier years were 10x as apocalyptic.
The only thing more destructive than this in my opinion in Russian History is the Soviet Revolution of 1917.
This is what the "kleptocrat" Putin faced when he came to power. 75 percent of Russians were living in poverty. Most had lost even modest legacies of the Soviet era—their life savings; medical and other social benefits; real wages; pensions; occupations; and for men life expectancy, which had fallen well below the age of 60.
In only a few years, he had mobilized enough wealth to undo and reverse those human catastrophes and put billions of dollars in rainy-day funds that buffered the nation in different hard times ahead.
So, people in the rest of the world, especially Westfags for whom, making cheap jokes and hypocritical propaganda is supreme, might judge this historic achievement as they might.
But there is a reason why many Russians, to this day still call Putin “Vladimir the Savior.” To think that it was all easily solvable through higher prices and that just anyone could have done it, while managing to throw off the shackles of The Great Satan is the height of retardation.