Extractive industries are one of the big things that poor countries poor.

70 years ago, Japan and West Germany were desperately poor, now they have surpassed us in quality of life. The key is that their economies needed lots of skilled labor and they had the political wisdom to realize skilled labor comes from investing in people: good schools, good health care, government that has to serve the community not just manage it.

70 years ago Russia was in good shape relative to the rest of the. Europe and Japan were reset, China and India still developing, Africa colonized, only the Americas remained as an economic rival.

But so much of Russia was turned into mines and fossil fuels to feed the industrial core of the Soviet Union - such as the area that's now the (pre-war) Russia-Ukraine border. Now, well, Russia has some moderately wealthy places in the west, but a ton of corruption and underdevelopment, especially in places whose economy has been dominated by extraction. And they're literally in a middle of a war trying to conquer the old industrial region, largely motivated by nostalgia for the Soviet days.

Shelling factories is a stupid way to add industrial capacity. Not only because they'll need to be rebuilt, but because the skilled labor to rebuild and staff them is forced to run away and the only way to replace them is to have a functioning society of your own. It's worse than pointless to conquer manufacturing areas.

Conquering natural resources, though, that makes sense.

So, anyway, yes we should mine rather than importing. But we need to enforce a fair deal for the public. And use tariffs to punish multinationals that abuse poor countries.