population almost three times that of Italy has an economy that's 10% smaller....
2.3X, not "three times".
Very nice TLDR.
An alternative TLDR could be:
1) Italy's neighbors are France, Switzerland, Austria, and Spain.
2) Russia's neighbors are Belarus, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, China, and Polar Bears.
3) Russia is 17M square kilometers, much of it impenetrable taiga forests, and much of it north of the Arctic Cirlce.
4) Italy is 300K square kilometers of some of the best land on Earth, with certainly the best climate on Earth.
5) Russia wasn't even allowed to join the World Trade Organization until the mid 2000s (entrance into which is cited as the main reason for China's meteoric rise), whereas Italy was propped up by the West beginning from the end of the war, while Italy itself is a founding member of the EU.
6) Italians eat biscotti and sip on coffee, while America protects their ass from all sorts of invasion. They couldn't even bomb Libya, which is on their doorstep, for more than a week before reaching out to America for resupply.
7) Russia busted its ass for nearly a century helping lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty all around the world.