The weakest link of Russia is its coach Buzato, how many nonsense challenges he called and how many nonsense timeouts he made today? He might be a decent trainer but definitely he is not a court side coach. He acted so weirdly often when the games were in their critical moments.
Busato made a clever move for himself with sending young talents to ECH. To explain it further: he created his excuses for possible failure in this tournament (if it is called failure not to get a medal with this young team) and he will try to be in the head coach position at least one more year. We all know that Russian volleyball community always want to see Russia in top, fighting for gold medal whicever tournament they play as it is their tredition in this sport. I remember their head coach committed suicide right after the failure in London Olympics. There were rumors about his possible death that he couldnt handle the pressure of the volleyball community from Russia (I dont know if its reason was cleared later, why he did something like that, but I remember there were news about the pressure from the volleyball community and he couldt handle it). In Busatos case, After 2019 ECH, Russia won bronze medal in World Cup and it was a good start for Busato, and this year before the VNL there were statements from him that they aim to get a medal but he failed despite of Russia was one of the few teams participating with A team. I think Russia had played a great Olympics this year, they beat the olympic champion in the group phase, they had the chance to be at the top of the pool in the last match, showed a very good volleyball in quarterfinal but they 'failed',if you can say it so. I think he knew he was runing out of credit and a possible failure in ECH with A team might be his end with Russian NT so that he choose to play with youngesters. I think Fetisova, Voronkova, Zaryazko, Malova could have played in this tournament. They are not old and they could have played in this tournament if the chance was given.
However, this tournament has showed that Russia has full of talented girls to be ready to represent their country, maybe bring back their glory days for the upcoming years. All the volleyball world is excited about Arinas development in upcoming years I feel like has Sokolova has reincarnated in the body of Arina