"Putin is acting out of weakness, not strength"

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-5488995/DOMINIC-LAWSON-Putins-Russia-dirt-poor-basket-case.html Quoting:

Russia is, by land mass, the biggest country in the world, so naturally it looms large in our minds. And when, as it appears, the country’s leader — an ex-KGB officer by the name of Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin — commissions a nerve agent attack on the streets of our most beautiful cathedral city, Salisbury, we become fixated by the notion of Russian power. Such anxiety is natural. But we should put this incident in its proper context. Which is that it is a reckless act indicating not strength but weakness . . .

Russia is an undeniably great nation and people. But its gross domestic product is no larger than that of Italy and far smaller than the UK’s. Those outline figures do not do justice to the appalling inefficiency of Russia’s economy, mired in corruption which would disgrace any tin-pot sub-Saharan dictatorship. The result, as one might expect, is extreme levels of inequality and poverty.

A rare British exposé of what life is like in the Russian heartland was provided by the Sunday Times reporter Matthew Campbell in January, when he travelled to the southern Urals: ‘I have only witnessed impoverishment like this before when reporting civil wars in West Africa and Latin America. Here, the miserable conditions are intensified by industrial squalor and the brutal Russian winter. Even in the tumultuous years after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 I did not see poverty like this.’

Putin — with remarkable success, it has to be said — distracts and deflects public anger by blaming everything on the West’s sanctions, which were implemented after Moscow annexed Crimea and poured troops across the border into Ukraine. But those military escapades were themselves designed by the Kremlin to shore up popular support at a time when the colossal corruption and inequalities stemming from it had led many thousands to demonstrate against the Putin regime.

Last month, there was an incident which combined both these elements. A 500-strong force of largely Russian mercenaries in Syria attempted to seize one of the country’s oilfields — and was all but obliterated by the U.S. Air Force.
The Kremlin attempted to cover up this debacle, but the mother of one of the slaughtered Russian mercenaries told the TV network Current Time that her only son, Ruslan, had joined the military campaign ‘because of poverty, because there are no jobs’ . . .

No organisation has produced a clearer and more comprehensive analysis of Russia’s deep crisis than the Carnegie Moscow Centre.

Its most recent (2017) report is devastating: ‘A substantial part of Russia’s production capacity — more than 40 per cent by some estimates — is both technologically and functionally obsolete and cannot produce competitive and marketable products. For example Russia’s machine stock has shrunk by over half in the last ten years. Over the next few years we can expect a decline in investment . . . this downward spiral will eventually lead the country to economic collapse.’

This is one reason why capital has been flooding out of the country: the oligarch class want to take out as much of their money as possible, while they can. And the exodus is human as well as financial. Russia is thought to have lost up to 4.5 million people through emigration since the start of the 1990s — many of the best and brightest among them . . .

The Russian bear may be a physical colossus, but its teeth are rotten. It is much weaker than it appears."