The weakness of Russia

Bronwen Maddox:

When President Bush said yesterday that “Russia is not an enemy”, he was right. He meant it as conciliation: a decision to try to calm President Putin down from his outburst on Friday, when he attacked the US for its imperialism.

But Bush’s soothing remarks ahead of today’s G8 summit are an accurate description. Russia is not an enemy because it is not powerful enough to be one any more. Most of Putin’s threats are empty; if the US ignores them, as it most likely will, then there is nothing he can do about it.

Some of Mr Putin’s new belligerence no doubt comes from three years of high oil prices. Just as he has sought to rewrite “colonial” energy licences signed in the early 1990s, when Russia was struggling to haul itself out of the debris of the Soviet Union, he is threatening to amend arms control treaties struck at the same time.

But this is bravado. Russia’s population is shrinking and its military budget is small and stretched. Its most powerful weapon is oil; its greatest vulnerability is that the price may fall.

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The Russian military is a mess too. Its ships are mostly rusting in port because they cannot afford to use them. Its army has failed in Afghanistan and Chechnya. Rag tag raiding parties humiliated it both places. The arms it sold Arab countries have been shown to be inferior in several wars over the last 40 years. On top of that, his argument makes absolutely no sense. He has already admitted that he is not targeting European cities, but thinks defensiv e missiles will cause him to have to target those cities?