Smaller than Texas, less healthy than Bolivia

Nobody doubts that Russia is a military power. With more than 7,000 atomic bombs, Russia can afford to be and remain a bully global. However, the economy of this nuclear kleptocracy is smaller than that of the state of Texas. With more than three times the population of Spain, income per capita of the Russians is three times less than that of the peninsula. Pablo Pardo, analyst of the newspaper The world, states about the Russians: “A country that combines political hypernationalism and economic third-worldization is clearly a danger. And it is because three factors feed off each other. Without nationalism, the the status quo economic and militarism make no sense; if the economy is reformed, it must be assumed that the country is not a great power, and if the armed forces are adapted to the real demands of the country, the official ideology and the economic model are no longer sustainable”.

Having an economic and social structure of a third world country, Russia’s future and prospects are complex. While life expectancy in Colombia is 74.5 years, in Russia it is 68.5 years, still below Venezuela and slightly below Bolivia. Much of the demographic decline is related to one of the highest levels of alcoholism in the world, coupled with high rates of premature death. The economic structure is equally fragile and third world. Russia exports oil, natural gas, coal, and other raw materials, and imports everything else. In essence, Russia is a large mining company, a huge gas station with nuclear warheads, which is lending few balls to a post-fossil future. However, foreign sales of war material stand out, which depend more and more on unstable and shameless buyers such as Syria and Venezuela. Russia, however, has handled the temporary fossil fuel bonanza well: its international reserves exceed $600 billion and its domestic debt is less than 20% of GDP. But the fact is that addiction to oil, gas and coal is hard to cure, and Russia is doing little to defossilize its economy.

There is an underlying question and that is, how much can Russia do to destabilize Colombia and eventually use Venezuela to invade us? Keen analyst Andreas Kraemer, several years before Russia’s bloody invasion of Ukraine, wrote: “All countries should prepare for increasingly erratic behavior, an erosion of the state in Russia’s core and periphery, and a high risk of military confrontation. Russia can export instability, but this has no global added value; it is not a profitable project for the post-fossil era.” Putin is not interested nor is he very clear about where Colombia is. What Putin wants is to be a permanent gadfly for the United States. Anything that this gadfly — which has 7,000 warheads — can do to make the Yankees uncomfortable, he will do.

Apostille: the author of this note has heard and read several arguments in favor of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The strangest of all is that Russia cannot have a country on its borders that can be part of NATO. Once Russia annexes Ukraine by blood and fire, one assumes that with this same reasoning they will annex Poland, since it already belongs to NATO. Once incorporated Poland, comes the annexation of Germany… France… Spain… ad nauseam. The Russians are interested in invading only the neighbors.

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