Yup, the world is going to hell in a handbasket!

And power mad Putin is pushing it?

He better watch out for the fire breathing dragon singeing his tail, which is more than a match for the bear, except in its nuclear arsenal?

Albeit, the eternally patient never defeated Dragon, has enough of those to wipe out any perceived international enemy, in a first strike scenario!?

However, in a nuclear war, sheer numbers become a liability; and as always, the Russians have vast unpopulated waste as their natural advantage.

That said, let me say this, a dictatorial, power mad, sabre rattling Putin, is heavily reliant on a chinese market, for oil and gas sales, which is all that supports his military spending or military budget?

And given china's vast untapped shale deposits,which they're tapping into as fast as they can, perhaps for not very long?
Rhrosty.

Interesting, but hardly surprising, BRICS always seemed a fantasy, probably only China will prevail in the long term. So many experts in the early 90s really seemed to believe that Russia would become a prosperous liberal democracy, that was another fantasy,

The acronym 'BRICS' will quickly be forgotten.

Throsty
Everyday you destroy the potential of On Line Opinion to provide a vehicle for informed , rational debate with wild invective like, “a dictatorial, power mad, sabre rattling Putin”. That this important issue has not attracted another response is, I would suggest, because many others have also withdrawn from participating.
Instead of being intimidating and destructive, why don’t you contribute evidence based articles to OLO, perhaps arguing why (with evidence, not rhetoric) “the world is going to hell in a handbasket” ( a dystopia I share).

Mac
Please name the “many experts in the early 90s[who] really seemed to believe that Russia would become a prosperous liberal democracy”. Do you mean the backers of Yeltsin who handed over the great enterprises to oligarchs, brought Russia to its knees and inflicted enormous suffering on most Russians. They certainly did not share this “fantasy”, and now, other than the tiny minorities in Moscow and St Petersburg, Russians don’t want the Bush/ Clinton dynastic millionaire type “liberal democracy”.
Russia desperately needs reform, but the aggressive US, NATO and EU (supported by ignorant opinion) is driving it to embrace China and even further authoritarian behaviour

Financially speaking, the USSR was never in a position to compete with the US alone, much less the combined West. Because of its centralised economy it was able to concentrate on developing weapons -- including nuclear power -- and producing propaganda at the expense of human rights and human welfare. It also stole a good deal of technology and resources from its vassal states, and lied unblushingly and at great length about its wealth and progress. But apart from weapons and space technology, it was falling rapidly behind the West from 1930 onwards. Gorbachev's great achievement was to make that so transparently obvious to everyone that not even the Communist Party could go on pretending.

If Soviet power had not collapsed in 1990, by now we would be looking at an economic implosion several orders of magnitude greater than that of Greece. I'm no fan of Putin, but merely to keep Russia running and solvent into the 21st Century has been a fairly major achievement. I can understand why his electors are afraid of the alternatives.

Leslie,

To clarify,

(1) I never indicated I supported what happened to the Russian economy and people after the collapse of the Communist system, many Russians are probably worse off economically, particularly pensioners and state employees. I realise that many members of the previous Soviet nomemklatura transformed themselves into the new capitalist oligarchy.

(2 ) I remember reading Francis Fukuyama's "The Last Man and the End of History" in the early 90s, Fukuyama predicted the universal triumph of capitalist liberal democracy, I was very sceptical at the time, no one would make those claims in 2015.

"Russia desperately needs reform, but the aggressive US, NATO and EU (supported by ignorant opinion) is driving it to embrace China and even further authoritarian behaviour"

(3) Don't blame the big bad West for Russia's slide into authoritarian rule, the country has no democratic traditions whatsoever. Actually I can understand the Russians' strategic concerns in regard to the Sevastopol, a valuable warm water port, however there appears to be an alarming irredentist aspect to current Russian policy.