Russia: The Dying Giant
I've been saying, and writing, for some years now that Russia is a dying giant. The Russian bear doesn't have the muscle it did a few decades back. It's sick, it's losing its teeth, and it's broke. The Russian people aren't having kids, and President Putin's Ukraine adventure isn't going as he probably initially thought it would.
But even the vestige of what was a global superpower, back in the days of the Soviet Union, can still be powerful. Russia still has the world's second-largest nuclear arsenal. They are still designing and building some of the newer military technologies, like drones. And here's the thing about bears: A bear that is wounded and dying may be one of the most dangerous creatures around.
Emzari Gelashvili is a former member of the Georgian (as in, the former Soviet "republic," not the American state) Parliament and has served in Georgia's Ministry of Defense, Ministry of State Security, and Ministry of Internal Affairs. His specialty was Russia and Iran, and he has penned a lengthy and worthwhile analysis of Russia's state at RealClearDefense. It's worth reading, and he reinforces some of my own points about Russia.
Western security discourse is dominated by a single fear: a powerful, aggressive Russia expanding its military reach across Europe. Billions of dollars flow into think tanks, defense budgets, and political campaigns built on this premise. But what if the fundamental premise is wrong — not because Russia is benign, but because it is collapsing? What if the most dangerous Russia is not the one that conquers, but the one that dies?
Russia's first big problem is one that it shares with much of the modern, developed world; as the old saying goes, the future belongs to those who show up for it, and Russia appears to be opting out.
Demographics
In 1991, Russia's population stood at 148.5 million people. In 1992, for the first time in peacetime history, the number of deaths in Russia exceeded the number of births. Demographers named this inflection point the 'Russian Cross' — the moment when the death curve crossed above the birth curve and a sustained demographic decline became structurally embedded in Russian society. It was not caused by war, plague, or famine in the traditional sense. It was caused by systemic despair.
Note that date. A lot of this started with the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the departure of the Soviet puppet "republics" - like Georgia and Ukraine. Mortality in Russia spiked to the point where the average life expectancy of a Russian man was on a par with the poorer parts of sub-Saharan Africa. Generations of Russian subjects saw their savings wiped out when the Soviet state banking system collapsed. And the Russian birth rate collapsed as well and never recovered to the replacement rate. Add to that the loss of much of a generation of yung men into Putin's Ukrainian meat grinder, and you're looking at a demographic disaster.
Finally, the Russian people who can leave started leaving. They went to Israel, they went to Europe, they went to America, and bear in mind that the Russians who were most able to leave were the ones who were vital in rebuilding any semblance of an economy. The start of the Russo-Ukrainian War speed-boosted this, as a generation of young men left for places like Serbia, Armenia, and Finland to escape conscription.
Economics
Between 2014 and 2025, Russia's economy grew at an average annual rate of approximately 1.5 percent. Over the same period, prices rose by 77 percent. Russians in 2025 were poorer in real terms than they were in 2014 — before a single Ukraine-related sanction was imposed. Of 53 developed economies ranked by economic efficiency, Russia places 51st. Employment in the machine-building sector has fallen from 4 million to 440,000 — a nearly tenfold decline. Light manufacturing employment has fallen by two-thirds. Growth sectors are couriers and security guards.
For a nation to be truly prosperous requires a robust manufacturing sector. Russia is losing that. Oh, it's not gone yet; they are still building weapons, most notably drones and other small, cheap (in military terms) tech. And inflation, in part due to the collapse of the ruble, in part because of the massive spending on Putin's Ukraine adventure, has hit hard; Russians are now spending almost 40 percent of their incomes on food and other basic essentials; the comparable figure in the United States is about 13 percent.
Our "poor" people in the United States are better off than what passes for the middle class in Russia.
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Nuclear Weapons
Russia possesses approximately 6,000 nuclear warheads. The threat of their use has paralyzed Western decision-making at every critical juncture. The strategy is explicit — 'escalate to de-escalate': use the threat of nuclear escalation to deter conventional adversaries and extract political concessions. The strategy has worked. Western governments have repeatedly limited military assistance to Ukraine, declined to authorize the use of Western weapons against Russian territory, and moderated their strategic objectives.
But there is a question Western policymakers have been reluctant to ask publicly: how many of those 6,000 warheads are actually operational?
Ay, that's the rub. Nuclear weapons are not items one builds and sticks away in a warehouse against the day they may be needed. They are surprisingly delicate and require regular maintenance. The fissile material, enriched uranium or plutonium, degrades slowly, but it happens, and must be periodically renewed to regain full strength for the device. The tritium fuel for a fusion device degrades even faster, with a half-life of a little over 12 years. And it's not clear that Russia has been maintaining all of these weapons. Russia is going broke. Railroads are collapsing. Essential infrastructure, like roads, are not being maintained.
But some of those warheads probably will work, even so. And that's the real concern.
Desperate Measures
Consider the state of Russia today: A dying state, in the throes of an economic and demographic decline. Under the heel of a president, Vladimir Putin, a former Colonel in the KGB, who longs for the heady days of the Soviet Union, and who appears to be growing increasingly irrational as he ages. And Russia still has thousands of nuclear warheads. If only 10 percent of them work, that's 600 devices, many of them powerful thermonuclear devices, that are functional.
As late as the late 1980s, our fears of the Soviet Union were of Soviet military might; we faced, and trained for, the possibility of thousands of Soviet tanks storming into Western Europe, supported by massed artillery and heavy air support. The Red Army of World War II was a blunt instrument but an effective one; when they came at you, they came at you with the whole inventory, and that's what us old Cold War types were worried about. Now, though? The nuclear arsenal may be all that Russia has left to fight a major-scale war with.
Mr. Gelashvili presents a rational solution:
The goal should not be Russia's destruction. The goal should be preventing a desperate regime from concluding that catastrophe is its only remaining option — because a regime that reaches that conclusion, in possession of even a fraction of a nuclear arsenal, presents dangers that dwarf any outcome achievable through managed transition.
Sun Tzu wrote: "Build your opponent a golden bridge to retreat across." Perhaps that is the answer for Russia. The alternative may be for Russia, in the throes of collapse, to start lashing out at its neighbors, even at the United States - and that lashing out may well include nuclear weapons. That's not something anyone should want to contemplate. Desperate men with nuclear weapons could well unleash a holocaust.
