BORDERS: Russia’s borders are long and impossible to defend, prompting the Russians to endlessly expand outward until they hit significant geographic or military resistance.
RESOURCES: Russia is a huge producer of oil and natural gas, and its vast geographies sustain massive mining and even more massive grain production. Much of this activity is seasonal; most Russian territory vacillates between frozen and swampy.
DEMOGRAPHY: The horrific Soviet legacy and the post-Soviet birthrate collapse have fused with skyrocketing mortality fueled by alcoholism, heart disease, violence, tuberculosis, and HIV. Russia is suffering through a complete, multivector, unstoppable demographic collapse.
MILITARY MIGHT: Russia still invests heavily in defense, though much of the hardware is showing its age. Thirty-plus-year-old submarines and an aircraft carrier that habitually catches fire, but impressive tanks and aircraft and the world’s largest nuclear arsenal—Russia’s kit may be old, but it still packs a punch.
ECONOMY: Sanctions and an overreliance on commodity exports have made Russia struggle since the Soviet fall, but Russian geography never supported a successful, industrialized economy.
OUTLOOK: Russia is an aging, insecure, former power determined to make a last stand before it is incapable of doing so. American disengagement from the global scene couldn’t have come at a better time, but the reactivation of Russia’s traditional local foes couldn’t have come at a worse one.
IN A WORD: Panicked.