Russia has been flexing its muscles a lot lately, pushing back against international sanctions over its actions in Ukraine and stirring fears that go beyond those of a new Cold War toward the specter of a nuclear conflict.
Amid a war of words over Russian support for rebel forces in eastern Ukraine who have declared their independence in defiance of a Sept. 5 ceasefire, Moscow has been testing NATO air defenses in Europe, sent a fleet to the waters off Australia in time for the G-20 summit Saturday in Brisbane, and even announced it would resume Cold War-era patrols in the Gulf of Mexico.
“Whether it’s the bullying of Ukraine, whether it’s the increasing Russian military aircraft flying into the airspace of Japan or European countries, whether it’s the naval task group which is now in the South Pacific, Russia is being much more assertive now than it has been for a very long time,” Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott said Friday.
Abbott, like many world leaders, repeated the oft-cited concern that Russian President Vladimir Putin is trying to “re-create the lost glories” of his nation’s Soviet and imperial pasts.
But author and geopolitical analyst Peter Zeihan says Russia has a bigger problem that makes Putin’s actions more understandable and more dangerous to world stability: It is facing a demographic disaster.
Russia’s population has been steadily declining since the end of the Cold War in 1991, a trend that is expected to continue over the long term, even though there was a slight increase in 2013. Only 143.8 million people live in the world’s largest country geographically, making it also one of the most sparsely populated.
“The only country in the world that’s declining faster is Ukraine,” Zeihan said. “In five years, the Red Army will only have about half the number of recruits that it does now.”
Zeihan, author of The Accidental Superpower, a book about how geopolitics affects the global environment, said Putin wants to restore the Soviet Union’s borders because they are more defensible, and in the process gather in millions of Russians who found themselves living in newly independent countries after the communist superpower broke up.
“They’re aiming for a slow die-out rather than a fast die-out,” he said.
For example, 60 percent of the 2.4 million people in Crimea — which Russia captured from Ukraine and annexed in March, creating the current crisis — are ethnic Russians. Russia-speakers also predominate in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions of eastern Ukraine, where rebels, backed by supplies of new Russian weapons, have consolidated their control since a Nov. 2 independence vote.
More than a million ethnic Russians live in the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, all of which have been the focus of Russian intimidation — a particularly dangerous situation because all three nations are NATO members. On a visit to the Estonian capital of Tallinn in September, President Obama declared: “We’ll be here for Estonia. We will be here for Latvia. We will be here for Lithuania. You lost your independence once before. With NATO, you will never lose it again.”
Meanwhile, Putin told the official ITAR-TASS news agency in an interview before leaving for the G-20 that the international sanctions against Russia were a violation of international law.
“This is harmful and, of course, it does certain damage to us, but it is also harmful to the United States, because as a matter of fact the entire system of international economic relations is being undermined,” he said.
Moscow also warned France of “serious consequences” on Friday if the first of two Mistral helicopter carriers being built for the Russian navy isn’t delivered by the end of November. The ship was supposed to have been turned over on Friday, but Paris has been under pressure from other NATO allies not to deliver the vessel while Russian aggression against Ukraine continues.
Putin’s gambit, according to Zeihan, is to intimidate Europe into giving him a free hand in the East, while hoping the United States continues to disengage from the continent. So far, he added, it’s working.
Perhaps the only clumsy thing the Russian leader has done was to order military aircraft to resume patrols over the Gulf of Mexico, which was announced Wednesday by Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu.
The risk for Russia, he said, is that such acts will awaken the United States to the need to confront the newly resurgent threat from Moscow. And the risk for Washington is that Putin will continue to push, because he has no choice.
“The U.S. is going to be risking confrontation with a desperate country that’s convinced it’s dying out, because it is,” he said.
