Total personnel strength has shrunk from 5 million to little more than 1 million The army

Total personnel strength has shrunk from 5 million to little more than 1 million The army was humiliated in Chechnia. Russia retains a moderately efficient navy and submarine deterrent, but the airforce has crumbled; flying standards are now “below basic safety levels, let alone combat efficiency”, wrote the respected International Institute for Strategic Studies last year. Shorn of its military threat, therefore, cannot Russia simply be ignored ? After all, it has returned to its proper place in history’s scheme of things – a large European power, currently going through a very bad patch. So why not let the place stew in its own juice? What, after all, can the West do? Money, as the latest squandering of $5bn of IMF money to defend an indefensible exchange rate proves, is not the answer.But this argument is not only unfair, it is untenable. It is unfair because to dismiss Russia now is to overlook the extraordinary double revolution under way Yes, it is in a mess.

But its importance to the real global economy, other than as a supplier of raw materials, is, in reality, quite minimal. Only for Germany among the major economic powers is Russia an important trading partner.In political and military terms the picture is just as grim. At least until Mikhail Gorbachev loosened the reins, the Kremlin was synonymous with omnipotence. Putting a figure on Russia’s gross domestic product is well nigh impossible. Only the stoical fortitude of ordinary Russians has enabled them to tolerate suffering that, in any other European country, would have brought bloody revolution.Just as the Soviet Union before it, Russia has an economy which subtracts value and functions largely by barter The difference now is that its borders have opened.

Much of the country’s riches and many of the best of its minds have migrated abroad, probably never to return. Things were bad enough when I left Moscow at the beginning of 1991, when the demise of a superpower was a matter of a few months away. Even then there were queues and shortages in the capital and appalling privations in the provinces. Since then, output has dropped by 40 per cent and investment, the seed corn of future output, has fallen by 75 per cent. In whole sectors of industry, workers go for months without pay. Just conceivably, the present occupants of the Kremlin might pull off the feat But this time their weapon is weakness, not strength. Or, put another way, Russia both does not matter – and yet matters enormously.On the eve of the new millennium, Russia, in relative terms, is perhaps as weak as it has ever been in all the centuries of its existence as a nation state.

About 10 per cent of applications are granted, and the rest go to court. Even if the decision in court is rejected, the asylum-seeker can stay on, in effect, indefinitely, as the appeal process suspends the rejection.”Whether or not illegal immigrants claim asylum, Hungarian officials and border guards are preparing for a massive increase in the number of migrants, as EU membership draws closer. Then the front line in the war against people-smuggling will shift to Hungary’s borders with Romania, Yugoslavia and Ukraine.”When Hungary joins it will have borders with non-member states, so of course a lot more people will head for Hungary, partly because our standard of living will rise. And then once someone enters Hungary they will be able to travel freely in the EU.”It is ironic that back in the summer of 1989 it was the same stretch of border that Ibrahim and his family tried unsuccessfully to sneak through, which was torn open by the then Communist government. That opening released an outpouring of tens of thousands of East German refugees, and spelled the end of the Iron Curtain, the Communist bloc and, ultimately, the Soviet Union itself.But now that border is, for many fleeing refugees, the final, uncrossable frontier.. “THEY’RE VICIOUS, they’re cunning, they’re randy and, interestingly, they have their own sophisticated honour system based on the Shing Fu Commandments of Samurai warriors,” a Ministry of the Environment spokesman revealed yesterday when I rang for an update on events that have had families in the New Forest barricading themselves in. “But frankly the last thing we want is for people going around seeing the mink as Beelzebub in a small fur coat.”

“But they’ve already mugged a fisherman.”
“Yes, they learn very quickly.