The bear is back. That's what all too many Russia-watchers have been saying since Russian troops steamrolled Georgia in August, warning that the country's strongman, Vladimir Putin, was clawing his way back towards superpower status.
The new Russia's resurgence has been fuelled - quite literally - by windfall profits from gas and oil, a big jump in defence spending and the cocky attitude on such display during the mauling of Georgia, its US-backed neighbour to the south. Many now believe that the powerful Russian bear of the Cold War years is coming out of hibernation.
Not so fast. Predictions that Russia will again become powerful, rich and influential ignore some simply devastating problems at home that block any march to power. Sure, Russia's army could take tiny Georgia. But Putin's military is still in tatters, armed with rusting weaponry and staffed with indifferent recruits.
Meanwhile, a declining population is robbing the military of a new generation of soldiers. Russia's economy is almost totally dependent on the price of oil. And, worst of all, it's facing a public health crisis that verges on the catastrophic.
To be sure, the skylines of Russia's cities are chock-a-block with cranes. Industrial lofts are now the rage in Moscow, Russian tourists crowd far-flung locales from Thailand to the Caribbean, and Russian moguls are snapping up real estate and art in London. But behind the shiny surface, Russian society may actually be weaker than it was even during Soviet times.
While Russia has capitalised impressively on its oil industry, the volatility of the world oil market means that Putin cannot count on a long-term pipeline of cash flowing from high oil prices.
Something even larger is blocking Russia's march. Recent decades, most notably since the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, have seen an appalling deterioration in the health of the Russian population, anchoring Russia not in the forefront of developed countries but among the most backward of nations.
This is a tragedy of huge proportions - but not a particularly surprising one, at least to me. I followed population, health and environmental issues in the Soviet Union for decades. I've visited Russia more than 50 times over the years, so I can say from firsthand experience that this national calamity isn't happening suddenly. It's happening inexorably.
UN figures
According to UN figures, the average life expectancy for a Russian man is 59 years - putting the country at about 166th place in the world longevity sweepstakes, one notch above Gambia.
For women, the picture is somewhat rosier: They can expect to live, on average, 73 years, barely beating out the Moldovans. But there are still some 126 countries where they could expect to live longer. And the gap between expected longevity for men and for women - 14 years - is the largest in the developed world.
So what's killing the Russians? All the usual suspects - HIV/Aids, tuberculosis, alcoholism, cancer, cardiovascular and circulatory diseases, suicides, smoking, traffic accidents - but they occur in alarmingly large numbers, and Moscow has neither the resources nor the will to stem the tide.
On the other end of the lifeline, the news isn't much better. Russia's birth rate has been declining for more than a decade. And, sadly, the health of Russia's newborns is quite poor, with about 70 per cent of them experiencing complications at birth.
Last summer, Peter Piot, the head of UNAIDS, said that bringing Russia's HIV/Aids epidemic under control was "a matter of political leadership and of changing the policy". He might just as well have been talking about the much larger public health crisis that threatens this vast country.
But the policies seem unlikely to change as the bear lumbers along, driven by disastrously misplaced priorities and the blindingly unrealistic expectations of a resentment-driven political leadership. Moscow remains bent on ignoring the devastating truth: The nation is not just sick but dying.
Murray Feshbach is a senior scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars and a research professor emeritus at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service.
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