What the hell, this long thread is making me nostalgic and it's been too long since I've gotten on a high horse and tried to but my way back into an argument.

To drag this argument back to Russia's economic and military condition, and since I know little about the latter that mostly means the former, I don't know if your stances necessarily differ that much. Yes, Russia has a respectable enough GDP per person (total GDP isn't too meaningful as a measure) - multiple times that of Ukraine, and that gap wasn't nearly as big at the time the Soviet Union fell apart. On the other hand, a very big part of that consists of oil and gas (I see numbers between 60% and 70% of Russian exports), and the corruption is bad, even worse than in other major developing countries such as the rest of the BRIC.

Speaking from personal experience, which means the chemical industry, I would say there are certainly well-run Russian companies which are internationally competitive due to good management and Russia's advantage of having had a mostly healthy and well-educated population for many decades, instead of having to play catch-up with the West on that like most other "developing" nations. On the other hand there are also many companies who may still be exporting, thanks to Russia's wealth in oil, gas and minerals and its industrial legacy, but are inefficient and incompetent to a degree that would have put them in bankruptcy ages ago in either the West or most other developing countries who lack the oil & gas riches. Russia is, to a large extent, coasting on its natural resources and its old Soviet factories. Which is not sustainable in the long run, but then their rather plutocratic governing class doesn't seem too concerned with the long run (even if it's not as bad as Ukraine's, in either plutocracy or shortsightedness). So in that sense, yes, their economy is "crap", and considering that their advantages over their rivals in health care and education are partially balanced by the disadvantage of sharing the West's demographic issues, it's indeed hard to rank them among the economic powerhouses of the future at the rate they are going.

And in political terms, their direct sphere of influence suffers from much the same problems they do, often even magnified (you have some dealings with Kazakhstan, don't you?), and looks like it will only lose relevance as it goes along, too. China is an ally of convenience, nothing more, and outside that I don't see Russia having too much influence - they don't really have anything that impresses other countries or makes them an inspiration, the way Europe, the US, China and some smaller countries like Canada or South Korea all do in their different ways.