WHO WILL BREAK IT TO THE rEALISTS?:

Russia has huge political and economic problems, says Dmitry Medvedev (Luke Harding, 9/11/09, guardian.co.uk)

Russia's president, Dmitry Medvedev, has admitted that his country faces appalling structural problems including a weak democracy, shrinking population, and a non-performing economy.

In a withering assessment of the country, Medvedev avoided criticising Vladimir Putin, the man in charge for most of the last decade and now prime minister, but said Russia had so far failed to fulfil its enormous potential.

The country faced vast social challenges, he said, including corruption, a feeble civil society, terrorism, alcoholism, and smoking. Russia was also in the grip of a poverty-fuelled insurgency across its North Caucasus, he added.

"An ineffective economy, a semi-Soviet social sphere, a weak democracy, negative demographic trends and an unstable Caucasus. These are very big problems even for a state like Russia," Medevdev wrote in his official blog.

It's a mark of little Democrats understand the world that the UR has wasted so much time and energy trying to appease them. W's closest adviser was a Sovietologist and he still began his administration by disposing of the ABM treaty and blithely ignored their objections to the liberation of Iraq.

Posted by Orrin Judd at September 11, 2009 5:47 AM