Russia (Russian Federation)
RU · Eastern Europe / Northern Asia · Major regional power · UN Security Council permanent member (P5) · Largest nuclear arsenal
Russia is a permanent UN Security Council member and the world’s largest nuclear power by warhead count, with an estimated 5,580 total warheads (FAS, 2024). Despite a GDP roughly the size of Spain’s, Russia exercises global influence disproportionate to its economic weight through its nuclear arsenal, permanent UNSC veto, energy exports, and willingness to use military force.
Russia’s February 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine — the largest land war in Europe since WWII — has fundamentally restructured European security, triggered the largest NATO expansion since the Cold War (Finland 2023, Sweden 2024), and produced the most severe Western sanctions regime ever imposed on a major economy. Russia has shifted to a full war economy, with defence and security spending consuming approximately 40% of the federal budget by 2024.
Note on economic data: Russian financial statistics should be treated with caution. Sanctions, capital controls, rouble volatility, and deliberate opacity in state reporting make independent verification of GDP and spending figures difficult. The $2.25 trillion GDP estimate reflects IMF modelling but carries significant uncertainty.
Russia leads the Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO), though the alliance has been significantly weakened: Armenia froze its participation and suspended treaty compliance following Russia’s failure to support Yerevan against Azerbaijan in Nagorno-Karabakh, rendering the CSTO effectively inactive outside Central Asia. Russia has deepened its partnerships with China (the “no limits” partnership signed February 2022), Iran (Shahed drone transfers to Russia for use in Ukraine), and North Korea. A Russia–North Korea comprehensive strategic partnership signed June 2024 includes mutual defence provisions; North Korean troop deployments to Russian territory and Iranian ballistic missile transfers are now confirmed operational facts.
Russia has restructured its economy around the war in Ukraine. Defence and security spending reached approximately 8.5–9% of GDP in 2024 — consuming roughly 40% of the entire Russian federal budget (SIPRI est., 2025) — the highest proportion since the Soviet era. Russia maintains the world’s largest nuclear arsenal with approximately 5,580 total warheads, of which approximately 1,710 are deployed (FAS, 2024). The Russian Armed Forces have approximately 1.15 million active personnel, supplemented by mass mobilisation — Russia announced partial mobilisation of 300,000 reservists in September 2022 and has continued recruitment drives since.
Russia possesses the world’s largest tank fleet and largest artillery inventory. The war in Ukraine has significantly degraded Russian conventional forces — Western assessments estimate Russia has lost thousands of armoured vehicles and hundreds of thousands of casualties, though exact figures are disputed and Russian reporting is unreliable.
Ukraine: Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, following its 2014 annexation of Crimea and support for separatists in Donbas. Russia has formally annexed four Ukrainian oblasts (Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, Kherson) — annexations rejected by the UN General Assembly (143–5 vote). The war has produced the largest European refugee crisis since WWII.
Georgia: Russia recognised the breakaway Georgian regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia as independent states following the 2008 war. No UN member other than Nicaragua, Venezuela, Syria, and Nauru has recognised them.
Moldova (Transnistria): Russia maintains approximately 1,500 troops in the Transnistria region of Moldova — an unrecognised breakaway territory — in defiance of Moldovan sovereignty and repeated calls for withdrawal.
Arctic: Russia is the dominant Arctic power by territory and military presence, operating 40+ icebreakers (more than all other states combined) and claiming an extended continental shelf overlapping with Canadian and Danish/Greenlandic claims.
Russia under Putin is the paradigm case for offensive realism — the theory (associated with Mearsheimer) that great powers are inherently aggressive, seeking to maximise relative power and eliminate threats on their borders. Mearsheimer himself argued NATO expansion provoked the Ukraine crisis, though most scholars counter this excuses Russian aggression and ignores Ukrainian agency. Constructivists study Russia’s foreign policy as driven by great power identity — Putin’s rhetoric consistently invokes Russia’s historical status as a great power (derzhava) that the West has attempted to humiliate. The 2022 invasion has also renewed interest in democratic peace theory: Russia represents the clearest post-Cold War case of an autocratic state launching a major war of territorial conquest against a neighbouring democracy.
- 1FAS, Status of World Nuclear Forces — fas.org
- 2SIPRI, Military Expenditure Database 2024 — sipri.org
- 3UN General Assembly, Resolution ES-11/4 — Territorial Integrity of Ukraine — undocs.org
- 4IMF, World Economic Outlook Database 2024 — imf.org
- 5NATO, NATO’s Response to Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine — nato.int