Putin's sabre-rattling rhetoric

With just two weeks to go before the presidential elections in Russia, candidate and current prime minister Vladimir Putin has announced plans to invest the equivalent of 600 billion euros in Russia's armed forces. Among other things he wants to purchase 400 intercontinental missiles, 600 fighter aircraft, 2,300 tanks and 20 submarines by 2020. This is all about posing as a super power, the liberal-conservative daily Corriere della Sera writes mocking Putin: "The statements are only for domestic consumption, although they are also meant to impress the international 'partners' - with modest success. … The West knows only too well that such announcements have been made in the past without any follow-up. And after the coma of the 1980s and 1990s the apparatus of the military industry appears to have turned into a bottomless pit. Several attempts to renew it have failed miserably. And Russia also cut a poor figure in its most recent attempts to play a role in space research [the Mars probe Phobos Grunt crashed]. Nonetheless, a nice adversary overseas can do wonders in difficult times."

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