Putin may be a 'paper tiger but he's got Nato worried

Trump put his finger on what some call ‘Russophrenia’ - the belief that the country is about to implode militarily and economically. But its president still has a masterplan that shouldn’t be underestimated, warns

- Owen Matthews

Is Vladimir Putin gearing up his war machine to attack Europe once he's defeated Ukraine? Or is Russia, in fact, as Donald Trump wrote this week, “a paper tiger”? In his strongest-worded condemnation of Putin yet, Trump this week attacked Russia for “fighting aimlessly for three and a half years in a war that should have taken a real military power less than a week to win”. Trump added that “Putin and Russia are in BIG economic trouble” and claimed that Russians are finding it “almost impossible to get gasoline”.

In calling out the Kremlin’s failure to defeat Ukraine - a country with a quarter of Russia’s population and an economy 10 times smaller - Trump has put his finger on what some analysts call “Russophrenia”. This is the paradoxical belief that Russia is collapsing economically and militarily and is about to implode - but simultaneously also represents a deadly strategic threat to the Baltics and Nato. Logically, both cannot be true at the same time.

Trump’s “paper tiger” slur depends, of course, on who you’re comparing Russia to. Obviously, by every basic metric, Russia is colossally outgunned and outmanned by the might of Nato – which has 3.5 million active personnel compared to Russia’s 1.32 million, 22,000 military aircraft to Russia’s 4,800, and more than 2,200 warships versus the Russian navy’s fewer than 800.

But while such crude arithmetic might be relevant to armchair warriors wargaming a full-scale conventional war in Europe, the key to Putin’s military successes in Chechnya, Georgia, Syria, Crimea and against Ukrainian forces in Donbas in 2014-15 has been his ability to concentrate forces against a much smaller enemy and win quick victories.