Letters to the Editor | 21 July 2007

Why Russia’s defensive

Sir: The only pertinent fact from Fraser Nelson’s anti-Russia diatribe last week is that the country’s defence budget is 5 per cent that of America’s. (The New Cold War, 14 July). The rest of the article is scaremongering. An evening spent in Moscow should convince anyone that Russia has not left ‘the orbit of the West’, rather that it has embraced our way of life with gusto. Five minutes spent in a supermarket in Saint Petersburg, Saratov or Volgograd nails the lie that ‘the free market has perished in Russia’. And why should not Russian gas companies start to charge market prices for their output, after years of subsidising countries like the Ukraine?

Mr Nelson condemns Russia for having ‘weapons that are deadlier than anything developed by the Soviet Union’. Russian citizens, on the other hand, are probably quite relieved that their military hardware is better now than it was in the late 1980s.