[_dps]

Russia provides something like 20% of global wheat supply, something like 15% of global agricultural supplement input, and something like 12.5% of global oil/gas. They also have an enormous intellectual human capital history — the soviet era physicists and mathematicians were definitely peers to their western counterparts, which is to say nothing of their literature. And finally, they have top-tier homegrown armaments in nuclear, submarines, ICBMs, fighter aircraft, and so on.

I think any metric (e.g. GDP) that reduces this multidimensional situation to "mostly irrelevant" is probably saying more about the metric than about the reality on the ground.

[jdrc]

By that metric greece should be a superpower. They have the world's 1st navy too.

It doesnt work that way. Russia is not irrelevant, but almost-irrelevant. It can be cut off from the global economy without disastrous results

[gumby]

They are far far from an imperial power though, and haven’t really been one since the mid sixties, perhaps earlier. They should just face the music as onetime apex predator Britain has. Italians are proud of their Roman forebears but have no pretensions of contemporary imperial greatness. Likewise Turkey.