Reuters Two decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia's failure to cultivate power on the global stage using trade and diplomacy is forcing it back into its costly Cold War addiction to missiles and guns. While Western countries cut military spending to deal with the global financial crisis, Russia plans to spend 20 trillion roubles ($611 billion) on defense through 2020 — a figure even Vladimir Putin said he was “frightened” to speak aloud. The boost in military spending will add three percent of gross domestic product to government spending over the next three years and could be a tough task at a time of financial fragility when investment is needed across Russia's oil-dependent economy. The aim is to revive its rusting armed forces and rebuild political muscle in the band of ex-Soviet states to its south, an energy-rich and strategically important region where China and the West also vie for influence. “The Russian authorities understand the country is doomed to be the kind of power that needs military might,” said Ruslan Pukhov, director of Moscow-based military think tank CAST. “'Soft power' doesn't work for us. We need people to be afraid of us and we seem to be unable to find a proper substitute for military power,” he said. Although Russia has sought to burnish its image abroad by quintupling its annual foreign aid budget to $500 million in the past four years, it still trails far behind others in the Group of Eight industrial powers on that score and is struggling to find the softer bargaining chips of Western diplomacy. The United States had the biggest amount of aid spending in 2009 in dollar terms, some $28 billion. The call for military reform, which Russia has repeated for more than a decade, stems from problems in conflicts stretching from failure in Afghanistan in the 1980s to the embarrassments suffered in a five-day war with Georgia in 2008. Reflecting lessons learned from the difficulties Western militaries have faced from Afghanistan to Libya, Russia's modernization is forcing it away from the ‘unthinkable' nuclear exchange that dominated Cold War thinking. Instead Moscow now wants to replace 70 percent of its weapons by the end of the decade and create a nearly fully contract army made of lighter and more mobile units that can defend against and attack smaller, more elusive enemies. New focus on the military may come at the expense of President Dmitry Medvedev's campaign to invest in new sectors and diversify the country's oil-reliant economy, a plan which critics say is failing to gain traction in the halls of power. “Modernization, as a plan, failed to sell,” said Pavel Baev, a Russian analyst with the Peace Research Institute Oslo. “It's not going anywhere so we have chosen hard power once again.” __
