The notions of "the West" and "the rest" may have been overworked recently, but they give us a way of thinking about the issue. The West may still be viewed as a fairly cohesive group, with its membership represented in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, and its spokesmen generally on the same wavelength in G20 gatherings. The US, the EU and Japan, plus Australia and Canada, are all recognised OECD nations. Their combined GDP in 2012 was $42,245 billion, more than 20 times that of Russia. Russia may dominate world maps, but it is an economic pygmy compared with the developed nations as a bloc.

Putin has overseen large rises in defence expenditure, apparently convinced that extra soldiers and weapons enable Russia to project more power on the international scene. His government has also tried to accede to the OECD, which requires that members tick a number of boxes (respect for property rights, acceptance of international patent law and the like), but so far Russia has been turned down. The intervention in  Crimea surely means that OECD membership is out of the question for Russia, perhaps for many years. 

The OECD nations have been at peace for  almost 70 years. They tend to see eye to eye in international negotiations and are held together by a number of longstanding alliances, of which Nato is only one. Expenditure on weaponry is not a clever way to achieve soft power in today's world, but how much would Russia need to spend to match the OECD bloc? Typically nowadays an OECD nation spends about 3 per cent of GDP on defence. Russia would have to spend 60 per cent of GDP to match that and, even then, it would have no guarantee that its expenditure was of the same technical standard and military effectiveness. 

Putin's aggression may or may not recover Crimea for Russia. But a safe prediction is that its long-run effects will be bad for Russia economically and will postpone the catch-up of its living standards to Western European levels. Almost 80 years have passed since left-wing thinkers were impressed by Stalin's industrialisation of Russia. Their intellectual heirs should note that today Russia's exports of manufactured goods are a fraction of those of South Korea or Mexico, and it will now fall further behind.