: re: President Vladimir Putin’s Dangerous Moves

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine 
Date: Thu, Apr 16, 2015 at 9:02 AM
Subject: re: President Vladimir Putin’s Dangerous Moves
To: "letters@nytimes.com"

To the Editor:

  If one counts tanks, or subs, or missiles, Russia is a great world power; by any other metric, mr. Putin is running an economy the size of Brazil's and is running it into the ground.  So of  course, he wants to militarize any disagreement. And it is in the world's interest to marginalize him.

    Mikhail Gorbachev famously acknowledged that the Soviet Union couldn't afford to spend endlessly in a stupid arms-race. We must take that lesson to heart, even if Mr. Putin does not.

Barry Haskell Levine

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/16/opinion/president-vladimir-putins-dangerous-moves.html?_r=0