Russia has a strong military, especially its nuclear arsenal. One of the biggest advantages the Russians have over most of the world are submarines that can launch nuclear missiles. That's dam near close to impossible to defend against and the whole world knows it. But as a country, and a world-power, they are a shadow of what they once were because they spent all that dam money on the nukes. Those ain't cheap my friends. Guess who just figured that out? Rocket Man & Iran. It's not hard to get them stop building those because they are immensely costly to build, test, protect and maintain, etc, etc, etc. You can't just build them like an M5 and leave it sitting around. No sir. Way more goes into them than that!

Russia, they need to sound big and bad because on one level they are --the nukes-- and on the other level they are not --the ground war. Mostly they just like to scare the border countries so they can keep using them for whatever they want.