Russia is a nation with yearly medical doctor salaries that average $5,160 to $6,120 while nurses make an average of $2,760 to $3,780 annually. That means a top-end doctor, like a surgeon, is only making about $500 per month, less than the national average of around $650 (the “average” isn’t a useful indicator of actual income, however, because it’s skewed by the bizarre level of income paid to Russia’s super-rich oligarchs). Contrast this with the fact that Moscow was rated two years running as the world’s most expensive city to live in (Russia is on pace this year to exceed 20% annual consumer price inflation, after nearly reaching 12% last year — the inflation rate on basic commodities average people can afford is even higher), and you have Russia’s medical profession in a perilous vice. As a result, many Russian physicians turn to corrupt practices like selling drugs on the black market and demanding bribes from patients in order to make ends meet.

Given that background, you will not be surprised to learn that Russia has only 200,000 of the 600,000 physicians it needs as a nation. Who would want to enter the profession on those terms? Russia “spends only three percent of its GDP on health, a figure that is only half of what it should spend and one that puts Russia near the bottom of developed countries” according to scholar Paul Goble, translating a Russian report by Leonid Roshal, the director of the Moscow Research Institute on Emergency Pediatric Surgery and Traumatology. And of that measly 3%, up to a third will be siphoned off by corruption before it ever reaches those it was intended to support. “Today is a favorable moment for Russia. There are both money and the chance to do something,” says Roshal. Goble reports: “But on the basis of Moscow’s recent actions, he lamented, there is little reason for anyone to expect that any significant increase in funding will occur any time soon.” Russia doesn’t rank in the top 100 world nations for male adult lifespan, and faces one of the world’s worst AIDS crises as well as serious problems with smoking and alcohol fatalities.

Roshal understands that Russia’s dictator Vladimir Putin would rather spend the nation’s fossil fuel proceeds on buzzing America with strategic bombers and helping Iran go nuclear. He knows that a major investment by Putin in healthcare would only create a more vibrant population, one more capable of organizing protest actions against his draconian crackdown on democracy. Putin prefers for Russians to stay weak and sick, thus easier to control, freeing even more funds for his crazed reinvigoration of the cold war.

Incidentally, the situation in the legal profession is little better. Goble points to a recent interview by Igor Trunov, head of the Central Bureau of Lawyers in Moscow, condemning the level of preparation of the country’s lawyers in light of a recent announcement by Moscow State University, the Russian Harvard, that “the diplomas of lawyers trained at the University’s law faculty after 1992 may be declared invalid because of shortcomings in training they received there.” This means that lawyers are in no position, as they might be in more developed countries, to root out corruption and incompetence in the medical profession, making the situation even worse.

I reported on Tuesday that Putin had stated at the NATO summit that Ukraine is “not a state” and has no right to existence independent of Russia — basically the same attitude he takes towards Chechnya. It seems that Putin actually wants to provoke his neighbors, and the world’s most potent military alliance, into a new cold-war conflict even though he himself is without allies, even as his own nation is literally going extinct because of illness it has no ability to treat. The world’s journalists need only get out of bed to be confronted by examples of Putin’s belligerence, but they can search the live-long day and not find a single example of Putin demanding a rise in doctor salaries.