Russia Is Toast

The population is literally dying off, the country's political development is going backwards, and in the end any success we've seen from the nation has been nothing more than Russia riding the wave of high energy prices.
Russia is Toast: 10 reden waarom

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/we-need-to-boot-russia-out-of-the-brics-2010-1?slop=1#ixzz15GrxYmlm

HIV:
It has been five years since Svetlana Glukhova was diagnosed as HIV-positive, but she says she still has no idea whether she needs drug therapy. Doctors at the only AIDS center in her city do not have the necessary laboratory equipment to decide that.

She does know that even when she took her first AIDS test, the sores on the fingers she once used to inject heroin already were failing to heal.

The United Nations says Russia has the worst AIDS problem in Europe, fueled by ``extraordinarily large numbers of young people who inject drugs." But the disease has spread widely through the population, and more than half of all new cases result from heterosexual intercourse. Officially, 340,000 Russians are infected with HIV or AIDS, but the UN says the number could easily be four to 10 times higher.

Compounding the problem, most Russian victims are young. The prevalence of the illness among young people threatens to add to Russia's demographic meltdown by killing them before they can bring a new generation into the world.