Try ISIS with snow. Or a gigantic Republican red state; imagine the USA without its western and northeastern coastal states.

Historically Russia is a Slavo-Turkic hybrid with an uncodified internal racial pecking order that puts Orthodox ethnic Russians at the top, white Christian Armenians, Poles, Balts and Georgians in the middle, Muslims from the Turkic -Stans, Tatarstan and the Volga region on the next rung down and the indigenous Inuit peoples and Mongolians like the Buryats at the bottom. A year old Twitter thread of Kamil Galeev of the Wilson Center has a precise description of this pecking order in all its nuanced complexity.

Russia is 25% Muslim and its demography points to ethnic Russians becoming a minority within a generation.