Russia is only a regional power

And Russia IS SO a cultural super-power.

Much of the slavic-speaking world (300 million people in more than a dozen countries) look to Russia as a cultural leader.

It is never reported this way in western media, but much of the Christian world outside of the west sees Putin as its de facto spokesperson. Putin has been much more outspoken about his Christian faith--moreso than any US president or European head of state in the past several decades. Putin's rationale for Russian involvement in Syria is that Assad is the only ME leader who actively protects the Christian minority (10%) from Islamist oppression.

The NATO war on Serbia in the 1990s prolonged by Russian involvement in the conflict. I was working in Europe at the time, and Russian TV showed UN troops blowing up churches and moving orthodox Christians out of their ancestral lands, to 'create a refuge' for Islamists in the region. UN/NATO oversaw the removal of (orthodox) Christians from the area, to create a muslim majority by exactly the kind of "ethnic cleansing" that Serbia had been accused of.

Western media is monolithic in its portrayal of Putin as a KGB bogeyman. His outspoken faith in never mentioned. But his 'post-atheist' leadership of Russia is a major reason why most of the pro-islamist terrorism of the past two decades has targeted Russia rather than Western Europe and the US.

If you ask people in Sub-saharan Africa what recent leaders they most admire, they will almost always answer George W. Bush and Vlad Putin.