Possibly, but not entirely obviously. European Russia (as well as Ukraine, and I expect, but have not explicitly heard, Belarus) has reams of arable land suitable for many crops (if not all, e.g. you need relatively hardy varieties of grapes) with extremely good soil (something that current biotech can’t really reproduce, only create subpar workarounds for, or so biologists tell me). It’d already be enough to feed the rest of Europe if not more, if only the Soviet Union had not repeatedly and systematically burned out any trace of initiative or entrepreneurial spirit in the agricultural workers. There is now some development (if with a strong criminal tang to it), but the Russian village is, to put it bluntly, dying. You could call it “flyover country”, I guess, except there’s hardly any local air traffic, etiher.

It’s not hard to see: board a (non-express) train from Moscow to St. Petersburg, get off on a small station of your choice somewhere in the middle, the kind that has a couple of platforms if that, then take one of the (cheap) local taxis to a random local settlement that’s not on the railroad. Stay there for several days. The people you’ll see will be fundamentally lovely, but most will be one or more of over 60, deep into the bottle, or only there until they can leave for what passes for a larger settlement. (Stay away from the local disco, though, and don’t expect anybody to speak anything but Russian.)

Or at least that’s how I learned it.

All of this is to say that the main thing keeping Russian agricultural development down is disintegrating infrastructure and a horrid business environment, not an inhospitable climate.

(If you’re wondering why I’m overlooking the enormous three fourths of the country that are known under the unassuming name of the “Asian part”, the simple answer is—with apologies to the wonderful inhabitants of Novosibirsk and many other places—not that many people live there; 20% of the already pretty sparse population, in fact. So if you’re looking at all of those humongous tracts of land and thinking what life would be like if they were used for agriculture, think again. The problem is not that it’s cold there on average, necessarily, even if it is in many parts—the problem is that it’s very continental there, and there is no friendly neighbourhood body of water to even things out. Wikipedia tells me Novosibirsk and Omsk are about as far north as Ontario and Newcastle-upon-Tyne, while Chita and Irkutsk are even further south. There’s also only the one railroad, with a rugged 4x4 your only hope of getting to most other places, and the soil sucks. If it thaws out, which would of course be disastrous in terms of greenhouse gases, it would still suck, only in a more squishy fashion. Can’t farm it, can’t quarry it, can’t build upon it, which is why people hardly ever do. My God, it’s full of empty space.)

As a final note, looking at Russia as an adversary ... serves to tickle the fancy of the powerful arseholes here, of course, but looks kind of silly to me TBH. There’s a lot of good people and interesting stuff happening, but the population is half that of the US and the GDP is less than a tenth. I mean, come on. Not in third world territory, yet, but getting there, definitely. Russia is not an all-powerful boogieman, except in the fever dreams it has on its sickbed. Even if it still contains enough spite to ruin your day repeatedly (as well as enough brilliance to carry the world forward for years).