Despite all its oil wealth, Russia may end up being one of the last countries to emerge from the financial crisis. Not only are its banks in shambles, but just yesterday it put the brakes on a 16 year campaign to join the World Trade Organization. Clearly fed up with having to tick off reform boxes for Western powers, Russia’s Vladimir Putin got petulant and told the WTO that Russia would only join if Belarus and Kazakhstan could tag along, too. Given that these countries haven’t even left the starting bloc on WTO admission talks, it’s likely that Russia’s entry will be much delayed – if in fact it ever happens.

That’s bad news, because Russia desperately needs to diversify its economy away from oil, on which it is totally dependant. It’s debatable whether Russia should ever have been a BRIC – as one economist recently said to me, “You could just as easily have stuck Saudi Arabia in there.” The oil hides all manner of ills – Russia’s debt to GDP ratio and deficit figures don’t look as bad as some other countries at the moment, but the minute that oil prices go down, it all goes out the window. Corruption and inefficiency are endemic, and unemployment is rising (at ten percent officially, but probably much higher, especially in industry heavy towns), and the downturn has sparked a number of protests over recent months – just last week, Putin paid a visit to a small factory town where 400 jobless workers blocked a highway for several hours and put on a big show of browbeating local officials and factory owners for not helping workers.

In fact, it’s the Russia central government that’s chiefly at fault. The country needs a wholesale economic overhaul and reform, even in the energy sector, which is amongst the least efficient in the world. The fact that lots of unconventional natural gas is coming online now in the U.S. and Europe should be all the prompting Russia needs to stay the WTO course. When the world no longer needs its energy, it will have even less patience for Russian petulance.