I should add that some of the students in my first-year Russian class had no previous foreign-language study at all, and many had only studied Spanish or French, with their inflections that are overall much simpler than in Russian. (I had an advantage because in high school I'd studied Latin, which is even more heavily inflected than Russian -- so I was already painfully familiar with the concept of case-declension, for example.)
I'm not sure that French and Spanish have fewer inflections than Russian. how many forms does a spanish verb have? Don't forget that obligatory, inseperable unstressed pronouns are a part of the verb, in fact.
Latin verbs have more forms have more forms, but the noun declension is much more regular than in Russian.