This is a good article it paints the Russian populace or at least enough of it believing in a mirror image of Trump's 'Make Russia Great Again'. I believe with the fall of the SU muscovites and others at least got their crappy soviet 'council flats' and their 600sqm of the countryside where they can build shacks, homes, allotments dachas etc effectively for free whilst the oligarchs looted the main productive engines of state So it was the equivalent of two homes free from the Russian state. So they can live on not a lot which is what they are going to get. Imagine an equivalent existed in the UK where you got a flat and a country plot effectively for free. You could probably live on fumes.
www.upi.com/Archives/1992/04/28/Moscow-ceremony-marks-privatization-of-100000th-apartment/4659704433600/
www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2022/03/05/chinas-xi-jinping-sits-pretty-amid-carnage-putins-murderous/
According to Vladimir Putin, everything is going according to plan.
Maybe the Russian president is deluded enough to believe it, but assuming they still have some way of knowing what’s really going on, not many Russians can genuinely share this view.
It’s not just that Russia’s “special military operation” is encountering a good deal more resistance than Putin seemingly anticipated, or that it appears waylaid by logistical mishaps, inadequate equipment and lack of military resolve.
It’s also that the Western response in terms of sanctions has proved a good deal stronger and therefore more damaging to Russia than he would have expected.
Putin’s assault on a sovereign nation has succeeded in uniting the democratic world against him in a manner that few even in the West foresaw.
Yes, Europe is still buying his oil and gas, and until this ceases it remains deeply complicit in Putin’s war; Europe is effectively financing the Kremlin’s murderous land grab to the tune of around $1bn (£700m) a day.
Yacht seizures and other forms of tokenistic retaliation won’t make a great deal of difference as long as this continues.
Yet by invading, the Kremlin has surely greatly accelerated the transition away from Putin’s gas to alternative sources of energy. Europe is finally resolved to rid itself of its addiction to Russian hydrocarbons.
My guess is that this will happen sooner, rather than later, whatever the sacrifices needed to do it.
It takes a particular type of maniacal self belief to consciously terminate your largest export market, and think this makes any kind of sense, but that’s going to be the effect of Putin’s invasion.
After the bombing of Pearl Harbour, Isoroku Yamamoto, commander in chief of Japan’s combined fleet, is reputed to have said, “I fear that all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve”.
Putin thought the West too divided, decadent and in love with its creature comforts to respond, but it is already clear that he miscalculated.
China’s position therefore becomes key to his survival. The West cannot defeat Putin as such. The Russian leader’s burgeoning arsenal of nuclear weapons ensures Nato’s inaction, potentially rendering direct military intervention an act of mass suicide.
Unless toppled by a palace coup in the meantime, which seems somewhat unlikely, Putin will therefore eventually prevail in Ukraine, though tragically there may not be much left of it by the time he does. They make a desert, and call it peace.
Yet Russia will emerge from the rubble completely isolated, and with its economy again in freefall.
Never mind the oligarchs, Russia’s emerging upper middle classes will find themselves cut off from the outside world, from their European skiing holidays, their villas in Marbella, and the Western luxury goods they love so much. Even if allowed to travel, they’ll be denied the foreign exchange to do so.
In terms of culture and sport, Russia is condemned to pariah status for a generation or more. If the calculation was that the West would eventually come to terms with Ukraine’s annexation, and carry on as before, it was badly mistaken.
Yet equally, it would be wrong to assume that Putin is without popular Russian support for what he is doing.
For many ordinary Russians, the “Wild East” capitalism of the last 30 years has not been a happy experience, with Soviet pensions and welfare rendered virtually worthless, and far flung communities, denied the once captive markets and supplies of empire, left to rot in the manner of America’s “rust belt”.
Putin’s “make Russia great again” rallying call has plenty of popular appeal.
All the same, it is no surprise to see the Russian leader use the pretext of war to impose all the remaining elements of the police state he appears all along to have aspired to.
The intention is clear; he means to rule by the only means left available to him – brutal repression of information and protest. Welcome to Soviet Russia 2.0.
It’s possible that a landmass as large and rich in natural resources as Russia could still get by as the autarky it once was, but it is likely to need China’s active support for this to be sustainable.
This is by no means a given, despite the joint statement early last month on the eve of the Winter Olympics to the effect that the two countries’ friendship had “no limits”.
The fact is that reasonable economic relations with the West are a good deal more important to China’s President Xi Jinping than cosying up to a fellow autocrat.
The threatened use of nuclear weapons, and the indiscriminate targeting of civilian populations will be giving China plenty of pause for thought.
The neutrality of Beijing’s current position enables China to extract some highly favourable contracts for energy supply and the shipment of other commodities. In anticipation of increased trade, the share prices of a number of Sino-Russian logistics companies have already risen strongly.
But as things stand, the pipeline capacity simply doesn’t exist for China to rapidly replace Europe as a substitute market for Russian gas. What is more, Xi will be wary of providing Russia with a work around for Western sanctions if there is any danger of the same sanctions being applied to China.
Beyond oil and gas, neither Europe nor the US do a great deal of trade with Russia.
China is a different matter. Deeply integrated into Western supply chains, and a major recipient of Western inward investment, China would not be able to cope with the sort of sanctions that have been imposed on Russia.
Nor would Europe and the US immediately be able to cope without access to Chinese manufactured goods. Like it or not, we are joined at the hip through trade and the finance that supports it.
It would be a hell of a win for Beijing if it could somehow broker a peace in Ukraine, but I don’t see that happening.
On the face of it, there is no compromise that would be acceptable to both Russia on the one hand, and Ukraine and its Western sympathisers on the other.
Putin is committed to conquest. There is no offramp. In any case, Beijing lacks the diplomatic skills for such a coup.
So Xi will sit on the sidelines, playing one side off against the other. It suits Beijing just fine if the war in Ukraine causes the West to pivot back from an increasingly hostile obsession with China to facing down old enemies beyond the Baltic.
The renewed focus in defence budgets on tanks and land forces also diverts money away from the naval power needed to limit Chinese ambitions in the East and South China Seas.
Xi will therefore feel under no particular pressure to pick a side, much as both Putin and the West would like him to.
Sad to say, but the biggest winner from the madnesses of tsar Putin is likely to be President Xi.