While the attention of Russians and others around the world have been diverted – and one should ask be asking what they have been diverted from and why – ten pieces of bad even disastrous economic news have come out from or about Russia in the last 24 hours alone.
Moscow analyst Yury Khristenzen says that Moscow plans to “export separatism” across the entire former Soviet space, including Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania to break those countries to its will, confident that it can do so because the West will not be willing to go to war against a nuclear power
With yet another sports competition just moved out of Russia and attention to former sports minister Vitaly Mutko’s role in the doping scandal intensifying, many in Moscow now fear that Russia could be stripped of the 2018 World Cup.
Nina Khrushcheva, a scholar at the New School in New York, says that what is likely to happen with the Trump administration is likely to turn out “more unbelievable” than Hollywood films like “The Manchurian Candidate” and to end even worse.
The lengthy closure of the Kaliningrad airport as a result of a plan accident highlights the complete lack in Moscow of a plan to ensure the energy, transportation, and information security of that Russian exclave.
Vladimir Putin has no interest in the deal Thomas Graham suggests he now wants, Vitaly Portnikov says; and consequently, if Washington pursues the course the former US diplomat and current Kissinger Associate advisor proposes, it will only embarrass itself.
According to historian Leonid Mlechin, “fear of weapons of mass destruction” has disappeared and consequently it will not be as hard as it was to “push the nuclear button.”
Avraam Smulyevich, a leading Israeli specialist on ethnic issues in the former Soviet space, says that Kyiv might be forced to agree to a Trump-Putin deal on Crimea but that such a deal would “only convince the Russian dictator that he had invade other countries without being punished”
Given that Vladimir Putin has signaled that any serious reforms in the near term are unlikely or even impossible, ever more Russians are predicting revolution, especially as that country enters the centenary of the two revolutions of 1917.
Pavel Pryanikov says that the three most important trends of the past year likely to cast a shadow on Russian domestic politics in the year ahead are the return to high office of the methodologists, the end of Russian nationalism, and the revolt of the regions.
