I don't know how the matters stand at the moment, but in August there was a transactional glut, i.e. there were a few thousand unconfirmed transactions that didn't get confirmed in time (up to 50,000, if I'm not mistaken). I got caught too, my ~1 BTC transaction hadn't been confirmed for 2 days. I guess it was a deliberate effort by miners to stimulate the price, since I saw a lot of new blocks with only the miner's TX in them...
Therefore, it is hard to predict what the miners can be up to
The Chinese have a fairly good idea where miners are going, and what they are doing - they make them and have the biggest mining operations in the world. I'd say the Russians are in on this, 100%.
I assume that the Bitcoin network will be paralyzed (at least temporarily) if 70% of miners (i.e. mining pools) decide to call it a day and be done with that