Quote from: bryant.coleman on January 27, 2021, 07:47:15 PM

Quote from: DrBeer on January 27, 2021, 06:33:26 PM

Resource economy mixed with sanctions and technological degradation = the rebirth of a once competitive country into a militarized, embittered third world country, with a totalitarian regime, they are not able to really rule the country ... No need to compare a beautiful picture from a financial center in Moscow or St. Petersburg with life in Rostov, Syzran or Kaliningrad! According to official statistics (imagine how much in reality!?) 30% live below the poverty line. The incomes of the population are falling rapidly, the population is taking huge consumer loans, and its solvency is falling rapidly. Businesses stop, unemployment rises. After the imposition of sanctions,% of the presence in the EU gas market is reduced, entire sectors of the economy are falling apart, regions are dying out ... Mortality exceeds the birth rate, and the "indicators" of the population are still held up by a large flow of migrants. The prospects are even worse, they will soon have to be responsible for state terrorism (MH-17), crimes against Georgia, Moldova, Ukraine, Syria, .... Therefore, the currency of such a state has no prospects.

All this is true, but the reason is not sanctions that were imposed in 2014. Even without the sanctions, Russian economy would have been in ruins right now. Back in 2014, they were overly dependent on the export of oil and natural gas. The price of these commodities declined by more than 50% in 2014, and on top of that the Russian monopoly in the most profitable market came under threat from American LNG and piped natural gas from Azerbaijan. They should have diversified away from the oil-based economy when the crude prices were above $100 per barrel. But the regime never bothered about that and as a result they are suffering now.

It's hard to disagree, it's just that the sanctions became a catalyst for this process. As if the Russian media did not "trumpet" about the successes and achievements - and before the introduction of sanctions, the economy degraded. In fact, most of the pillars of today's Russian economy are the remnants of the USSR, which were slightly modernized during the time of high oil prices. But oligarchization, in fact, the embezzlement of the country's income by a small group of Putin's henchmen, and a disregard for the work on the development of the economy and technology, has led to the fact that we see the country rapidly sliding downward, becoming in fact a raw materials appendage for other countries. And if we talk about foreign policy, then the prospects here are even worse - self-isolation, the status of a world terrorist, support for totalitarian and criminal regimes, financing of gangs - this also does not benefit the Russian Federation. The Kremlin regime has committed so many crimes that normalization of relations with the whole world is possible only through total responsibility to the victims of this regime, and most likely strict control and restrictions on the development of weapons, including nuclear, chemical and bacteriological.