Vladimir Putin's Russia
"His freedom of maneuver is limited now and many important economic factors no longer depend on him: the ruble rate, the price of oil, inflation."
"No matter what Putin says, whether he sounds conciliatory and reassuring or bellicose and threatening, this would not affect those basic factors."
Maria Lipman, financial analyst, Moscow
 |
"The politics of containment were not invented yesterday. ... The more we retreat and justify ourselves, the more brazen our opponents become and the more cynically and aggressively they behave. No one will succeed in defeating Russia militarily."
Russian President Vladimir Putin
Russia is teetering on the cusp of economic failure. When Vladimir Putin jeered at the financial instability of Ukraine a year ago, withholding promises to aid it economically the financial catastrophe that was awaiting Russia was not yet fully developed. Sanctions since then certainly played their part, and when Russian financial institutions began to feel the pain, the ruble dropped and the stock market wobbled dangerously, it seemed clear enough that wild spending at Sochi wouldn't help.
And then came news of the United States expanding its oil and gas field production through shale gas and fracking, and less dependency on Middle East oil impacting on its former allies like Saudi Arabia. But things are very complicated in the Middle East, even more so than in eastern Europe, and the diabolical plans of Iran to access nuclear weaponry and realize its imperial aspirations to rule the MidEast coming afoul of its Sunni Arab neighbours led to OPEC agreeing with Saudi plans to strategically lower the price of oil on the world market.
With that decision, to make Iran suffer financial hardship lowering its oil receipts, it impacts elsewhere as well, whereby Russia's production costs are higher than the new price per barrel of oil, and there went the financial future of Russia. And it is the future that President Putin spoke of during his annual address on the State of the Nation whose health now doesn't look as robust as it once did when Mr. Putin decided to pump up his military with expensive new technical toys, and to surreptitiously invade Ukraine.
Russia is diving into a recession come the turn of the new year. And in preparation for that dread event, belt-tightening is advised; for Russians and for their institutions, not necessarily for Vladimir Putin and his cronies. Dismissal notices have been handed out for thousands of health-care workers as doctors and nurses are being laid off and hospitals are being closed. Ask Moscovites now about their pride in the $5-billion Sochi Winter Games; their choice in retrospect might be to ditch the games and support health services, but it's too late now.
Ask the mothers whose sons in a country where conscription is law, how much pride they feel in reuniting the Crimean Peninsula with the Russian Federation, when raw wood coffins are delivered to their homes in the dead of night, so they may bury their children. The Russian government claims, to accusations that its military is fighting alongside the ethnic Russian secessionists in east Ukraine that there are no Russian soldiers in Ukraine.
Those Russians who may appear there are "volunteers", fighting in their own free time. The fact being that Russian military commanders dispatch those under their command to fight this 'ideological war' as a duty toward Mother Russia, and those battalion commanders receive additional funding in recognition of the numbers they dispatch. The Kremlin has no responsibility for those military it commissions to fight in Ukraine.
The Committee of Soldiers' Mothers struggles against lies, indifference and the criminality of the Putin regime. Formed in 1989 to provide legal aid to Russia's conscripts and their parents, usually single mothers with single sons, they number roughly four million. Over seven thousand complaints are received by the NGO's Moscow office yearly, 60 percent of them representing human rights violations. When families attempt to find the real causes of death of about 2,000 to 2,500 soldiers annually, there are no official explanations.
They are forced to accept the mutilated, tortured bodies of their sons. Some die of hazing, a practise rife in the Russian military. More often now, they die when as conscripts having no recourse to protection under any law, they must obey when their commanders send them to act as 'volunteer' fodder in aid of their co-nationalists living in Ukraine, determined to slice away their favoured portion of the country and unite with Russia.
The question now is how long it will take for ordinary Russians to stop idolizing a man who has brought such calamitous times to the country, his self-aggrandizement, his isolation of the country from much of the civilized world, his penchant for aligning Russia with such human-rights-averse regimes like those of Iran, Syria and Turkey, while in Russia's backyard a growing Islamist insurgency continues to threaten.
Labels: Conflict, Economy, Russia, Ukraine
posted by Pieface @ Saturday, December 06, 2014
<< Home