Russia Blues. By Srdja Trifkovic.
It’s been three-and-a-half years since I was in Moscow. The city does not look or feel different now — in the second year of the war (a.k.a. “Special Military Operation”) and massive Western sanctions — in its usual bustling, often chaotic and brutal self. The stores are still full of Western goods; the prices of groceries are stable and similar to those in Central Europe. …
Technology laggards, and its getting much worse:
It is lagging technologically, however, and it is suffering from an acute and growing shortage of highly trained engineers, technicians, and scientific researchers, whose numbers have been declining for over two decades. Economists now outnumber engineers …
In the ratio of college-educated engineers to general population, Russia ranks 29th in the world. …
The results for the Russian economy … are staggering: Russia produces only 20 percent of its own machinery. Depending on the specific sector, it depends 40-60 percent on imported equipment and machine tools. No car or airplane can be made in Russia without foreign components. … Investment in the huge and vitally important energy sector is declining; machine building is minimal; metallurgy and shipbuilding have all but disappeared. …
While China has thousands of miles of high-speed railways, Russia has failed to build its only proposed project of this kind — the 800-kilometer (500 miles) Moscow-Kazan high-speed railway — which was canceled “for no good reason.” …
Living standards are falling behind — Russians are poor:
Since 2013, Russia’s economy has grown at 0.9 percent per annum. During the same period, the world economy has outgrown Russia by 310 percent. Poland has done so by 470 percent, South Korea by 320 percent, the United States and the European Union by 270 percent, and China by an astounding 750 percent. Russia’s per capita income is now lower than that of Turkey or any former Soviet-bloc country in Europe, save Bulgaria or the three Baltic states. …
Who cares?
One of the results is Russia’s very high mortality rate — “the highest in all of Europe” … — and collapsing birth rates, which are declining again after a slight and, as it turned out, temporary recovery in 2015. …
Based on 33 public health indicators, Russia occupies the 119th place in the world….
It’s terminal:
After this visit, I am having some serious concerns about Russia’s resilience to the enormous external and internal pressures it is facing. …
A Muscovite friend took me out to dinner on Wednesday night, April 5. He sounded resigned rather than angry when he said that “the promise of the Russian spring has fizzled out, and all my hope with it.” He is a solid patriot, let me add, and not some bleeding-heart liberal who routinely denigrates his country to foreigners (in which case he wouldn’t be my friend in the first place). He sees a system “which is on the way to become almost as calcified as the late Brezhnev era, with no bold thinking at the top, no vision, and certainly no burning heart.” …
So much for rebuilding the Soviet empire by conquest:
With regard to the war, I have not met anyone who thinks that Putin’s two clearly stated objectives — disarmament and denazification — can be attained. My friends agree that the Russian army is not able to make a major breakthrough and that the best we can hope for is some negotiated peace, far short of any meaningful definition of “victory.”
On the other hand, it seems clear that leaving any part of the western Ukrainian Banderastan unoccupied will mean leaving unleashed a violently hysterical anti-Russian beast that will never rest. …
How the war will end:
The drama will probably end in some sort of deadlock between the continuing American bid for global dominance and China’s resistance, while Russia descends gradually into the status of a second-class power, ever more beholden to the Middle Kingdom.
The Ukrainian campaign is not just the fight to retain strategic depth along Russia’s vulnerable southwestern flank; it is also the struggle to retain its status as a great power. The Biden administration is now more than ready for reckless escalation, a deadly game of chicken with nuclear stakes. The future is dark.
