The reaction to the sanctions is absurd: a ban on foreign investors from selling Russian shares. Markets collapse and tanks get bogged down, he was convinced that Ukrainian society would collapse
A presidential decree to prevent foreign investors from selling their stakes in Russian companies: Vladimir Putin orders the avalanche on the markets to stop, perhaps convinced that he can command them like his tanks. But it is a river in flood, and Russian securities are becoming waste paper: Sberbank, the largest Russian bank, has lost 91% of its value on the London stock exchange. It is not just the European, American and British sanctions, it is a trivial calculation of the risks of continuing to do business with a country that has overturned international law and order, and two oil giants, Shell and British Petroleum, announce the intention to get rid of their large stakes in Russian state-owned energy companies. And the Western VIPs who sat on the boards of directors of Moscow’s economic giants are resigning one after the other, with the visible exception of former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, whose aides are quitting in protest over the his position is more than ambiguous.
It is not clear whether Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin had the courage to explain to the Kremlin boss that not the whole world obeys him, and that markets in particular cannot be controlled, let alone frighten. On the other hand, the opinion poll center Fom has just published a poll in which it claims that voter support for the president has grown from 60% to 71% in a few days, and that the Russians are applauding the bombs dropped on Ukrainian cities. The Russians can continue to take to the streets against the war, facing handcuffs – almost 7,000 arrested in recent days – and flooding social networks with doves of peace and anti-war protests, but this information is unlikely to reach the Kremlin .
The British think tank Rusi claims that even behind the sensational underestimation of the Ukrainian resistance there was a poll, commissioned by the ninth directorate of the FSB, the heir of the KGB: it showed a divided Ukrainian society, discouraged, with Volodymyr Zelensky at 27% of satisfaction. The Kremlin does not know how to judge a democracy: elections are won with Bulgarian percentages, polls always show enthusiastic support for the top, and so a leader who leads the popularity polls with “only” a quarter of the votes is considered a weak one failed. A dictatorship always suffers from the absence of negative feedback, no one dares to report unwelcome information to the supreme leader, and what anyone who had been in Kyiv for a day knew – that Ukrainians could be divided over leaders, parties and ideas , but unanimous in the love of national independence – it turned into some Moscow passage in the reassurance that they could not wait to return to the Kremlin’s hand.
Despite the compulsory studies of Marxism in the Soviet era, Putin shows himself to be a bad student who continues to fail to understand that it is existence that conditions consciousness and not the other way around. And so the Duma approves the prison for those who “spread fake” about the war, which cannot even be called “war”, under penalty of censorship. Yesterday the judiciary blacked out the historic radio Echo in Moscow, which not even the communist coup leaders in August 1991 had dared to close, and the Dozhd cable TV, the latest broadcasters that, with great difficulty, were trying to make information. With an Orwellian obstinacy, the Kremlin insists on silencing any non-aligned voice, ordering “comprehensive measures” against those who disseminate information and call for protest in the streets. The latest target is Wikipedia, threatened with blackout for its voice on the war in Ukraine, while the length of propaganda talk shows on TV is doubled.
To inform the Russians of what is happening, however, the currency exchange boards, the ATM terminals with out of cash and the screens of flights to Europe and America canceled are enough. The government has ordered the 80,000 tourists left abroad to return home by their own means, while the planes to Istanbul and Yerevan, or other destinations not yet blocked, are full of those who prefer to flee, even if Putin has forbidden to bring out more than $ 10,000 in cash (and to transfer money overseas). The borders are open for now, but otherwise Russia is rapidly transforming into a new Soviet Union. There will be no more credit cards, no more mortgages, replaced by cash hidden in the mattress. There will be no more premieres of Hollywood, which has suspended distribution in Russian theaters. There will be no more luxury cars: BMW, Mercedes, Volvo and GM have stopped exports, and brands left on the market are skyrocketing prices, to try to cope with the inflation forecast of around 20-30% . But the final blow has come from major international container companies, such as Maersk: without them, freight traffic with Russia is practically annihilated.
Giving orders to the markets not to fall too far in this disaster seems almost a symptom of madness. But Mishustin’s government goes further, and allocates up to a trillion rubles from the National Wealth Fund to support the plunging Russian bonds. It is the oil “treasure” accumulated over the years, which Putin had refused to use to protect the Russians from Covid. Today, after a million deaths from coronavirus, the fund is opened to save the state oligarchs from misery. If the collapse of the markets continues, an astronomical sum taken from the taxpayers will be pulverized. If it stops, the Russian state will have bought the big names in the economy at bargain prices, in a meganationalization that will definitively bring back the USSR for which Putin and his constituents felt so much nostalgia.
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