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By John Webster, Website, 12/14/24

John Webster has been active in politics since the late 1960’s. He has worked in senior positions in Local Government and is a long-term critic of Government economic, environmental and foreign policy. He served two terms as Deputy Leader of Cheltenham Borough Council as a Liberal Democrat before returning to the Forest of Dean and re-joining the Labour Party which he had first joined in 1980 and left at the time that it was clear that Britain was to support the war in Iraq. He is member of Jewish Voice for Labour which is led by Jews who are opposed to the actions of the Israeli Government.

I’d like to take a close look at the war in Ukraine. If the UK and NATO wants to fight Russia, people need to know the facts.

Ukraine is a large country – 2.5 times the size of the UK but with a pre-war population of about 40 million. The Ukraine conflict has been brewing for years and the areas annexed by Russia are about the size of the United Kingdom. They include some 7 million people in 4 regions in addition to the Crimea peninsula with a front line stretching from Land’s End to John O Groats.

Internal conflicts between Ukrainian Nationalists in the west of the country and Russian speakers in the east led to a US supported ‘coup’ in 2014 and a civil war which cost some 14,000 lives. The army split between nationalists and pro-Russian elements who defended the Donbas area and Crimea was annexed by Russia.

The USA fully supported the Ukrainian nationalists and despite the majority of Ukrainians not wanting to join NATO, the Ukrainian Government declared it wanted to and allowed US intelligence services (the CIA) to establish spy bases on the Russian border.

What concerned Russia was the aim of NATO to place intermediate missiles in Ukraine that could hit Moscow in 5 minutes or less. In 2019 the USA tore the existing INF (Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces) treaty up which would have forbidden the production of such missiles.

Prior to this there were attempts brokered by Germany and France to reach an agreement in which Ukraine didn’t join NATO and, in an attempt to resolve civil conflict, give the Luhansk and Donetsk republics the kind of autonomy that Wales and Scotland have, but still as part of Ukraine. The agreements were sabotaged by ‘the west’ and Ukraine. Ukraine subsequently banned the Russian language and closed down the Russian Orthodox Church.

The encroachment of NATO was seen as such an extreme threat by Russia that, in breach of international law, it intervened in February 2022 with a token force of about 200,000 troops. The Ukrainian army was somewhat bigger than this and had been armed to the teeth by ‘the west’. The force moved in on Kiev and the Donbas, taking most of the Donbas very quickly mainly because many Russian speakers there welcomed them. This was their prime target.

Negotiations took place brokered by Turkey which both sides agreed to – but which were rejected by Ukraine when it was given guarantees by western politicians to support Ukraine for ‘as long as it takes’. The agreement would have meant Ukraine would stay intact but NOT be part of NATO. When it was rejected, Russia expanded its army to approaching 1 million troops and set about resolving the situation with the use of extreme force.

Russia is depicted by lazy thinkers in ‘the west’ as a ‘gas station with nukes.’ It is the biggest country in the world with a population of 146 million and a working population of 74million (compared to 33million in the UK) and has an abundance of natural resources. Measured in conventional terms this puts it 11th in the world’s economies behind Britain but measured according to what is called Purchasing Power Parity (which is favoured by most international organisations like the world bank and the IMF), Russia is the 5th largest economy in the world after China, the USA, India and Japan. It looks like it will shortly become the 4th.

The 30,000 or so sanctions applied to Russia by ‘the west’ to try and destroy it have meant it has had to reorientate its economy towards China in the east and has had to become much more self-reliant. In sharp contrast to ‘the west’ its economy is growing. Whereas in Britain and the USA, most ‘economic activity’ is now in service, finance and administrative sectors, much more of Russia’s economy produces real things – food and manufactured goods.

It also has massive military capacity and produces is own munitions and weapons including tanks and aircraft. It has 5th generation aircraft. F16s are a capable 4th generation aircraft but up against Russia’s air defence systems aren’t capable of being deployed anywhere near the front line. Along with the USA and China, it is working on 6th generation aircraft. A ‘gas station with nukes’ would not be able to do this. Where is Britain in this race? Nowhere.

It has a formidable military which now dominates the battle field in a country right next to it so its supply lines are relatively compact– it has (in the words of President Obama) ‘escalatory dominance’.

According to Mediazona (established with the BBC and Russian ‘dissidents’ to monitor Russian casualties), Russia has suffered under 80,000 killed in action since the beginning of the conflict. This is a record of funerals etc and is almost certainly an underestimate with the real figure probably being somewhere around 150,000 deaths.

There are no such figures for Ukraine but the reports from the battlefields and the extension of graveyards etc indicate a very much greater death toll – probably in the order of at least 3 times that of Russia. Bear in mind that Britain’s total military killed in action in World War 2 amounted to just over a quarter of a million over a period of 5 years. Ukrainian losses are likely double this in half the time.

The reality is that Russia has fought the war as one of attrition with saturation shelling on a 650 mile front with the use of drones and spy satellites that expose the battlefield. It has air superiority, outguns Ukraine with shells at a rate of 7 to one, uses massive glide bombs and has accurate hypersonic missiles which have largely demolished the power grid and which are very difficult to intercept with the current missile defence systems.

It has more battle-hardened infantry. It has increasing superiority in drone warfare. It has the most sophisticated electric warfare system in the world and is working on the s500 air defence system which it maintains can intercept hypersonic missiles. Neither the USA or the UK possess such missile at the moment but it is assumed they will in then future because the US plans to locate them in Germany where there is growing opposition to them.

The western media complacently dismisses such claims BUT they are demonstrated every day on the Ukrainian battlefield as the Russian army advances. It now outnumbers the Ukrainian army which cannot recruit enough willing volunteers to fight. In these conditions who do you think is taking most casualties?

At the start of the war many Ukrainians fled – over 5 million of them to Russia. The idea that everybody in Ukraine supports ‘the west’ is clearly not true. The hope of the west is that Russia will ‘collapse’ as a result of sanctions and western pressure. The sabotage of the Nord Stream gas pipeline to Germany was intended to bankrupt Russia. Instead, it has crippled the German economy. This is not a strategy that is working.

Neither does calling Putin names amount to a strategy. Putin has mass popular support. Recent reports from the western backed Levada institute put it at some 80%. Does this indicate collapse? People in ‘the west’ may think Putin is a nasty bully. In Russia he is a hero.

The USA has poured tens of billions of dollars into Ukraine but despite this, Russia is winning the war. The UK has pledged £3billion a year to Ukraine while seeking cuts to the British armed forces and has recently sent Stormshadow cruise missiles capable of striking deep into Russia.

This has led to retaliation with an Intermediate Ballistic Missile with multiple conventional war heads that has destroyed a missile production facility in Dnipro, and which can hit anywhere in Europe and which ‘the west’ has no defence against at all. Russia could literally destroy any military facility in the UK and the only response that we could offer would be to escalate to nuclear retaliation. The message to any rational organisation should be clear.

The fiction in most media in the UK is that brave little Ukraine is holding its own. It is actually being torn to shreds and has been used by ‘the west’ to try and weaken Russia and disrupt the developing alliance between Russia and China. Sanctions have backfired and driven China and Russia closer together: they are becoming increasingly economically and militarily interdependent and have almost certainly shared missile technology which has transformed modern warfare and in which they lead the world making ‘power projection’ with aircraft carriers a thing of the past. If we keep antagonising these two powers then we will suffer.

The majority of non-western countries in the world are opposed to the economic and military domination of the USA, and we are seeing more and more countries align themselves with the BRICS group which supports the UN charter rather than the ‘rules based order’ of the USA. Russia’s intervention in Ukraine has been judged illegal but to say it was ‘unprovoked’ is simply not the case. This is why, outside of the ‘western world’, Russia is NOT isolated.

The USA spends more than China and Russia on Defence BUT it has much bigger commitments. China has one overseas base and Russia 21, mainly in than old Soviet Union area. The USA has some 800 and Britain 30. This is where much of the military budgets actually go.

The kind of contempt for Russia that has been fed to the British people by the media to maintain the fiction that Ukraine is winning is to justify the huge amount of money we are giving to it. We SHOULD be asking what are we doing in Ukraine?

The idea that we are ‘defending democracy’ is not serious. Ukraine is dominated by corrupt politicians and has banned all those that question the war. This is about global dominance based on a declining US Empire.

Will Trump make any difference? Trump is what people in the US call a ‘Blowhard’ and bully. In my view unless he decides to stop the war immediately, he is likely to threaten to escalate it under the impression that Russia will bend to such threats.

Vladimir Putin may or may not be a nice man. That is not the prime qualification needed for being President of Russia or any other country. Can you really see him bending to Trump. Would YOU like to play poker against Putin?

We need to step back from this now. British policy is putting us directly in harm’s way.

By MK Bhadrakumar, Indian Punchline, 1/3/24

The dataset by the Brussels-based think tank Brugel aggregating the data on European natural gas import flows and storage levels puts in perspective Ukraine’s decision to halt the transit of Russian gas to Europe. The statistics reveal that as of end-2024, Russia had become the second largest gas supplier to the EU after Norway, overtaking the United States — now, that’s 3 years into the Ukraine war and the Western ‘sanctions from hell’ notwithstanding.  

In particular, in December 2024, Russian LNG was delivered to Europe in an amount of 2.16 billion cubic meters — an all-time record since 2019. The European Union’s import of Russian LNG in 2024 amounted to almost 21.5 bcm against 17.8 bcm a year earlier and 19 bcm in 2022. 

What does this mean? First, EU countries find its irresistible to source LNG from Russia, which is reliable, abundant and cheap. Second, Ukraine’s decision, coming in the middle of the winter heating season, will trigger a price spiral for natural gas on the whole in Europe, but in immediate terms only. To borrow the words of Ralph Nader, if the use of solar energy has not been opened up, that’s because the (Russian) oil industry does not own the sun! 

Third, ensuing from the above, the demand of Russian LNG will only increase. Fourth, there is widespread discontent in European industry that the US suppliers have taken advantage of gas shortage in Europe due to the sabotage by the Americans, with help from Ukrainian henchmen, of the Nord Stream pipelines (which directly connected Russian source to German ports bypassing Ukraine). Big Oil subsequently sold LNG to Europeans twice or thrice the price in the US domestic market and made windfall profit. (here) 

Fifth, the skyrocketing gas prices will further shoot up the cost of production in European economies, especially Germany’s, which is also heading for parliamentary election on February 23.  Sixth, there is bound to be resentment in the European mind that Ukraine is ‘biting the hand that feeds it.’ In Germany, there is already an undercurrent of opinion that energy ties with Russia ought to be revived for economic recovery, a stream of opinion that may swing the political fortunes of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) which is not only a far-right and right-wing populist political party but also Eurosceptic and calls for improving ties with Russia.

On the other hand, if the set-up in Kiev hopes to please Big Oil, things are only likely getting more complicated in the transatlantic relationship under Donald Trump. Elon Musk, tech billionaire and close advisor to Trump penned an opinion piece last week supporting the AfD. Musk since doubled down and Vice President-elect JD Vance took to X to call Musk’s op-ed “interesting.” 

Vance wrote: “I’m not endorsing a party in the German elections, as it’s not my country and we hope to have good relations with all Germans. But this is an interesting piece. 

“Also interesting; American media slanders AfD as Nazi-lite, but AfD is most popular in the same areas of Germany that were most resistant to the Nazis.” 

According to Pew Research Centre, nineteen percent of German adults have a positive view of the AfD and the party is running second in opinion polls. Besides, AfD has a strong anti-immigration stance like Trump’s in relation to the US. 

Plainly put, the famous line of late American philosopher and social critic Eric Hoffer comes to mind — “People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them.” In this respect, Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova’s statement on January 2 is to the point: 

“The responsibility for the shutdown of Russian gas supplies lies entirely with the United States, the puppet Kiev regime and the authorities of European countries that sacrificed the wellbeing of their people in order to provide financial support to the US economy. 

“The cessation of the supplies of reasonably priced and environmentally friendly energy from Russia not only weakens Europe’s economic potential but is also negatively affecting the living standards of Europeans. The geopolitical background of the Kiev regime’s decision is perfectly clear. It is the US – the key sponsor of the Ukraine crisis – that is the main beneficiary from the redistribution of the European energy market.”

But that is a pipe dream. What cannot be overlooked is that Russia also used to sell oil to Germany at discounted price anchored on long-term agreements. President Vladimir Putin once disclosed a state secret that Germans even used to sell surplus Russian gas after its own use to third countries, especially Poland, to make a tidy profit to subsidise its domestic price. Apparently, given the centrality of Russian-German energy alliance in Russia’s strategic calculus, Moscow looked away. 

Such considerations probably weighed on Gorbachev’s mind too when he green-lighted German unification, ignoring Margaret Thatcher’s angst and France’s preference that the two German States (FRG and GDR) merely developed good relations, at most in the form of a confederation. (France was acutely afraid that Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost would persuade Germans to accept neutrality as the price of reunification.) 

These are indeed moments when one fails to understand such “sentimental” Russian attitudes — be it on German unification or selling gas to Europe at discounted price, or the unilateral disbandment of Warsaw Pact (which, again, Thatcher thought was a rushed, premature decision.) This is rather intriguing since the Russians know better than any country, being the victim of waves of Western aggression in its tortuous history, that politics is hard ball. 

In the final analysis, Ukraine must be held responsible for this vengeful decision. But Kiev has expressed readiness to discuss preserving transit with Europeans. What emerged from the recent visit of Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico to Moscow and his one-on-one with Putin is that Europe is ready to move the turnover point for Russian gas in Ukraine. He claimed Putin nodded consent, too. 

Putin told the media after the talks, “Regardless of the war, our supplies were regular and we paid, and still pay… money for transit.” Actually, Ukraine gets $1 billion annually as transit fee! Putin added that Moscow is also ready to supply gas to Europe through Poland, using the existing Yamal-Europe route. “All it needs is just pushing a button”. 

The Russian government daily Rossiyskaya Gazeta quoted expert opinion that business circles are likely to initiate talks on resuming transit and, in fact, gas companies from Central Europe have already taken the first steps by signing a declaration supporting gas transit via Ukraine for 2025. 

Valery Andrianov, an associate professor at the Financial University under Russian Government told the daily that overall, halting supplies via Ukraine is not likely to cause a substantial gas deficit in Europe, as this has already been factored into gas prices, so it won’t be a surprise for the gas market. However, any interruption in supplies will increase the instability of the European gas market, making it more dependent on various external and largely uncontrollable factors, such as gas prices in Asia, delivery destinations of American LNG, or production dynamics on the Norwegian shelf. 

By Andrew Korybko, Substack, 1/3/24

Russian Energy Minister Alexander Novak shared an update on the proposed Russian gas pipeline to China through Kazakhstan, which was analyzed here in November, shortly before the start of the year. He confirmed that “This process, so to speak, is underway. Estimates, the feasibility study and negotiations are now underway.” This statement shouldn’t be misinterpreted as assuming that the project is a done deal like RT implied in its report, however, since it’s more of a message to the US at this point.

The previously mentioned analysis cited last summer’s about the continued Sino-Russo pricing dispute over the Power of Siberia II (POS2) pipeline, which boils down to China demanding bargain-basement prices (reportedly equivalent to Russia’s domestic ones) while Russia obviously wants something better. This impasse hasn’t yet been resolved, and while some like Asia Times’ Yong Jian consider the trans-Kazakh proposal to be an agreed-upon rerouting of POS2, that’s arguably a premature conclusion.

Pricing disputes still exist and the “process” that Novak described has only begun. It’s far from finalized and might still take a while to be completed, if ever, as suggested by the POS2 and Pakistan Stream Gas Pipeline precedents. The first, which was earlier known as the “Altai Pipeline” before the decision to reroute it via Mongolia, has been discussed for a full decade already with no deal in sight. The same goes for the second, which was first agreed upon in 2015, but no progress has been made since then either.

Amidst the latest talk of the Russia-Kazakhstan-China (“RuKazChi”) gas pipeline, Russia’s last direct gas pipeline to Europe was just shut down after Ukraine’s decision to let their five-year transit agreement lapse. Russia can still indirectly export gas to Europe via TurkStream, and Europe can always compensate for this long-foreseen loss of 5% of its gas import total via more Russian LNG, but the writing is on the wall that the EU will continue diversifying from Russia under American pressure.

In that event, Russia’s lost budgetary revenue from energy exports to Europe can only realistically be replaced by China, but Russia is still reluctant to agree to the bargain-basement prices that China is reportedly demanding. Its decisionmakers’ thought processes can only be speculated upon given the opacity and sensitivity of these talks, but this might reasonably be due to the expectation that the US’ more muscular containment of China could coerce Beijing into agreeing to better prices with time.

Another possibility, which isn’t mutually exclusive at this point at least, is that they might also be holding out hope that some of their European exports could one day be resumed seeing as how the infrastructure still exists but their partners made a US-pressured political decision to cut off imports. The best-case scenario from their perspective would therefore be that China agrees to prices closer to the market rate while the EU resumes some of their Russian gas imports after the special operation ends.

The reality though is that Russia is unlikely to have its cake and eat it too, and there’s no guarantee that either of its two main gas partners – the EU and China – will behave as expected even at a later date. The EU won’t resume any pipeline imports unless it receives approval from the US while China is known to operate on a much longer timeframe than most so it might hold off on clinching a deal indefinitely until Russia finally accepts its bargain-basement price demands. This places Russia in a very bad position.

Unless something changes, Russia might very well be coerced by the unfortunate circumstances in which it finds itself into agreeing to China’s reported proposal to sell it gas at domestic prices, which could turbocharge China’s superpower rise while placing Russia in a greater position of dependence. That might be preferred by Russian decisionmakers over sitting on these reserves indefinitely without receiving any financial benefit from them as sanctions start to create fiscal and monetary challenges.

From the US’ perspective, it’s worse for Russia to turbocharge China’s superpower rise and enter into a relationship of greater dependence with it that could be exploited by China to procure other resources at equally cheap rates than to allow the partial resumption of Russian exports to Europe. At the same time, such resumptions couldn’t be approved until after the Ukrainian Conflict ends, and this would be politically impossible in any case unless the US could spin the outcome as a victory of sorts over Russia.

Likewise, Russia couldn’t agree to this arrangement unless it too was able to spin the outcome as a victory, especially if the informal terms include a commitment not to build any new pipelines to China in exchange for the abovementioned proposed resumption overcompensating for that lost revenue. Therein lies the need for creative diplomacy of the kind suggested here last month and here the other day, the insight of which will now be blended, summarized, and built upon for the reader’s convenience.

The gist is that the US and Russia could agree to a series of mutual compromises culminating in the partial restoration of an energy bridge between Russia and the West for the purpose of depriving China of its envisaged decades-long access to ultra-cheap Russian resources for fueling its superpower rise. No one should assume that everything proposed below will enter into force, but these suggestions could help move their talks along. From the US’ side, its possible compromises could take the form of:

* Ukraine finally holding elections as part of a US-backed “phased leadership transition” against Zelensky, who’s the top obstacle to a lasting peace, and then legitimizing the following two agreements;

* Ukraine restoring its constitutional neutrality in order to exclude itself from ever joining NATO and thus resolving the core security concern that provoked Russia’s special operation;

* Ukraine demilitarizing and denazifying everything east of the Dnieper in what had for centuries been Russia’s traditional “sphere of influence” (everything west had traditionally been under Polish influence);

* The US terminating its bilateral security agreement with Ukraine in order to assure Russia that any cessation of hostilities wouldn’t be a ruse for rearming Ukraine and reigniting the conflict at a later date;

* The US agreeing that no Western peacekeepers will deploy along the DMZ between Russia and Ukraine east of the Dnieper (all parties might agree to an entirely non-Western peacekeeping mission though);

* The US also agreeing that Article 5 won’t apply to any Western country whose uniformed troops in Ukraine, which would be unilaterally deployed there in this scenario, come under attack by Russia;

* The US approving the EU’s partial resumption of Russian gas pipeline imports in order to buoy the bloc’s struggling economy via an influx of low-cost fuel (but higher-priced than what China demands);

* The US and EU returning some of Russia’s seized assets as “compensation” for the West retaining control over the European portion of its pipelines;

* The US lifting its sanctions on the Russian-EU energy trade, including Russia’s use of SWIFT, and expanding this to include more countries and spheres as a reward for keeping the peace with Ukraine;

* The US waiving sanctions on Russia’s Arctic LNG 2 project for itself, the EU, India, and Japan so that they can replace lost Chinese investment and ensure that they receive this gas instead of China;

* The US replicating the preceding policy on a case-by-case basis to squeeze out and ultimately replace all Chinese investment in Russian energy projects to preclude the possibility of more future exports to it;

* and the US building upon the trust that it hopes to regain with Russia through these compromises to resume frozen strategic arms control talks on a priority basis before the expiry of the New START in 2026.

From Russia’s side, its own compromises could take the form of:

* Agreeing to only the partial demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine west of the Dnieper (ideally with the first influenced by the Istanbul Agreement while the second might remain superficial);

* Limiting its control of Ukrainian-claimed lands to only Crimea and those four regions that voted to join Russia in September 2022’s referenda;

* Tacitly accepting that it won’t be able to assert control over the parts of Kherson and Zaporozhye Regions west of the Dnieper but nevertheless continuing to officially maintain such claims;

* Agreeing to limited military restrictions on its side of the DMZ as a trust-building measure for furthering the rest of the complicated negotiation process and then complying with these terms;

* Informally agreeing to prioritize the development of its Arctic and Pacific fleets over its Baltic and Black Sea ones in a tacit cession of influence to NATO that soberly reflects the current military realities;

* Formally acknowledging the loss of control over the EU and Ukrainian portions of its pipeline infrastructure (ideally in exchange for “compensation”, including the return of some of its seized assets);

* Tacitly accepting that the rest of its seized assets are lost, but possibly agreeing that they can be invested in rebuilding Ukraine and/or Syria or donated to the UN, perhaps to fund a new African project;

* Informally agreeing not to build new pipelines to China or expand energy exports to it so long as sanctions-waived energy investments from and exports to others overcompensate for that lost revenue;

* Unofficially preferring sanctions-waived investment from others (America, Europe, India, Japan, South Korea) in its resource-rich Arctic and Far East regions as opposed to that from China;

* Doing the same with regard to preferring tech imports from them (and Taiwan too, which was Russia’s main source of high-precision machine tools a year ago);

* Tacitly accepting that these sanctions waivers can be rescinded in an instant if Russia reneges on the Ukrainian or Chinese terms of this proposed grand deal;

* and negotiating with the US in good faith on strategic arms control, which could ultimately include restoring limits on intermediate-range missiles in Europe that lead to warehousing the mighty Oreshniks.

For as politically difficult as these compromises might be for each side, the US could spin them as having stopped Russia from controlling all of Ukraine and thus preventing it from planting its boots on the Polish border, while Russia could spin them as having stopped Ukraine from joining NATO and thus preventing that bloc from planting their boots on its exposed western border. Moreover, Russia would relieve pressure upon it in Europe, while the US Navy would control the bulk of China’s energy imports.

The key to this is the US offering Russia a decent deal in Ukraine with lucrative sanctions-waived energy and tech opportunities that would incentivize Russia into informally agreeing to deprive China of decades-long access to ultra-cheap resources for fueling its superpower rise at the US’ expense. This grand deal is Trump’s to lose, and the world will know that he fumbled it if Russia makes progress on new pipelines to China, which could accompany or be followed by him “escalating to de-escalate”.

By Ben Aris, Intellinews, 1/2/24

I agree with Aris’ analysis of the economics. On the political side, I think he leaves out considerable context. He also assumes that some of the accusations against Putin made by the west are proven true, when they’re not, such as Navalny’s death necessarily being a murder and Putin ordering the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko. I don’t know if he thinks he has to say these things for his economic analysis to be taken seriously by people in the west or if he really just unquestioningly believes all of the accusations leveled against Putin, even when closer scrutiny reveals a less than clear picture. – Natylie

Russian President Vladimir Putin has been in power now for 25 years. The BBC’s Russia editor Steve Rosenberg wrote a retrospective as his first ever story was to write up Yeltsin’s resignation on December 31, 1999, passing the presidency to Putin. [https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd0ek943v7ko]

“I will never forget New Year’s Eve 1999,” Rosenberg began. “I was working as a producer in the BBC’s Moscow bureau. Suddenly there was breaking news: Russia’s President Boris Yeltsin had stepped down. His decision to resign took everyone by surprise, including the British press corps in Moscow. When the news broke there was no correspondent in the office. That meant I had to step in to write and broadcast my first BBC dispatch.”

I remember that night just as well. The announcement caught everyone off guard, as it came in the late afternoon and everyone was already out of the office, getting ready for the parties that were about to start that evening. And if you have spent any time in Russia, you will know that New Year’s Eve is THE big party of the year.

(Because Russia festivals still work on the Gregorian Calendar December 25 Christmas is a total non-event, as the Orthodox Christmas is on January 7 and even that is a meek second fiddle to Easter, the main Christian festival in the East.)

The Moscow press corps scrambled, running back to the office to bang out a write up of the most momentous story since Yeltsin signed off on the dissolution of the Soviet Union, also in December on the 26th almost a decade earlier.

But it turned out to be easier than you might think. As Yeltsin was so sick – he disappeared entirely from the second round in the crucial 1996 presidential elections to have a multiple by-pass open heart surgery – pretty much everyone had an obituary on file as Yeltsin was expected to die any day. So, all we had to do was a search and replace of the word “died” for “resigned” and pretty much everything else could stay unchanged.

Rosenberg goes on to list the Putin legacy, which naturally enough focuses on the war in Ukraine.

· Since Vladimir Putin’s decision to launch his so-called “special military operation” Russia has sustained heavy losses on the battlefield

· Russian towns and cities come under regular drone attack

· Ukrainian soldiers have occupied a part of Russia’s Kursk region

· International sanctions are heaping pressure on Russia’s economy

· What’s more, the country’s demographic situation is dire

· Domestic repression has picked up apace

But as one of the longest serving foreign correspondents in Russia, Rosenburg adds some nuance: “One thing I can say with certainty: over twenty-five years I’ve seen different Putins.”

This is exactly my experience. Putin and the Russia story is complicated. As a journalist that mainly focuses on business, as early as the end of his first year I wrote there are two Putins: the political one and the economic one. And they are very different.

The political one kills people with poisoned tea, represses free speech and crushes democratic opposition. The economic one has overseen the most remarkable economic revival, restored Russia as a great economic power, made some deep and very effective reforms to things like the tax system and to deal with Russia’s demographic crisis (although he hasn’t solved that problem), and lifted an entire generation out of poverty into relative prosperity.

I went to his very first state of the nation speech where he put demographics at the top of the policy priority list and set the goal of “catching up with Portugal as the top economic priority. And he put his money where his mouth is by hiring German Gref, now the head of Sberbank, as an economic guru who launched the “Gref Plan” to implement a radical economic reform plan. It was a heady time. Gref was a total outsider and had no power of his own, yet thanks to Putin’s personal backing he pushed through radical change after radical changed that has evolved into today’s National Projects 2.1 that is still a top domestic policy initiative.

The heavy irony is that Putin’s ambition is not to recreate the Soviet Union, but, as he recently laid out in great detail in his Valdai speech, to Make Russia Great Again.

His quote about “the greatest tragedy of the 20th century was the fall of the Soviet Union” is widely abused as the rest of that quote, never mentioned, is “… for Russians who found themselves trapped in “foreign” countries…” ie living in the newly independent 15 republics created in December 1991.

European Dreams

And Europe was up for a partnership with Russia in general and Putin in particular – until Russia started booming in the second decade of this century.

Putin has always seen the best way to make Russia great is through partnership with Europe. Former First Deputy Prime Minister Arkady Dvorkovich told me this personally: “China is too far away, and they are too different from us. Russia is a European country. Our future is with Europe.”

It is also widely forgotten that Putin’s first foreign trip as president was to the UK, where he stood on the floor of the House of Commons and announced a 50:50 joint venture with BP and the privately owned Russian oil company TNK. This was not a 51:49 joint venture, but an unheard of even split 50:50 joint venture – in other words, a true partnership. Tony Blair jumped at the deal and BP made an absolute mint over the next two decades.

Putin then went on to Brussels where he met with Mario Draghi, then head of the EU, and asked to join the EU. He was told “no.” Russia is simply too big and would have swamped the EU institutions. Putin accepted that, so he went on to do the next best thing: he started to build the Eurasian Economic Union (EUU).

I interviewed the architect of the EEU several years later, who told me it was specifically designed to mirror the EU (unlike its precursor, the Customs Union), using exactly the same rule book, so that it could easily integrate with the EU and create a single market “from Lisbon to Vladivostok” – a phrase much loved by Putin for many years.

He even asked to join Nato, which was met with a half measure: the Russia-Nato council.

But of course, it went wrong most obviously from the 2014 annexation of the Crimea. In the run up to the annexation, the EU blocked many of Russia’s attempts to create other partnerships like BP-TNK that Putin pursued, like buying shares in EADS (Airbus) in an attempt to get a seat on board to rescue Aeroflot and Russia’s aviation industry, or its attempt to buy the bankrupt Opel carmaker to rescue AvtoVaz. That deal was blocked by the US to prevent the technology transfer to Russia that would have created a European automotive powerhouse. Putin, who had personally brokered the Opel deal with former German Chancellor Angela Merkel, was visibly furious when Washington put the kybosh on it. And that is not to mention Russia’s 18-year-long WTO accession saga that finally ended in 2012 – probably the high water mark in East-West relations, when the long-sought “partnership” looked like it might work. Russia made a lot of significant concessions to get into the WTO, like basically sacrificing its entire pork production business to European imports.

Putin became disillusioned as it became clearer and clearer that the EU would never accept Russia as a partner. The Maidan revolution in Ukraine in 2014 crystalised these fears. Putin came to the conclusion that the West was actively afraid of Russia’s competition in things like aviation and automotive and actively trying to hobble Russia’s development, but at the same time the EU was happily helping itself of Russia’s cornucopia of raw materials and giant consumer market, the largest in Europe.

These tensions came to a head when EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell came to Moscow in 2021 to broker a deal and repair relations with an increasingly brittle Kremlin. He suggested trade should be separated from politics – a compromise. But it was too late. Borrell was met by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov who humiliated the EU diplomat by having three EU diplomats expelled while the two men were sitting across the table from each other and then followed up with the “new rules of the game” speech delivered in February 2021 at a joint press conference. Lavrov’s main point was: Russia would no longer tolerate the West doing business with one hand and applying sanctions and interfering with Russian domestic policy with the other. With this speech, Putin’s patience with the West had run out and the speech was the first shot fired in what would become the Ukraine war a year later.

Putin’s dream of a single market from Lisbon to Vladivostok was dead. Putin never wanted to partner with China – Russians remain as afraid of China as the West is – but given the failure of building a European partnership, the Chinese option is the obvious alternative. By rejecting Putin’s overtures to build real working relations and engaging with Russia, albeit a difficult and daunting prospect, the upshot has been to drive Moscow into Beijing’s arms, which I suspect will prove to be a major geopolitical blunder in the long-term.

Economic revival

As the commentary on Putin’s 25 years in office comes out the focus is on the half dozen wars he has overseen and the growing repression. These things are true, but the Russians themselves focus on the economic revival Putin engineered and the stability he has brought.

It’s hard to overstate how much Russians hated the Yeltsin-era. In the West, Yeltsin is seen as a hero who tried to bring democracy to Russia. In Russia he is seen as the man who destroyed the country.

The Western-advocated “shock theory” introduced by Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar inflicted almost a decade of misery and an early grave for tens of millions of men. I arrived in Russia in 1993 just after the price liberations were put in place and inflation was running at 1,400% a year – 4% a day. The economic crash was an order of magnitude worse than anywhere else in the former Warsaw Bloc, as detailed by bne IntelliNews’ despair index, and the payment system collapsed so completely that Russia became a barter economy as its money became meaningless – the so-called virtual economy, made famous by academics Barry Ickes and Clifford Gaddy – again something that is rarely mentioned these days.

Putin quickly fixed all these problems, starting with a complete overhaul of the labour code that slashed Soviet bureaucracy and the introduction of a flat tax regime that unfettered business. The tax rates – the lowest in Europe – has remained untouched for almost all of Putin’s tenure. It has only just been amended in the last few months to finally introduce the beginnings of progressive taxes 25 years later.

The effects of these reforms were stunning. Russia was still reeling from the default and devaluation on August 13, 1998 when Putin took over at the start of 2000. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) was predicting that Russia’s economy would spend years in recession at the time; GDP expanded by 10% that year in a record that has never been matched. That marked the start of a totally unexpected decade-long boom that transformed everyone’s lives.

“At the time the average per capita income in the US was $30,000. If you took that as the baseline for the equivalent incomes in Russia in 2000, then by 2008 the equivalent per capita incomes in Russia were $600,000 a year,” a Russian friend explained to me to describe what the change felt like.

Again, it is hard to overemphasise how dramatic the economic changes of the first two decades of Putin’s rule have been:

GDP Size:

2000: Russia’s nominal GDP was approximately $278.3bn.

2024: The nominal GDP is projected to be around $1.862 trillion.

Debt Levels:

2000: Central government debt stood at 55.9% of GDP.

2024: This ratio decreased to 14.6% of GDP and it can cover every penny of this debt with its cash reserves.

International Hard Currency Reserves:

2000: Russia’s foreign exchange reserves at the start of 2000 were an astonishingly low $12.5bn.

2024: By the start of sanctions in 2022 they had reached $600bn.

GDP per Capita:

2000: GDP per capita (nominal) was about $1,902.

2024: Now it is approximately $13,005 in nominal terms and $47,299 in PPP (purchase power parity) adjusted terms, on a par with many EU countries.

Average Incomes:

2000: The average monthly income was a mere $79 per month in nominal terms.

2023: Since then, incomes have decupled to $948 per month in nominal terms, by far the highest of any Former Soviet Union (FSU) country. In PPP adjusted terms that is equivalent to around $2,100 a month – again on a par with most EU countries.

This transformation was brought about by Putin’s decision to raise public sector wages by about 10% every year for a decade starting in 2000. Putin realised that the gap between private and public sector wages – half the country is budgetniki – was getting so big that it would inevitably lead to social unrest so he shared Russia’s petrodollar riches with the hoi polloi.

Inflation Levels:

2000: After the hyperinflation of the 1990s, inflation was still high, with rates around 20.8%, and didn’t fall to single digits until 2007.

2024: Inflation remains the main macroeconomic headache but is still in single digits but projected to be around 9% by year-end.

This economic transformation is the foundation of Putin’s popularity. It is not that the Russians love Putin, but they are grateful to him for normalising their lives. They may not like the way he runs the country, but they don’t rebel as they are more scared of losing what they have gained than demanding change in the hope they could live better under a more liberal system.

Moreover, Putin job of making sure there is no alternative has been made easier by the fact that the opposition has remained fissiparous and ineffective. The two opposition politicians that might have replaced Putin – Boris Nemtsov and Alexey Navalny – were both murdered. But even if they had been allowed to run for office, most Russians see both as untested and unqualified to run the country. The irony of Russian elections is Putin would probably still win even if they were free and fair. When criticised by a reporter as Putin took office for the fourth time, he shot back: “And how many terms has Merkel served? Four, isn’t it?” She had just been re-elected for a fourth time two months earlier.

As for the Ukrainian war, Russian surveys conducted in 2022 university found that Russians thought that going to war with their “brothers” in Ukraine was a stupid idea and were very uncomfortable with the idea of Russian troops invading Ukraine. However, since then similar surveys have found that once the war started, and it is universally seen as a war with Nato, which is supplying most of Ukraine’s weapons and half its money, Russia needs to win.

That is another thing that Putin gifted Russia with: the restoration of the famous Russian national pride after the humiliation of losing its superpower status following Yeltsin’s dissolution of the Soviet Union – another reason why Yeltsin is so hated in modern Russia. Today patriotism is at an all-time high.

Make Russia Great Again

Rosenberg is aware of all this but like most is not sure how all this fits together to explain Putin.

“From the speeches he gives, the comments he makes, Putin appears driven by resentment, by an all-encompassing feeling that for years Russia has been lied to and disrespected, its security concerns dismissed by the West,” Rosenberg says. “But does Putin himself believe that he has fulfilled Yeltsin’s request to “take care of Russia?”

Looking at the story from the business perspective I think this is exactly how Putin sees his relationship with the West. As one of the best-known reporters in Russia, Rosenberg had the opportunity to pose this question to Putin personally last month at the annual marathon presidential press conference.

“Boris Yeltsin told you to take care of Russia,” Rosenberg reminded the president. “But what of the significant losses in your so-called ‘special military operation’, the Ukrainian troops in the Kursk region, the sanctions, the high inflation. Do you think you’ve taken care of your country?”

“Yes,” President Putin replied. “And I haven’t just taken care of it. We’ve pulled back from the edge of the abyss.”

Rosenberg said Putin portrayed Yeltsin’s Russia as a country that had been losing its sovereignty. He accused the West of having “patronisingly patted” Yeltsin on the shoulder while “using Russia for its own purposes”. But he, Putin, was “doing everything”, he said, “to ensure Russia was an independent sovereign state”, Rosenberg writes.

“Presenting himself as the defender of Russian sovereignty: is this a view he’s come up with retrospectively to try to justify the war in Ukraine? Or does Putin really believe this take on modern Russian history?” Rosenberg asks. “I’m still not sure. Not yet. But I sense that it is a key question.”

Personally, I think the answer to this question depends on which perspective you choose to take. Obviously, most of the coverage of Russia today compares Moscow of today with London, Washington and Brussels of today — a comparison of the values, democracy, corruption, wealth etc. – and obviously Moscow falls down badly.

But if you take the other perspective, the Moscow of today set against the Moscow of January 1, 2000, then you get a completely different picture, one where Putin’s complaints seem much more reasonable and one where he appears as a much more effective and successful leader. Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, since 2000 Russia has made the most progress and is the more prosperous of all the FSU countries created on that day.

The problem is that both these perspectives are valid. The question is which one do you choose, or how do you combine them?

As Rosenberg ends his article: “The answer to it may well influence how the war ends – and Russia’s future direction.”