Al Jazeera: Russian Economy In Record Decline
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posted by eagle on August, 2009 as ANALYSIS / OPINION
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 12, 2009
13:00 MECCA TIME, 10:00 GMT
| Russian economy in record decline | |  | | Russia's economy has declined sharply after years of strong growth from energy prices [EPA] |
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Russia's economy has shrunk by 10.9 per cent in this year's second quarter, in the country's worst contraction on record. The results, which underlined the depth of the recession in Russia, were worse than the market had expected, analysts said. Dmitry Medvedev, Russia's president, said earlier in the week that the economy risked hitting "a dead end" unless it saw rapid reform. "As soon as the crisis took place, (the economy) crumbled. And worse than in many other countries. Why? Because we did not change the structure of our economy," he said. Devalued currency Analysts had forecast a contraction of 10.2 per cent, following a 9.8 per cent contraction in the year's first quarter. "It's much worse than what the market expected," Chris Weafer, chief strategist at the Uralsib investment bank in Moscow, told the AFP news agency. "The underlying problem is the fact that there is very ... |
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Window On Eurasia: Russia Prepares To Delay Census Scheduled For 2010 To 2012
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posted by eagle on as ANALYSIS / OPINION
Paul Goble
Vienna, August 12 – The Russian Federal Service for State Statistics (Rosstat) is preparing and will send to the Economic Development Ministry which oversees its work a formal proposal to delay the next national census from October 2010 to October 2012, Rosstat head Aleksandr Surikov said today in Vladivostok.
As he has done several times over the last few months, Surikov said that the international financial crisis was being this decision, given the enormous cost of conducting the census. On this occasion, he suggested that Moscow would have to come up with “no less than 10 billion rubles” (300 million US dollars), a figure somewhat below his earlier projections.
The Rosstat head said that the census could not be conducted in 2011 because the government will have to pay for elections during that year. As a result, he said, Moscow will have to carry it out in 2012 in order to ...
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Window On Eurasia: A New Georgian War Could Destroy Russia The Way Afghan Conflict Did The USSR, Latynina Warns
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posted by eagle on as ANALYSIS / OPINION
Paul Goble
Vienna, August 12 – A new war with Georgia, something Russian officials and commentators are increasingly talking about, could have the same impact on the Russian Federation that the invasion of Afghanistan had on the USSR, according to Yuliya Latynina, a Moscow commentator who specializes on the Caucasus.
In an interview posted on the Kasparov.ru portal today, Latynina suggests this risk is all the greater because Moscow does not now control the republics of the North Caucasus within the borders of the Russian Federation and thus does not see how the problems arising from a new Georgian war could spread northward (www.kasparov.ru/material.php?id=4A827880091EB).
Latynina begins by pointing out that in the Caucasus as a whole at the present time “two different processes are taking place: the spread of rumors about a possible new war of Russia with Georgia and the escalation of the use of force ...
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Window On Eurasia: Russian Military Suffers Casualties In Exercises With Other Countries’ Forces
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posted by eagle on as ANALYSIS / OPINION
Paul Goble
Vienna, August 10 – The number of non-combat losses of the Russian armed forces is not only six to nine times greater than Moscow claims but reflects the problems many Russian commanders now have in interacting with their opposite numbers from other countries during international military maneuvers.
Last year, Ruslan Gorevoy reports in the current issue of “Versiya,” Russian Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov said that his forces had suffered 471 non-combat deaths, but Veronika Marchenko, the head of the Mother’s Right Foundation, said that the actual figure is much higher, 2500 to 3,000 (versia.ru/articles/2009/aug/10/zhertvy_voennyh_uchenij).
The difference between official and unofficial figures, Gorevoy says, is not simply about intentional underreporting but rather because the Russian defense ministry does not count those who die from injuries after they have been demobilized or those who die “in the course of joint military exercises with the armies of other countries.”
Both of these figures are classified ...
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Window On Eurasia: Internet ‘Horizontal’ Now Threatens Putin ‘Vertical,’ Moscow Commentator Suggests
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posted by eagle on as ANALYSIS / OPINION
Paul Goble
Vienna, August 11 – Ten years ago, the Internet blogosphere and Vladimir Putin burst on the Russian scene at almost the same moment, setting the stage for a “David and Goliath”-style conflict in which the horizontal ties promoted by apparently weak blogosphere are becoming a real threat to the outwardly impressive power of the latter, according to a Moscow commentator.
And while Igor Yakovenko writes in yesterday’s “Yezhednevny zhurnal” that there is nothing inevitable about the victory of the former over the latter, the struggle between the two is far less unequal than many imagine and the possibilities for the emergence of a new and more open Russia thus far greater (www.ej.ru/?a=note&id=9346).
The blogosphere, which Russians call “the live journal” with its Russian-language acronym “ZhZh,” Yakovenko notes, arrived “thanks to America and like all globalization was a HORIZONTAL phenomenon.” The second, Putin’s VERTICAL, in contrast was the product of the country’s long ...
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