Russia’s pandemic-political update: home alone

RUSSIA ECONOMICS - Report 03 Dec 2020 by Evgeny Gavrilenkov and Alexander Kudrin

Russia’s epidemiological situation continued to evolve In November in line with previous trends, such as the continuously growing number of new cases per day. What has changed, however, was the fact that the number of people discharged due to recovery grew steadily as well, so that the growth rate of the so-called “active” cases has slowed significantly.

Amid the pandemic, Russian foreign policy in recent months has finally started drifting toward maintaining a kind of “social distancing” with the West, which is unsurprising as initially it was the consolidated opinion of the Western countries to “isolate” Russia in the aftermath of the 2014 developments in Ukraine. Both parties now have matching interests to isolate from each other, and as this is now happening by mutual desire, this trend is set to strengthen in the next decade and even for a longer period.

It looks as though Russia will be more concentrated on domestic and regional issues than on broader geopolitical issues as there is a growing understanding that its slowly advancing economy does not match its geopolitical ambitions, and quite often makes it more difficult to deal with regional problems.

Now read on...

Register to sample a report

Register