These things happen sometimes, ship anchors sometimes damage cables, but not this often and without serious problems in the ship. Russians are attempting plausible deniability.
These things happen sometimes, ship anchors sometimes damage cables, but not this often and without serious problems in the ship. Russians are attempting plausible deniability.
If the EU decides to join the US the war is over and Russia will keep the occupied lands. If the EU decides to support Ukraine then because of the devastating sanctions there is a strong chance Russia loses.
So it's in Russia's interest to make life as difficult as possible for Europe over the coming months in order to convince them that ending the war is in their best interest.
How did that not work then yet?
All of it are merely suffering that the russian citizens suffer, but canwithstand. Russia does not import food, does not need to import fuel, and can import most consumer goods from china and bypass western sanctions.
Therefore, russia's gov't can allocate most of their internal resources for war production.
Also, the discussion was about the effect of the sanctions. But the inflation is going up not because of that, but because of the huge amount of Russian government money that's flowing to the military and to the weapon industry.
I'm not sure how useful that exchange-rate data is when the Russian government has made it harder to for their people to actually trade away rubles even at a price they like. [0]
I'd also expand the time window: The Jan-2022 ruble had already taken geopolitical damage, because of how Russia attacked Ukraine using insignia-less forces in 2014. In contrast, a 2012 ruble was more like $0.30.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/31/russia-capital...