https://gilbertdoctorow.substack.com/p/its-the-economy-stupid-russias-economy
it’s the economy, stupid! Russia today
Published by gilbertdoctorow
Gilbert Doctorow's latest book, "War Diaries. The Russia-Ukraine War, 2022-2023" is a unique contribution to literature on the war thanks to the author's reports on the Russian home front written during his periodic visits to St Petersburg at a time when Russia no longer issued visas and nearly all Western journalists had left the country. Doctorow's two-volume "Memoirs of a Russianist" published in 2020 also constitutes a category of its own, consisting largely of diary entries rather than reminiscences written decades later.. Volume 2 focuses on the community of 50,000 expatriate managers working and living in Moscow during the 1990s, about which none of his peers has yet to write. Gilbert Doctorow is a professional Russia watcher and actor in Russian affairs going back to 1965. He is a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College (1967), a past Fulbright scholar, and holder of a Ph.D. with honors in history from Columbia University (1975). After completing his studies, Mr. Doctorow pursued a business career focused on the USSR and Eastern Europe. For twenty-five years he worked for US and European multinationals in marketing and general management with regional responsibility. From 1998-2002, Doctorow served as the Chairman of the Russian Booker Literary Prize in Moscow. During the 2010-2011 academic year, he was a Visiting scholar of the Harriman Institute, Columbia University. Mr. Doctorow is a long-time resident of Brussels. View all posts by gilbertdoctorow
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Gilbert Doctorow 
I thought it was already in the public domain that Russia’s economy had turned into wartime production. Something which I think was unavoidable giving the existential nature of the “SMO” which in fact is a full fledged brutal proxy war the entire West if fighting against Russia.
NATO Europe has turned into Ukraine’s strategic rear, is ramping up drone production in ever increasing pace while boasting about it and there has been no willingness at the Russian leadership to reciprocate in that strategic rear. The reciprocal attacks limited to Ukraine’s (energy) infrastructure going on for about half a year did not result in a desired halting of attacks on Russia’s (energy) infrastructure. The death toll in the border regions is increasing with the mounting prevalence of Western provided drones (https://oxygene84.substack.com/p/stories-von-der-ostfront). The briefing from Russia’s MOD may even have been some warning or disagreement with the current course. Either way, Lavrov down played it by giving some ambiguous comment.
Your take is still more optimistic than mine because the West has effectively started a blockade on Russian maritime traffic. The access to the Atlantic ocean of the Russian Baltic sea ports is increasingly being hampered by the fact that maritime vessels necessarily need to pass Swedish waters and are systematically being pirated (https://t.me/two_majors/74478). Of course there are the many attacks on maritime vessels in the Mediterranean (Arctic-Metagaz and multiple dozens more) ostensibly by Ukraine but in reality executed by Western intelligence agencies.
Russia’s economy is increasingly being damaged by the West which can only result in either a significant shift in policy change (major military escalation) or shift in the Russian leadership.
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