Many people are trying to predict the future.
But there is one problem.
You can make any predictions from the point of uncertainty
and even find decent justifications for any of the extreme points of view.
When and how will Putin's regime end?
When and where will the war stop?
Will it remain in Ukraine only or spread throughout the continent?
The range of answers is unlimited.
Today we’ll talk about something different.
Today we’ll discuss two consequences
which are bound to occur no matter what will happen next.
Let's start with the first one – with Russia's inevitable loss of the raw materials market
What is the European Union,
which now consumes most of Russia's raw materials?
It’s 447 million people and approximately 5% of the world’s population.
It’s 18 trillion dollars of GDP in 2020 and 1/5 of the world’s economy.
At the same time the European market almost completely depends on energy products import.
Oil, gas, and coal
Just to make sure you understand the scale of dependency –
the country with the largest oil extraction potential in the EU is Romania
which takes the 42nd place in the global rating.
And the Netherlands is the gas extraction leader, taking the 27th place in the world.
Even Norway, the largest European country outside the EU with an economy based on fired fuel export,
is in the top-20 of the global rating of oil-and-gas potential.
From the point of view of energy products export the EU is the most attractive market in the world.
It’s the third economy, a developed economy, a highly energy-demanding economy.
The economy which unlike the first two, of the USA and China,
can’t provide itself with energy products.
The USSR and Russia were traditionally the leading oil-and-gas suppliers for Europe.
Before the war Russia supplied half of the gas exported to Europe, almost 1/3 of all the oil and oil products.
That’s what nourished Putin’s confidence.
Because even in the most critical situations,
the EU has never allowed itself to refuse Russian energy products.
Now Europe is not in the best place.
While the EU’s energy system is adapting to the new suppliers and the ways of obtaining gas and oil,
several difficult years will pass.
Production will suffer badly, unemployment and inflation rate will increase,
there will be significant political conflicts inside the EU countries and between them.
They will need macro-economic investments to disrupt and replace the system which has been built for decades.
Macro-economic sums will be also paid to those who are going to suffer from it.
We’d like to mention that revolutionary changes in energy supplies should be taken
by the economy which lost more than 6% during pandemic 2020
and which despite the nice growth in 2021 hasn’t fully recovered yet.
But it’s also obvious that those who help Europe now and come to the EU
with their tankers, cisterns, and barrels and will come with their pipes, storage places and pumping stations later,
those who make investments and provide energy products to Europe,
will stay there until the mankind uses fossil energy at all.
And I’ll remind you, this is the market taking 20% of the global economy
with one of the highest levels of industrial development and almost complete dependency on energetic import.
Yes, there will be several difficult years for Europe.
But during those years mineral companies and the countries
exporting oil and gas will split the “Russian inheritance”.
Who will ever refuse such a royal gift from Vladimir Putin?
It’s a half-share of the biggest mineral supplier,
the market vacuum where you can come to and get an endless and stable money flow.
This inheritance share-splitting has already started.
Russia has lost 1/3 of its European gas supplies.
Its share decreased from 45% in April 2021to 31% in April 2022.
This share has not evaporated – it’s billions of dollars earned by someone else.
Vladimir Putin and his circle live in the world of absolute money power and immediate profit.
The world around them is a Soviet caricature for capitalism.
It’s Dunno on the Moon (Russian satirical novel) where a greedy bourgeois will never miss a green dollar.
Where words and behavior contradict each other and exist separately.
Where the European politicians will surely talk a lot and the corporations will say they don’t like it,
and yet, they will have no choice but to continue working with Russia and buy gas because business is business.
And it’s so difficult to accept another idea that it’s impossible
to create a permanent deficit of resources in such an important market.
It doesn’t matter how difficult and expensive changes on the energy market are,
there will be a lot of candidates to own the money that once went to Russia.
While Europe is solving an ethical problem on how to stop paying for the war,
someone will try to solve a commercial problem – how to get rid of Russia on the European market.
And this problem will surely be solved.
It's not that important how exactly this problem is going to be solved –
by the supplies of liquified gas or by building new pipelines –
or who is going to solve it and who and how is going to divide the Russian inheritance.
The thing is that Russia is going to lose the European market of energy products.
Energy market reorientation is a one-way ticket.
And this is bad news.
No one would care what kind of regime settled in Russia or what kind of changes happened.
New infrastructure will be built and will work nicely, new suppliers will fight for their interests.
The source of free currency, which was unlimited, as we thought, dried out for us.
One of the most popular myths in modern Russia is a myth about “the roaring 90s”.
It’s like there was a total mess and criminal chaos and then Putin came,
and we felt stability and comfort again.
To tell you the truth, it’s a lie.
A significant crime decrease didn’t start when Putin came to power
but in the end of 2010s after his second term.
And it’s not a unique achievement of the Russian government.
It’s a part of the global trend called “the great crime drop”.
There has been a significant decrease in crime rate in the developed countries during the last decades.
There are a lot of reasons for that – economic growth, demographic changes, security technologies development.
Russia caught up with this trend a bit later, but it’s a fact that a crime drop happened in our country too.
It’s also a fact that the situation will change soon and not for the better.
There are several objective factors which cannot help but lead to it.
What is the situation when more crimes, murders, robberies, rapes, car thefts occur?
Several things should happen at the same time.
There should be a lot of people ready to commit crime because of their personal qualities.
There should be a motivation to commit crime.
And a certain level of impunity – the feeling that you can easily escape punishment.
Let’s discuss what do those 3 factors mean for Russia today or, to be more precise, for Russia tomorrow?
There are hundreds of thousands of soldiers who participate in this war.
Most of them are young 19- or 20-years-old men.
In most cases they have no education or understanding what they want in their life.
And right now they are getting a horrible traumatizing battle experience.
One day those young men will come back home.
They will face a complete indifference from the government which ordered them to shed blood.
Of course, they won’t get any promised benefits or payments.
Or they will get just mere scraps.
It will be especially difficult for disabled people.
They will get miserable benefits and the environment which is not accessible at all.
Unfortunately, in Russia it’s a heroic thing for a disabled person
to leave home and pass an obstacle course in the street.
You can imagine what people will think about this world.
You come back home from the unjust and criminal war where you didn’t protect anyone from anything,
but you were an aggressor instead.
And many soldiers who are in Ukraine right now understand it better than us.
You come back to the world which doesn’t care about you at all.
You come back to your town.
There has been no job even before that and now the last production sites closed.
You have no other skills except or killing people and thieving.
It might look like it’s an obvious way to survive
if you cooperate with the vets like yourself and try to get money illegally.
You will set an example for others –
for the workers of those closed production sites, for instance, who need to provide for their families.
This phenomenon of the after-war “lost generation” was described perfectly well
by the writers of the second half of the 20th century – first of all, by Remarque.
Our country also witnessed something like that in the 90s
when lots of Afghanistan and Chechnya vets came back home.
Now, let’s proceed with the second factor.
The motivation factor.
If economic development makes criminal activity less appealing,
economic fall, on the contrary, leads to crime increase.
Any person thinking about committing crime weighs the pros and cons in this or that way.
There are some people, of course, who would prefer a mafia boss career rather than anything else.
But there are not so many of them in any society.
Like Viktor Tsoy (the Soviet rock star) sang in one of his songs:
“Someone who has got a good plan for life is not going to think about anything else”.
If you have a normal interesting job, growth prospects, paid holidays, and medical insurance,
it’s quite unlikely that you will be tempted to rob a small shop in the railway station after work
risking being caught or shot by a policeman.
The Russian economy attacked by sanctions will not grow in the nearest future, it will shrink instead.
Private investments will decrease.
Almost the only option to earn some money will be working for state
or state-related structures with all the benefits – salary on the poverty threshold,
the prospect to work in one position for decades, useless paperwork and so on.
And meanwhile, there will be much easier ways to get money illegally.
Let’s say, very soon there will be a huge growth in the car theft rate in Russia.
And of old cars too.
People don’t usually insure them or install expensive anti-theft alarm systems.
A car components deficit is a good motivation to steal such cars and take them down.
The same situation is with apartment robberies.
In recent years such crimes have become more and more rare.
It’s quite stupid to risk you liberty, break into the apartment just to find there a TV and a microwave
you can easily buy in Avito (a platform for selling and buying secondhand things).
But the deficit of home appliances and the components will become stronger,
and the motivation to steal things will become stronger too.
And, finally, the third factor which is about punishment.
It might look extraordinary, but in Russia, where even now more than 3%
of the employable population is connectedwith security agencies,
the inevitability of punishment will decrease with time.
First, it’s obvious from the statistical point of view –
сrime level will become higher, and it will be more difficult to fight against it.
Second, and it’s even more important, the government and the security agencies will have other priorities.
Well, these priorities are different even now.
Their priority will be to defend the regime from new risks.
The fact that you can get 7 years of imprisonment for criticizing the war out loud is quite effective.
Normal people with average views become shocked and want to abandon everything
and leave the country, never become involved in politics, and never run for any post – even for a municipal deputy.
That’s what the authors of those severe sentences look for.
Citizens who want to change power through legal authorities get scared,
lose motivation, and emigrate – really or emotionally
But this seat will not be vacant for long.
Sooner or later, someone completely different will take this seat.
It’s not about extremism invented by the security authorities for the post in Vkontakte (Russian social media),
or invented terrorists, but about the real ones.
Those who are not scared of risks.
What should they be frightened of, if they can get more for words rather than for murder?
With the regime becoming stricter and the economic situation worse,
the fight of the senile regime for life will take more and more energy from the security authorities.
Nine investigators worked on the case of the deputy Gorinov, 6 of them usually work on highly important cases.
Five experts analyzed his speech.
Political processes demand great resources.
And all of those resources won’t be spent on the investigation of real criminal cases.
Real criminals will find it easier to escape responsibility.
The consequences we’ve mentioned today will happen anyway.
Even if the war stops tomorrow, they will happen for sure.
In any case Russia will lose income from European energy exports.
In any case Russia will have severe social problems.
And first of all, the blossoming of criminal activity.
We can’t avoid those consequences.
But the problem is that every day of war makes the rate
and the severity of those inevitable consequences even worse.
The thing is that all of that happens with our country for nothing.
There is nothing else on the other side of the scale.
Russia achieves no goals leading this crazy war in Ukraine.
Russia doesn’t make its influence stronger, or fights NATO, or builds a multi-polar world.
Russia doesn’t help the Russians in Donbas.
On the contrary, it destroys the cities and kills them.
When someone unprofessional becomes the head even of a small production site, the result will be poor –
debts, reputational losses and in the end, the loss of business.
When someone unprofessional, who makes irrational decisions, is the head of the country,
he can just derail the whole country for no reason – just for the sake of his personal ambitions.
This is exactly what happened to Russia.
But of course, the most horrible thing in this crazy situation is dozens of thousands of lost lives.
There is nothing worse than people who died for nothing.
But if for Ukraine the end of the war becomes the start
of the renaissance and quick transformation into a developed European country,
for Russia the problems will just start there.
There will be plenty of them, but those two we’ve discussed today, are bound to happen.
Till tomorrow!