The Russian economy (catch all)

[Firn]

With Russia's Economy, Talk Is Cheap (Op-Ed) by Mark Adomanis.

Some Russian analysts have spoken of the "war between the television and the refrigerator," a pithy way to describe an escalating clash between a politicized propaganda narrative in which Russia is "rising from its knees" and an increasingly bleak economic reality in which inflation, shortages, and recession loom ever larger.

In terms of what Western Russian analysts should pay attention to I would rephrase this slightly as the fight between Sputnik (a state-run news agency) and Rosstat (the state statistics service).

I found I also increasingly useful to ignore a lot of the output which was designed to be noise and look at the research articles and statistics. Maybe the best frame for thought was actually the old Collapse of an Empire: Lessons for Modern Russia. Mark Thoma once joked that new economic thinking means reading old books. In this case it worked surprisingly well.

As always, reality has exceedingly little regard for abstract ideological notions.

Great quote that.