Russia: 2020 has confirmed that the country has solid foundations
Russia: a "giant with feet of clay"?
The expert: "2020 has confirmed that the country has solid foundations".
(by A. Borelli) - FarodiRoma (Italy)
"The experience of 2020 suggests that the foundations of Russia are more solid than some analysts imagine". Not, therefore, a "giant with feet of clay", according to the version of an accredited cliché, but a country "able to face and overcome adversity with legendary ability". The analysis is by a careful observer like Paul Robinson, a lecturer at the University of Ottawa, Canada, and author of numerous publications on Russian history and the Soviet Union. Taking stock of the year just ended for the authoritative television and web newspaper "Russia Today", Robinson stigmatized, data in hand, the forecasts that, with some recurrence, give the next Russia, "if pushed energetically enough , to collapse ".
The historian also enumerates the reasons given in support of the thesis of this alleged weakness: firstly, for 2020 and inevitably, the harmful effects of the pandemic which, the historian writes, "The government has faced by repeating many of the mistakes of other European countries , reacting too slowly and then loosening the block before the initial wave of the virus was completely under control ”. Indeed, at the end of December, as anticipated by "Il Faro di Roma", Deputy Prime Minister Tatiana Golikova admitted that over 81% of the excess deaths recorded between January and November in Russia are due to the coronavirus: in practice , more than 186 thousand deaths against the approximately 55 thousand estimated by the Kremlin task force.
But the economic consequences of the crisis are also significant: Russian GDP will fall, according to initial calculations, by 4%; a painful setback after years of timid growth. Not only that: as Robinson himself notes, other elements have been heaped up to entangle an already complex situation. The constitutional amendment that opened the way for the re-nomination of President Vladimir Putin in 2024 "has turned - writes the Ottawa professor - into a missed opportunity to change the Russian political system in a more democratic direction, while a series of measures, such as 'labeling individuals for the first time as "foreign agents" added the impression that the Russian state has become increasingly oppressive ". In addition, “on the external front, Russia is under increasing pressure from foreign powers. The United States withdrew from key arms control treaties and imposed a series of economic sanctions against Moscow ”. In the south, Turkey has tried to gain positions in the always difficult Syrian area to the detriment of Russia, while tensions in Armenia, due to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, and in Belarus, with the ongoing protests against President Aleksandr Lukashenko, have escalated. the perception of an extremely unstable and potentially explosive Russian border.
According to Robinson, however, similar fuses capable of exploding internal and external balances have so far been defused by the Kremlin with an ability that, in various contexts, has demonstrated the fallacy of easy cassandras of doom: because if it is true, for example, that the decrease in Gross Domestic Product for 2020 is estimated at 4%, the figure is still far better when compared with the repercussions of Covid on the economy of other European countries, estimated between 8 and 10 percent; the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan, which at first seemed to undermine Russia's position in the Caucasus, turned for Putin's diplomacy into an opportunity to find a compromise solution at the last minute that confirmed the Russian role of guarantor of pacification within the Caucasus region;
The president's party, "United Russia", is still very well accredited by the polls and presents itself to the appointment with the September vote for the Duma in healthier conditions, politically speaking, more than good. And the gesture at the end of the year with which Putin, in a letter of good wishes to the American President-elect Biden, called for a relaunch of the dialogue with the USA, reopens prospects for a Russian repositioning in the world chessboard. Robinson then comments in his analysis for RT: “2020 has thrown a lot against Russia, but Russia has resisted very well. It will take much longer to be able to break it down ”.