Read Part 1 here (redistribution of assets, banditry).

What Russia does to its economy is suicide and criminal thinking will become the country’s main policy in the near future. A dark period is looming over Russia and will stay there until the end of this century, says an economist and scholar who had helped design Russian economic reforms in the 1990s. 

On Russia’s territorial integrity

In an interview for the Popular Politics, an independent YouTube channel, Igor Lipsits, doctor of economics, author, and a co-founder of the Higher Economic School in Moscow, says that Russia is trapped to subsistence by the size of its territory, which offered vast resources but is also plagued by plenty of differences (ethnic, economic) and killed or inhibited the desire to innovate or to look for alternative answers. 

More to read:
How Trump wants to stop the Russia-Ukraine war: give land to Putin

The favorite method to get rich in Russia is to conquer new territories, just like in the Middle Ages. The Russians got doomed on the day they conquered the Kazan Khanate [in 1552] – its first major territorial expansion. Since then it’s lived with the idea of expansion as a source of welfare.

Although there are no imminent premises for Russia’s disintegration at present, this process is possible if the country is struck by major catastrophes such as civil war and mass riots.

There’s little chance that the aboriginal peoples of Siberia will rise to independence. What really matters is distance. The Far East region, for example, has little in common with the European Russia – shipping goods from that region to Moscow makes them uncompetitive and locals prefer doing business with China and even trade for Chinese yuan rather than Russian rubles.

Times of hardship may transform the country, in the best scenario, in a confederation of independent but closely cooperating republics or push to disintegration into dozens of statelets under the control of warlords with no moral or legal constraints, acting as medieval feudals.