Landslide
Vladimir Putin has — somewhat inevitably — secured another 6 years as president of Russia after apparently taking 87% of the vote, according to exit polls from the weekend’s "sham" election. Candidates were reportedly vetted by the Kremlin, campaign financing and fundraising was limited by the state, and voting was enforced by gunpoint in some parts of occupied Ukraine, leading to protests breaking out within Russia and around the world.
Russia’s ruble
Putin’s rule in one form or another has been steady for 25 years now, having served as president or prime minister ever since 1999 — making him the longest-serving leader since Joseph Stalin. But, with Russia increasingly sealed off from the rest of the world, how is the country’s economy faring?
The ruble, Russia's national currency, has seen some extreme fluctuations for an economy of its size since the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. From 2020-2021, 100 rubles would typically buy somewhere between $1.25 and $1.60 — an exchange rate that, in the wake of the invasion, reached as low ~$0.72. Since then, the Kremlin has made concerted efforts to prop up its currency, implementing extended capital controls, ordering Russian companies to sell off other countries’ cash, and decreeing that “unfriendly” foreign entities must pay for gas in rubles.
Other measures of Russia’s economic wellbeing are equally distorted, with GDP seemingly holding up well... in part because it measures every new tank, bomb, and weapon produced by the country.
Like so many other questions surrounding modern Russia, the answer to “how is the country’s economy doing” is shrouded in some deliberate, and some unintended, obfuscation.
