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Russia’s Dwindling Middle Classes No Catalyst for Shift in Kremlin Foreign Policy
April 22, 2021
Jake Cordell
After years of rapid expansion during President Vladimir Putin’s first stint as president, Russia s middle class has dwindled in the years since his return to office in 2012. Confrontation with the west after the annexation of Crimea, the resulting sanctions and the Kremlin’s focus on macroeconomic stability at the expense of prosperity have entrenched a stagnation which has hit middle-earners hard. By one count, Russia’s middle class shrunk 20 percent during the economic crisis that followed.
But even as their economic decline coincided with Russia’s more aggressive foreign policy, there is little evidence that Russia’s current and former middle-classers connect their plight to the Kremlin’s conduct beyond its borders. There may be economic discontent at home, but Russia’s confrontational stance against the west remains popular, and calls to reverse year
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Apr 14, 2021 11:25 AM
MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russian police raided a student magazine s editorial office on Wednesday and detained four of its journalists on criminal charges of encouraging minors to take part in anti-Kremlin protests, the outlet said.
The independent DOXA outlet set up by students and university graduates in 2017 in Moscow said police had taken detainees for questioning and seized equipment including phones, and that a court would rule later on pre-trial restrictions.
The detentions come amid a crackdown on allies of Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny whose arrest and jailing earlier this year sparked several nationwide protests that police said were illegal and broke up using force.
Distribution has been plagued by marketing missteps and self-inflicted wounds, experts say. Russia’s vaccination of its own population is seriously lagging compared to other major industrial countries. Production problems have also hampered its use inside and outside Russia, and tarnished what might have been a fresh reminder of Russia’s scientific potential.
“If what Russia wanted was kudos and credit for having developed one of the first earlier, very probably safe and effective vaccines for COVID-19 and it would have been well-deserved kudos and credit a better strategy would have been transparency from the very beginning,” said Judy Twigg, a professor of political science at Virginia Commonwealth University and expert on global health issues in Russia and Eurasia.