From MB’s well-placed Russian source.
Yesterday the Western press declared that Russia’s billionaire’s were in a panic about their wealth, thereby implying that sanctions are an effective form of negotiation with the Great Bear. Russia’s richest businessmen – I have met some of these people and numerous numbers of their underlings, and there is not (with the arguable possible exception of Anatoly Chubais) anything about any of them which makes them worthy in any way of being Russia’s richest businessmen – apart from the fact that they have shown themselves better at killing, embezzling, bribing or extorting access to revenue generating assets in Russia than others . The people of Russia know this. Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin (VVP) knows this. They (and their families) know this.
The people of Russia and VVP also know that the only way any of them make any money whatsoever is by extracting natural resources (start with oil gas coal and iron ore) and selling it to whoever is buying. Unlike Australia, for Russian producers of many of these commodities it is often the case that the state (in one of its many guises) is the buyer, or that the need to do something with the resource in question reflects a strategic goal of some sort – so that effectively the revenues generated by Russia’s richest come from the state.
