With oil prices plummeting, the ruble tanking against the dollar, and the Russian economy squeezed by Western sanctions, Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev on Monday offered an assessment that might easily qualify as the understatement of the new year. “The economic situation is quite problematic to say the least,” he said.
Even as Russian consumers find the value of their rubles shrinking and consumer goods harder to find, there is a flip side to the contraction, one that has potentially significant ramifications for Russia’s volatile domestic politics. Since the first week of January, labor migration into Russia — mostly from Central …read more
Source: Foreign Policy