On January 29, the Bologna Institute of Policy Research (BIPR) hosted the first seminar of the spring semester, featuring distinguished scholars from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center. Sergey Radchenko of Johns Hopkins University SAIS Europe moderated the forum, which looked at Russia's alleged economic resilience, political maneuvers in the face of sanctions, and the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, painting a complex picture of strength and vulnerability.

Challenging President Putin's optimistic view, Alexandra Prokopenko conducted a critical examination of Russia's economic landscape. Despite Russia's 3.5% economic growth rate, which might surpass that of Germany and the United Kingdom, the impact on Russian citizens' welfare remains debatable. Military spending is increasing at an unprecedented rate, rising from 5% of GDP in 2023 to a predicted 8% in 2024, the highest level since the 1990s. China, Turkey, India, and even Eastern European nations' trade with Russia helps to support its reliance on oil and gas revenues. However, the strategy to circumvent sanctions through intermediaries in countries like Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Turkey, and the UAE raises questions about the long-term viability of this economic model, especially given the high inflation rates and the looming trilemma of financing the war, maintaining a facade of normalcy, and ensuring macroeconomic stability with inflation lingering at 7.4%.

Looking at Russia's economic policy through the lens if budgetary legislation, Ekaterina Schulmann described the unprecedented increase of both the revenue and spending in 2024 budget and the leaking plans for tax increase, contrasting with the public image of a country with limitless financial resources. She shed light on the political manoeuvres driving Russia's budgetary inflation, citing electoral ambitions for 2024. The temporary increase in spending aims to secure electoral support, but there is widespread scepticism about the post-election economic reality. Russia's technocrats have maintained resilience and navigated the sanctions, but remain both overworked and constantly threatened by the pressure from the siloviki, masking a deeper unrest among these critical but underappreciated figures.

In the following, Alexander Gabuev provided insights into the conflict's international ramifications, citing stalled US aid packages to Ukraine and China's calculated hesitance of engaging politically in the Russian war against Ukraine. Beijing's strategic silence highlights a broader geopolitical calculus in which engaging could result in tangible benefits without the risk of sanctions.

Concluding the round of panelists, Alexander Baunov delved into speculative territory, questioning Putin's regime's legitimacy and long-term survival. The alarming trend of dissent suppression, combined with an authoritarian narrative, suggests that the regime is on the verge of legitimacy. The comparison to democratic recoveries in historically authoritarian states suggests that Russia, which lacks a democratic governance tradition, faces a difficult path ahead.

The Q&A session focused mainly on the fate of Russia's technocrats in possible post-Putin scenarios, drawing parallels to the post-Stalin power transition. This analogy provided a historical context for understanding Russia's power transition dynamics, emphasizing the desire for a benign leader and the avoidance of internal elite strife. The discussion highlighted the critical, but precarious, role of technocrats in shaping Russia's future in an environment where political advancement remains elusive.

Overall, the speakers provided a nuanced understanding of Russia's current situation, balancing economic optimism with the harsh realities of political and social tension. A thorough examination of Russia's economic indicators, political strategies, and the shadow of the Ukraine conflict revealed a nation at a crossroads, with global consequences hanging in the balance.

hosted by Professor Sergey Radchenko


ALEXANDER BAUNOV
Alexander Baunov is a Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and Visiting Fellow at the Robert Schuman Centre. He is currently the editor-in-chief of Carnegie and, before February 2022, was editor-in-chief of the websites belonging to Carnegie's Moscow Centre, which were shut down by the Russian authorities after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Before joining Carnegie, Baunov spent five years working as a senior editor at the independent news website Slon.ru, where he worked since its launch. Baunov has written on a wide variety of international and domestic topics, including modern Russian ideology, Russian foreign policy, Russia's place in the modern world, Ukraine, the European economic crisis, the Arab Spring, and the 2011–2012 Moscow protests. Before joining Slon.ru, Baunov was a reporter for Russian Newsweek, where he later headed the magazine's team of international reporters. He has reported from a variety of places, including the polar areas of Norway, South Africa, Japan, and Chile. Baunov turned to reporting after five years of service at the Russian Foreign Ministry, during which time he spent a number of years in Athens, this posting being in part due to his Master's degree in Ancient Greek, Latin, and Classical Literature from Moscow State University in 1995. In 2013, he was on the short list for the PolitProsvet journalism award and headed the award's selection committee the following year. Baunov is the author of WikiLeaks: Backdoor Diplomacy (Moscow, 2011) and Mif Tesen (Moscow, 2015). His best selling book The end of the Regime dedicated to the democratic transition in Spain, Portugal and Greece, was finished and published during his stay at the European University Institute.

ALEXANDER GABUEV
Alexander Gabuev is Director of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center where he leads a renowned team of analysts who were formerly part of the Carnegie Moscow Center, which was forced to close by the Kremlin in early 2022 after nearly three decades of operation. Gabuev's own research is focused on Russian foreign policy with particular focus on the impact of the war in Ukraine and the Sino-Russia relationship. Since joining Carnegie in 2015, Gabuev has contributed commentary and analysis to a wide range of publications, including the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Economist. Gabuev began his career as a journalist. He was a member of the editorial board of Kommersant and served as deputy editor in chief of Kommersant-Vlast, which at the time was one of Russia's most influential newsweeklies. Gabuev started his career at Kommersant in 2007 working as a senior diplomatic reporter, as a member of the Kremlin press corps, and as deputy foreign editor for Kommersant. Gabuev has previously worked as a non-resident visiting research fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) and taught courses on Chinese energy policy and political culture at Moscow State University. From April-June 2018, Gabuev was a visiting scholar at Fudan University (Shanghai, China) where he taught courses on Sino-Russian relations. Gabuev is a Munich Young Leader of the Munich Security Conference and a member of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy (Russia).

ALEXANDRA PROKOPENKO
Alexandra Prokopenko is a non-resident scholar at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center. She is a visiting fellow at the Center for Order and Governance in Eastern Europe, Russia, and Central Asia at the German Council on Foreign Relations (DGAP). In her research, Prokopenko focuses on Russian government policymaking on economic and financial issues. From 2017 until early 2022 she worked at the Central Bank of Russia and at the Higher School of Economics (HSE) in Moscow. She is a former columnist for Vedomosti. Prokopenko is a graduate of Moscow State University and holds an MA in Sociology from the University of Manchester.

EKATERINA SCHULMANN
Ekaterina Schulmann is a Nonresident Scholar at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center in Berlin and an Associate Professor at KAZGUU University in Astana, Kazakhstan. Dr. Schulmann specializes in the decision-making and bureaucratic behavior of modern authoritarian regimes, with a particular emphasis on Russia. Schulmann is the author of the books Legislation as a Political Process (2013), Practical Political Science: A Guide to Contact with Reality (2018), and The Return of the State: Political History of the 2000s (2023). She has contributed chapters to the books The New Autocracy: Information, Politics, and Policy in Putin's Russia (edited by Daniel Treisman, 2018) and Myths and Misconceptions in the Debate on Russia (Chatham House report, 2019). Since 2017, she has hosted a weekly program, Status, on Echo Moscow radio, dedicated to popularizing political science terminology and concepts. Schulmann is active on Telegram and YouTube, followed by 1.17 million subscribers.