Today Vladimir Putin summed up the results of the year in Russia. Obviously, Washington was also preparing for this date, transmitting declassified intelligence data to the media, according to which since February 2022, the Russian army had lost 315,000 people killed and wounded, that is, 87% of its personnel at the time of the SVO. But in Moscow, the loss figures were not announced today; no one asked about them. What hasn’t Vladimir Putin said yet? The festive atmosphere of farewell to the outgoing year could not be disturbed by bad news. The Kremlin Administration has a task by March 2024 that everything in Russia should be stable, especially in the socio-economic sphere. Therefore, today Putin spoke about GDP growth by 3.5%, income growth by 5%, and wages by 8%. High budget revenues in Russia are more than offset by the catastrophically inefficient public sector of the economy, which is incapable of managing capital, which Putin, of course, did not want to talk about. Published a month ago ranking of the most unprofitable companies in Russia 2023 The total loss of Russia’s leading state-owned companies at the end of the year amounted to almost 1.1 trillion rubles. Six out of ten companies that went into the red are owned or indirectly controlled by the state. Some participants in the Forbes rating are chronically unprofitable – for example, Moscow Metro has not earned a profit since 2016, and the Svyaznoy Network company has even started bankruptcy proceedings. The largest player in the construction market, the state-owned Gazpromstroy, the general contractor for the construction of Gazprom’s facilities, had a loss last year exceeding 77 billion rubles. The State Transport Leasing Company (STLC) went into the red by 53 billion, Russian Post by 31 billion rubles. These state “captains of Russian business” are dragging the economy down even as it, in Putin’s words, “wins back the decline and moves forward.” Corruption, including that of the security bloc, which is supposed to protect the country from terrorist attacks and sabotage, coupled with the incompetence and inefficiency of the public sector of the economy is another “trap” that Russia can fall into. But on New Year’s Eve, Putin did not talk about this. Or he doesn’t know.
“ВЧК ОГПУ”
