We had a Russian specialist who came to NED last week and gave a talk. She said that she had no idea, and she is from Russia and she is a specialist, so I don't want to pretend to know. I don't have a crystal ball.
But what I said in my testimony is something that I deeply believe. We have to remember that Russia is a country that has really, for a long time, been in the middle of an existential crisis, not only an economic crisis but also a demographic crisis. Its population has been going down. With all of these terrible problems that Russia faces—the corruption, the health problems—for Russia to now reach out in an imperialistic way to take over other peoples, the cost of that is going to be extraordinary.
Last year there was $63 billion of capital flight from Russia. That capital flight is going to increase as wealthy people in Russia try to protect their resources against what they think is a very insecure situation.
There was $80 billion of direct foreign investment in Russia. That investment will go down as it becomes obviously more difficult to invest in Russia, and there will be rules against it. I expect that the economic crisis of Russia is going to intensify.
There is also a profound hatred in Russia among the common people for bribe-takers. According to a poll released by the Russian Academy of Sciences, 34% of the people in Moscow said that they'd like to shoot bribe-takers on sight, and that two-thirds of Muscovites would like to do that. There is this hatred.
Now, Putin is saving himself—or he thinks that he's saving himself—by trying to whip up nationalist hysteria. Indeed, he has had a temporary spike in popularity, but that is not going to continue.
We should think of the Russian economy today as a kind of Potemkin economy. There is something false about it. They do have wealth. They do have resources. They will be able to accomplish certain aggressions, but ultimately I believe that the contradictions of the Russian economy will sharpen, the discontent will grow, and the activists who are now isolated will become much more influential in the period ahead, in my view.