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András Tóth-Czifra Profile picture
András Tóth-Czifra
@NoYardstick
Political & risk analyst. 🇪🇺🇭🇺🇺🇸. @FPRI fellow, formerly: CEPA, ESI. Tweets about illiberalism & state capacity in 🇷🇺🇪🇺. Tweets reflect my own views.
Jul 5 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
To understand Orban's Moscow visit, consider that he's engaged in a battle for influence in the EU, trying to put together an illiberal alliance. He'll take any opportunity that allows him to look like a rising political pole, and yes, he's going to use theCouncil presidency. /1 No, he isn't representing the EU, but he won't push back against Putin when he alludes that he does.

This is the part that benefits Putin: for his domestic narrative he needs to show that the EU is close to caving on UA (that is, the active phase of the war will soon end)... /2
Oct 20, 2023 • 30 tweets • 6 min read
Over the past week since the Polish opposition’s victory I have seen a lot of optimistic commentary suggesting or hoping that Orban’s government is likely to fall next. While I welcome the optimism, there are caveats. I will share a couple of thoughts in this thread. 🧵 First of all, the Polish election is undoubtedly a momentous negative development for Orban. He lost an illiberal ally that now reportedly blames the defeat on his advice, he now has a powerful adversary, and Fico won’t be able to fill the gap.
May 12, 2023 • 12 tweets • 5 min read
This week's @BearMarketBrief is out. You can read about the non-existent Victory Day celebrations, whether regional budgets are really running out of money, new policies to support Arctic development & more. Subscribe!

For stories from the regions that didn't make the cut, 👇🧵 1. Crackdown on some regional “systemic” opposition personalities has continued apace. In Samara an aide to Mikhail Abdalkin (who mocked Putin’s speech in February) was detained, as well as another aide to another deputy. t.me/horizontal_rus…
Mar 18, 2023 • 10 tweets • 4 min read
Here's the new @BearMarketBrief for your weekend reading! In this week's edition, we go all Far East and North Caucasus: read about gubernatoropad (another one bit the dust since BMB went to edits), coal exports and more!

Subscribe - and 🧵 👇 for more stories from last week 1. Let's start with the second chapter of the 2023 gubernatoropad - this happened after this week's BMB deadline, but I have written about the implications here, and expect a slightly longer meditation on the directions of regional governance soon.

Mar 18, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
This is exactly why I think the ICC warrant is important.

Over the past year I've written several times about the importance of timelines shifting and big upfront costs becoming unavoidable. This is also such a shift. It confirms things aren't going back to normal under Putin The Russian government's current domestic and fiscal policies are a risky bet on Putin's unshakeable belief that the war is a circumstance & sooner rather than later, Russia will outlast the resolve of its adversaries, after which things will settle into a new normal.
Mar 17, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Gubernatoropad-2023, chapter 2: Putin dismisses Smolensk governor Alexey Ostrovsky, an LDPR politician. Since his successor is Vasily Anokhin, a federal government official from Marat Khusnullin's team, LDPR may be compensated with another region in the near future. I wouldn't rule it out that the dismissal also has to do with Slutsky's elevation to party chair instead of the dead Zhirinovsky. Both LDPR's other governor, Mikhail Degtyaryov and especially Ostrovsky, were Zhirinovsky's men.
Mar 9, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
The scandal around Volkov's signature on the Friedman/Aven letter highlights the pitfalls of the differences between principled activism and politics where you need to make compromises, but you also need to be able to create a justifying narrative.
meduza.io/news/2023/03/0… As @faridaily_ points out, these stories also say a lot about the way Russia's liberal public intellectuals (and by extension, middle class) have been indirectly co-opted and offered an ever-shrinking bubble by the regime.
t.me/faridaily24/817
Dec 3, 2022 • 10 tweets • 3 min read
Rosstat's industrial production figures for the first ten months of the year are out, so again I put them on a map, contrasting the indices for the first ten months of the year with the indices for the first two months of the year. A short 🧵 The last time I shared a map was in September, for July. Things have changed for the worse since. This is partly due to mobilization, but also the effect of sanctions.
Dec 2, 2022 • 10 tweets • 5 min read
Thursday means @BearMarketBrief and this week I got to wonk out a little about one of my favorite topics: municipal waste management! Read on and subscribe!

For some other topics that did not make the cut (but may next week), see below. 👇🧵 Several regions experienced disruptions in utility provision over the past week. In Khakassia, approximately 70,000 people were left without heating in below-freezing weather. Similar incidents happened in Krasnodar, Novosibirsk and the Maritime Territory.
sibreal.org/a/v-abakane-70…
Dec 1, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
It looks like the Kremlin is throwing a carrot to regional elites: regional deputies who engage in other activities (read: businesspeople who sit on legislative assemblies) will be exempt from income declaration obligations.
tass.ru/ekonomika/1647… The "problem" arose fairly recently; specifically after a public administration reform adopted last year when it looked like the authorities may use the redefinition of regional lawmakers' status to rein in local business elites who often run for office in their regions.
Nov 18, 2022 • 11 tweets • 5 min read
As Twitter goes to the dogs, let me share with you today's dispatch from @BearMarketBrief with some content from yours truly.

Also, some of the stories that didn' make the cut, but you may want to check them out, in the 🧵👇 One thing you definitely want to check out is this collection of stories about the opponents of the war in the broader Volga region, curtesy of @SvobodaRadio:

Nov 15, 2022 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Reports of an explosion in the Polish village of Przewodow, near the border with Ukraine, killing two people. Cause unknown, but some have suggested that it's a Russian missile. Keep an eye on this.
radio.lublin.pl/2022/11/wybuch… Developments:

Oct 27, 2022 • 20 tweets • 6 min read
We know that Russia’s federal budget is cracking under the weight of sanctions and that the government is forced to use the National Welfare Fund to finance a ballooning deficit. But what’s happening to regional budgets? A short thread 🧵 For those who aren’t familiar with Russian budgeting: regional budgets finance vital state functions. About 90 percent of them are spent on five broad areas. “National economy” includes investments.
Sep 30, 2022 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Area man invading and waging genocidal war against a neighboring country vows to lead "anti-colonial movement"

Not going to live-tweet Putin's rant, but it really does look like he's trying to merge all existing anti-Western conspiracy theories and put a nuclear bomb behind them In a way, Putin didn't say anything radically new in this speech. However, the tone is becoming increasingly menacing. He seems to try to pull together a regime ideology from scraps of history, lies and whatever else is on Solovyov. Like Trump, but with drastically fewer checks.
Sep 22, 2022 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
Yes, everything we know about Putin's mobilization suggests desperation & a lack of strategy other than trying to survive the next couple of months.

However, consider that Putin expects a sympathetic illiberal government in Italy before the end of the year & troubles in Germany I don't know if Putin thinks that throwing a large number of badly equipped and trained draftees on the front can turn the battle for Ukraine around. But his other goal still seems to be betting on things changing in Europe, and there he may very well think 2-3 months are enough.
Sep 20, 2022 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Between today's law on military mobilization & Luhansk occupation officials ordering a "referendum" for *next week*, it seems Putin has chosen a form of escalation. It's also a significant change in how the war has been interpreted to domestic audiences kommersant.ru/doc/5571059?ut… Considering that just days ago these "referenda" were reportedly postponed indefinitely, and mobilization was something only relatively minor players like Kadyrov and Zyuganov were allowed to talk about, this is a major and potentially risky change.
Sep 6, 2022 • 26 tweets • 7 min read
A couple of recent examples of problems with salary payment in Russia, which were important enough to make the news.🧵 The State Traffic Air Management Corporation may not have funds to pay salaries in late September, due in part to the double whammy that the COVID crisis and sanctions delivered to it.
moscowtimes.eu/2022/08/30/gos…
Aug 12, 2022 • 30 tweets • 6 min read
I don’t have much desire to insert myself into the “visa ban” discourse, bc I think time would be better spent discussing energy policy, ramping up weapons shipments to Ukraine, and further sanctions. But it looks like the discussion will impact policy, so here’s my two cents. 🧵 As far as I can see, many people who argue for a visa ban make either a moral or a practical argument, along the lines of “Russians shouldn’t be able to enjoy themselves in Europe while their government wages war in Ukraine”, and/or “They should stay home to topple the regime”.
Aug 11, 2022 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
It's not just the size of the deficit but how it is growing: in July domestic VAT revenues dropped by 41% y-o-y, CIT by 32%, while expenses grew by 25% y-o-y (and 21% overall in January-July). Given the considerable upfront costs of long-term structural adjustments (export infrastructure reorientation, import substitution, etc.), this is not sustainable. Ministries have asked the government for 5 trillion rubles extra expenses per year.
Jul 23, 2022 • 40 tweets • 11 min read
So you're shocked and appalled by Viktor Orban's speech today, in which he talked about Hungarians not being "mixed-race" and not wanting to become that?

I understand the revulsion, but not the shock. Orban has been saying such things for years. A long 🧵 2015 October 30, at a conference, he speaks about organized ethnic replacement.
Jun 7, 2022 • 29 tweets • 6 min read
In this somewhat rambling THREAD 🧵 on some recent developments in the Western discussion on Russia’s war against Ukraine, I would like to focus on our incapacity to keep being focused on the tasks at hand and not to be distracted by our own impatience and fantasies. As Russia’s February invasion of Ukraine enters its fourth month, a degree of exhaustion is capturing Western countries and organizations providing support to Ukraine. This is inevitable.