@davidhazony Personally, I'm very skeptical. It mirrors the perspective of Western observers far too closely. I don't know how, exactly, an FSB bureaucrat sees the world, but I'm extremely confident that anything he writes would contain *something* that sounds very weird from our POV. @davidhazony Also, why would a bureaucrat responsible for projections of the effect of sanctions on the economy have any visibility into the precision of casualty estimates from the front? To a Western observer, it's all just "Russia-watching", but inside the FSB bureaucracy...

@politicalmath This is a self-correcting problem, as we learned in 1989 with Japan. Sometimes a foreign country, for its own reasons, agrees to ship us lots of great consumer goods in return for nothing but pieces of paper good primarily for purchasing our domestic assets. (1/x) @politicalmath Eventually, that foreign country has no choice but to cash in those pieces of paper in return for our domestic assets. This bids up the price of those assets, causing everyone--including the foreign country--to overpay for them. This is annoying, but has a happy ending. (2/x)