All of them are not russian but still a large majority if I got my information correct. Still, combine that with over a million young people just leaving russia, a ruble in free fall, a "war time economy", inflation flirting with 30% (higher for food) and the central bank kicking up rates to a historically 21% high while promising that it won't actually help... and yeah everything is going according to plan for this "3 day special operation".

I know who's gonna go down in history on the losers side.

[–] Buffalox 8 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

Even after increasing interest rates 3 times from 16% to 21% over a few months, the value of the Ruble is still declining!
I haven't been able to find much info on their inflation though, I've had to kind of extrapolate that, but if it's really higher than 30% for food, there must be a lot of Russian families that feel that badly. Hopefully that will help cool the Russians support for the war.
IMO it's unlikely that inflation is lower than 15%, which will already be a problem for many Russians, and will only get worse with Putins current economic policies.

I'd be interested to know where you get info on inflation in Russia?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Prune602 unfortunatly on Twitter writes up on the Russian economy on a regular bases. Here is a pretty decent thread on inflation: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1841884096655720630.html

[–] Buffalox 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Thanks for the twitter free link 👍, Interesting read. Despite examples on single items that are higher, I think 30% is a bit on the high end, but it's good to see people debunk the official propaganda.

I found the butter situation mostly confirming my own estimate.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/russia-wartime-economy-butter-price-inflation-1.7371742

But even this article on a single issue doesn't state the size of the package:

Reuters reporters found shopping bills showed the price of a pack of Brest-Litovsk high-grade butter in Moscow has risen by 34 per cent since the start of the year to 239.96 roubles ($3.41 Cdn).

Searching further I found that the brand is generally sold in either 120 or 180 gram packages.
So that doesn't help much except here we generally used 250 gram but many have shrinked it to 200g, so Russia may suffer some shrinkflation too?
But the claim is that butter has officially increased 25.7%, but according to Reuter price checks it's 34%. But butter is supposed to be in the high end.

For sure inflation is nipping away the value of Russian wages. And it's weird to read about Russians that are puzzled about why prices are increasing? But maybe they don't dare say what they are thinking.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

No worries the Russian government is already solving the butter situation. They just started importing butter from the UAE.

https://www.interfax.ru/russia/989968

[–] Buffalox 2 points 1 month ago

Yes and also Turkey and Iran. Most is supposed to come from Turkey.

The interesting thing is that allegedly this is caused by the unstable economic situation in Russia, it's simply too risky to invest in production.
And as long as that is true, the Russian industrial output will keep shrinking, making the economy even worse.

[–] Valmond 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

You are right in calling me out, I can obviously be wrong. Or just overly optimistic :-)

Most of my information about the russian economy comes from different youtube channels, the food inflation being higher than the 'close to 30% general inflation' came, IIRC, from "Joeblogs" yt.

If you have better sources I'm interested.

[–] Buffalox 3 points 1 month ago

Apart from general economic information, which has to be filtered for propaganda, I don't have much.
But there has been pretty thorough reporting of the butter situation, like this article:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/russia-wartime-economy-butter-price-inflation-1.7371742

The central bank forecast 8.5% inflation for the year, but that seems unrealistic. But they can politically freeze some prices for instance on fuel and electricity. But they also dictate "free market" prices more widely now, something they've done to keep cost for the war machine down. This may dampen inflation, but instead is likely cause shortages. It's hard to do that for food though, because shortages there is as bad or probably worse than high prices. So that may explain why inflation on food is higher than average.

@[email protected] posted a very interesting link to a debate on twitter on inflation:
threadreaderapp.com/thread/1841884096655720630.html