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Notes -
Pretty well, given the generally consistent validation of his arguments.
As long as you don't extend them beyond the points he's actually making, they're pretty banal and uncontroversial, unless you consider things like 'major economic interventions come with a cost' controversial. If anything, it's critiqueable for being non-falsifiable by predicting long-term consequences that wouldn't be expected yet.
Just to go by its own TL;DR, the video is making a constrained set of points, with some topic-adjacent topics explicitly in other videos including an entire video later on how war economies don't suddenly collapse, that Russia has tools to patch short-term damage to the economy, but that Russia is likely to receive longer-term harms due to the tradeoffs it will have to do to continue fighting. He calls the pro-Ukrainian view that sanctions would grind the Russian war effort to a stop a dream, but also that they do harm, which has been generally observed in how the Russian economy's growth and metrics have changed over the years since 2022. He makes clear that the economic competition is dependent on how willing the West is to support Ukraine- and that he has questions on how the West would be willing to provide the significant levels of support needed, which is downright preescient given how the 2022 situation evolved before the Nord Stream explosion led to the general German shift on permitting major categories of support that were within the west's economic capacity to do.
From various other sections on the Russian economy- feel free to register what you think aged poorly-
-The war is not a closed-system war of just Russia vs Ukraine.
-The Russian economy will not have a near term collapse, and that Russia built up substantial pre-war preparations to mitigating economic disruption to the war production economy (and that he would talk more about that in a following video).
-The Russian indicators of economic health in the first months of the war relied on interventions that can provide short-term metric success but which disguise (and cause) longer-term issues. That Russia has resorted to more, not fewer, distortionary techniques- as well as obscuring data that could verify health if the economy were healthy- would also seem to validate.
-The Foreign Trade Reserves, despite the immediate drop in the early war, were a concern but that he specifically disagreed with a lot of the then-contemporary views and did NOT view it as a short or medium-term threat to Russia's ability to wage war due to options available to stabilize it. *For those less familiar with western government planning time frames, which is his background as a procurement specialist, 'short term' is often 0-to-2 years, and medium-term is often 2-to-10.
-On Russian energy exports, he makes the point that Europe was/is undergoing an expensive economic shift away from dependence to limit Russian ability to blackmail, which occurred, and that the Russians would progressively lose the Europeans as a dependent market, which has also been seen as Russian gas exports by pipelines have decreased far more than LNG gas exports have risen At no point does he argue that this means Russia is going to lose all their income and ability to sustain war in the coming years, and this is well before the European sanctions model (which was designed to let sea-based hydrocarbons continue onto global markets, but reduce Russian profits) was outlined, which itself is reflective of the Western political will.
Skipping ahead past the NATO economic figures to Russia on, the 'What Next' section is more predictive-
'What Can Russia Do?' Perun identifies a number of potential options Russia could do to maintain the war economy, with the general theme of longer term costs, but continued ability to wage war into the medium term. A number of the options have been seen, including appropriations, interventions, inflation, and Chinese import substitution.
'What Can the West Do?' Perun identifies a number of potential options the West could do to leverage their economic advantages. Many of these were not utilized in 2022, and we're seeing the implications of some of these delays this year with the current artillery ammo disparity- which is a validation of the analysis that the economic advantages depended on will and longer-term planning, which there was a lack of support for in 2022 and into 2023 is causing consequences in 2024, which remains well within his window of Russia's ability to continue fighting.
And so on and so on. As an analysis video, it continues to hold up- not because the facts are the same in May 2024 as they were in Apr 2022, but because they were true in 2022 and resulted in the sort of actions he predicted Russia could do to continue fighting the war over the period of time that has passed since the video. Russia has repeatedly intervened in its markets and taken more and more steps to sustain the economy, and these are the sort of interventions normally considered to cause longer-term damages and costs, and the need for such relatively drastic interventions is indicative of the economic mismatch at the heart of the comparison argument.
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