Absolute ignorance. I work for a Russian company, I have lived in the former Soviet Union for 15 years, 7 years in Russia. I speak Russian and know plenty about what is going on there. The Rouble was crashing hard and they didn’t have the foreign reserves to back it up- so how to fix it so gullible propagandists like the author here can spruik nonsense? Easy- they stop the Rouble from being free floating and pegged it at a rate they wanted it to be. The Rouble isn’t strong, it isn’t anything indicative of what is going on. It is pegged in a floating band like the Chinese Yuan. And that’s totally fine unless you are trying to sell it as being strong. 300,000 IT workers have left the country, one of the few pillars of the economy outside of oil/gas. Sovcomflot, the largest oil tanker business in Russia, is delisted on foreign exchanges and is about to go bankrupt- their tankers can’t get surveyed as seaworthiness, the navigation chart software for those ships has been turned off and no insurer will touch them. So any gains in oil to places like India will soon evaporate. They are making cars now in Russia without airbags or ABS, they can’t build tanks or more missiles - all because of the semiconductor bans. Inflation is double the rate of elsewhere. I know so many Russians who have lost their jobs and others are in industries where 90% of their colleagues have already left Russia. GDP is expected to drop at least 7% this year, it is going to take years to recover from all this. There are capital controls limiting access to funds and foreigners are banned from selling their shares on the stock market-and they made up 45% of its volume. The whole situational, especially with control of the media, is to try and sell the idea that nothing is wrong- it’s forgivable for a Russian on a diet of state tv to believe that- it is not for anyone else.