Napetost v Ukrajini - Krimu

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Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko has demanded that Belarus's transactions with Russia be settled in dollars or euros because of the slump in the value of Russia's rouble, the official news agency Belta reported on Thursday.
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Over half of Belarus's exports go to Russia, mainly trucks, tractors and industrial machinery, and around 92 percent of transactions are currently carried out in roubles.

"We're going to trade not in roubles, but in dollars," Belta quoted Lukashenko as saying. "We should have long ago demanded Russia pay us also in hard currency."

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Uporabnik darjan pravi:
Saj niso kradli, lepo smo videli, da je bil janukoviæ pobraten s putinom, ali zakaj misliš, da ga je sprejel s odprtimi rokami, ko je prebegnil v rusijo?

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Uporabnik Pac_Man pravi:
So tudi sankcije, ampak se mi zdijo dolgcajt. Pač, dodatno privijanje vijakov.



Na prevlado petrorublja bo treba še malo počakat. Belorusija hoče, da jim Rusija začne plačevat v dolarjih.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/12/18/russia-crisis-belarus-idUSL6N0U21C520141218

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Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko has demanded that Belarus's transactions with Russia be settled in dollars or euros because of the slump in the value of Russia's rouble, the official news agency Belta reported on Thursday.
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Over half of Belarus's exports go to Russia, mainly trucks, tractors and industrial machinery, and around 92 percent of transactions are currently carried out in roubles.

"We're going to trade not in roubles, but in dollars," Belta quoted Lukashenko as saying. "We should have long ago demanded Russia pay us also in hard currency."

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If you’re the type who finds macho posturing impressive, Vladimir Putin is your kind of guy. Sure enough, many American conservatives seem to have an embarrassing crush on the swaggering strongman. “That is what you call a leader,” enthused Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor, after Mr. Putin invaded Ukraine without debate or deliberation.

But Mr. Putin never had the resources to back his swagger. Russia has an economy roughly the same size as Brazil’s. And, as we’re now seeing, it’s highly vulnerable to financial crisis — a vulnerability that has a lot to do with the nature of the Putin regime.
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But Russia’s difficulties are disproportionate to the size of the shock: While oil has indeed plunged, the ruble has plunged even more, and the damage to the Russian economy reaches far beyond the oil sector. Why?

Actually, it’s not a puzzle — and this is, in fact, a movie currency-crisis aficionados like yours truly have seen many times before: Argentina 2002, Indonesia 1998, Mexico 1995, Chile 1982, the list goes on. The kind of crisis Russia now faces is what you get when bad things happen to an economy made vulnerable by large-scale borrowing from abroad — specifically, large-scale borrowing by the private sector, with the debts denominated in foreign currency, not the currency of the debtor country.
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And Russia fits the standard playbook.

Except for one thing. Usually, the way a country ends up with a lot of foreign debt is by running trade deficits, using borrowed funds to pay for imports. But Russia hasn’t run trade deficits. On the contrary, it has consistently run large trade surpluses, thanks to high oil prices. So why did it borrow so much money, and where did the money go?

Well, you can answer the second question by walking around Mayfair in London, or (to a lesser extent) Manhattan’s Upper East Side, especially in the evening, and observing the long rows of luxury residences with no lights on — residences owned, as the line goes, by Chinese princelings, Middle Eastern sheikhs, and Russian oligarchs. Basically, Russia’s elite has been accumulating assets outside the country — luxury real estate is only the most visible example — and the flip side of that accumulation has been rising debt at home.

Where does the elite get that kind of money? The answer, of course, is that Putin’s Russia is an extreme version of crony capitalism, indeed, a kleptocracy in which loyalists get to skim off vast sums for their personal use. It all looked sustainable as long as oil prices stayed high. But now the bubble has burst, and the very corruption that sustained the Putin regime has left Russia in dire straits.

How does it end? The standard response of a country in Russia’s situation is an International Monetary Fund program that includes emergency loans and forbearance from creditors in return for reform. Obviously that’s not going to happen here, and Russia will try to muddle through on its own, among other things with rules to prevent capital from fleeing the country — a classic case of locking the barn door after the oligarch is gone.

It’s quite a comedown for Mr. Putin. And his swaggering strongman act helped set the stage for the disaster. A more open, accountable regime — one that wouldn’t have impressed Mr. Giuliani so much — would have been less corrupt, would probably have run up less debt, and would have been better placed to ride out falling oil prices. Macho posturing, it turns out, makes for bad economies.

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Dzindzia, a 37-year-old printer repair shop owner from Ivano-Frankivsk province in western Ukraine, shot to fame in recent years as a member of Road Control, an activist group that campaigns against widespread corruption in Ukraine’s traffic police. Dzindzia’s impulsiveness and devotion to the cause quickly marked him out as Road Control’s star when he posted videos of traffic police soliciting bribes online. Several officers were fired as a direct result of Dzindzia’s work, making him public enemy number one for large contingents in Ukraine’s interior ministry.

In November last year, when Dzindzia went to film officers at a pound allegedly extorting bribes from drivers in exchange for returning their impounded cars, the police summoned a gang of hooligans who beat him and two of his colleagues so severely they had to be hospitalized, fellow activists say. The alleged attackers got off scott free — prosecutors later filed charges against Dzindzia for allegedly attacking security at the pound and claimed that he had beaten himself up by bashing his head against the door.

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First, how did they get that debt? Here’s the Russian current account balance over the past couple of decades:

It has been in consistent large surplus, with a cumulative surplus of more than $900 billion. Russia should not be a debtor country. It has managed this nonetheless, presumably because corporations and banks have borrowed abroad, and somehow that money has ended up invested in luxury London real estate and other things. It would be nice to have a good picture of how the flow of funds worked.

That said, at first glance the debt level doesn’t look too high. Here’s the ratio to GDP:

The central bank helpfully points out that this is in a range the IMF considers low-risk, and there wasn’t any visible upward trend.

But watch out for that denominator. Debt to GDP was stable, but GDP was rising fast in dollar terms, not because of real growth, but because of real appreciation. Compare the actual rise in the ruble price of a dollar, which was modest until the past few weeks, with the rise that would have compensated for relative Russian inflation:

So I would argue that Russia was in fact going rapidly deeper into debt, but that this was masked by the growing overvaluation of the ruble thanks to high oil prices. Now comes the fall, and suddenly debt looks like a much bigger issue.
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Anyway, interesting stuff. At this point the approved move is either (a) go to the IMF or (b) invade the Malvinas. Somehow, (a) doesn’t seem likely — and Putin did (b) in advance.

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Evgeny Gavrilenkov, the chief economist at the investment banking arm of Russia's largest lender Sberbank CIB, has warned that actions taken by the Russian authorities to bail out Russia's troubled banking sector could cause a "full-scale banking crisis".

"If the Central Bank of Russia continues to provide refinancing in exchange for non-marketable securities that banks can generate in almost unlimited amounts, the system will gradually ramp up to full-scale banking crisis," Gavrilenkov said.

That is, the emergency measures undertaken by the central bank to pump liquidity into the country's banking system in order to prevent widespread defaults could end up coming back to bite it. In essence he thinks that banks may prove unable to pay back loans from the central bank with interest rates now set at 17% and the collateral that they pledge in exchange for it may not be of sufficient quality to cover the losses.
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There are already clear signs of stress in the banking system. The interbank lending rate, the interest rate that banks charge to lend to each other, jumped to 27.3% yesterday, the highest rate since data started being collected in 2006 according to Bloomberg. The news suggests that confidence in the banking sector is quickly eroding and that banks are becoming concerned with the quality of their peers' balance sheets.

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Gallows humour is back in Moscow. Asked what he would do to stop the rouble spiralling out of control, the former governor of Russia’s central bank replied: “I would pick up a pistol and shoot myself.”

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Traders in the City watched open-mouthed as the dam broke on Black Tuesday. The event exposed the awful reality that the Kremlin does not have the infinite foreign reserves that many had supposed. “What is happening is a nightmare that we could not even have imagined a year ago,” says the central bank’s deputy chief, Sergei Shvetsov.

The currency has since stabilised at 60 to the dollar. But it has lost half its value in a year. Russia’s $2.1 trillion (£1.3 trillion) economy has shrunk to $1.1 trillion, half the GDP of California.

The external debt of Russian banks and companies has by mathematical effect ballooned to 70pc of total output. “A Russian downgrade to junk is only a matter or time,” says Tim Ash, from Standard Bank.

“The crisis is suddenly filtering into people’s daily lives,” says Bill Browder from Hermitage. “55pc of consumer goods in Russia are imported and these are doubling in price. People are buying anything they can that keeps its value.”

Vedomisti reports that there is a de facto run on banks as depositors pull what they can from ATM machines, fearing the guillotine at any moment. Soviet queues are appearing again.

Crowds have descended on Ikea stores, converging in pick-up trucks to buy hard goods before it is too late. The company suspended sales of kitchens on Thursday, saying it cannot meet demand.

Those scrambling to buy cars may have missed their chance. Jaguar Land Rover has halted sales to Russia. So has General Motors, citing “rouble volatility”. The big three dealerships - Transtekhservice, Major Auto, and Avilon - have frozen sales.

As the buying frenzy subsides, the eerie stillness of depression may instead take hold. The central bank says the economy could contract by 4.7pc next year if oil prices settle at $60 a barrel, but that was before the rate shock. BNP Paribas says each 100-basis point rise cuts 0.8pc off GDP a year later. Rates have risen 750 points in a week.

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“It’s going to be worse than the default crisis in 1998. This time you have a situation where the West is against them,” says Browder. “Russian companies are shut out of the global capital markets. The country can’t turn to the IMF because Washington will block it. There is no lender of last resort.”

Western sanctions are still escalating. With wicked timing, President Barack Obama this week chose not to veto a law passed by the US Congress that tightens the noose further, even though he warned previously that it may irk European leaders and erode Atlantic unity. The law implies fresh curbs on the Russian energy sector, and may limit credit to Gazprom. It stiffens Ukraine with $350m of military aid, a high-risk move. The White House says Putin can reverse the process at any time by implementing the Minsk ceasefire deal agreed three months ago. “The aim is to sharpen the choice that he faces,” it says.

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The grumbling is getting louder. “We all cheered when we took back our Crimea. Now we are reaping the fruits of our conquest,” says the governor of Krasnodar, Alexander Tkachyov. “We thought that nothing would happen. Now we face the payback, because there are no miracles. It has become clear that Russia is facing a real economic war, and there should be no illusions.”

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Putin took a huge gamble. Deutsche Bank and other lenders were already forecasting an oil glut in 2014 as the US flooded the markets with shale oil. Nor did the Kremlin team seem to fully grasp that Russia is far more vulnerable to sanctions now that it depends on foreign capital and is tied into global finance. For the last decade, an elite cell at the US Treasury has been sharpening the tools of economic war, crafting ways to bring countries to their knees without firing a shot.

The strategy relies on hegemonic control over the global banking system, buttressed by a network of allies. Iran has felt its grim effects. “It is a new kind of war, like a creeping financial insurgency, intended to constrict our enemies’ financial lifeblood, unprecedented in its reach,” says Juan Zarate, who once led the team.

Putin can retaliate in other ways. “He is going to escalate. The huge prize for him is to test the credibility of Nato while Obama is still in office,” says Browder. That worry is shared by many, especially in the Baltic states with Russian minorities. Four fifths of Estonia’s fortress town of Narva are ethnic Russians, and they live within sight of the border. An incident could flare up at any time.

“The nightmare scenario is if ‘little green men’ appear in one of the Baltics, and it then invokes Nato’s Article V [mutual defence clause],” says Ian Bond, the former British ambassador to Latvia and now at the Centre for European Reform. Any dispute may be murky. Yet if Nato ever fails to uphold an Article V plea, the alliance withers.

Russia was sliding into decline before the storm hit this year. Its trend growth rate had collapsed. It was near recession when crude was trading at $110 a barrel, a remarkable indictment of Putin’s 15-year reign. The country has become reliant on the commodity supercycle. Oil, gas, and metals together make up 73pc of exports and half the budget. The economy is a patronage machine built on commodity rents, a textbook case of the “Dutch Disease”.

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The economy is a tangle of bottlenecks. Russia ranks 136 for road quality, 126 for the ability of firms to absorb technology, 124 for availability of the latest technology, 120 for the burden of government regulation, and 105 for product sophistication, in the World Economic Forum’s index of competitiveness.

Critics say Russia squandered its chance to build a modern, diversified economy at the end of the Cold War. It now faces a bleak future as an ageing crisis hits and the workforce shrinks by 1m a year. Lubomir Mitov, from the Institute of International Finance, says Russia is weaker than it was in the Soviet era of the 1980s, when it still made things and brimmed with engineers. “They have lost their technology,” he says.

Mitov says it will be lucky merely to repeat the stagnation of the Brezhnev era. Every $10 fall in the price of oil cuts export revenues by 2pc of GDP. The “financing gap” will soon be 10pc of GDP. “It is a perfect storm,” he says.

Russia still has $414bn of reserves but this is below the country’s $700bn external debt, in stark contrast to 2008.

“In addition to being twice as levered, Russia is entering this crisis with lower reserves,” says Tatiana Tchembarova from BNP Paribas. She says the Kremlin has already committed $143bn of reserves for next year, and “more will be required to support Russia’s banking system”. The bank rescue cost $170bn five years ago.

Russia firms must repay $120bn of hard-currency debt over the next year. They cannot roll over the loans. Eric Chaney from AXA warns clients to brace for a wave of defaults by “non-strategic” companies.

The Kremlin will prop up national champions but this bleeds their reserves. Browder says Putin is trying every trick to put off the inevitable, but capital controls are coming. “They won’t announce it: they will just starting doing it quietly by forcing companies to convert dollars into roubles,” he says.

The Nordic bank SEB says the central bank faces a horrible choice between ferociously high interest rates – perhaps 100pc – or exchange controls. “We think it will reluctantly opt for the latter,” it says. SEB expects the Kremlin to freeze dividends and force companies to repatriate earnings. Isolation and Stalinist autarky lie ahead.

What is remarkable is that Russia’s leaders so quickly forgot the lesson of the mid-1980s when collapsing oil prices broke the back of the Soviet Union. Former premier Yegor Gaidar dated the moment to September 1985, when Saudi Arabia flooded the crude market. The Kremlin sold its gold, down to its pre-1917 imperial bars, until it ran out of cash for food imports. “The collapse of the USSR should serve as a lesson to those who construct policy based on the assumption that oil prices will remain perpetually high. A seemingly stable superpower disintegrated,” he said.

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Russia's lower house of parliament hastily approved a draft law on Friday that would give the banking sector a capital boost of up to 1 trillion rubles ($16.5 billion).

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Finance Minister Anton Siluanov told reporters on Friday that banks could start receiving the additional capital early next year, and that the law would mean the budget could slip into a deficit of around 0.8 percent of gross domestic product.

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Russia's lower house of parliament hastily approved a draft law on Friday that would give the banking sector a capital boost of up to 1 trillion rubles ($16.5 billion).Finance Minister Anton Siluanov told reporters on Friday that banks could start receiving the additional capital early next year, and that the law would mean the budget could slip into a deficit of around 0.8 percent of gross domestic product.The State Duma passed the banking capital bill in all three readings in an accelerated process on Friday.

The state had already provided additional capital to banks including VTB (VTBR.MM) earlier this year.

The central bank also eased regulation of the banking sector this week to help stabilize the rouble RUB=, down some 45 percent against the dollar this year, and Putin has promised an amnesty for those returning capital to Russia.

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It turns out that having your economy entirely based on oil is a bad idea.

All it takes, as Russia is finding out, is for oil prices to unexpectedly drop, and you're left with an economic crisis that turns into a currency crisis that morphs into a financial crisis — which, of course, only makes the economic crisis even worse. It's a cycle of doom that's hard to stop, no matter how vehemently you insist that your "bear" won't let itself become a "stuffed animal" by having its "fangs and claws" torn out.

The latest news is that Russia's banks are about to get bailed out to the tune of $16.5 billion. That became inevitable once the interest rate they charge each other on short-term loans—which shows how much they believe in each other's solvency—shot up to 28.3 percent on Thursday, higher than it was even during the 2008 crisis. And, to give you an idea how big the black hole in Russian bank balance sheets must be, this is all happening despite the fact that the central bank just said that banks could pretend that they don't have losses. Okay, it didn't exactly say that, but close enough. Specifically, Russian banks can stop marking their losses to market, and use the old exchange rate to calculate the "value" of the assets on their books. Potemkin balance sheets, though, aren't enough to fool the bankers themselves. They know how broke their banks are, so they don't trust any others.

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It's all about oil and foreign currency debt. As I've said before, it's only a small simplification to say that Russia doesn't so much have an economy as an oil exporting business that subsidizes everything else. So now that the price of oil has halved the past few months, Russian companies don't have as many petrodollars to turn into rubles. That means there's less demand for rubles overall, so its price has fallen. But wait: it gets worse. Not only do Russian companies have fewer dollars coming in, but they also have to pay back the dollar loans they took out. And they can't roll those over, because Western sanctions over Russia's incursion into Ukraine have cut them off from international credit markets. The only way they can pay back what they owe is by selling more things to people in Russia. But the rubles they get from that don't buy as many dollars as they used to, so those debts are harder to pay off.

But wait: it gets even worse than that. The Russian central bank just jacked up interest rates from 10.5 to 17 percent to try to convince people to hold their money in rubles that will pay them a lot instead of dollars that won't. The hope was that this would end the bank run on the currency, and prop the ruble up. Ordinary Russians, you see, have been besieging banks to turn their rubles that have been rapidly losing value into dollars or euros that won't. And they've been using any rubles they're stuck with to buy up stuff—like luxury cars and Apple products—before prices go up even more. It's gotten so bad that Ikea has had to suspend sales in Russia, because they can't meet all the demand and need time to figure out how much they should increase prices.

For now, all this panic buying will maintain Russia's illusion of an economy. But once people run out of rubles to burn, Russia is going to be left with no economy and 17 percent interest rates instead of no economy and 10.5 percent interest rates. Borrowing costs that high mean nobody will want to. Russia's recession, in other words, will turn into a full-on depression. And all those Russian businesses that worried their rubles wouldn't be enough to pay back their dollar debts won't even have rubles in the first place.

And who loaned Russian businesses all this money? Russian banks, in large part. That's why they're, to use a technical term, screwed. Their balance sheets are filled with dollar loans that won't get paid back and ruble assets that won't be worth as much as they thought. So the banks will hunker down and stop offering loans to anyone other than Putin's cronies, which, on top of the sky-high interest rates, means there will be a severe credit crunch.

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The Russian government needs more dollars, and the easiest way to get them is to stop Russian people and companies from getting them. What economists call capital controls. Putin swears he won't do this, but that's a lie. He's already starting to. The Russian government, you see, has started monitoring when big exporters sell any foreign currency they earn, and, according to one official, will "instruct" them when to sell dollars. Putin can call that whatever he wants—I'm sure there's a bear analogy in there somewhere—but those are soft capital controls.

If Russia ever decides to diversify its economy, maybe it should start making stuffed animals. Kids love teddy bears.

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IN March, the House Intelligence Committee chairman, Mike Rogers, was asked on “Fox News Sunday” how he thought President Obama was handling relations with Russia versus how President Vladimir Putin had been handling relations with the United States. Rogers responded: “Well, I think Putin is playing chess, and I think we’re playing marbles. And I don’t think it’s even close.”

Hmmm. Marbles. That’s an interesting metaphor. Actually, it turns out that Obama was the one playing chess and Putin was the one playing marbles, and it wouldn’t be wrong to say today that Putin’s lost most of his — in both senses of the word.

Rogers was hardly alone in his Putin envy. As Jon Stewart pointed out, Fox News has had a veritable Putin love fest going since March: Sarah Palin opined to the network that: “People are looking at Putin as one who wrestles bears and drills for oil. They look at our president as one who wears mom jeans and equivocates and bloviates.” Fox contributor Rudy Giuliani observed on the same day that in contrast with Obama, Putin was “what you call a leader.”

Only if leading your country to economic ruin is a form of leadership. And this is not Monday-morning quarterbacking. It has been obvious for months that Putin was fighting the market, Moore’s Law, Mother Nature and human nature all at once.

He bet almost his whole economy on oil and gas that only can be exploited long-term at the risk of disruptive climate change; he underestimated the degree to which technological innovation has enabled America to produce more oil, gas, renewable energy and greater efficiency, all at the same time, helping to undermine crude prices; he talked himself into believing that Ukrainians toppled their corrupt leaders only because the C.I.A. told them to — not because of the enduring human quest to realize a better future for their kids; and he underestimated how integrated and interdependent Russia is with the global markets and how deeply sanctions, over time, would bite him.

Let us not mince words: Vladimir Putin is a delusional thug. He created, fell in love with and is now being disabused of a fantasy notion of his and Russia’s power. Might he lash out militarily now to distract his people with more shiny objects? Yes, he might, but then he’d only be violating another rule of geopolitics: “The First Rule of Holes” — when you’re in one, stop digging.

I say that with no satisfaction. In fact, I say it with deep regret. I opposed NATO expansion and our unilateral ripping up of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, when Russia was weak. I wanted — and still want — to see America partner with Russia to help stem global disorder, because in many places in the world we can’t be effective without a Russian partner. Alas, we expanded NATO — and unintentionally helped to foster the political conditions in Russia for Putin’s xenophobic, grievance-based politics to flourish.

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Along the way, Putin lied to the world and deluded himself. His big lie is that the popular toppling of the corrupt government of Viktor Yanukovych in Kiev was just a Western plot to bring Ukraine into NATO. In Putin’s spook-defined world, no one has agency — except the Central Intelligence Agency (or K.G.B.). It is inconceivable to him that a critical mass of Ukrainians might have looked over at Poland and envied how well it had done since freeing itself from the Kremlin’s orbit and joining the European Union — that they might have then said to themselves, “We want that”— and that to get it they might have taken to the streets and overthrown Putin’s ally in Kiev, demanding a less corrupt, more transparent, democratic government.

Putin cast all of that as a C.I.A.-NATO plot in order to rally the Russian people to his side and justify his ugly grab of Crimea and his Ukraine intervention, which included indirect involvement in the shooting down of a Malaysian civilian airliner. The real truth is that Putin is not afraid of NATO expansion to Ukraine. That was never in the cards. He is afraid of European Union expansion. He does not want Ukraine to join the European customs union, adopt its anti-corruption and transparency regulations and begin to build a successful economy on European principles that every day would stand as a contrast to and critique of the nontransparent kleptocracy Putin and his oil-and-gas clique have built in Russia.

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His big delusion is that his mind-set is trapped in a 19th-century worldview, where Russia is entitled to and will always have “spheres of influence” on its borders. But spheres of influence are not like some honorary degree you get from Moscow University and can keep forever. Today, spheres of influence have to be earned and re-earned. Because, today, thanks to technology, emergent citizens are able to articulate and organize for their own aspirations much more effectively. These are “people of influence,” and they’ve asserted themselves in squares from Tahrir to Taksim to the Maidan in Kiev. Ukraine may be the first battleground in history where people of influence have squared off against a sphere-of-influence thinker. I am still betting on the people.

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Warren Buffett observed during the 2008 economic crisis that “only when the tide goes out do you find out who is not wearing a bathing suit.” Well, the oil tide has gone out, and it revealed that Putin was swimming naked. In doing so, the country he threatens most today is Russia — but not Russia alone. A triumphant, oil-fueled Russia riding a petro-surge is dangerous; but a defeated, angry, increasingly impoverished Russia is dangerous as well. So despite all of the above, I’d be willing to see the West work with Putin to ease the sanctions on Russia, but only if Putin is ready to stop stealing other people’s marbles, only if he is truly ready to be part of the solution in places like Ukraine — not the problem.

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Rosneft, Russia’s state-owned oil company run by President Vladimir Putin’s longtime friend and former chief of staff Igor Sechin, appears to be behind the currency’s abrupt tumble. Facing $60 billion in debt while bruised by Western sanctions, and having been denied a massive government bailout, the company scrambled to find a way to make debt payments due this month, according to The New York Times. Rosneft issued 625 billion rubles in bonds and sold them to Russian banks, which then deposited them with the Central Bank. “The central bank started the printing press to help the Sechin-Putin business, and gave Rosneft 625 billion newly printed rubles. The money immediately appeared on the currency market, and the rate collapsed,” the liberal Russian politician Boris Y. Nemtsov told the Times. End result: Rosneft wins, Russians lose.

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And speaking of expansionism, the ruble’s collapse seems to have triggered an abrupt revision of the Kremlin’s policy in Ukraine. Earlier this month, several senior Kremlin officials responsible for directing Russian policy in Ukraine resigned. On Tuesday, amid the ruble’s fall, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said “Moscow was not suggesting federalization or autonomy for the self-proclaimed republics of Donetsk and Luhansk, because the issue ‘is for Ukrainians to decide,’” Sputnik, Russia’s new state-owned media outlet, reported.

That brings the Kremlin a long way away from its messaging this spring, when Lavrov and others were adamantly calling for federalization in Ukraine's east. Now that the situation in the rebel's self-proclaimed republics is a full-blown frozen conflict, the Kremlin may no longer feel the need to keep funding the separatist rebellion—which is fortunate, because it can't afford to.

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✔️31 Mar, 2014
$1 = 35RUB
Ukraine needs federalization - Lavrov

✔️16 Dec, 2014
$1 = 80RUB
Up to Ukraine to decide on federalization - Lavrov

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