Paul Goble
Staunton, Mar. 11 -- In order to fund Putin's war in Ukraine, Moscow has cut funds to most federal subjects of the Russian Federation, but it has not cut them eqally. Instead, it has shifted funds from some regions to others, giving new hope to the beneficiaries and prompting despair among those from whom funds have been taken.
The clearest and most dramatic example of this, Siberian commentator Dmitry Verkhoturov says, involves Russian regions east of the Urals where Moscow has redistributed funding from Siberia proper where most of the region's people live to the Far North where most of the natural resources and the Northern Sea Route are located.
According to the analyst who once called for Siberian independence and then attacked modest efforts to gain autonomy for that region (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2018/02/if-no-one-wants-siberian-independence.html), Moscow at present now "doesn't see any prospects" for Siberian development, a conclusion that if true will mean that ever more people from that increasingly depressed region will leave and ever more of those remaining will be radicalized (sibmix.com/?doc=14934).
And that in turn may mean both the re-emergence of a more powerful Siberian regionalist movement and greater Chinese penetration of Siberia, whose people may come to view Moscow as a greater threat to their well-being than Beijing is and thus will constitute a new challenge to the Kremlin's control of an enormous swath of territory between the Urals and Lake Baikal
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