Northern Sea Route Shows that ‘Shortest Path is Not Necessarily the Most Profitable,’ Inozemtsev Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Aug. 26 – Moscow invariably suggests that the Northern Sea Route will beat out the Suez Canal as the primary sea path between Asia and Europe; but that argument is deeply flawed because “the shortest path is not necessarily the most profitable one,” Vladislav Inozemtsev says.

            There are many reasons why this is true in the case, the Russian economist says; but before considering them in detail, it is important to remember that Moscow’s claim that the NSR is shorter is itself flawed because it is measured from northern China rather than other Asian ports further south (ru.themoscowtimes.com/2026/08/26/sokraschayuschaya-rasstoyaniya-mechta-a204315).

            But the most important is that the speed ships travel on the NSR is very different from that of vessels using more southerly routes. Because of ice, NSR transit often proceeds at two to three knots compared to 19 to 20 elsewhere, a difference which in itself vitiates the advantages of the geographically shorter northern route.

            There are other problems with the Russian assumption about the advantages of the NSR, Inozemtsev says.  Most large container ships require deeper water to sail through than is available in parts of the NSR. A ship drawing 15 meters which many do simply can’t pass through the NSR which in places drops to far less, only nine or ten meters.

            Another problem is that ships using the southern route typically drop off and pick up cargo at ports along the route, but in the case of the NSR, these are few and far between; and so shippers lose that advantage as well, something the enthusiastic Muscovite backers of the NSR ignore

            Beyond that there is the problem of ice. Of the 116,000 merchant ships in the world, Inozemtsev says, only “about 360” of the container ship segment are ice class, that is, built to withstand ice and required by insurers for passage via the NSR. Building more ships is hardly an attractive option when there are other ways to bring goods to market.

            And there is the problem of icebreakers which must accompany even ice capable ships along the NSR. According to Inozemtsev, “Russia’s icebreaker fleet is too small to handle” a flow much great than the one now, which is far belong what Putin called for only a few years ago and which can’t approach the volumes he and others have projected.

            Changing any of these things would be massively expensive, far beyond the means of the Russian state. That means Moscow would have to hope for and then rely on foreign investors, something that would make the NSR anything but the bulwark of Russian greatness and national security Putin hopes for.   

Russians and Ukrainians Increasingly Divided in Their Assessment of Stalin, Levada Center Reports

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Aug. 25 – Ever more Russians over the last 15 years have had a positive assessment of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, while among Ukrainians, attitudes toward the Soviet dictator have deteriorated sharply from an already low point to an even more negative one since Putin launched his expanded war there in 2022, according to Levada Center surveys.

            Last month, the independent Russian polling agency said, slightly more than half of Russians surveyed said they had a positive attitude toward Stalin, about a quarter were indifferent to him and about a tenth were negative (levada.ru/2026/08/25/otnoshenie-k-figure-stalina-v-iyule-2026-goda/).

            The share of Russians expressing a positive attitude toward Stalin has been increasing since the 1990s and reached its highest level in recent times in 2023. Ukrainian attitudes toward Stalin were never as positive as those of Russians, but since 2022, they have plummeted. Now only three percent of Ukrainians say they view him positively.

            Because of the terror famine Stalin conducted in Ukraine and his repressions of Ukrainians more generally, he has never been popular there; but the new polls show that Putin’s action in Ukraine has deepened the divide between Russians and Ukrainians on this question as well as on so many others.

            And that in turn suggests that if and when Putin’s war there ends, it will be far more difficult for Russians and Ukrainians to view each other in positive ways, especially given how central Putin has made Stalin and his role in World War II in the construction of present-day Russian identity. 

Russian Universities Increasingly Recruiting Students to Serve in Putin’s War and Offering Drone Studies Programs

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Aug. 25 – Under pressure from the Kremlin to provide more support for Putin’s aggressive foreign policy, ever more Russian universities are pressuring students to sign up for military service in Ukraine now and creating drone studies departments whose graduates will presumably help not only in that conflict but in future ones as well.

            More than 80 percent of Russia’s highest-ranked universities now push students to sign up for military service although in many cases this effort is ostensibly for non-combat positions (novayagazeta.eu/articles/2026/08/25/47-iz-50-luchshikh-rossiiskikh-vuzov-agitiruiut-studentov-zakliuchit-kontrakt-s-minoborony-vyiasnila-novaia-evropa-news).

            That is an extension of efforts the Putin regime has put in place since 2022 to ensure that it will be able to fill the ever-depleting ranks of Russian forces in Ukraine and thus is no surprise. But the decision to create drone studies programs at 32 of the 50 top higher educational institutions is something new and disturbing.

            While using drones against Ukraine and defending Russians against Ukrainian drone attacks is a politically useful tactic, most of those who might enroll in drone studies programs almost certainly won’t be ready to work in this military sector in Putin’s current aggressive campaign in Ukraine.

            Thus, the decision to create such programs highlights something far more disturbing: the intention of the Kremlin to continue its aggressive foreign policy beyond Ukraine and to use drones to do it, a technique that it had not prepared for earlier but now recognizes is going to be a feature of most future conflicts.

Putin’s ‘Optimization’ Policy and War in Ukraine have Made Doctors and Nurses among the Most ‘Protest Prone’ Groups in Russia, Expert Says

Paul Goble

Staunton, Aug. 25 – Putin’s healthcare optimization policy has reduced the number of hospital beds by 20,000 a year over the last decade even as his war in Ukraine has placed ever greater demands on Russia’s healthcare system and the doctors and nurses who work in it, Sasha Fokina says.

That combination has made these medical workers among the most overburdened and underpaid professionals in that country, the feminist activist and political analyst say, and made them among the most “protest prone” of all groups there (posle.media/article/healthcare-in-wartime-how-womens-labor-is-changing).

These protests typically take the form of petitions, media campaigns and meetings with officials rather than with the more politically risky demonstrations, Fokina says, because other than emigration, Russia’s health workers can’t change jobs easily and thus are trapped by the system.

According to research she cites, in 2025, social and labor conflicts in the healthcafre sector accounted for 62 percent of all such clashes; and in 2026, healthcare is among the top three conflict-prone sectors, even though repressive measures have reduced the number and overall share.

One of the reasons Fokina has focused on this issue is because women dominate the medical professions in Russia, forming 70 percent of all doctors and 95 percent of all nurses, and because they have suffered the most from Putin’s policies which are exactly the reverse of what they should be in wartime.

In order to keep fielding an army, she continues, the Russian government should be providing the medical system with more funding and medical staff with higher salaries; but instead, Putin has cut back both, increasing suffering not only among patients but also among doctors and nurses.

Putin’s ‘Authoritarian Legalism’ has Soviet Not East German Roots, Lea and Taskin Say

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Aug. 25 – Many observers argue that Putin’s commitment to authoritarian legalism has its roots in his experience while serving as a KGB officer in East Germany; but in fact, Aaron Lea and Boruch Taskin argue, what Putin is doing now just like what the GDR did earlier arose from Soviet theory and practice under Stalin.

            The current Kremlin leader uses law to cover whatever he wants to do so as to simultaneously “paralyze” Western democratic institutions who forcing them into bureaucratic games and “neutralize” domestic opponents who are thereby stripped of the moral high ground, the Israeli analysts of Russian origin say (kasparovru.com/material.php?id=6A8DC886F3A48).

            Because the GDR pursued the same approach and formalized it, many assume that Putin picked its principles up from his service there, but in fact, his approach, like that of the Stasi, arose of “the Leninist concept that law is not a neutral arbiter over the state but a class instrument of the ruling party.”

            And that principle was elevated to a dominant feature of Soviet reality under Stalin when his prosecutor Andrey Vyshinsky sought not to destroy the power of law but rather to appropriate it for use by the dictatorship itself against the people in whose name that power ruled, the two analysts say.

            To be sure, Lea and Taskin continue, “the Soviet tradition of political processes was public and crude. East German refined it to invisibility: psychological destruction without traces, legal persecution without obvious political motive, and even social death without physical violence.”

            This system worked in the GDR and is working in Russia now because of what they call “the Gulliver effect” because the system works not as a result of “a single massive chain by which the state shackles a person” but rather because it leaves people who wake up to discover that they are “held fast by hundreds of slender threads, each of which in itself is negligible.”

No single rule of this kind creates a totalitarian state on its own -- indeed, many exist in any modern legal system. The difference lies not in the existence of an individual thread, but in how they are combined,” Lea and Taskin say, pointing out when the state so chooses, “hundreds of regulations” work in concert to produce totalitarianism.

That is what has been happening under Putin, and this must be understood now and after he leaves office because then lustration of the kind that was visited upon the former GDR will be a minimum requirement for overcoming the system the current Kremlin leader is using. 

Azerbaijani-Central Asian Relations Acquiring a Military Dimension, Kazakhstan Portal Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Aug. 25 – Last week, defense officials from Kazakhstan met in Baku with their Azerbaijani counterparts to discuss expanding military cooperation in the coming year, the latest example of the formation of a military-political association of Central Asian countries and Azerbaijan and through them with Turkey, Kazakhstan’s Altyn-Orda portal says.

            Azerbaijan and the countries of the former Soviet Central Asian region “are increasingly building relations not only in trade, logistics and energy but also in the field of defense” and with Azerbaijan as the bridge with Turkey as well, the portal continues (altyn-orda.kz/tyurkskij-oboronnyj-poyas-tsentralnaya-aziya-i-azerbajdzhan-usilivayut-voennoe-sotrudnichestvo/).

            The reason for this is the rapid growth in a new economic space involving these countries involving the middle corridor route between Asia and Europe, a route that “cannot exist in a geopolitical vacuum.” That makes “the coordination” of defense issues “the logical next step.” And “this process is already beginning.

            Azerbaijan has taken the lead in this development; and while in the period since 1991, “the security of Central Asia was built largely around Russia” and Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan remain members of Moscow’s Collective Security Treaty organization. “But in recent years, the geopolitical situation there has changed.”

            According to Altyn-Orda, “Russia’s war against Ukraine has drastically reduced Moscow’s ability  to act as the only guarantor of security in the vast Eurasian space;” and as a result, “the states of Central Asia are pursuing an increasingly independent foreign policy, developing relations” with a variety of countries.

            In this shift, Azerbaijan and Turkey are playing a special role. Azerbaijan “geographically connects Central Asia with Turkey and Europe. It has an army with modern combat experience, actively uses Turkish and military technologies and at the same time closely cooperates with Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.”

            And Turkey has the ability to “become the main military-technological partner” of an association of Azerbaijan and the Central Asian countries, given its “production of drones, armored vehicles, ammunition, communication system and military training,” resources that will allow the regio to “reduce its dependence on Russian weapons.”

            This emerging group and its moves toward becoming an alliance of its own “does not necessarily have to be a copy of NATO” and need not be directed against any particular country. But rather it can help the countries be in a position to deal with security problems as a region rather than individually, something that will give them greater independent influence. 

Putin Elite has Three Immediate Reasons for Devoting Ever More Attention to Emigres, Sonin Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Aug. 25 – Putin and his inner circle in recent weeks have been devoting ever more attention to Russians who have left Russia,  attention that at times has risen to a kind of “collective hysteria,” Konstantin Sonin says; and he argues that there are three reasons that the issue of emigres and “relocants” is now so fraught in Moscow.

            First of all, the economist and commentator says, Kremlin propagandists need a new “abstract enemy” now that Ukraine has become a real one with its attacks on Russian cities and infrastructure because it is easier to create propaganda about an abstract enemy than about a real one (echofm.online/opinions/prichiny-isterii).

            Russians abroad at present are no threat to the regime, but memories of the role that emigres played in the past provide just enough fuel for Putin and those around him to believe that such people could threaten those in power once again and to use propaganda tropes like those the tsars and commissars did.

            Second, Sonin argues, there is “’the technical’ perspective,” driven by the fact that “the potential for whipping up hatred against Ukrainians has been exhausted.” Having lost the target it has been concerned about, Putin’s propaganda machines “must always be kept busy with something;” and emigres and those who have moved abroad are a good target in that regard.

            And third, some members of the Putin elite suffer from an intensifying “fear of the future,” even though Sonin argues, this fear which has to do with the isolation of Russia is “largely unfounded” but “fear – even when irrational – is a powerful force” – and so fears that the departure of Russian is a sign that Russia has been cut off from the West are real.

            Consequently, the Kremlin’s current obsession with emigres and those who have relocated abroad is likely to continue and perhaps even intensify given its problems in Ukraine and at home, highlighting along with everything else the paranoia and lack of good judgment currently at the top of the Russian political system.