Siberia’s ‘Economically Accessible Resources’ Aren’t that Large, Verkhoturov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Feb. 26 – Those who talk about “Siberia’s plentiful resources” are engaged in “wishful thinking,” Dmitry Verkhoturov says, because while the geologically located resources there are in fact great, those that are “economically accessible “aren’t that large, already are being intensively exploited and include primarily energy resources like coal, oil and gas.”

            Most people who talk about Siberia confuse the two, the economic journalist says; but in fact, they are very different things, with geological resources including many things that no one can access because they are too deep or process because they are too far from any infrastructure that could allow them to reach markets (sibmix.com/?doc=20000).

            A clear example of an economic resource, Verkoturov says, is the Borodinsky open pit coal mine. It produces 24.8 million tons a year and has an estimated reserve of 650 million tons. Not only has it been explored in detail but it is connected to the rest of the world by roads and railways.

            An equally clear example of a geological resource is the Tunguska coal basin. It is estimated to contain as much a five trillion tons of coal, but this coal lies beneath 2000 meters of lava; there is no road, railway, or even reliable river pathway to reach them meaning that this enormous reserve can’t be used unless all those things are built.

            Given that Siberia’s boosters often include the latter with the former, many may be surprised to learn that the region’s “economically viable resources aren’t all that extensive;” and they aren’t likely to become so anytime soon as building the infrastructure to reach them is prohibitively expensive and difficult.

            “If we count the 50-kilometer strips on either side of the railroads where transport infrastructure exists or could be built relatively quickly – and there are approximately 13,000 km of railroads in the Siberian Federal District, then the area containing more or less economically reachable resources amounts to only 1.3 million square kilometers.”

            That is slightly less than 30 percent of the total area of the Siberian FD,” Verkhoturov says; and “the rest of the district’s resources are purely geological and economically inaccessible.” Everyone involved must recognize that “Siberia’s resource wealth exists only in the geological sense; but it isn’t yet possible to exploit it” – and likely won’t for decades.

Family Members of Russian Combat Victims Need Psychological Help Too, Adding to the Burdens on Russian Society and State, ‘Vyorstka’ Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Feb. 23 – The number of Russians who will need psychological help as a result of Putin’s expanded war in Ukraine is larger than a significant fraction of the 700,000 veterans and includes the wives, mothers, family members and even friends of the more than 200,000 Russian soldiers who have died and the even greater number of those who have been injured.

            The total of those with psychological problems as a result of the war is already overwhelming the ability of the Russian medical system to cope and is likely to swamp it entirely in the coming months if and when the war ends, Vyorstka journalist Anna Ryzkkova says (verstka.media/zheny-i-materi-pogibshih-voennyh-nuzhdayutsya-v-psihologicheskoi-pomoshhi).

            Veterans groups, sometimes with the support of the government and sometimes independently, are trying to fill the gap; but they lack the resources to do so, Ryzhkova says; and the result is untold human suffering as she recounts on the basis of interviews with family members of the direct victims of Putin’s war among Russian forces.

            Such people rarely get the attention that veterans with PTSD do; but their numbers are so large and growing that they constitute a social and ultimately political problem even greater than the military one alone, yet another example of the collateral damage that Putin and his war have inflicted on the Russian Federation.

Many of 80,000 Russian Policemen who Left Their Positions in 2025 Joining Private Security Companies, Expert Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Feb. 22 – That the Russian police force has been losing officers rapidly because of low pay, poor working conditions and problematic management has long been widely recognized (jamestown.org/war-against-ukraine-leaving-russian-police-state-without-enough-police/).

            But despite the resignation of some 80,000 officers last year, relatively little attention has gone to what new jobs they are taking, except for the widespread assumption that many of them are using their skills in the Russian army in Ukraine given how much higher pay there is (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2026/01/low-pay-attitudes-of-commanders-why.html).

            Now, however, independent Moscow expert Pashkin says that a large share of police who have quite are instead joining private security companies where they can do many of the same jobs they were doing but for higher pay and better benefits and without the risks of police work (svpressa.ru/society/article/503493/).

            What they are not doing, at least not in large numbers, is joining criminal gangs, he says. His interlocutors say that Russian gangsters are very strict about that now. “They don’t hire police officers because it is supposedly considered bad manners” for any gang leader to employ those who used to work against them.  

             That represents yet another privatization of state functions and the state monopoly on violence, a trend that could in the future prove very dangerous if the numbers of police in Russia continue to fall relative to the number of private firms who are armed and might under certain circumstances challenge them.  

Reopening of Moscow’s GULAG Museum as Museum of Memory Intended to Prevent Any Comparisons between Stalin’s Time and Putin’s, Sarkisyan Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Feb. 23—Nearly two years ago, the Russian government closed the Moscow GULAG Museum, supposedly for renovation; but now instead of reopening it, the powers have replaced it with a Museum of Memory, one with an entirely different purpose and an entirely different message, Dzhulietta Sarkisyan says. 

            The GULAG Museum had focused on Stalin’s crimes; but its replacement will, in the words of its new management, “be devoted to the memory of the victims of the genocide of the Soviet people” and its exhibits will trace “all stages of  the military crimes of the Nazis in the Great Fatherland War,” the journalist says (novayagazeta.ru/articles/2026/02/23/zabudte).

            More to the point, Sarkisyan continues, the replacement museum, which is now headed by a veteran of Putin’s expanded war in Ukraine, won’t devote any time or space to Stalin’s activities but only to those of the Nazis. The museum will send its holdings to the archives and dismiss those who made the museum such an important phenomenon.

            All this “creates the impression that talk about the mechanisms of terror – snitches, ‘enemies of the people,’ a punitive bureaucracy, closed courts and fear – is too easily viewed as a mirror of contemporary life and that those who too the decision about the closure of the museum understood this perfectly,” the journalist says.

            By this action, she continues, “the state is step by step changing not the details but the very conditions on which society is allowed to talk about repressions.” People will no longer be able to count on institutions like the GULAG Museum to help them recover their pasts but have to mouth whatever the decisions come down “’from above.’”

            And thus the closure of the museum is part of the process the Putin regime has launched to revisit and annul the rehabilitation of Stalin’s victims, a process intended to cast doubt on the entire narrative concerning Stalin’s crimes, and instead encourage Russians to conclude that they should blame all losses not on their own leaders but on foreign aggressors.

 

Moscow Fails to Publish Ethnic Composition of Compatriot Returnees and Russians are Upset, Shustov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Feb. 23 – Sometimes, the Putin regime’s choice to stop publishing data has an effect very different than the Kremlin intends: it leads Russians to make conclusions at odds with the ones their country’s leaders want them to draw and prompts them to question what their government is doing.

            That is what is happening now regarding the number of people coming to Russia under its compatriots program which seeks to have people with roots in Russia to return. This year, as the number fell (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2026/02/fewer-compatriots-returned-to-russia-in.html), Moscow highlighted the country of origin rather than the ethnicity of those doing so.

            Since most of those coming back now are returning to Russia from the countries of Central Asia, many Russians now assume that their country is being flooded with Muslim Central Asians, and they don’t like that at all, Aleksandr Shustov says (ritmeurasia.ru/news--2026-02-23--kakie-sootechestvenniki-pereseljajutsja-v-rossiju-86021).

            A careful examination of data from a variety of sources, the Rhythm of Eurasia commentator says, shows that most of those returning to Russia from Central Asia are in fact ethnic Russians not Muslims, just as has been true every year since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

            But by not publishing and highlighting that data on a regular basis, Shustov says, the government has gotten itself into trouble with many Russians who draw conclusions at odds with reality. And the invariable supporter of the Kremlin says that “the state has a simple means of dispelling the concerns of society” about what is going on.

            All it needs to do, he continues, is “to add in reports an indication of the nationality of those involved and regularly publish data in quarterly monitoring reports,” something Moscow used to do but in the last several years has stopped doing, a change that has not had the intended result.

            The problems the Russian authorities have landed themselves in by cutting back on the release of such data, of course, reflect not so much concerns about statistical transparency but an obsession about nationality among Russians and the way in which demographic change is leading to a decline in the percentage of the titular nationality in their country. 

Russia’s Forestry Industry has Collapsed, Driving Down Incomes and Wrecking Regional Budgets East of the Urals

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Feb. 23 – In 2025, Russia’s forestry industry “collapsed to a ten-year low,” erasing the gains of earlier years, simultaneously driving down incomes and wrecking the budgets of the governments of federal subjects east of the Urals, according to Russian government figures reported by the Voice of the Regions portal.

            Russian production in this sector fell to 176 million cubic meters, far below the 200 cubic meter mark that the authorities had assumed was the baseline. Indeed, the situation has become so dire that the portal entitles its report about this collapse “Taiga on the Brink” (regionvoice.ru/tayga-na-grani-lesnaya-otrasl-rossii-lesozagotovka/).

            The forestry industry is not just about harvesting trees. It is an enormous system involving everything from cutting down forests to processing the wood and moving it to both domestic and foreign customers. But, according to Voice of the Regions, “when demand falls, tensions arise at every stage.”

            The decline in foreign demand has not been compensated for by a rise in domestic demand, the portal says; and prices continue to rise for fuel, equipment, and infrastructure maintenance. As a result, incomes are falling and jobs disappearing all along this pathway. And regions where it is a dominant force are losing tax revenue and having to retrench. 

            If the current trends continue, not only will the forestry industry face more than “the temporary downturn” Moscow likes to talk about, but it and all who depend on it will have to adjust to “a more profound transformation of the development model” Russia’s forestry industry has long thought it could rely on. 

Bomb Lenin Laid Under Russian Nation ‘Continues to Tick’ and Could Explode at a Most Inopportune Time, Khramov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Feb. 4 – Russians must recognize that the bomb Lenin laid under the Russian nation “continues to tick” and could go off at some point if they do not take additional steps to overcome his legacy by eliminating the non-Russian republics and changing the national narrative they currently employ, Aleksandr Khramov says.

            The Moscow paleontologist and Russian nationalist argues that Lenin hated the Russian nation just as much as he hated capitalism and that he did everything he could to undermine the interests of the Russians and prevent them from forming their own nation state (apn.ru/index.php?newsid=49234).

            Indeed, Khramov continues, the main goal of the Bolshevik leader was to ensure that the Russians would never have their own “national home” but instead would “be consumed in the furnace of world revolution.” And he adds that Russian leaders have been fighting to overcome that legacy ever since, but there is a long way to go.

            That task must be completed, the commentator says, because “the bomb of national republics planted under Russia by Lenin has not yet been completely defused and continues to tick, biding its time” for when problems in the country as a whole will reach the point that such explosions will do the most harm.