re: Latest Updates: Russia-Ukraine Conflict

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20 years huh? That must be some crystal ball you have.

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I was playing it safe and adding a decade onto most geopolitical experts' prediction of 10 years...

Stratfor's Decade Forecast (2015-2025) put the internal political collapse of Russia from various factors at next year... 2025

Russia
It is unlikely that the Russian Federation will survive in its current form. Russia’s failure to transform its energy revenue into a self-sustaining economy makes it vulnerable to price fluctuations. It has no defense against these market forces. Given the organization of the federation, with revenue flowing to Moscow before being distributed directly or via regional governments, the flow of resources will also vary dramatically. This will lead to a repeat of the Soviet Union’s experience in the 1980s and Russia’s in the 1990s, in which Moscow’s ability to support the national infrastructure declined. In this case, it will cause regions to fend for themselves by forming informal and formal autonomous entities. The economic ties binding the Russian periphery to Moscow will fray.

Historically, the Russians solved such problems via the secret police — the KGB and its successor, the Federal Security Services (FSB). But just as in the 1980s, the secret police will not be able to contain the centrifugal forces pulling regions away from Moscow this decade. In this case, the FSB’s power is weakened by its leadership’s involvement in the national economy. As the economy falters, so does the FSB’s strength. Without the FSB inspiring genuine terror, the fragmentation of the Russian Federation will not be preventable.

To Russia’s west, Poland, Hungary and Romania will seek to recover regions lost to the Russians at various points. They will work to bring Belarus and Ukraine into this fold. In the south, the Russians’ ability to continue controlling the North Caucasus will evaporate, and Central Asia will destabilize. In the northwest, the Karelian region will seek to rejoin Finland. In the Far East, the maritime regions more closely linked to China, Japan and the United States than to Moscow will move independently. Other areas outside of Moscow will not necessarily seek autonomy but will have it thrust upon them. This is the point: There will not be an uprising against Moscow, but Moscow’s withering ability to support and control the Russian Federation will leave a vacuum. What will exist in this vacuum will be the individual fragments of the Russian Federation.

This will create the greatest crisis of the next decade. Russia is the site of a massive nuclear strike force distributed throughout the hinterlands. The decline of Moscow’s power will open the question of who controls those missiles and how their non-use can be guaranteed. This will be a major test for the United States. Washington is the only power able to address the issue, but it will not be able to seize control of the vast numbers of sites militarily and guarantee that no missile is fired in the process. The United States will either have to invent a military solution that is difficult to conceive of now, accept the threat of rogue launches, or try to create a stable and economically viable government in the regions involved to neutralize the missiles over time. It is difficult to imagine how this problem will play out. However, given our forecast on the fragmentation of Russia, it follows that this issue will have to be addressed, likely in the next decade.

The issue in the first half of the decade will be how far the alliance stretching between the Baltic and Black seas will extend. Logically, it should reach Azerbaijan and the Caspian Sea. Whether it does depends on what we have forecast for the Middle East and Turkey.

We will see...

Would you trust this, more?

The Moscow Times: "Russia's Population Decline Hits Record Rate

Do you know how to read a demographic chart?

That narrowing at the bottom means "not very many young people under 30..." and that means a country will not have a workforce in 20 years (especially in one with an especially low life expectancy, where A Russian male has a 1-in-4 chance of dying before he turns 55 years old).



NEWSWEEK: "Russia's Worst Case Scenario Sees Population Drop by 15 Million


Russia's Demographic Crisis

In Russia today, fertility levels are extremely low: less than 1.2 births per woman per lifetime, if current trends continued indefinitely. Yet it is not the low levels of fertility, Eberstadt argued, that makes for Russia's demographic crisis.

The crisis, Eberstadt stated, is due to the great increase in mortality in Russia over the past decade--and the prolonged period of stagnation in life expectancy during the late Soviet era. Over the past forty years, Eberstadt remarked, the Russian Federation has suffered a retrogression in health levels that is unprecedented for any urbanized literate society during times of peace.