Shocking news:
Andrei Klepach, the chief economist at Russian state development corporation VEB.RF, was reportedly fired on Aug. 16, a day after Russian media widely circulated his warnings that Russia was losing its economic and technological competition with the West.
I swear when I read this article yesterday I wondered when he’ll fall out of the window. I guess he is lucky!
This is the first step to reaching the window. The climb takes a little bit.
That’s what we thought about Yevgeny Prigozhin, too, when he made nice with Putin after the attempted coup.
In Putin’s Russia, you don’t jump out of the 40th-story window, the 40th-story window jumps you!
The firings will continue until the economy improves.
According to one of The Bell’s sources, VEB.RF head Igor Shuvalov dismissed Klepach following an order “from above.” A second source confirmed that the firing was connected to Klepach’s May remarks.
We are falling behind. We are losing both the technological and economic competition in the world. And, as I have already said, we are losing it not only to China and the United States — in some respects, we are losing it to Ukraine," Klepach said.
Two weeks later, the replacement guy rolls in and presumably announces that Russia is stomping China and the US economically and technologically, despite simultaneously waging a war against Ukraine. This new position, while establishing by example new limits on what it is politically-acceptable to say, does not improve matters in Russia.
