RUSSIA & UKRAINE – Johnson’s Russia List table of contents & links :: JRL 2020-#73 :: Tuesday, 21 April 2020

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Johnson’s Russia List :: JRL 2020-#73 :: Tuesday, 22 April 2020
A project sponsored through the Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies (IERES) at The George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs. The contents do not necessarily represent the views of IERES or The George Washington University.
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1. Moscow Times: Russia Reaches Record Life Expectancy of 73.4 Years.
2. Christian Science Monitor: Fred Weir, As Moscow locks down, small businesses feel the crunch. It’s never been easy to run a small business in Russia. Now the pandemic is threatening to shut them down in a new way. But Russian entrepreneurs are figuring out ways to get by, and officials are starting to help them.
3. TASS: Izvestia: ‘COVID-19 epidemic is massive, but Ebola was worse’ – virologist.
4. TASS: About 30% of Russians hope to travel domestically or abroad as early as summer, says poll.
5. Kremlin.ru: Meeting on sanitary and epidemiological situation – en.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/63229
6. Sky News (UK): Coronavirus measures are ‘paying off’ in Russia as two million tests take place. Russia has worked hard to scale up testing capacity with 100,000 tests a day across a network of state and private laboratories.
7. Meduza: Russia needs to strengthen its COVID-19 response . Epidemiologists are barely making models of Russia’s pandemic post-shutdown, so we made our own. The country could see one million deaths unless it does a lot more than it’s doing.
8. Awful Avalanche: Russian Covid Survivors Tell Their Personal Stories – Part II – awfulavalanche.wordpress.com/2020/04/20/russian-covid-survivors-tell-their-personal-stories-part-ii/
9. The Nation: Alex Luhn, Russian Officials Dawdled as the Coronavirus Took Hold. Now Muscovites are being forced to use QR codes as travel permits.
10. Irrationality: Paul Robinson, PSYCHOLOGICAL CONNECTIONS.
11. RFE/RL: Lenin At 150: Even Without COVID-19, Russia Was Set To Snub The Soviet Union’s Founder.
[https://www.rferl.org/a/lenin-at-150-even-without-covid-19-russia-was-set-to-snub-the-soviet-union-s-founder/30568383.html]
12. Financial Times: Russian industry scrambles to cope with coronavirus restrictions. Companies build temporary accommodation and run buses for staff to keep business going.
13. Intellinews.com: Ben Aris, UPDATED: Oil prices fall to less than zero for the first time in history. Oil prices dropped to less than zero dollars as producers are forced to pay buyers to find some place to store their output.
14. Intellinews.com: Russia has become an agricultural powerhouse, but remains a net importer of food. Despite being the world’s biggest exporter of grain, Russia still imports more processed food than the raw materials it exports.
15. Moscow Times: Explainer: What Happened to Oil Prices and What Does it Mean for Russia?. Oil prices in the U.S. went negative for the first time in history. Should Russia be worried?
16. Republic.ru: Vladimir Frolov, Universal Reset. Russian Foreign Policy in the Age of Coronavirus. [Russia Matters summary of republic.ru/posts/96442]
17. TASS: Nezavisimaya Gazeta: US gearing up for ‘star wars’ against China and Russia.
18. www.rt.com: Another ‘worst deal ever’? US withdrawal from crucial Open Skies treaty is done deal, Russian FM believes.
19. Carnegie Endowment for International Peace/Kommersant: Igor Ivanov, Rethinking International Security for a Post-Pandemic World.
20. International Politics: Kimberly Marten, NATO enlargement: evaluating its consequences in Russia. (excerpt)
21. Infobrics.org: Latvia Wanted To Bridge EU with Russia But Is Now in Economic Trouble – infobrics.org/post/30764/
22. Foreign Affairs: Dmytro Kuleba, The Peril of Polling in Crimea. Is It Possible to Measure Public Opinion in an Occupied Territory? (With response)
23. The New Kremlin Stooge: Mark Chapman, Dmitry Rogozin; “I’m Afraid I’ll Look Like a Dick” – thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com/2020/04/20/dmitry-rogozin-im-afraid-ill-look-like-a-dick/#more-716
24. Financial Times: Peter Frankopan, Putin’s People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and Then Turned on the West. Catherine Belton’s riveting account traces an underestimated officer’s rise to the Kremlin.
25. Norman Pereira: The Devil and Mr. Putin.
26. Moscow Times: Ben Noble and Nikolai Petrov, Russian Power Agencies in the Time of Pandemic.
27. Just the News: John Solomon, Newly declassified evidence casts doubt on Obama intel assessment about Russia’s election intentions. CIA’s former Moscow station chief says 2017 conclusion that Russia tried to elect Trump not supported by evidence.
28. AP: Senate panel backs assessment that Russia interfered in 2016.
[DJ: Find report here: intelligence.senate.gov/press/senate-intel-releases-bipartisan-report-obama-admin-response-russian-election-interference]

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