Will the Russian "bear" soon overcome the "cold"?

(Baonghean) - This Christmas season, for Russians, the cold weather is probably not as scary as the "cold" of falling into the depths of the economic crisis. Former Russian Minister of Economy Alexei Kudrin said that Russia has fallen into a comprehensive crisis and in 2015 a series of small and medium-sized Russian companies will go bankrupt, Russia's credit rating may fall to "junk" level. President Putin also predicted that difficulties will continue to surround Russia for at least a few more years. In recent days, the world has witnessed Russia struggling to escape from difficulties with difficulty.

Russians rushed to buy goods as the ruble fell in value. Photo from the internet

Along with the above measures, the Russians have had to resort to drastic measures to stop the recession. On December 23, the government of Prime Minister Medvedev "forced" large enterprises to sell foreign currency to support the falling ruble. Specifically, Russia's leading export enterprises such as Gazprom and Rosneft had to sell some USD, "pump" USD into the market to rescue the ruble. Large enterprises have been required to reduce foreign currency reserves to the lowest level, before October 1, 2014. The government will "sit down" with the "big" exporters to force them to implement the above regulation before March 1, 2015, accordingly, at least 5 corporations must sell 1 billion USD per day until March 1. Immediately after this announcement, the ruble not only stopped its decline, but also showed signs of increasing by 5.5% to 1 USD for 55.4 rubles. This is an effective measure, because the ruble has recovered about 20% compared to its low of 1 USD for 80.1 rubles on December 16.

Along with strong domestic measures, Russia has just reached cooperation agreements with China. In particular, China pledged to help Russia in difficult circumstances by increasing trade transactions in yuan with Russia. With this measure, Russia accepts being "yuanized" in terms of import and export, and China also takes advantage of this opportunity to promote the influence of the yuan, demonstrating the influence of the position of the world's second economic power.

Thus, Russia has struggled hard to get out of the difficulties and those struggles have been more or less effective. However, the price to pay for the decisions forced to be made in unfavorable circumstances is not small, but in this situation, the Russians have no choice but to make trade-offs. Even when Russia has taken temporary measures that must be paid, the "light at the end of the tunnel" has not yet come to the Russians on the way to find a way out of the difficulties. Analysts predict that even if the ruble increases in value again, the Russian economy will still be in a bad situation if world oil prices continue to fall. Another difficulty that continues to appear next to Russia is that the Ukrainian Parliament has just voted to pass a bill to abolish the non-aligned status, opening the way for the Ukrainian government to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), something that Russia does not want. Along with that, on December 19, the Kremlin announced that Russian President Vladimir Putin had invited North Korean leader Kim Jong Un to visit Russia in 2015, and just a few days later, all international newspapers reported that North Korea was experiencing its worst Internet outage. Although this information is not really related to each other, it still evokes not really good feelings towards Russia at this time.

However, on the eve of the New Year, people still think of good things. At this time, the virtue of overcoming difficulties of the Russian people is remembered and the image of the Russian "bear" overcoming the "cold" to survive appears more clearly.

Chi Linh Son