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bne June 2022 Cover Story I 27
This article is one of a series called The Fourth Russia that imagines what the world will be like five years in the future. It is pure speculation based on best-guess assumptions and
is designed to be a jumping off point for thinking about what the longer-term consequences of the war in Ukraine will be for Russia, Europe and the world.
The year is 2027 and it is five years to destabilise the region but has opened
the door to Russian soft power with its “feed the world” campaign and cheap grain supplies.
The world has been broken into two, with many developing countries in the Global South welcoming Moscow’s support, and already not very liberal, have subscribed to the Moscow Consensus, which puts the interests of the state over those of the individual that is the core of the Washington consensus.
Russia laid the groundwork for this support with its active distribution
of its Sputnik V vaccine during the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic
in 2020 and there is still a lot of resentment over the West’s so-called vaccine apartheid. Following the outbreak of Covid-26 last year, many of the countries in the Global South are once again looking to Moscow for help.
Fourth Russia
When the invasion of Ukraine started
on February 24, 2022 many said that Russia had returned to the Soviet Union, but instead Russia has emerged in a fourth reincarnation.
The first was 1,000 years of Tsarist Russia that dramatically gave way to the Bolshevik Russia following the October revolution. That too passed away dramatically with the collapse
of the Soviet Union in December 1991, leading to three brief decades of relative prosperity and progress. However, with Putin’s decision to attack Ukraine the “Free Russia” period also came to an abrupt end and the country now finds itself in a fourth phase.
since Russia invaded Ukraine.
Just how much progress has the country made since then and just how much damage has the extreme sanction regime imposed on Russia done?
The world was changed in 2022. Today critics say that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s attempt to force a new security deal on Nato was a missed opportunity. After he died suddenly from leukaemia shortly before the 2024 presidential elections secretary of the Security Council of Russia Nikolai Patrushev was a shoo-in but has proved to be even more intransigent than his predecessor.
Patrushev’s decision to expand Russia’s military presence in the northern, western and southern military districts, as well as move significant hardware into Novorossiysk and Crimea that can reach the entire Mediterranean boards as well as beef up its naval base at Taras in Syria have alarmed Kyiv and Washington, as Russia reasserts itself in the region already wracked by food insecurity and social unrest following the food crisis in 2022.
The four-year global recession that started in 2022 after commodity
and energy prices spiked has caused international relations to become brittle, and the intense US pressure on the rest of the global community as it tried to enforce its harsh sanctions did a lot of damage, forcing countries to choose sides in a fight they would have preferred to sit out.
The bread riots that broke out in North Africa in the autumn of 2022 and famine in many sub-Saharan countries continue
“The bread riots that broke out in North Africa in the autumn of 2022 and famine in many sub-Saharan countries continue to destabilise the region but has opened the door to Russian soft power. ”
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