A few months ago on March 3, Yuval Noah Harari wrote that Russia is nothing more than “a gas station with nukes“. And in fact, a report published in July, that examined the financial implications of phasing out fossil fuels in six emerging economies showed that fossil fuels represent a staggering 34% of the total Russian government revenue. But even with all those fossil fuel revenues, Russia’s GDP per capita is just 12.000 USD! So if we already lived in a non-fossil fuel civilization (that the world desperately needs to become) Russia’s GDP per capita would be slightly higher than Botswana’s but lower than Cuba’s.
The same report warns that 13 trillion USD in fossil fuel revenues will just disappear in a low-carbon world economy and advises that those six fossil fuel-dependent countries must diversify their economy to tackle that dramatic change. But it is not easy to see how will Russia be able to do just that if it has a very serious lack of highly skilled human resources. Russia has almost the same GDP per capita as Bulgaria but has a ratio of top scientists per million of the population that is only half that of Bulgaria.
But even that much was before thousands of Russians (including highly skilled ones) fled to neighboring countries https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-01622-1 not to mention the many (more than 200.000) who recently fled Russia after the military conscription began on 21 September, which further exacerbated the Russian brain drain.
Gulnaz Sharafutdinova, a Russian-born Professor at King’s College, argued that the invasion of Ukraine was primarily a response to Putin’s declining popularity among the Russian people, driven by economic challenges. Ironically, Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine has, in turn, hastened the global shift away from fossil fuels, exacerbating the very economic problems that initially influenced his action
This underscores that the very same (Assassin-in-Chief) Putin who has compared himself to 18th-century tsar Peter the Great will be remembered as the sole responsible for plunging Russia into economic hardship, reminiscent of a bygone era when Russian teachers received compensation in the form of mere bottles of vodka as their monthly salary.
Pacheco-Torgal 