Source: TW
Protests
I can’t say much about people’s feelings because now you can get up to 15 years in jail for criticizing this ‘special operation’, calling it a war (yes, you can’t), ‘spreading fakes’, supporting sanctions or calling for protests. Have to blink twice. Can’t really protest because everyone gets instantly detained, even random people. See what happened on Bolotnaya Square +++(←2012 government allegations against several people)+++, protests after Nemtsov was killed +++(supposedly at government’s behest)+++, or what happened in Belarus +++(← 2021 post election protests, arrests, torture)+++. These governments are good at shutting down protests. Anti-riot police is everywhere now. Not only they control TV channels and websites, they control ALL the media. Social media networks get fines for not cooperating. FB and Google got fined for ’not removing fakes’, gov limits speed and then bans them. Already happened before. VPN helps.
Currency
Central bank’s assets are frozen, ruble dropped by almost 50% already and they had to close stock exchanges, freeze stocks owned by foreign investors so they can’t cash out, etc. The stock exchange will likely open on Monday, will see how it goes 🙃. They announced that they will spend $8.5 billions to buy out stocks of Russian companies. More gov-owned companies. Cool. Now they also announced that the companies can issue buy-backs (those were heavily regulated before). Now there are talks about nationalization of companies that are stopping any activities in Russia. Maybe these are just talks to make them come back, but it does look scary. If it happens - we’ll get no investments and nobody will want to do any business with us for many years.
By their measures it looks like they have huge problems with USD/EUR, so they limit everything that drains USD/EUR out of country. Maybe they are doing this to not let the technical default happen? Common next step is to just forcefully convert people’s USD by the market rate. Or just take their money. The state recognizes your service 🙃 I doubt these two measures will take place, the protests will emerge imo.
Central bank introduced a 12% commission for buying currency on the exchange. It was 30% at first. Banks made bid-ask spreads insanely wide, sometimes up to 2.2x. ATMs had massive queues because people are trying to cash out USD since the first few hours. On the second day we got telegram bots that send alerts when there is USD cash in an ATM somewhere. Queues occur even at 3 am (second pic, taken few days ago. Lines are way bigger now).
A new law forces you to exchange 80% of USD/EUR you got since Jan, 1st as salary to our currency. Now you can only cash out $10k in 6 months in banks, everything over gets converted to ruble w/ bad exchange rate. Can’t travel with >$10k USD in cash. Can’t transfer USD/EUR to your own foreign bank accounts. Can’t transfer over $5k/mo to relatives abroad. This will go through September, if nothing changes.
+++(Rus ejection from)+++ Swift is not such a problem: we have SPFS, which processes all transactions inside our country. Update: Visa/MasterCard banned us, so we can’t pay for international services or use bank cards issued by Russian banks outside of Russia. We have our own payment processor, a Visa/MC clone - Mir, which ironically translates to ‘Peace’. Surely it only works in Russia, so we’ll use Chinese UnionPay to make transactions between countries and use cards abroad. Only a few banks have UnionPay cards -> big fees and queues.
Crypto exchanges banned us, so grey market thrives. A way to get money from outside is to get paid in crypto and trade it with someone here. The spread between buying and selling USD & EUR is so big that it is better to take the risk and also trade with someone instead of banks.
Business impact
Stores and businesses freeze activities, you probably know this. Some close not because of sanctions, but because of instability - it is cheaper then to recalculate everything, re-sign contracts, change logistics and prices.
Small business is fucked again. Happened during covid, happens now. Supplies are 2x the price, logistics issues, etc. Better credit terms, but that’s it. They might take other measures, but looks like it will be barely enough to keep some alive, different priorities. Many fled to Georgia because they opened bank accounts for Russians and we have visa-free entry. Now to open a bank account you have to sign a paper that you are against the war etc, but if it gets leaked to Russian gov you’ll get fun times so nobody really does this.
Flights and airbnb prices exploded, of course. Private jets flew to Dubai, some then flew back to Moscow, and back to Dubai again. This started happening the next day all of this began.
Local businesses might collapse, we might get hyperinflation, unemployment, etc.
Internet isolation
Another scary thing is that they -might- shut down internet here: basically they are trying to create a local copycat scheme of the whole internet. And a button to switch it off. They are migrating everything to use local IP issuing system instead of RIPE. Cross-border cables have to be owned by local companies. All ISPs have to use SORM: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SORM and Deep Packet Inspection. Meaning they can physically shut off cables, making VPNs useless.
So basically they can even make these websites work sort of locally. < This is speculation and theories for now.
They might introduce whitelists and filtering packets with DPI+++(=deep packet inspection)+++ will be easier since there’ll be no other traffic. VPNs won’t be effective, and mesh networks will become popular. Satellite internet won’t help at all because you need to somehow get a dish and it’s easy to track it.
They are also working on government-issued SSL certificates. This already happened in Kazakhstan in 2015. Basically it allows someone to intercept, decrypt, modify and encrypt back all the traffic.