(02-22-2020, 11:23 AM)MalabarJag Wrote:

(02-22-2020, 09:05 AM)mikesez Wrote: Russia's national interest is not necessarily the same thing as Putin's interest.
It might not be in Russia's national interest to get into another arms race with the US, but some of Putin's oligarch allies could stand to make some serious rubles off of it.
And the energy market is more complicated than you might think.
If China and Japan feel like they shouldn't buy Iranian oil, they buy Russian oil instead as an example.
With fracking, American natural gas still hasn't made a dent in Russia's sales. Transporting natural gas by boat does not work as well as pipelines, and even if they wanted to boycott Russian gas, Europe would have an easier time getting LNG from Qatar rather than us.

You are really stretching here. While not everything Putin does wasn't in Russia best interest, they all seemed so at the time. Can you give me a solid example of a Putin policy that was clearly against Russia's interest at the time the decision was made?

The entire Putin project is against Russia's national interest. 
In American capitalism, the profit gets reinvested into new business ventures that could potentially employ more people and increase convenience for everybody.
In Russian kleptocracy, the profit disappears into ether.  Putin makes sure his government keeps looking the other way, not trying to tax or even acknowledge most of it before it leaves the country for good.

https://qz.com/1330955/russias-missing-wealth/

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