Andriy Nechaev, Russia’s first economy minister since the collapse of the Soviet Union, says that the country’s economy, now led by Vladimir Putin, has gone “to shit,” but that’s not really the biggest worry, Insider reports.

“[Problema] It’s not that we’re in shit, but that we decided to sleep in it,” Nechaev said at a financial forum organized last week. A video recording of this moment was published in Telegram by the local newspaper “Vechernye Vedomosti”.

Nechaev, who was in charge of Russia’s economic management from 1992 to 1993, also warned that the country faced an imminent economic crisis as Russia’s budget deficit exploded this year, reaching more than the full-year forecast in January-April alone. 2023 year.

Russia’s former economy minister said Moscow has enough reserves to cover the deficit for a year, but after that it will have to borrow.

At the same event, he joked that if “McDonald’s” can be replaced by pancakes (a type of Russian pancake), then advanced electronics cannot be replaced by anything.

Import of electronic components is one of the big problems of the Russian economy

Netsiaev is not the first Russian economist to sound the alarm over the country’s problem with finding replacements for Western-made electronics, a situation that has already hurt the Russian arms industry’s ability to compensate for losses in Ukraine.

Last September, Oleg Vyugin, a former high-ranking official in the Russian Ministry of Finance who also worked for the Russian Central Bank, warned that “the world will move forward, but Russia will only use second-rate technology and spend enormous resources to reproduce what already exists in the world , but cannot be imported.”

The tenth package of sanctions, adopted by the European Union against Russia on February 25 this year, includes new restrictions on the export of components that can be used in the Russian arms industry and in other technological sectors.

The EU sanctions deal comes after Britain, the US and Canada have already announced similar packages imposing new sanctions on Russia a year after it launched its invasion of Ukraine. The G7, a group of the most powerful democratic economies, also took steps to expand sanctions already in place.

This month, the United States imposed broad restrictions, including on consumer goods that can be exported to Russia and later used by Vladimir Putin’s armed forces.

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