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Korea Joongang Daily | Kim Byung-yeon Professor, Department of Economics, Seoul National University
2022.04.27
Russian President Vladimir Putin is not just destroying Ukraine with his war but also the future of Russia. The country’s economy in 1990 before the collapse of the Soviet Union was 10 percent the size of the U.S. economy. By the late 1990s, it was just 2 to 3 percent of the U.S. economy due to persistent recessions and a weakening in the ruble. Russia’s economy began to rebound from the 2000s and became 14 percent the size of the U.S. economy by 2013. But the expansion stopped there. After the invasion of Ukraine, Russian talent supporting sustainable growth and foreign capital have fled the country, ruining its future. As long as Putin stays in power, they won’t return.
Ominous signs were already there. During a meeting in 2011, a president of a university in Moscow shared his concerns about the possibility of Putin — then a prime minister — returning to presidency after Dmitry Medvedev. Fearing Russia going back to autocracy, he vowed to leave the country if Putin returns to power. A year under Putin’s presidency, he indeed left Russia for good. According to the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS), as many as 50,000 scientists left the country for research and work overseas from 2014 to 2019. They will unlikely return home after the war. An estimated 20,000 Russians abandoned their homes in the first 10 days of the war in Ukraine, according to Konstantin Sonin, a Russian-born economist at the University of Chicago.
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