Anders Aslund is a direct, reasonable and perceptive analyst of Russia’s economy.

He lays it on the line here:

Russia’s isolating itself politically and you see this, this extraordinary crudeness [with which] Putin and [Foreign Minister Sergei] Lavrov talk to everybody. And that of course means that people are less inclined to deal with them. Each crude statement by Putin and Lavrov now increases the political risk for Russia. And also that Russia now repeatedly promises things and doesn’t do [them].

It means that Russia’s word is today considered to be worth nothing whatsoever. And that’s Russia’s problem, rather than anybody else’s problem.

And the test of the soundness of a country’s policy is:

When a big boom is ending, that’s when the quality of your economic policy is being proved. And any serious mistake costs a lot.

That thought applies rather more widely than Russia and the CIS states, of course…

Update: a good FT piece on Russia’s problems:

If you were two times leveraged and the underlying stock has gone down more than 50 per cent, that’s it, you’ve lost everything,” says one market insider, speaking on condition of anonymity. “A lot of minigarchs are very rapidly becoming nanogarchs.”