Life after Putin
The turning point, perhaps, in Russia's war to exterminate the Ukrainian state came in mid-January when Germany's do-nothing minister of defense stepped down, and to be replaced by a do-something politician. Germany got the big tanks moving, however reluctantly.
Meanwhile, political attitudes within Russia are hardening, as this series of headlines attests to:
- Russian Tech Giant VK Orders Workers to Return From Abroad or face dismissal, as the company fears that remote workers could deliberately sabotage VK, if family members were drafted into the Russian army.
- Critical Russian Emigres Should Have Property Seized, said the speaker of the lower-house state Duma Vyacheslav Volodin, adding that "scoundrels" who left the country could face criminal prosecution for insulting Russia, its inhabitants, soldiers, and officers.
- Russian [energy, engineering, and trade] Firms Can Ignore 'Unfriendly' Foreign Shareholders as a means of combating the effectiveness of Western sanctions.
The purpose behind this last headline: "The heads of several Russian companies have recently complained of not being able to approve their company's annual budget or to modify the composition of its board of directors for lack of a clear directive on the validity of votes cast by foreign shareholders."
The order, signed by Russian president Putin, applies to companies with revenues over $1.5 billion and lasts to the end of this year. Next year, companies can decide for themselves whether to count votes from unfriendly shareholders.
(Russia counts 49 countries as unfriendly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unfriendly_Countries_List#List_of_countries_and_regions.)
On the other side of the new iron curtain, discussion has begun on what happens to Russia after it loses the war. The sad thing is that after Communism fell and the Soviet version of Russia collapsed, Russians never got a chance to recover. Over the centuries, they went from dictatorship by czars, by Marxists, by oligarchs, and by Putin.
In "Is there hope for Russia after Putin?", Mark Galeotti discusses, "Quite how and when Vladimir Putin will lose power is unclear, but the inevitable event will offer Russia another opportunity to break with its Soviet past."
3D part in KOMPAS-3D from ASCON
Import Substitution
David Levin, who produces the Russian-language isicad CAD news site, writes this month, “The past year was an absolute turning point for the domestic CAD market: many foreign vendors left, and domestic vendors have yet to fully take their place.”
isicad itself felt the bite from Western CAD vendors leaving Russia and taking their advertising with them. As a result, the online zine experienced a drop in articles of 31% in 2022.
Mr Levin declared that the word of the year is “import substitution,” referring to Russian CAD programs replacing Western ones, which until last year had dominated the Russian market. He then surveyed the 276 articles published to see which CAD vendors were the most mentioned:
- "Autodesk" fell from first place (a “monopoly held throughout the years of our portal's existence”) to second. "Dassault" dropped of the top ten list.
- Replacing them are the names of Russian brands like "ASCON" (the new #1) and "T-FLEX" (moved from 6th to 3rd place).
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