Russia's War on Ukrainian Farms: The Black Sea Theater

Ukrainian agriculture is a central pillar of the country's economy and of its post-war recovery and reconstruction. Russia’s deliberate targeting of agricultural infrastructure and its naval blockade of the Black and Azov Seas have prevented Ukrainian grain from reaching world markets, threatening the global food system. Since Russia failed to renew its participation in the grain deal in July 2023, the Black Sea has become an increasingly contested space. Although Ukraine has unilaterally declared a maritime corridor and some commercial ships have defied Russia's warning that they may be targeted, in the absence of a new agreement on a Grain Corridor, this remains a perilous and risky path for Ukrainian grain. If there is hope for a new Grain Deal, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, President of Türkiye, will likely be its broker. Erdoğan is interested in a normalization of food trade not only to shore up Türkiye's own food security, but because the country’s food-commodity trade relations with Europe and the Middle East make it a central node in the global food system

Russia in a changing climate

Climate change will shape the future of Russia, and vice versa, regardless of who rules in the Kremlin. The world\u27s largest country is warming faster than Earth as a whole, occupies more than half the Arctic Ocean coastline, and is waging a carbon-intensive war while increasingly isolated from the international community and its efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Officially, the Russian government argues that, as a major exporter of hydrocarbons, Russia benefits from maintaining global reliance on fossil fuels and from climate change itself, because warming may increase the extent and quality of its arable land, open a new year-round Arctic sea route, and make its harsh climate more livable. Drawing on the collective expertise of a large group of Russia-focused social scientists and a comprehensive literature review, we challenge this narrative. We find that Russia suffers from a variety of impacts due to climate change and is poorly prepared to adapt to these impacts. The literature review reveals that the fates of Russia\u27s hydrocarbon-dependent economy, centralized political system, and climate-impacted population are intertwined and that research is needed on this evolving interrelationship, as global temperatures rise and the international economy decarbonizes in response. This article is categorized under: Policy and Governance \u3e National Climate Change Policy Trans-disciplinary Perspectives \u3e National Reviews Trans-disciplinary Perspectives \u3e Regional Reviews. © 2023 The Authors. WIREs Climate Change published by Wiley Periodicals LLC

Power Politics: The Political Economy of Russia's Electricity Sector Liberalization

AbstractPower Politics: The Political Economy of Russia's Electricity Sector LiberalizationbySusanne Alice WengleDoctor of Philosophy in Political ScienceUniversity of California, Berkeley Professor Steven Vogel and Professor Kiren Chaudhry, Co-ChairsThis dissertation tells the story of the post-Soviet electricity system and the politics of its transformation from a ministry to a market. A core concern of the project is the process of building institutions for new markets. The aim of my research is to provide an empirically grounded analysis of how markets are constructed in the post-Soviet context. Who has been able to shape post-Soviet markets, how and why? And what does this process tell us about the emergence of market institutions more generally?Dominant theories of state-market relations tend to regard the Russian state as captured by either oligarchs or corrupt bureaucrats: either oligarchs prevented the creation of markets, or institutions were shaped to enable rent-seeking by the most powerful oligarchs or bureaucrats. Neither approach successfully accounts for significant sub-national variation in the institutional architecture of newly created electricity markets. Many observers have also argued that with political recentralization, the Russian state has veered toward full-fledged economic re-nationalization. I find, rather, that different tiers of the Russian government have been combining market forces with state control, pursuing a developmentalist agenda that aims at integrating a more economically robust Russia into the international economy. A central aim of the dissertation is to highlight a developmental strand in Russian economic policy, which at its broadest aims to create strong domestic economic actors who can compete internationally while generating employment domestically. The prevailing paradigm of how liberal reforms happen in Russia rests on an anemic logic: liberalizing forces in the government make concessions to opponents of reform to buy their approval. These concessions are usually considered rents, or rent-seeking opportunities. I found that during the transformation of the electricity sector interactions between the state and Russia's new private entrepreneurs followed a different logic: the government, first at the regional and later at the federal level, made concessions to opponents of full liberalization to enlist their assistance for broader social and developmental aims, rather than to buy approval or for the narrow goal of creating rent-seeking opportunities. During the 1990s, regional governments sought to cooperate with regional oligarchs in their attempts to cushion the impact of liberal reforms emanating from Moscow. Subsequent institutional outcomes in the electricity sector resulted from President Putin's strategy to selectively grant concessions to different types of oligarchic conglomerates - with either an energy or an industrial lead-firm - in return for their contributions to the federal government's developmentalist agenda. The dissertation considers two further elements central to the transformation of the electricity sector from ministry to market: the influence of competing experts and the legacy of Soviet-era industrial geography. Two aspects of the governments' developmental agenda shed light on each of these questions. First, international integration, a key component of the government's developmental agenda, contributed to the replacement of Soviet-era technical experts with managerial experts over the course of reforms. These new managers promised to modernize the electricity sector in a way that would further the competitiveness of electricity companies and Russia's economy more broadly, making the electricity sector legible for both domestic and international investors. Secondly, the government's development strategies often aimed at keeping elements of the Soviet-era industrial structure intact. Even as production chains were torn apart and reassembled during the turbulent post-Soviet collapse and transition period, some elements were preserved and shaped the politics of electricity sector reforms. Depending on the industrial geography of a region, conglomerates' interests vis-à-vis the electricity sector differed across regions. Up-stream energy conglomerates and down-stream industrial producers ended up influencing the transformation of the electricity sector differently in Siberia, European Russia and the Far East, which resulted in the different ownership and subsidy regimes in the newly created electricity markets. The broader implications of these findings concern the boundaries of new "zones" of regulation that are created during liberalization. My findings suggest that the boundaries of emerging regulatory zones cannot be taken for granted: they may or may not overlap with established political boundaries, they are themselves subject to political conflicts and industrial geography is an important factor shaping new regulatory zones

The monetisation of L’goty: changing patterns of welfare politics and provision in Russia

This article explores the contentious 'monetisation' of in-kind benefits (l'goty) that converted them into cash allowances and redistributed responsibility for welfare provision between federal and local governments. We provide an empirical account of these reforms and discuss their implications for the conceptualisation, financing and regional dimensions of welfare provision in Russia. We find that budgetary pressures were not the primary motivation for the recent changes, nor were old forms of social provision fully abolished. Monetisation launched a process that shifts responsibility for well-being onto individuals and institutionalises the spatial differentiation of welfare provision