From the Centre for European Reform, this is the CER podcast.

It is a critical moment.

If we do not act with urgency, we would then severely undermine the liberal order.

Brexit means Brexit, and we're going to make a success of it.

The wind is back in Europe's sales.

We have now a window of opportunity, but it will not stay open forever.

Good morning and welcome to the CR podcast.

My name is Luigi Scatieri.

I'm a research fellow at the Center for European Reform.

And today I'm speaking to Ian Bond, who's our Director of Foreign Policy on Russia.

So Ian, just to jump straight into it, Russia's had quite a bad year so far, we could say,

in the sense that it was first hit by the drop in the oil price, by engaging in an oil price war,

and then by coronavirus.

Do you want to maybe start off by telling us a bit about how it's dealt with these two crises and indeed

how they came about perhaps? Yeah, well, the oil price war is an entirely self-inflicted wound.

The oil price at the beginning of the year was something over $60 a barrel for Russian crude oil, and that was a very comfortable price for the Russian Treasury,

Russian finance ministry, which sort of aims to get the budget to balance at just over $40 a barrel.

And any surplus above that can go into the sovereign wealth fund, the national welfare fund

it's called and that pays for any shortfalls in pensions or social spending or whatever.

And that's something that Putin was quite keen on boosting this year.

As we're talking today, the price of Russian oil is just over $20 a barrel, and it's

been a bit lower than that. That's because the Russian oil giant Rosneft decided that this was

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