All right, Alexander, it's been a while since we've done a video on the Russian economy.

So let's talk about what is happening with the Russian economy.

We have big meetings with India that are taking place.

We had a meeting with China between the Russian foreign ministry and the Chinese foreign ministry as well.

And we also have Putin saying a couple of days ago, he said that his goal is to really ramp things up with bricks and with China and with India as far as trade and cooperation goes.

I mean, that was what Putin said.

He really wants to crank things

up, the cooperation, the economic trade between these two BRICS countries and between all the BRICs

members, but he singled out China and India. So what is the state of the Russian economy and

how do you see a Russian trade going forward with these countries?

Right. Well, let's start with the Russian economy because, again, there's been an enormous

amount of commentary about this in the West, pretty much all of it wrong. And you have to go back

to programs we've been doing about it since the summer. We pointed out then that because of the very fast expansion

that the Russian economy achieved last year and the year before,

the economy was overheating.

That caused inflation to rise.

The central bank decided to put the foot on the break to slow the economy down as far as possible in order to bring inflation down. We've done

programs explaining the central bank's interest rate policy and why interest

rates went up so high. And we also explained the fact that the central bank's actions have the full

backing of Vladimir Putin. He made a decision with the central bank that he preferred lower inflation,

even if that meant low to zero growth this year. And by the way, if you are familiar

with economic policy, as it used to be conducted in the West, that is exactly how it used to be conducted

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