Bitcoin Russian Black Bag – Bitcoin Magazine

by James · July 6, 2022

This article originally appeared in Bitcoin Magazine “Censorship Resistant Problem.” To get a copy, visit our store.

If the world around you collapsed overnight, it’s easy to imagine that you would have a plan. Many would pack their bags and board the next plane to start a new life in a better place. But when society collapses slowly, it’s harder to know when it’s time to go. Sure, the shelves are bare now, but that’s just because of the panic purchase. The government may have passed laws banning criticism, but they will not last, right? And besides, what would you do with your job, with your cat?

For several weeks these were the questions the Russians asked themselves when it was suddenly too late. At first glance, not much changed after Vladimir Putin ordered the attack on Ukraine. Across the border, rockets rained down, killing countless civilians and forcing millions to flee their homes, but in Moscow things went more or less as normal. People worked, traded and partyed just like before. But gradually, and then suddenly, the war began to shake the lives of the Russians as well.

In the months before the invasion, people believed what they were told by the government – that Western spy agencies’ reports of troops gathering on the divided border were simply hysteria, and that there was no plan to launch an offensive.

“Throughout history, Russia has never attacked anyone,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov insisted, just two weeks before the tanks began rolling. “After going through so many ourselves, we are the last country that would resort to war.”

Few, it seems, were as surprised as ordinary Russians when Putin appeared on their television screens in the middle of the night to announce that he had ordered “a special military operation” to “demilitarize and de-Nazify” Ukraine.

“We were like little children,” Masha Kopilova, a 28-year-old marketing manager from the Siberian city of Tyumen, told Bitcoin Magazine, “we did not think anything bad would ever happen – and so it did.”

She was on a business trip to Turkey at the time, worried about economic chaos and political repression; she is one of the tens of thousands of russians who are now determined not to return home.

In the days and weeks since, the West has pressed the economic equivalent of the nuclear button, imposing sanctions on a scale never seen before against an economy that until recently was the sixth largest in the world in real terms. Measures introduced by countries such as the United States and the United Kingdom, as well as the EU, have blocked investment by international companies and cut off access to foreign funds, threatening to force Russia to default on its debts. The extent and severity of the restrictions overshadow everything that was imposed on countries such as Iran, Cuba or North Korea in the past. Although no one knows what specifically they want to achieve, it is clear that they are designed to harm.

“This is an economic blitzkrieg against us,” President Vladimir declared in March, as a new round of Western sanctions began to bite. “But it has failed.”

For years, the Kremlin has worked to reduce its dependence on foreign exchange and technology, fearing that the day might come when they were shut down. In reality, Russia was as wired into the global financial system as almost anywhere else. The disconnection from the SWIFT payment platform has dried up billions of the value of the banks, while export bans have seen that the production of everything from cleaning products to tanks has stopped.

Few thought their personal relationship would change that much. “We have had sanctions before,” said Andrei, an agricultural pesticide seller from the town of Samara on the Volga River, just 36 hours after the invasion began. “We had them because of Crimea, we have had them because Donald Trump won that election – they will try to punish us for anything. But it has never affected me.” And in many ways it had not done so – he drives a new Mercedes and his Instagram is full of photos taken on holiday abroad from China to London, but this time things were different.