If You Are Going to Do Business in Russia, It Helps to Be Brain Dead

That way, you won't feel the pain when your Russian associates, the utilities and the courts all conspire to rob you blind.

As Ikea has found out.

Vladimir Putin has signaled that he wants his old job back in 2012, so don't expect much to change in Russia anytime soon. It'll be the same corrupt place that it has been ever since Communism fell (and well before, though it wasn't so blatant). Not that things were going to change much, what with Dmitri Vladimirov Putinik Medvedev doing little more than keeping Putin's seat warm for him.

It probably won't matter much over the long run, since Russia is demographically collapsing. The people in the lower classes will continue to drink themselves into stupors and die early, if AIDS doesn't kill them first. The population losses are going to be far worse then the Great Patriotic War, but without the Germans laying waste to the westernmost regions of Russia.

By the middle of the century, the Chinese may be able to just walk into Siberian Russia and take it without a shot being fired. There won't be enough young, healthy Russians left to make up a decent army, let alone fight a war with China.