Ukraine's Poroshenko signs EU accord

[Benton D Struckcheon]

40. That's a reasonable argument.

But the thing is this: this is Putin's third term. Including Medvedev, he's either been Prez or Prime Minister for 14 straight years, so the import/export profile I displayed there is a direct result of his policies. It's not like Russia lacks the human capital; their educational system churns out excellent math/sci/engineering folks like their sausages. So the fact they can't sell processed goods abroad can only be because they have a gov't more interested in extracting the rents from the resources they sit on because they take up 1/6th of the land mass of the planet rather than follow policies that would allow those people to beat up on the tech stuff the West produces.
His taking the east would only allow him to follow through on maintaining Russia's position as the world's number two arms exporter, after the US. Another sterile pursuit, and another one that certainly doesn't advance anything except the cause of human misery. (There's four former Soviet republics on that list, which is certainly an outsized representation. One gets the feeling the EEU was meant - had he gotten Ukraine to join, as they're one of them - to be more of an arms export union than anything else.)
16 years of Putin, and more than two decades since the fall of the USSR. I think by now we're seeing the result of post-communist policy, most of it a version of neo-liberal claptrap (their flat tax is beloved of Western reactionaries, and I've already documented elsewhere their close ties to Europe's far right). It's not pretty.