Russia is facing “economic oblivion” in the long-term because of international sanctions and the flight of businesses, several economists have said.

The International Monetary Fund last week upgraded Russia’s gross domestic product estimate for 2022 by 2.5 percentage points, meaning the economy is now projected to contract by 6% this year. The IMF said the economy seemed to be weathering the barrage of economic sanctions better than expected.

The Central Bank of Russia surprised markets in late July by cutting its key interest rate back to 8%, below its pre-war level, citing cooling inflation, a strong currency and the risk of recession.

The ruble recovered from historic early losses in the aftermath of the invasion of Ukraine to become a top performer on the global foreign exchange market this year, prompting Russian President Vladimir Putin to declare that Western sanctions had failed.

Meanwhile, Russia has continued to export energy and other commodities while leveraging Europe’s dependency on its gas supplies.

However, many economists see long-lasting costs to the Russian economy from the exit of foreign firms – which will hit production capacity and capital and result in a “brain drain” – along with the loss of its long-term oil and gas markets and diminished access to critical imports of technology and inputs.

Ian Bremmer, president of Eurasia Group, told CNBC on Monday that while short-term disruptions from sanctions are less than originally anticipated, the real debate goes beyond 2022.

“Anecdotal evidence suggests the manufacturing dislocations are rising as inventories are depleted and scarcity of foreign parts becomes binding. Chips and transport are among the sectors cited, in some cases reflecting dual-use military demand,” Bremmer said.

“Governmental arrears may be contributing to broader shortages. Imports of consumer goods are increasing, but less so intermediate/investment goods.”

Bremmer highlighted that as sanctions intensify and popular discontent grows, the educated are leaving Russia, underscoring the importance of trade sanctions on sensitive technologies and the “longer timeline by which sanctions undermine trend productivity and growth.”

“Brain drain leads to a direct decline in the working age population, especially high-productivity workers, reducing GDP,” he said.

“It affects overall productivity, reducing innovation and affects overall confidence in the economy, reducing investment and savings.”

Eurasia Group projects a sustained, long-term decline in economic activity to eventually result in a 30-50% contraction in Russian GDP from its pre-war level.

‘Catastrophically crippling’

A Yale University study published last month, which analyzed high-frequency consumer, trade and shipping data that its author’s claim presents a truer picture than the Kremlin is presenting, argued that rumors of Russia’s economic survival had been greatly exaggerated.

The paper suggested international sanctions and an exodus of more than 1,000 global companies are “catastrophically crippling” the Russian economy.

“Russia’s strategic positioning as a commodities exporter has irrevocably deteriorated, as it now deals from a position of weakness with the loss of its erstwhile main markets, and faces steep challenges executing a ‘pivot to Asia’ with non-fungible exports such as piped gas,” the Yale economists said.

They added that despite some “lingering leakiness,” Russian imports have “largely collapsed,” with Moscow now facing challenges in securing inputs, parts and technology from increasingly jittery trade partners and as a result, seeing widespread supply shortages in its domestic economy.

“Despite Putin’s delusions of self-sufficiency and import substitution, Russian domestic production has come to a complete standstill with no capacity to replace lost businesses, products and talent; the hollowing out of Russia’s domestic innovation and production base has led to soaring prices and consumer angst,” the report said.

“As a result of the business retreat, Russia has lost companies representing ~40% of its GDP, reversing nearly all of three decades worth of foreign investment and buttressing unprecedented simultaneous capital and population flight in a mass exodus of Russia’s economic base.”

No path out of ‘economic oblivion’

The apparent resilience of the Russian economy and the resurgence of the ruble was largely attributed to soaring energy prices and strict capital control measures – implemented by the Kremlin to limit the amount of foreign currency leaving the country – along with sanctions restricting its capacity to import.

Russia is the world’s largest exporter of gas and second-largest exporter of oil, and thus the hit to GDP from the war and associated sanctions has been softened by high commodity prices and Europe’s continued dependence on Russian energy for the time being.

Russia has now relaxed some of its capital controls and cut interest rates in a bid to bring the currency down and shore up its fiscal account.

“Putin is resorting to patently unsustainable, dramatic fiscal and monetary intervention to smooth over these structural economic weaknesses, which has already sent his government budget into deficit for the first time in years and drained his foreign reserves even with high energy prices – and Kremlin finances are in much, much more dire straits than conventionally understood,” the Yale economists said.

They also noted that Russia’s domestic financial markets were the worst performing markets in the world so far this year despite the strict capital controls, with investors pricing in “sustained, persistent weakness within the economy with liquidity and credit contracting,” along with Russia’s effective ostracization from international financial markets.

“Looking ahead, there is no path out of economic oblivion for Russia as long as the allied countries remain unified in maintaining and increasing sanctions pressure against Russia,” the report concluded.

“Defeatist headlines arguing that Russia’s economy has bounced back are simply not factual – the facts are that, by any metric and on any level, the Russian economy is reeling, and now is not the time to step on the brakes.”

New York Magazine said Vice President Harris was the “most scrutinized” person to hold the position in recent administrations. (Logan Cyrus/AFP via Getty Images)

Vice President Kamala Harris steps off Air Force Two after arriving in Aurora, Illinois, on June 24, 2022. (Getty Images)

President Joe Biden holds a press conference. (Fox News )

Credit…Sebastian Hidalgo for The New York Times

Just months after being sworn in as president in 1953, Dwight D. Eisenhower gave an unusual task to his vice president, Richard Nixon.

Years earlier, when Eisenhower was the supreme commander of the Allied forces in World War II, he was distressed over the unpreparedness of Vice President Harry Truman upon President Franklin Roosevelt’s sudden death. Now president at 62, a former four-pack-a-day smoker with what would become a serious heart condition, Eisenhower understood the importance of training a vice president for the presidency; Nixon had just six years’ experience as a congressman and senator from California before becoming Eisenhower’s running mate.

The president had no great liking for Nixon, whom he barely knew, but he gave him a lot to do — including dispatching the vice president and his wife, Pat, on what would become a 68-day trip through Asia and the Middle East. In the fall of 1953, the Nixons visited Japan, Korea, the Philippines, Thailand, India, Pakistan, Iran and Libya — the first of many chances for the vice president to establish personal ties with foreign leaders.

It was a deep education in diplomacy and statesmanship that served Nixon well. And the reviews were good; an enthusiastic story in Life magazine said that Nixon had established himself as “a mover and shaker of national and world affairs.”

Vice President Kamala Harris, who was a first-term senator from California before entering the White House, hasn’t been given the sort of immersive experiences or sustained, high-profile tasks that would deepen and broaden her expertise in ways Americans could see and appreciate. In the modern era, of course, a 68-day trip for a vice president would be laughable. But over the past 18 months, her on-the-job training in governing has largely involved intractable issues like migration and voting rights where she has not shown demonstrable growth in leadership and hit-or-miss trips overseas like the troubled foray in Central America a year ago and the more successful delegation to meet with the United Arab Emirates’ new president, leading a team that included Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin.

If other presidents have formed substantive partnerships in office with their V.P.s and made efforts to deepen their experience, President Biden and Ms. Harris have been unable to do so or uninterested in bringing about a similar transformation. From the outside, there’s little evidence that the Biden White House feels much of the urgency felt by General Eisenhower to enhance the role and preparedness of the person who might inherit the presidency at any moment.

Mr. Biden’s announcement last week that he tested positive for the coronavirus underscores the clear and present need for the 79-year-old leader, his aides and Ms. Harris to find ways for her to become a true governing partner rather than just a political partner who helped him get elected. This isn’t simply about being fair to Ms. Harris or elevating her as some other vice presidents have been elevated; Americans deserve to know and see that they have a vice president who is trusted by White House and administration officials to take over, should anything happen to the president.

Instead, we have mostly seen the opposite. She is hampered by Mr. Biden’s unpopularity, to be sure, but she has also not become the successful public face on any major issue. Recently she has energetically undertaken a “How Dare They” tour, as a Politico headline described her trips attacking Republicans on abortion rights after the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade — but this work only underscores the narrowness of her political role. It’s meant to whip up the Democratic base, a basic job of vice presidents. It’s not something that shows she is capable of assuming the presidency or gives Americans reasons to view her as a viable leader for a country in dire need of leadership.

The often shaky history of relationships between presidents and vice presidents — be it Roosevelt and Henry Wallace or, more recently, George H.W. Bush and Dan Quayle — is instructive not just in models for successful governance but also in the critical importance of having a skillful and well-prepared No. 2.

That Ms. Harris has been stuck in a political role is troubling for anyone concerned about the stability and continuity of the executive branch. No American president has celebrated his 80th birthday while in office, as Mr. Biden is set to do on Nov. 20. He is, thankfully, experiencing “very mild symptoms” of Covid, according to his press secretary, but it’s still hard to ignore actuarial reality and the plain fact that he appears frailer than a man or woman of 60 (or, for that matter, his 57-year-old vice president).

Of the 15 vice presidents who became president, eight came to office after the death of a president. (Four of those eight were later elected on their own.) That gives the vice presidency a sober weightiness, even when the presidential candidate and running mate are pictures of middle-aged vitality, like Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale in 1976 or Bill Clinton and Al Gore in 1992.

A penumbra of frailty has shadowed the modern presidency. It clung to Roosevelt by the end of his third term, though, because it was wartime, was rarely discussed publicly. It touched the 70-year-old Ronald Reagan, shot and wounded by a would-be assassin in March 1981, and Eisenhower, in September 1955, when the 64-year-old president suffered a major heart attack. Mortality was often on Eisenhower’s mind. In 1954, as he mulled running for a second term, he referred in his diary to “the greater likelihood that a man of 70 will break down under a load than a man of 50,” and above all, the “growing severity and complexity of problems that rest upon the president for solution.”

Ms. Harris is not to blame for her relative paucity of national and international experience. She had been in the Senate less than four years when Mr. Biden selected her, and he did so knowing that she had never served in an executive role. But since he tapped her as his running mate in August 2020, we’ve learned that her bonds with him and key administration officials are relatively thin. It’s no small matter that she’s had only a handful of private lunches this year with Mr. Biden. And after her first lunch with Mr. Blinken, in February 2021, she reportedly expected their lunches to continue, as they had for then-Vice President Biden with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Such interaction had been customary; for instance, in the late 1950s, Vice President Nixon formed an almost filial relationship with Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. Regular Harris-Blinken lunches, though, didn’t happen (although the two have met, have talked by phone and have had what one State Department official called “regular engagements” and “regular interaction”).

A deeply reported new book by two Times reporters, Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns, “This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America’s Future,” paints an authoritative portrait of the Biden-Harris relationship — or absence of one. It describes how Mr. Biden’s advisers were willing to overlook Ms. Harris’s weaknesses in favor of Mr. Biden’s immediate political interests and saw that her chief value came from helping to win the 2020 election. She was a historic choice, becoming the first woman, the first African American and the first South Asian American to serve as vice president. As for presidential readiness, Mr. Biden was more focused on putting together a multiracial coalition, to reflect the nation’s diversity in his administration.

Ms. Harris has been a regular target of negative stories — about staff disarray and departures or her annoyance that White House staff members didn’t stand when she entered a room or even her discomfort in some media interviews. She has also faced double standards in how she is seen and judged, as many women and people of color are, including when they are firsts in jobs.

But she’s also not the first vice president to be sniped at and frustrated by a job whose constitutional duties are to preside over the Senate and count electoral votes. Lyndon Johnson, once the powerful, bullying Senate majority leader, felt like an outsider when he was John F. Kennedy’s vice president. Mr. Biden himself, for all his vaunted closeness to President Barack Obama, resisted what he felt were attempts by the White House to control him during the eight years he served as vice president. But Mr. Johnson and Mr. Biden were Washington veterans; so, for that matter, was Mr. Bush, Mr. Reagan’s vice president. Ms. Harris was a newbie when it came to foreign policy and Washington infighting.

Today, not only are Mr. Biden’s age and health subjects of discussion — more so after his Covid-19 diagnosis — but so is whether he will run for a second term. Over the past six months, with Mr. Biden’s approval rating dropping sharply, dozens of Democratic strategists and officials have been expressing doubts about his skill as a leader and viability as a candidate; some want Mr. Biden to drop out, the sooner the better. In a time of inflation not seen for decades, mass shootings and a persistent pandemic, many Democrats view the November midterm elections with dread.

That’s also bad news for Ms. Harris, whose poor performance as a presidential candidate in 2019 led her to drop out before the Iowa caucuses. Mr. Biden’s declarations that he will run again seem only to encourage his opponents. Her absence from the executive branch, as a crisis manager and a shaper of policy, leaves her as a fairly weak heir apparent. Democrats, if not other Americans, would benefit if she could bring a compelling and varied set of experiences and ideas from her time in the White House to a competitive Democratic presidential primary race, giving more solid choices to voters and adding substantively to the debate.

The 2024 presidential campaign, in any case, is likely to be unusually ugly, fought over familiar contentious issues and with many Republicans willing to repeat, without shame or embarrassment, Donald Trump’s lies about the validity of the 2020 election, thus challenging the legitimacy of American democracy. With the government itself under siege from a new class of enemies within and with more than two years to go until the next presidential election, Mr. Biden must not only find a way to infuse his party with enthusiasm and fresh purpose but also fulfill an urgent obligation — to his party and the nation — to hasten and advance the education and authority of his vice president.

Osama bin Laden’s second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahiri was killed in a CIA drone attack in Kabul this weekend

Al-Zawahiri was Bin Laden’s No 2 in Al-Qaeda, the radical jihadist network once led by the Saudi millionaire. The two are seen above in this September 2006 file photo

President Joe Biden will address the nation Monday night about a successful counterterrorism operation regarding al Qaeda

Al-Zawahiri’s FBI poster, the FBI offered a $25 million reward for information on him

A bankruptcy claim has temporarily paused a foreclosure sale that would put dozens of tenants in a Bay Ridge apartment building at risk of eviction after their landlord allegedly defrauded them out of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

According to a lawsuit filed in Kings County Supreme Court and first reported by the New York Post, tenants say Xi Hui Wu, the landlord at 345 Ovington Avenue, “sold” them their condominiums in the 25-unit building — but did not have permission from the state to complete those sales and never handed over the deeds to the would-be buyers. 

Vladimir Putin, July 20, 2022Credit…Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times

PUTIN, by Philip Short

In the days after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Moscow suddenly felt different. My wife and I, serving there as correspondents, were overwhelmed by expressions of sympathy and solidarity. Russians we had never met faxed condolence letters. A teary-eyed stranger stopped me on the street brandishing a picture of herself at the World Trade Center from a trip years earlier. The outside of the American Embassy was carpeted with flowers, icons, crosses, candles and a note that said, “We were together at the Elbe, we will be together again.”

A young master of the Kremlin named Vladimir Putin seemed to take that to heart, pledging steadfast support for the United States. For a heady moment, it seemed as if the planet’s two dominant nuclear powers would rekindle the World War II alliance that led Russian and American troops to meet at Germany’s Elbe River in 1945. But now as then, it would not last. The sense of good will soon evaporated, and the illusion that Putin was a Western-oriented modernizer was shattered. Two decades later, Russia and America are facing off in a twilight struggle in Ukraine arguably as dangerous as the Cold War that followed the defeat of the Nazis.

Was that Putin’s fault or ours? Did we misjudge him or did we mislead him? Was it inevitable that Putin would come to see himself as a latter-day Peter the Great seeking to re-establish the czarist empire or could we have done more to anchor a post-Soviet Russia in the community of nations? Never have those questions been more profoundly relevant. Now weighing into the debate is the British journalist Philip Short, with his expansive new biography, “Putin,” which sees the rift between East and West largely through the eyes of its protagonist.

Short’s account is both perfectly and unfortunately timed, arriving just when we most need to understand Putin, yet missing the chapter that may yet define his place in history. The invasion of Ukraine does not take place until Page 656 of a 672-page text, having erupted just as Short was completing eight years of research and composition. Such is the peril of writing biographies of figures who are still alive and not finished writing their own stories.

But if the story is unavoidably incomplete, Short’s version nonetheless offers a compelling, impressive and methodically researched account of Putin’s life so far. He plumbs an array of sources, including his own interviews, to reconstruct the tale of a street brawler from a bleak communal apartment in postwar Leningrad who embarks on a mediocre career as a midlevel K.G.B. officer in East Germany only to make a stunning leap to power in Moscow following the chaos of 1990s post-Soviet Russia.

Short, a former journalist with the BBC, The Economist and The Times of London, adds to the library of insightful books about the Russian autocrat, including “The New Tsar,” by Steven Lee Myers; “Mr. Putin,” by Fiona Hill and Clifford G. Gaddy; “The Man Without a Face,” by Masha Gessen; and “Putin’s World,” by Angela Stent. But unlike those Russia specialists, he comes to his subject as a chronicler of some of history’s biggest villains, having written biographies of Pol Pot and Mao Zedong.

As critics observed about those volumes, Short’s determination to present a fully realized portrait of Putin may strike some as excessively sympathetic. “The purpose of this book is neither to demonize Putin — he is more than capable of doing that himself — nor to absolve him of his crimes,” Short writes, “but to explore his personality, to understand what motivates him and how he has become the leader that he is.”

In fact, he does absolve Putin of several crimes. Short opens with an extended examination of the never-solved apartment bombings of 1999 that were blamed on Chechen terrorists but suspected of being a government conspiracy to cement Putin’s path to power. Short exonerates Putin. He may be right; no one has ever definitively proved the case. But it is a curious way to start a book about an autocrat who is currently bombing plenty of other apartments in Ukraine. He likewise absolves Putin of notorious political attacks against the likes of Sergei Skripal, Anna Politkovskaya and Boris Nemtsov, while allowing that he probably was responsible for the gruesome poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko in London.

Yet Short’s book is no hagiography. He extensively covers the dark moments of Putin’s career — the leveling of Grozny during the second Chechen war, the reckless handling of the Moscow theater siege, the cynical exploitation of the terrorist attack on a school in Beslan to consolidate power, the crackdown on dissent at home, including the poisoning and imprisonment of Alexei A. Navalny. The Putin of Short’s book is not someone you would invite to dinner; he is crude and cold, arrogant and heartless. He is unmoved when his wife is in a serious car accident or when his dog is run over. His wife, a believer in astrology, once said he must have been born under the sign of the vampire. She is now, not surprisingly, his ex-wife.

There are small errors — Short writes, for example, that Start II was “still unratified by the U.S. Congress” in 2010 when in fact the treaty was ratified in 1996 — but these invariably slip into any work of this size and scope. More debatable may be some of his conclusions in which he adopts the Russian view. He equates Putin’s forcible annexation of Crimea to Western support for Kosovo’s independence, dismissing differences between the two as “nuances.” Indeed, Kosovo is one of “the West’s three cardinal sins” in Putin’s eyes “that had destroyed both sides’ hopes of building a better, more peaceful world after the collapse of the Soviet Union” (along with withdrawing from the Antiballistic Missile treaty and expanding NATO). Every Russian outrage is likened to some Western perfidy. Yes, the Russians interfered in the 2016 election but “the United States had done the same.” The deterioration in relations had a certain “inevitability” that was “largely the result of a series of Western, essentially American, decisions.”

Short advances the Russian argument that America betrayed a “promise” by Secretary of State James A. Baker III in 1990 that NATO jurisdiction would not move “one inch to the east.” In fact, there was no promise. Baker floated the idea during negotiations over reunification of Germany but later walked it back, and no such commitment was included in the resulting treaty that did extend NATO to East Germany with Moscow’s assent. By contrast, Short makes no mention of an actual promise Russia made in a 1994 agreement guaranteeing Ukraine’s sovereignty and forswearing the use of force against it, an accord Putin has obviously broken.

Indeed, Short accepts Putin’s explanation for his unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. “The State Department,” he writes, “insisted that the war had nothing to do with NATO enlargement and everything to do with Putin’s refusal to accept Ukraine’s existence as an independent state, which may have been good spin but was poor history.” Unless you read Putin’s own 5,000-word poor history published last year refusing to accept Ukraine’s existence as an independent state or remember that the invasion took place many, many years after the main NATO expansion and at a time when NATO membership for Ukraine was not seriously on the table.

It may be that all this was inevitable. It may be that the moments of Russian-American friendship were all exceptions to a generational struggle destined to be waged for decades to come. Putin seems to think so. Short recounts Putin’s memory of his meeting with Vice President Joe Biden in 2011.

“Don’t be under any illusion,” he told the future president. “We only look like you. … Russians and Americans resemble each other physically. But inside we have very different values.” Certainly, Biden would agree with that today.

PUTIN, by Philip Short | Illustrated | 864 pp. | Henry Holt & Company | $40