

By John Helmer, Moscow
@bears_with
Football is the most popular sport Russians like to play and like to watch. Ice hockey comes second.
The connexion between football and ice hockey, apples and tomatoes is that Gennady Timchenko (lead image left) is the sanctioned oligarch who is now moving into domestic production of apples to substitute for imports; he has been a player, sponsor, financier and director of ice hockey clubs, associations, and stadiums in Russia and Finland. Yevgeny Giner (right) has been the long established owner of the Moscow football club CSKA, a financial director at the Russian Football Union, and stadium builder; he is now taking a position in tomatoes.
Why apples, why tomatoes, why now in Russia?
The reason is the war – and the way in which the US and NATO campaign to destroy the Russian economy is rebuilding it in directions and in sectors which the pre-war oligarchs had no wish, no incentive to consider.
By curtailing their freedom to export cash, capital, and assets outside Russia, the sanctions have forced the oligarchs to look for the right combination of investment factors in the domestic Russian market. Apples and tomatoes qualify for them because of the large and growing size of consumer demand; the relatively low level of domestic competition for market entry; and the determining role of the state in raising protection from imports, allocating low-cost land for production; and handing out budget cash to pay for borrowing, seed, fertilizer, and other purchases, machine leasing, tax relief, subsidized storage and transport to the point of sale – and price fixing. Traditional oligarch methods for consolidating assets, raiding and bankrupting small producers, and court corruption can flourish under the war emergency regulations administered by state planning committee apparatchiki. They have taken over where the state anti-monopoly and environment regulators left off.
And so, by striking at Putin’s cronies, as the US Treasury and the Office for Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) call them, with their long-arm prohibitions, freezes, and threats of confiscation, the warfighters are revolutionizing the domestic economy.
Think of this revolution as an apple a day to keep the oligarchs in play.
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