While some actions could have been taken sooner, Putin said, the central bank was now raising interest rates to bolster the currency, providing liquidity to institutions that needed access to it, and keeping Russia from burning through its gold and foreign-currency reserves.
Insofar as Russia’s fate depends on what happens to the oil price, Putin’s guess that things will pick up by the end of 2016 is as legitimate as anybody else’s. While he was speaking, the Saudi oil minister, Ali al-Naimi, was also saying, in Riyadh, that the current collapse would prove to be temporary.
Russia will get through this economic crisis, and so will I—that was the uplifting message of this year’s Putin show.
