Re: Voodoo economics
They should be able to print Roubles for quite a bit. The collapse in the economy is going to be deflationary - so printing in order to keep people in work is actually quite a sensible move - as it was with Covid support. But that only works in the short to medium term.
The question is how much they can use the economy to substite for the imports they can no longer get. I suspect the answer is not much. Apparently the small artisanal food economy is now pretty robust in Russia, after the Russian response to Western sanctions after the Crimea annexation was a ban on imports of European luxury foods. But I suspect that's a tiny island around Moscow and St Petersburg - and not something they can do to get chips for their car plants or spares for their oil and gas drilling equipment.
Russia's economy is a lot more globalised than it was in the Soviet era - so the pain is going to hit most sectors of it. I guess they're going to be able to ship some stuff in from China, but you can imagine the prices might be a bit high (what with their being no alternative) and sanctions from Japan and South Korea are pretty heavy as well, so they're going to struggle to get things like chips, decent computers and machine tools. Which is terrible for the long term.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
