In his new article "Deglobalizing Russia," economics professor Sergei Guriev argues that the cost of Russia's current isolation policy will lead the country further into stagnation. It is questionable whether Putin can in the meantime continue to use the nationalist card to disguise this inexorable direction of his country, the culture of corruption that is eroding any semblance of the rule of law, and the corrosion of trust in Russia's state institutions.

Dmitri Trenin of the Carnegie Moscow Center pursues this argument. He writes that Russia needs a plan C. "Russia will be completely unable to revitalize itself as a world power if it does not address its own internal failings," Trenin argues. "Russia needs to unambiguously prioritize domestic development--not just for the sake of having an international role, but to give itself any kind of future. Russia's current political and economic order, if it persists, will sooner or later doom it to a tragic failure as a state."

For Andrew Wood, a former UK ambassador to Moscow, the idea of Western-inspired Russian modernization is gone. "The West should instead remain . . . patient and consistent in its current position towards the Kremlin," he writes.

These three papers put paid to the idea that Russia is in fact a strong power. Putin can send his fighter jets to Syria to support President Bashar al-Assad's vile regime, continue to back fighters in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, and impose sanctions on Turkey after Ankara shot down a Russian military plane that had invaded its airspace. But at home, Putin's economy is declining fast, and as these papers argue, he is doing nothing to reverse that decline.

Putin boasted that his decision to ban the import of certain European products in retaliation for EU sanctions would be to Russia's benefit. Russia could easily compensate by relying on its own agricultural produce and other goods, the Kremlin maintained. But instead of using Western sanctions to introduce reforms and loosen the state's grip on the economy and modernize the country's infrastructure, Russia has let the opposite happen. It is as if populism, bravado, and the rejection of globalization were substitutes for growth.

More worrying for an economy that relies on oil and gas exports to maintain growth--exports whose prices are at record lows--is the creeping stagnation that began before the Ukraine crisis. And as Guriev argues, Russian trade and economic deals with China will not reverse the decline, however much the Kremlin tries to promote the idea that it does not need the West and can find a savior in China.