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The Global Economic War With Russia

Stephanie Baker has been a journalist at Bloomberg for 27 years and writing between the intersection of business and politics for her entire career. 

Stephanie's just published her first book (which is amazing) and is the consequence of covering these topics for a lifetime. The network, the knowledge, the weird language of sanctions of financial opacity. It’s all there.

It’s called Punishing Putin, and is top to bottom the global economic war with Russia, post Ukrainian invasion. The fallout of the sanctions, why it has and hasn’t crippled the Russian economy as intended, and everything in and around Russian capital flight, Russian sanctions and the global economic war underwriting Russia's physical threat. 

We start with Stephanies experience covering Russia from Moscow in the 90s, her stumbling across a murder scene and then between that and the book, Stephanie working as Christopher Hitchens fact checker at The Nation, the details behind putting a book like this together then the details about western businesses who withdrew substantial Russian operations, the oil markets chicanery to skirt sanctions, Oligarchs, Minigarchs, Euroclear and frozen Russian capital, what the sanctions did where they've been effective and where they haven’t and a whole lot more.

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Here is a transcript of the opening exchange from the conversation…

Stephanie
Actually, the police had just arrived. I was in Moscow. arrived in Russia, moved there a few months before in May, roughly, of 1996. And at the time, I was working at Radio for Europe, Radio Liberty's office, offices in Moscow. And I walked home. It was a fairly easy 20-minute walk home. part of the walk took me through a small

garden park area. It was at night, but I felt safe and I probably shouldn't have because there splayed out on a light dusting of snow was a man who'd been shot and was bleeding out and the police had just arrived and shooed me away and I scurried home with my heart racing, terrified. And it only occurred to me later that it was a close call if I had...

perhaps left work 20 minutes earlier, I might have seen it happen. And I saw on the news later that night that he was just one of these many, what they thought at the time was one of these many gangland shootings that was plaguing Moscow at the time. And not a big figure, a no-name guy, potentially subject of a hit.

Ryan
If the environment had been such that you were aware of these gangland shootings happening, why did you feel so confident and safe to just walk around at night?

Stephanie
Well, there were these shootings, but I'd never seen anything myself. And Moscow did feel safe at that time. It didn't feel like a dangerous place despite that environment. mean, obviously I'd done a lot of traveling, listen, up until that point. Moscow seemed quite easy.

I'd spent six, seven months in East Africa when I was 19 and much rougher places. So Moscow seemed easy in If you'll allow a tangent, what were you doing there? I was a student. I had studied abroad in Kenya. And then I backpacked around East Africa afterwards solo, including through the Congo and Uganda and Rwanda, doing very stupid things that I really should not have done.

But yeah, I had a real taste for travel and adventure and wasn't scared probably when I should have been.

Ryan
When you were solo adventuring through the Congo, for instance, what year was it? 

Stephanie Baker
1988? In the late 80s. Did you have in your heart this ambition to be a journalist at the time and you were maybe scouting out a sense for how the world works?

I think it fed into my desire to be a journalist. I wanted to be a writer of some kind. And for sure when I, my first job out of college was as an intern at the Nation magazine, which is a left-wing. Christopher Hitchens. Did you know him? I fact-checked him. Nice. Which is not a very easy experience. Let me tell you. I can imagine. He does not like to have his facts question. Anyway, he got most of his facts right. So I didn't have that heart of a job. But when I started there, when I told my editors about this experience, they said, why didn't you write this up? And I just didn't have that vision at that point. I was too young and naive.

Ryan
Do you know how John Lee Anderson got into journalism? No. He was himself an extraordinarily vagabonding youth. I think his family sent him away to some distant relatives. I forget the country, forgive me, but somewhere in Africa as a teenager and he ended up guiding exhibitions throughout the Amazon when he was about 19 or something. And one day he walks into the Lima Times, tells through various routes of serendipity had landed in the office of the Lima Times. And they said, you know what, just jump into that conference room there and write a little bit about, what you've been doing so far. And the first four or five stories John L. Anderson ever published was just memoirs of his experiences in adventure as a very young guy.

Stephanie
Wow. Incredible.

Ryan
Forgive me, but Christopher Hitchens holds a particularly soft spot in my heart. You were fact checking him. So presumably you knew him quite well?

Stephanie
I wouldn't say I knew him well. I was very young. He was a big star and I, I think I met him in person a couple of times, dealt with him mostly over the phone. I'd get a pack, a fact checking pack from one of his articles that I'd have to go through. I mean, it was fantastic training as a reporter to be a fact checker. and then I went on to direct.

the interns for three, four months after that. So kind of ran that program. but it was a very good way to start out and yeah, Christopher Hitchens was just phenomenal.

Ryan
Was he as witty and charming in person as he was on the stage?

Stephanie
Yes, he was. I mean, such an intellect. as a recent college graduate, I was incredibly intimidated. Let's tell you clear about that.

Ryan
Okay. Back to the book. you arereporting for the Moscow times during perestroika during the consolidation of this incredible amount of power and wealth that the oligarchs went through. How abundant were the stories to you whilst you were working this bait?

Stephanie
So to be clear, perestroika was the Gorbachev era reforms during the Soviet Union. When I got to Russia in 1996, it was in the throes of an economic crisis as well as rapid privatization. And yeah, I'd look back on that time and I realized how I wasn't seeing the big picture. You get stuck into your lane and you're trying to figure out what's going on and trying to see how every story fits into a larger narrative and it's very hard to do as things are unraveling. But it was a front row seat to

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