MOSCOW, February 14. /TASS/. The West's bet on Russia's economy collapsing and a would-be rift in Russian society turned out to be a major miscalculation discrediting those who bought into it, First Deputy Head of the Russian Presidential Administration Sergey Kiriyenko said on Tuesday.
"This is not just a hot war against Russia, but also an economic war, and an absolutely unprecedented one. <...> An informational and psychological war is being waged, but those who unleashed it, bet on the wrong horse. Now they admit that their belief that the Russian economy would collapse has fallen flat on its face," Kiriyenko said, speaking at the Municipal Dialogue marathon organized by the National Association for the Development of Local Government.
"They very much expected that in the spring there would be a rift in public opinion, the Russian leadership would not have time to defend their own people in Donbass, nor defend the geopolitical interests of our country, because tens of millions of protesters were supposed to flood the streets of Russian cities and the Russian leadership was supposed to be forced to deal with [these] domestic problems," the politician recalled.
He noted that the main mistake Western analysts made was trying to mathematically predict the behavior of Russians.
"There are good analysts in the West, one wonders why they are so grossly mistaken. They're not wrong, they're just trying to judge Russians by themselves. They're good at math, but it's just not math. And the way people in Russia come together and unite when there is a threat to the country, when we have to defend our homeland, when we have to defend our people in Donbass and New Russia, it is not mathematical, that is why no analysts and supercomputers can calculate it," Kiriyenko stressed.