The weekend's events remind us of two things: If the current president is replaced, it seems at least not unlikely that the successor will be even more radical, even more bellicose. Besides the status quo and a change of power, there is a third scenario: the disintegration of the Russian state. Either way, a return of Russia's economic foreign relations to normality before February 2022 or even before March 2014 would be unthinkable.

Those who praise autocracies because they are supposedly more politically stable and therefore supposedly provide an attractive environment for economic profit-making fail to realize one thing: when autocracies wobble, they do so violently.

A return to a reasonably normal RUB market cannot be ruled out in the foreseeable future, but it is highly unlikely.