Starting from the 2010s, one of the mainstream economic commentator’s topics on Russia has been the growing participation in the national economy by the Russian Government, its increasingly non-liberal and thus ineffective economic policies and poor perspectives of Russia’s full integration into the world economy. After 2014 when sanctions by the United States and European Union were imposed on Russia, the theme has been broadened by the discussion of the amount of damage from these sanctions to the Russian economy. At the culmination of it, Obama stated that Western sanctions had left Russia’s economy “In Tatters”, not only pointing at the impact and power of Western sanctions themselves but also implying the ineffectiveness and hopelessness of the Russian economic policy.