Since the beginning of May, Russia has recorded more than 135 000 new cases of COVID-19 in just thirteen days. MLI senior fellow Marcus Kolga joined TRT World to discuss the COVID-19 outbreak in Russia and how Moscow is handling the containment of the pandemic.
“It’s not a question of how close, but how desperately overwhelmed they already are,” says Kolga. “They are close to a quarter million cases, today, rising by 10 000 per day, making Russia’s outbreak the second largest in the world at the moment.”
Moscow was slow to react and is now struggling to contain the outbreak. Kolga further discusses the continual efforts by the Russian government to suppress political dissent and the true numbers of deaths, Putin’s declaration to return to work, the number of high profile figures contracting COVID-19, and how all this will impact the Russian government.
