Lithuanian Annual Strategic Review

This article is based on a theoretical assumption that while international economic order has become increasingly politicised and political competition strengthened, governments become more and more active in intruding into the sectors of trade, finances, and production. Russia is being used as an example to investigate the way the decisions of cartelisation, export restrictions or stimulations, and similar ones become the most important mechanisms in dividing the markets. The analysis also includes the ways that Russia's economic resources determine its strategic and diplomatic power, as well as how the modern Russian economic system and its developmental tendencies are influenced by a special factor that has emerged in the post-Soviet economies - the factor of the political leaders' striving towards changing the state's economic matters in one way or another for the sake of the stability guarantees for their own positions and financial backing, and for the sake of their own private wealth or that of their close associates.