The Economic Crisis In Russia is Worse Than I Thought

I have been following the drama of the Russian Ruble in the past few days.  I knew that Russia faced economic sanctions from the EU and from the US due to the Ukraine conflict and Russia's theft of the Crimea.  I assumed that Russia had already factored in those hits because Putin has not backed off at all and continued to pressure Ukraine with more military actions and threats.  There were currency fluctuations with the ruble for months.  Then, somehow, oil got cheap. As much as a quarter of the Russian GDP came from oil exports. Bloomberg had a nice summary today:

From the article and Henry Meyer and Ilya Arkhipov:

The foundations on which Vladimir Putin built his 15 years in charge of Russia are giving way.
The meltdown of the ruble, which has plunged 18 percent against the dollar in the last two days alone, is endangering the mantra of stability around which Putin has based his rule. While his approval rating is near an all-time high on the back of his stance over Ukraine, the currency crisis risks eroding it and undermining his authority, Moscow-based analysts said.

 From Matt O'Brian at the Washington Post:

It's a classic kind of emerging markets crisis. It's only a small simplification, you see, to say that Russia doesn't so much have an economy as it has an oil exporting business that subsidizes everything else. That's why the combination of more supply from the United States, and less demand from Europe, China, and Japan has hit them particularly hard. Cheaper oil means Russian companies have fewer dollars to turn into rubles, which is just another way of saying that there's less demand for rubles—so its price is falling. It hasn't helped, of course, that sanctions over Russia's incursion into Ukraine have already left Russia short on dollars.

From Neil Irwin at the New York Times, explaining some of the tactical mechanics:

To try to stanch the bleeding, on Monday evening (the middle of the night Moscow time), the Central Bank of Russia announced a stunning interest rate increase. Its main deposit rate is now 17 percent, up from 10.5 percent when Russian banks closed for business Monday.It may go without saying, but an emergency interest rate increase of 6.5 percentage points announced in the middle of the night is not a sign of strength. Rather, it is the kind of thing you see only in an old-school emerging markets currency crisis. And that is very much what Mr. Putin’s Russia is now experiencing.The strategy is straightforward enough. The central bank, led by Elvira Nabiullina, is hoping that with interest rates so high, keeping money on deposit at a Russian bank is too good an offer to refuse. Russians (and Russian companies) have been shuttling rubles out of the country as fast as they can, looking for a safe port. The continued slide of the ruble is all the more remarkable given economic sanctions imposed in retaliation for Russian aggression toward Ukraine that make Russian money unwelcome at many global banks.

I don't know what this means for the world economy.  I read that one risk is the chance Putin might double down on his nationalistic aggression, which has made him popular, in order to distract his people from the economic crisis causes and impacts.