With oil prices down more than 50 percent in the past year, the ruble having lost more than half its value, a recession looming and the country already dipping into its rainy-day funds, the Russian economy is in a race against time. But one would be hard pressed to grasp the depth of the troubles from the Kremlin’s prescriptions. Anton Siluanov, the finance minister, laid out the government’s long-promised “anti-crisis” package in a live broadcast on state television last week, a laundry list of half-measures and a vague promise of a 10 percent budget cut that economists almost unanimously dismissed as inadequate. “That plan is nonsense,” the Russian oligarch Aleksandr Y. Lebedev said in an interview, describing it as throwing away money to rescue some of Russia ’s worst companies. “Lots of words and little specific.” President Vladimir V. Putin weighed in briefly, repeating that along with […]