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spigot was turned off from the Rosstat,” Sonnenfeld said. From the Russia list, Sonnenfeld and his team knew that hundreds of companies had withdrawn from Russia, making them skeptical of the IMF’s projections. “To have such a large number of companies leave would be a major impact for any country. And to have a country that is so dependent on Western expertise and investment, that just flies in the face of any rosy economic projection,” explained Andrew Kaiser, a member of Sonnenfeld’s research team and a leading expert on corporate engagement in Russia. While blatantly false, these projections began cracking at the foundation of the corporate exodus Sonnenfeld had galvanized through the Russia list.

Since the official Russian statistics were unreliable, Sonnenfeld challenged the team to piece together data from non-governmental data sources and analyze the Russian economy at a granular level. Kaiser recalled how Sonnenfeld began asking questions to investigate each component of the Russian economy: “Could you look at automotive sales? Could you look at how many countries are still producing and currently running plants in Russia? Could you look at where they could possibly be selling their oil? What is the existing energy capacity if they’re slowing down gas through the European pipelines?”

The research team focused on investigating six topics that together would depict the true state of Russia’s economy: natural gas and oil exports, trade relationships, consumption and production data, business withdrawals and the talent flight, fiscal and monetary policy, and financial markets. “It was like managing an orchestra because there were so many moving parts,” Tian said. Given the high stakes of the research, the team needed to have a high level of certainty in their findings — even when working on a tight timeline.