Thanks for posting that, really interesting...at least what I understand of it in the garbled together automated translation. I/K are surely a loss, but they were never reliable either in their four years together in seniors. They would have (probably) continued being contenders for medals, but who says they would have ever gotten it together when it mattered? Sochi was the exception in their career. B/S also managed one Worlds medal in their senior career. And that was in 2013, since then it has looked as if they'd been passed over a bit. These two couples were/are stronger than the pairs they have now, but even they weren't setting the world on fire. At this point IMO it is sort of a cop-out for the Russian fed/system to look at individual pairs and ignore the systemic issues that seem to be going on. Why don't strong junior pairs transition into seniors successfully? Kustarova and Svinin/Zhuk haven't always delivered, and neither has Zhulin for that matter.
Appreciated that he said that B/S would have been probably 5th, 6th at Worlds (I agree with that more or less), it would have been easy to claim them as some sort of saviours to make a point against the Russian couples who were there. Thought that was very fair and realistic of him, noting that Russian ice dance in general is in a transitional phase and not excluding his own couple. At least that's how I understood it. I agree with some of the criticism he has of the current bunch, but I don't think any of them are hopeless. They might not be world beaters, but surely they're all capable of improving and bettering their results. It might not reach former glory days, or at least not in the short term, but it's what they have and what they need to work with. Moaning about the past (or even better, some imaginary future that might have been...or not) can't be the answer.
And I did get a kick out of him somewhat indirectly dissing Shpilband for that "P/C only do easy stuff" remark. That yeah, putting in difficulty only for the sake of difficulty and to make the program look busy isn't so hot either.