Posted on 10/26/2025 6:09:29 AM PDT by Apparatchik
Vladimir Putin’s wartime economy has been resilient in the face of Western sanctions triggered by his invasion of Ukraine, but it’s hitting a wall and U.S. pressure on the energy sector could cause a recession, according to experts.
Massive defense spending has propped up growth, kept factories humming, and pushed unemployment lower, while Moscow has relied on allies like China for goods no longer available from the West.
“But the country has exhausted its reserves of manufacturing capacity and manpower,” Alexandra Prokopenko, a fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center and former Russian central bank advisor, wrote in Foreign Affairs on Monday.
“To produce substantially more equipment or recruit and train far more soldiers, Moscow would have to shift to a more comprehensive war footing by directing all available resources toward military needs, as it did during World War II, or commandeering civilian production lines for military purposes.”
Such a mobilization would require Moscow to order car plants, for example, to exclusively produce military vehicles. But the Russian government hasn’t resorted to those measures because it doesn’t want to create shortages of consumer goods and risk social unrest, she added.
Meanwhile, production bottlenecks, labor shortages, tighter government spending, and the lack of Western technology are increasingly causing strains in the economy, Prokopenko said.
GDP growth is slowing sharply, tracking at just 1.1% so far this year, down from 4.1% in 2024 and 3.6% in 2023. That’s partly because all the money Moscow spends for its war on Ukraine has few lasting benefits.
“In effect, defense spending functions like a disposable-goods economy: factories operate at full capacity, workers earn wages, and demand for inputs surges, but the output is designed to vanish almost immediately,” she explained.
(Excerpt) Read more at fortune.com ...
This war has been a bonfire of Russia’s wealth. With financial reserves and the old Soviet arsenals depleted, they continue printing money and loading their banking system with debt, to buy stuff that is promptly blown up.
Their natural gas empire, built over 75 years, has been squandered, and Gazprom is now a money loser. Their oil industry faces similar devastation this Winter, after which there will be no significant cash generation (i.e. real value generation) remaining in Russia, as they continue to blow big spending deficits on Putin’s war of choice.
As long as there was cash and the eastern peasants could fulfill the manpower meatwave attacks all seemed well.
For years now I have thought that end of this war would be caused by economic crisis in either Ukraine or Russia.
The near endless posts by the usuals proclaiming Russian produced GDP numbers have stopped, Moscow and St. Petersburg are beginning to feel the pain of Putin’s SVO/SMO//NWO….
The problem for “peace” is that pitin and his inner circle know that anything but “victory” means their end. Not the end of Russia, but of them, and that is all theu care about
It is hard to know how much “social unrest” could effect the Russian government.
Russians have been shown to tolerate a lot before stopping a war.
The counterpoint to that is Afghanistan.
The Ukraine/Russian war is far worse for Russia than Afghanistan was.
Please tell us again about how China is going to invade Ruzzia while distracted in Ukraine.
The EU is collapsing at an incredible rate, not Russia.
Stalin died at 74.
Khrushchev at 77.
Brezhnev at 75.
Yeltsin at 76.
Sep ‘23 😂
Sure, everything is great, that's why Russia's official bank rate is 16.5%. Crazy inflation, remember Carter years, inflation topped at 14%
Bank of Russia cuts the key rate by 50 bp to 16.50% p.a.
https://www.cbr.ru/eng/press/keypr/
... is it's more trash from another MSM rag that's been out of business for years - posted by one of FR's globaloid scabs.
We're even back to the "Putin is dying" meme.
And 1917.
THis is what people are missing, utterly. The central axis of the EU France and Germany managed from Brussels is an utter joke. The Globalists have themselves in a trap they cannot extract themselves from. They are self-cornered rats. Watch Ukraine slowly but relentlessly destroyed while trying to bleed Putin, or escalate and starte WWIII, or sue for peace. There is no good option for them, unless... the US could always Tomahawk the Russians. What could possibly go wrong?
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