Four years after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Russian economy is showing clear signs of structural exhaustion. The contours of a genuine economic endgame are coming into view for Russia. This is the finding of a new Kiel Report published by the Kiel Institute for the World Economy and the Stockholm Institute of Transition Economics.
You are seeing it, it is just very far away and doesn’t happen all at once. Just as an organism can have 100 things wrong with it, be terminally ill and refuse to die for decades, a country can be in a tailspin of decline for a long time.
Russia has dwindling international partners, ever-fewer customers for its resources, crippling domestic fuel shortages, and a devastated working-age male population. Just as its taking a decade or more to finish crashing, they’ll feel this for long after they stop doing the dumb things that have caused it.
I’m still seeing more and more ballistic missiles damaging Kyiv, still see Russia trying to capture cities and regions in the Donbas.
Yes, the economy is bad, but I don’t see the war ending soon because of it. People in rural Russia will just be worse off than they already are…