About half of the country’s federal budget goes toward the fight in Ukraine, money that does little to support its long-term development.
For four years, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has made the war against Ukraine the lodestar of his every move.
The single-minded approach has helped Mr. Putin salvage what began as a disastrous invasion, get his troops back on the front foot and dictate demands in peace talks mediated by Washington.
But his stubborn pursuit of the war has come at a huge cost. It has killed or wounded as many as 1.2 million Russians, by some estimates, while reordering Russia’s economy and society in ways that many economists believe jeopardize the nation’s future.
“You have lots of money spent on tanks, shells, bombs, military benefits and other things — no long-lasting value, nothing that works on what we call development,” said Alexandra Prokopenko, a former Russian central bank official who is now a fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center in Berlin.
This is key IMO! If you look past the official numbers, to see what happens in reality, it is very obvious that the Russian economy is shrinking dramatically. The war may be as much as 35% of the total Russian economy. Military was probably less than 10% before the war.
So even if the total economy is equal (it is shrinking), it means Russians have lost 25% for everything else, like hospitals, roads, private economy etc.
This will have an impact on the Russian economy for decades of lower investment and lower income for ordinary Russians.
Russia today is clearly way poorer than they were 4 years ago.
Spot on.
It also cost them their best customer, Europe. Russia is a gangster run petrostate, and fossil fuels are on their way out permanently. The time it had to maximize the temporary rewards of fossil fuel development and invest it in a future Russia was squandered. Europe, with little exception will permanently divest from fossil fuels and this war has only sped up that process. They aren’t coming back as a customer in any meaningful sense even after this war. European countries that learned to live temporarily without Russian fossil fuels will prefer to keep it that way.