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.
I’ll believe it when I see it. I have been hearing this since 2022 and they’re unleashing more and more ballistic missiles on Kyiv every week
Man I dont know about the missiles. But yeah I feel we read this article every week. “Sanctions are about to grind russian economy to a halt”, “Russias oil industry about to implode”, “Russian war industry about to hit its limit”.
It just never really seems to do so.
The media tend to oversensationalize things, the Russian oil industry imploding isn’t happening yet, but it has gone down to the point that nearly all of Russia is struggling to find enough fuel.
Killing off an economy takes forever, the effects of sanctions are slow, especially if an economy propped up by war time spending. But no amount of financial propping up can save an economy if its energy demands can’t be met. To be fair, Ukraine isn’t even close to disabling Russia’s energy infrastructure, they’re only seriously hitting one aspect of it.
They have been having widespread fuel shortages but yeah, they can keep limping along until they cannot I guess.
It happens slowly, then all at once
Let’s hope it also stops the war, but I think it will just make things more awful for poor people in Siberia who are already living under shitty circumstances
The number of missiles and drones launched by Russia has been fairly steady since last year, sure there are some peaks here and there, but on average the numbers don’t go up, rather they’ve been going down slightly for the past few months. Ukraine’s countermeasures have become much more effective though with less than 10% of drones making it through.
I specifically said ballistic missile attacks, which have gone up drastically
It’s not quite “more every week”; the numbers seem to be roughly stable since April. Of course it’s still a lot.
One question that occurs to me is whether they can actually sustain this. Missiles aren’t that cheap or fast to produce so it’s possible that they’re throwing out more than they can sustain in an attempt to wear down Ukraine at the last moment.
I’m not an expert on the weapon systems involved so maybe I’m way off base.
From a previous comment, I understand that they are being forced to use the significantly more expensive ballistic missiles, which use up fuel they can’t afford to use, specifically because their drone success ratio is so far down lately.
All other military options they have are removed: artillery, infantry and armor get killed by drones. Russian drones get shot down before reaching target. They are hoping they can force a better settlement with the current terror bombings before they run out of fuel entirely
Let’s hope that’s the case, but they have surely been benefitting off the fact that Ukraine’s anti-missile defences are down
First half of your sentence yes, second half of your sentence no. There are ebbs and flows of numbers of missiles launched, but compared to earlier in the war I’m pretty sure Russia is launching significantly fewer now, especially if you consider the destructive power of each missile used
No? They’re definitely ramping up their ballistic missile attacks and causing a lot more damage. Of course it’s not at the same pace as it was in the beginning, but that was after years of building up.