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.
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.