Continuing the war means the economy faces stagnation, while ending it would shut off the massive defense spending that's driven growth, Alexander Mertens writes.

Summary

Regardless of Putin’s decision regarding the war in Ukraine, Russia’s economy is facing a crisis due to factors such as sanctions, a shrinking sovereign wealth fund, and a labor shortage. The war has boosted growth, but Russia cannot sustain it without significant economic consequences.

  • DragonConsort@pawb.socialEnglish
    401·
    13 hours ago

    I’m not an economist or even especially well informed, but… Isn’t war kind of… You know. Expensive?

    Yeah I know it could pay off in the long term if you just swept up a country’s worth of innocents, genocided them and grabbed their land (Hi Israel), but… Fuck up the war badly enough, and there’s not going to BE a long term, just because the economy collapses. Right?

    • Kidplayer_666@lemm.eeEnglish
      30·
      13 hours ago

      Bold of you to assume China will just let russia collapse. Ideally, China economically subjugates Russia and makes it essentially a satellite state

        • ByteJunk@lemmy.worldEnglish
          14·
          11 hours ago

          I’m sure they can be re-educated as well as any other minority… (/s but not really)

      • InverseParallax@lemmy.worldEnglish
        235·
        13 hours ago

        The plan is to split Russia, the west bit (with the people) goes to Europe to deal with, the east bit (with the land and more resources than God) goes to China.

        And that gives us all 50-100 years of peace while both sides slowly digest what they have to deal with.

        Yes, Europe gets the shitty half of this deal, but they also get security, and the only person to ever successfully charge from China, across the whole Russian steppe to attack Europe was Genghis Khan, doubt that’s happening again.

    • PugJesus@lemmy.worldEnglish
      22·
      13 hours ago

      War being expensive is especially ruinous with modern (ie anytime past the 18th century AD) countries being deeply interconnected through market systems. All that money just pissed away trying to grab someone else’s land? Every other country in the world was investing that money in material or human capital incentives. When peacetime returns, unless you have a massive waiting market for your war economy production (like the US after WW1 and WW2), you will be at a massive disadvantage in the world market - causing a large number of domestic industries to suffer as they’re undercut by products of either superior pricing/availability, quality, or both.

      At this point, you can swing towards protectionism - but that will reduce the standard of living and efficiency of domestic industry as well, and potentially lead to backlash from other countries imposing protectionist policies in kind, damaging your exports and leaving your nation even poorer. So at the end of the day, no matter what you do, you’ve fucked over your own industries and budget for years at minimum, requiring significant political capital and competence in government just to make up the difference and catch up to the rest of the world - and that’s not even getting into damage done to diplomatic reputations, actual loss of materiel, and the sheer human cost of throwing people into the meat grinder.

      War requiring a war economy is a no-win scenario in the vast majority of cases.

    • catloaf@lemm.eeEnglish
      5·
      13 hours ago

      You’d think they’d have learned from the cold war, but I guess not.

      • partial_accumen@lemmy.worldEnglish
        7·
        12 hours ago

        You’d think they’d have learned from the cold war, but I guess not.

        Well, many parts of them have. Eastern Europe, formerly under Soviet conrol, is now firmly in market economies. Armenia has left the CSTO (Russia’s wish.com NATO), and Ukraine famously kicked out its Russia puppet leader. All of these were part of the Soviet Union or under their control before.

      • eran_morad@lemmy.worldEnglish
        6·
        12 hours ago

        fuckwits don’t learn from history. putin has a vast wealth of real-world failure from which to draw lessons, such as the soviet occupation of afghanistan. but, no. he needed to stroke his pencil dick over some old maps of the Blyat Empire. and now russians have to join in the suffering they brought on their cousins.

  • bigFab@lemmy.worldEnglish
    41·
    8 hours ago

    …not if he wins the war. Like japanese in late WWII. Die hungry or die fighting.

  • foggy@lemmy.worldEnglish
    181·
    13 hours ago

    I have a dream where I visit St Petersburg, Finland soon.

  • neidu2@feddit.nlEnglish
    8·
    12 hours ago

    They could have stopped at any time, but once their three day plan failed, putin decided to engage in a money-burning competition against a countries with 25 rimes their gdp…

    • Makeitstop@lemmy.worldEnglish
      13·
      12 hours ago

      He’s not relying on Ukraine’s allies running out of money, he’s betting that they’ll lose interest and/or vote for pro-Russian stooges before he loses the ability to win the war.

  • Media Bias Fact Checker@lemmy.worldBEnglish
    15·
    14 hours ago
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