how do they even have money left to spend???
They don’t. What they’ve been doing for a while is pretty much burning economic furniture for heat and printing more money.
If this is true, I have to wonder if the budget guy writing it up believes any of it will actually happen.
selling thier natural resources to china.
They are in a surplus lol. West really doesn’t understand how resilient other economies can be.
Russia has an “official” central bank interest rate of 20% with parts of the real economy seizing up due to the country’s resources being funneled into creating vehicles that last for a few months before being blown up in their invasion.
Large countries have a lot of levers they can pull to keep their economies going when they really need to, but they are damaging in the long run and get more damaging the longer they rely on them. Russia doesnt have some magical property of being extra resilient based on slavic tolerance of suffering.
That 20% thing is old now. Presumably, it kept going up when they stopped publishing it.
That’s the whole point. They have levers to do it. It can last a very long time.
How long they can do it for is a significant open question, the Russian economy is already showing serious warning signs and most of the forcasts that I’ve seen show 2026 as the year where things start to become very bad for them. It’s not an all or nothing thing either, its not that it is about to implode and all of a sudden Russia cant do anything, but that the economy degrades to the point where it becomes difficult for them to maintain funnelling sufficient resources into their invasion.
They are going to start forcibly sending citizens to be slaves in work factories, aren’t they?
I mean, they already are, just for recruitment to the army rather than factories. There’s plenty of stories of people being rounded up by police, put on trumped up charges and being given the option of jail and abuse there or signing up to go to the front line.
Sounds like Putin wants to have his Baltic desert before he’s even finished his Ukraine.
*dessert
Not much time for slow moving plans at his age.
A $1.1 trillion spend for Russia might actually get them a partially working aircraft carrier.
Do I believe that Putin would love to start shit with many of his neighboring countries? Absolutely, yes.
Do I believe that Ukrainian intelligence (and government in general) has a great self-interest in other countries beefing up their defense spending, and possibly using Ukraine as a proxy to further erode the Russian military? Absolutely, yes.
With what economy? Russia has a yearly GDP of $2.2T. Going to spend 50% of that on defense in one year? Or are we talking over the course of 10 years? At which point the geopolitical situation will have changed and Putin will likely be dead.
It says in the article that it’s over 11 years
They should finish their current war lmao.
