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.
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.
Yes, but in this case most of the Russian economy was safely being invested in British banks and real estate.
So for Russian leaders it was a no-lose scenario, until Britain had the balls to actually join the sanctions because they started assassinating people in London.
They did what?!
Assuming that was a clipboard fail:
https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/uk-sanctions-on-russia#:~:text=This sanctions regime is aimed,on the UK sanctions list.
They’re largely cut off from British banks and money transfers, and British banks are loaning money to Ukraine backed by Russian deposits and interest.
Yeah I have no idea what happened up there. Lemme just…
They did what?!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Litvinenko?wprov=sfla1
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_of_Sergei_and_Yulia_Skripal?wprov=sfla1
They don’t care, they’re Russian, it doesn’t matter to them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Gareth_Williams too, probably
Dude found in his own gym bag, right? That was fucked up.
These are only the ones we know about, maybe because they wanted to use them as examples.
yeah but for instance, Putin (having more than 200 billions $$$) and all his oligarchs friends, don’t give a shit, they can live in super mansion with 23 bathrooms, high ends cars and all the refine food/wine from around the world
Putin and his Russian Mafia oligarchs don’t mind the destruction of countless opportunities for their subjects. It’s a sacrifice that they are willing to make.