Alexandra Prokopenko, a former Russian central bank adviser now at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, published an op-ed in The Economist comparing Russia’s wartime economy to a mountaineer’s death zone. She invokes life at an altitude above 8,000 meters where the body consumes itself faster than it can repair. Fortune’s summary carries the headline that Russia is “eating its own muscle to survive.”
She’s right. Oil revenue crashed 50% year-over-year in January. Interest payments on government debt now exceed education and health spending combined. CSIS estimates 1.2 million military casualties.
The economy has split into a well-fed defense sector with short lifespan and a starving civilian one with short lifespan, producing GDP figures that measure the manufacture of assets designed for destruction. This is fact, uncontroversial. Russian officials have themselves warned Putin a financial crisis is likely to arrive this summer.
Stating that a malnourished nearly dead patient is dying is the easy part.
Prognosis or treatment options are where analysis is supposed to go. Prokopenko plays it safe precisely because it remains diagnostic. She documents the obvious symptoms with admirable precision, then concludes that Russia “can probably continue waging war for the foreseeable future”. Well, in fact, that’s a sentence her own evidence contradicts.
The Question She Should Ask
What happens when three converging failure modes intersect this summer? A banking system under stress from consumer loan defaults and corporate credit starvation; a military that now loses personnel faster than it can recruit, pushing Putin toward forced mobilization (the political third rail he avoided for three years); and oil revenue below the budget floor that forces binary choices between funding the war and funding the state.
These variables accelerate each other. Forced mobilization pulls workers from the civilian economy, accelerating loan defaults. Oil revenue decline constrains the budget, sharpening the choice between military and civilian spending. The banking system is the connective tissue. When it seizes, three problems merge into one big systemic event.
Russia had exactly this in 1998. We do not have to pretend it is theoretical.
The Question Everyone Should Want Answered
There is a second deafening silence in the analysis, more consequential than the first. Naming specific failure triggers immediately raises the matter of agency. If the collapse mechanisms are so clearly visible (banking contagion, recruitment shortfall, oil revenue floor) then so are the policy levers that could accelerate or shape them. Controlled prairie burns are far better than just waiting for lightning storms.
Tighter sanctions enforcement. Secondary sanctions on buyers of Russian crude. Further restrictions on financial system access. Coordinated pressure at the points where the three failure modes converge.
This is what “controlled burn” looks like in historical practice. Russia’s economy breaks. Russian officials are already telling their own president it breaks this summer. The question is whether external actors shape the manner of the burn or whether, as in so many previous cases, everyone waits for a lightning strike and then pretends the blaze was unforeseeable.
Prokopenko chose the mountaineering metaphor. Mountains are geological. Inevitable. Natural and beyond human agency.
Meh. At least she didn’t say here be dragons.
The more accurate framing is a large dam under pressure: the engineering failure modes are visible, the materials are known and stress points measured, and the difference between a controlled release and a catastrophic breach is whether anyone with authority decides to act before the structure does what is expected.
Green Berets know what I’m talking about.
The history of economic collapses in wartime states is a history of phase transitions. It is rapid, nonlinear, and in retrospect obvious. It is preceded by a long period in which analysts trying to protect themselves described trajectory without taking the risk of naming a destination.
Authoritarian systems by definition starve their populations and then in crisis exhibit the cognitive signatures of hypoxia: degraded emotional processing, loss of positive bias, impaired decision-making. It’s science not fiction.