Russia has 4 months left to the worst breakdown since the fall of the Soviet Union

Russia is entering a phase of the war where economic endurance, not military initiative, is becoming the primary constraint. The Kremlin’s strategy has increasingly relied on converting short-term financial mobilization into long-term stability, an approach that works only as long as revenue streams remain elastic. As wartime spending hardens into a permanent budgetary structure, the margin for absorbing shocks is narrowing rapidly. What once functioned as a buffer—energy income, reserve funds, and one-off cash injections—is losing its ability to offset structural imbalance. This places growing pressure on the state’s financial architecture, where fiscal stress can cascade quickly into political and social risk. Against this backdrop, developments inside the Russian Federation suggest that the war is now testing not just battlefield capacity, but the sustainability of the system that underwrites it.

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