Why Putin’s Russia may be closer to collapse than we think
If the Saudis again decide to flood the world with cheap crude to recoup market share – as many predict – oil will fall below $40 and Russia will spin out of economic control.
Few foresaw the sudden and total implosion of the Soviet regime, though all the signs of economic decay and imperial overreach were there to see by 1989. David Rowe
Ukraine is slowly losing the three-year conflict on the battlefield. Russia is slowly losing the economic conflict at a roughly equal pace. The Kremlin’s oil export revenues are too low to sustain a high-intensity war and nobody will lend Vladimir Putin a kopeck.
Russia’s overheated, military-Keynesian war economy looks much like the dysfunctional German war economy of late 1917, which had run out of skilled manpower and was holed below the waterline after three years of Allied blockade – as the logistical failures of the Ludendorff offensive would later reveal.
