Vladimir Putin has been waging a war against Ukraine for over a year – and if he has his way, it’s likely to last a while.Bild: AP / Uncredited
Analyse
War economy and perseverance slogans: This is how the Russian president wants to keep his people in line.
Philipp Löpfe / watson.ch
Leon Trotsky was a mastermind of the Bolsheviks. After the successful October Revolution, he swore the Russians to the concept of a “permanent revolution”. By this he understood a perpetual transformation of the capitalist Gesellschaft until the final victory of communism.
Vladimir Putin is not a communist, but he seems to have his own version of permanent revolution in mind: he wants endless war. “Putin has practically stopped talking about specific war goals,” political scientist Maxim Trudolyubow told the Guardian. “Nor does he offer a vision of future victory. His war has neither a clear beginning nor a foreseeable end.”
An unnamed diplomat is quoted by The Guardian as saying: “Putin is preparing the Russian people for a war that will never end.”
The endless war was not planned
An endless war was not originally intended. Putin wanted them Ukraine in a blitzkrieg and install a puppet government in Kiev. That went thoroughly in the pants. After suffering heavy losses, the Russian troops had to retreat to the Donbass and also give up large areas that they had previously conquered.
As a result, Putin appointed last Herbst 300,000 reservists. These should have worn down the Ukrainian soldiers in a winter offensive in the past few weeks. This plan didn’t work either. At none Front the Russian troops were able to achieve notable successes. That is unlikely to change.
The American military expert Rob Lee also explains in the “Guardian” that at most ten percent of Russian soldiers are currently able to carry out offensive actions. “You can only get a few partial victories, won with great sacrifice,” Lee said. “But they have no way of breaking through the Ukrainians’ defensive lines and thus turning the tide of the war in their favor.”
The Russian troops, apparently, still have not recovered from their defeat of the first days of the war. The two military experts Margarita Konaev and Owen Daniels state in “Foreign Affairs”:
“Holded back by poor leadership and abysmal morale, Russian troops are finding it difficult to recover, adjust their strategy and learn from their mistakes after a disastrous attempt to seize Kiev in February 2022.”
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on a visit to the embattled city of Zaporizhia. Photo: AP / Efrem Lukatsky
According to Konaev and Daniels, it is therefore entirely possible that Putin’s “endless war” may soon come to an involuntary end. “In view of the performance of the Russian troops, various Western experts believe it is possible that the Russian spring offensive will fail completely. A mutiny by the soldiers, yes, even a collapse of Vladimir Putin’s regime would then be conceivable.”
Also in Russian Business the consequences of the war and the sanctions are becoming increasingly noticeable. Major customers for oil and gas have disappeared. At the same time, government spending has skyrocketed. In January and February, fossil fuel revenues fell 46 percent year-on-year, and government spending soared more than 50 percent.
Alexandra Prokopenko, a senior official at Russia’s central bank, told the Wall Street Journal: “The Russian economy is about to slide into a long recession.” Prokopenko has Russia abandoned after the outbreak of war.
Oleg Deripaska, the billionaire and commodity oligarch, even warns: “Next year we will run out of money. We need foreign investors.”
In fact, Russia’s economic prospects are bleak. To keep its treasury in balance, the price of oil would need to be above $100 a barrel. In February, however, Russian oil traded at an average price of $49.56 per barrel. In the first two months, the deficit in the treasury was therefore 34 billion dollars.
Russian oil is currently selling at the spot price.Image: Stringer/dpa
This does not mean that Russia will be broke anytime soon. There are still $147 billion in the sovereign wealth fund. But Putin can no longer keep his promise not to scale back the civilian economy despite the war. Much of the industrial production now consists of making rockets, artillery ammunition and clothing for the soldiers. “This is not real growth in productivity,” explains Prokopenko. “It’s not economic development.”
Consumption also collapses. Retail sales fell by 6.7 percentage points in 2022. In February, 62 percent fewer cars were sold than in the previous year. The ruble has been devalued by 20 percent and inflation is currently at 11 percent. In addition, hundreds of thousands of young Men either emigrated or were drafted into the military.
All of this will have consequences. Wasily Astrow, an economist at the Institute for International Economic Studies in Vienna, therefore explains to the “Wall Street Journal”:
“We’re not talking about a crisis that will last a year or two. The Russian economy has found itself on a different growth path.”
However, the population seems to have reconciled itself to the war economy and Putin’s never-ending war. Andrei Kolesnikov of the Carnegie Endowment think tank told the Guardian: “Most Russians have accepted that this war will not be over any time soon and believe that they will have to get used to the new conditions.”
