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The temper relating to the struggle in Ukraine has modified in latest months. Ukrainian drones have struck Russian oil infrastructure, inflicting gas shortages throughout Russia. And the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, is exuberant about ending the struggle from a “place of power”.
The hope is that an financial disaster in Russia results in social unrest and political instability, probably ensuing within the collapse of the ruling regime. This may not be an unprecedented occasion in Russian historical past. The Soviet Union quickly unravelled amid financial and political disaster in 1991. However how doubtless is that this situation for Russia right now?
I’ve travelled to Russia yearly since 2022 and there was a transparent change within the temper. In 2022, it was all about survival and adapting to the brand new actuality of sanctions and struggle. Over the following couple of years, there was stabilisation and rising optimism concerning the economic system’s skill to adapt. Nevertheless, by 2026 there was discuss of an financial recession, even earlier than the present gas shortages hit.
With the economic system at full capability and army spending remaining untouchable, shrinking the civilian sector via excessive rates of interest and taxes is the one technique to tame inflation and stability the funds. VAT was elevated from 20% to 22% in January 2026, whereas taxes on small and medium-sized enterprises have been raised.
On the St Petersburg Worldwide Financial Discussion board in June, it was advised that robust instances are prone to proceed for at the least three years. The query now’s whether or not these financial difficulties will result in mass protests and a break up among the many elites as occurred in late Soviet instances.
Soviet collapse
The Soviet Union collapsed below the management of Mikhail Gorbachev, who carried out reforms to liberalise the economic system and political system. His resolution to decentralise financial decision-making undermined the Soviet deliberate economic system and led to extreme meals shortages.
The introduction of partially democratic elections in 1989 then gave opposition figures, similar to Gorbachev’s arch-rival Boris Yeltsin, a platform – which solely expanded in 1990 when Gorbachev devolved energy to the Soviet republics. Mixed with a deepening financial disaster, this led to Gorbachev quickly shedding energy and to the dissolution of the Soviet Union itself.
The state of affairs in right now’s Russia is totally different. Since 2000, Vladimir Putin has presided over authoritarian consolidation. He has weakened the delicate democratic establishments he inherited from Yeltsin, his predecessor, and has elevated management over the media. In the meantime, he has marginalised and eradicated political opponents similar to Alexei Navalny.
Putin has additionally cowed large enterprise. This maybe most notably occurred through the 2003 Yukos affair when Russia’s richest man, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, was imprisoned for tax evasion and his oil firm was seized. The Kremlin’s diploma of management over politics and society has solely strengthened because the struggle in Ukraine started in 2022.
All unauthorised opposition in Russia has been eradicated, both via imprisonment or emigration. The enterprise elite are more and more below Kremlin management, not least since sanctions have compelled lots of them to return from the west to Russia.
And the struggle has consolidated the affect of the siloviki (Russia’s law-enforcement companies), in addition to the military-industrial sector and armed forces, all of that are invested within the stability of the regime.
Photographs of queues at Russian petrol stations tempt the conclusion of a significant financial disaster just like that which introduced down the Soviet Union. However, having witnessed each, I can say this isn’t the case.
The modern Russian economic system remains to be useful. After 4 years of struggle and financial sanctions, each day life in most of Russia has hardly modified. The gas shortages that started in June 2026 have been most likely the primary actual disaster to have an effect on the vast majority of the inhabitants because the struggle began.
Russia’s authorities even have some room for manoeuvre. They will decrease rates of interest, which had already come down from 21% in 2024 to 14.25% by June. They will additionally devalue the rouble to spice up revenue from power exports. Russia’s economic system has already acquired a short lived reprieve within the type of larger oil revenues from the Iran struggle.
There’s financial pressure, however not at a stage that might trigger the Kremlin to just accept an entire change in fact.
On the identical time, the general stability of energy in a struggle of attrition can also be decided by the relative weak spot of the opposite aspect. And whereas Ukraine is having fun with flip within the struggle, its economic system is just functioning attributable to western monetary assist.
Its largest donor, the US, stopped funding after Donald Trump got here to energy in 2025. The EU has needed to decide up the tab, agreeing to supply €90 billion (£77 billion) of funding over the following two years. However Ukraine wants extra.
Presently, Russia and Ukraine are responding to one another’s actions with countermeasures. Russia has proven in early July the devastating drive with which it could actually strike Ukraine, finishing up a wave of assaults on the capital, Kyiv. Ukraine’s army has, in response, struck oil refineries in Russia’s Yaroslavl and Leningrad areas.
Alexander Titov is a lecturer in Trendy European Historical past at Queen’s College Belfast.
This text was first printed by The Dialog and is republished below a Artistic Commons licence. Learn the authentic article .
Ukraine’s provide of US Patriot missile defence programs has dried up and replacements are in brief provide because of the Iran struggle. Zelensky has requested the US for a licence to fabricate their very own interceptor missiles for the Patriot system. However any such manufacturing, if it ever went forward, would absolutely be focused instantly by Russian strikes.
Years of Russian bombing have additionally severely weakened Ukraine’s power infrastructure. And there’s a actual risk that Russia might render Ukrainian cities similar to Kyiv, Kharkiv and Dnipro uninhabitable this winter by knocking out electrical energy and heating, as virtually occurred in 2025.
Given all this, this can be very unlikely that Putin will give in to strain and withdraw from Ukraine. With either side satisfied they will win, there’s little prospect of the struggle ending any time quickly.
