The apparent resilience of the Russian economy has confounded many strategists who expected Western sanctions to starve its war effort:
Russia continues to export vast quantities of oil, gas, and other commodities — the result of sanctions evasion and loopholes deliberately designed by Western policymakers to keep Russian resources on world markets. So far, clever macroeconomic management, particularly by Russian Central Bank Governor Elvira Nabiullina, has enabled the Kremlin to keep the Russian financial system in relative health.
At first glance, the numbers look surprisingly strong. In 2023, GDP grew by 3.6 percent and is expected to rise by 3.9 percent in 2024. Unemployment has fallen from around 4.4 percent before the war to 2.4 percent in September. Moscow has expanded its armed forces and defense production, adding more than 500,000 workers to the defense industry, approximately 180,000 to the armed forces, and many thousands more to paramilitary and private military organizations. Russia has reportedly tripled its production of artillery shells to 3 million per year and is manufacturing glide bombs and drones at scale.
On the other hand:
Already, about around half of all artillery shells used by Russia in Ukraine are from North Korean stocks. At some point in the second half of 2025, Russia will face severe shortages in several categories of weapons.
Perhaps foremost among Russia’s arms bottlenecks is its inability to replace large-caliber cannons. According to open-source researchers using video documentation, Russia has been losing more than 100 tanks and roughly 220 artillery pieces per month on average. Producing tank and artillery barrels requires rotary forges — massive pieces of engineering weighing 20 to 30 tons each — that can each produce only about 10 barrels a month. Russia only possesses two such forges.
In other words, Russia is losing around 320 tank and artillery cannon barrels a month and producing only 20.
[…]
Open-source researchers have counted the loss of at least 4,955 infantry fighting vehicles since the war’s onset, which comes out to an average of 155 per month. Russian defense contractors can produce an estimated 200 per year, or about 17 per month, to offset these losses. Likewise, even Russia’s expanded production of 3 million artillery shells per year pales in comparison to the various estimates for current consumption at the front. While those estimates are lower than the 12 million rounds Russian forces fired in 2022, they are much higher than what Russian industry can produce.
[…]
Defense spending has officially jumped to 7 percent of Russia’s GDP and is projected to consume more than 41 percent of the state budget next year. The true magnitude of military expenditures is significantly higher. Russia’s nearly 560,000 armed internal security troops, many of which have been deployed to occupied Ukraine, are funded outside the defense budget — as are the private military companies that have sprouted across Russia.
[…]
Rather than demobilizing or bankrupting themselves, Russian leaders could instead use their military to obtain the economic resources needed to sustain it — in other words, using conquest and the threat thereof to pay for the military.
Plenty of precedents exist. In 1803, French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte ended 14 months of peace in Europe because he could not afford to fund his military based on French revenues alone — and he also refused to demobilize it. In 1990, Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein similarly invaded oil-rich Kuwait because he could not afford to pay the million-man army that he refused to downsize. In both cases, the mirage of conquest seemed attractive for sustaining overly large defense establishments without having to pay for them.
“Producing tank and artillery barrels requires rotary forges—massive pieces of engineering weighing 20 to 30 tons each—that can each produce only about 10 barrels a month.”
That seemed like a slow rate, so I went googling. This CIA document, Transfer of Austrian Gun-Barrel Forging Technology to the USSR, says “For example, a tank or artillery barrel can be forged in 10 minutes or less.”
Russia’s economy is greatly aided by the self-deceiving stupidity of Beltway boffins.
I don’t trust the people who write for FP, but I notice that they sometimes stumble across the facts. Usually they pick themselves up and proceed as if nothing had happened.
From U.S. Reactors Still Run on Russian Uranium:
[The article goes on to say that the Morally Virtuous West is already Taking Concrete Steps to save the world from the orc-like Russians.]
I doubt that Russia needs to resort to conquest. Russia has a lot of valuable resource. They can figure out how to trade them, with or without Western help.
I think the Russians are hard-nosed chess-players. I don’t have to like them, but I do have to respect them. I also have some hope that Putin will stand up before the world and give a Russian version of the 1953 “Atoms for Peace” speech.
One of the reasons Russia is winning its war with Ukraine is that Western media is full of bogus statistics like those quoted here.
Russia’s real economy, the production of things like electricity, steel, food… is at least 70% that of the US. It is 4 to 5 times larger than Germany’s, and 10 times larger than UK’s. For the data see,
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1549554660184231936.html
From another viewpoint, Russia has more engineers and scientists than does the US. Engineers work in manufacturing and infrastructure. So that nugget of information suggests that Russia’s real economy might be larger than the US’.
Russia has the fourth largest economy in the world. It is nearly autarkic: all critical components are made in Russia. It makes its own chips and computers, gun barrels, tanks, commercial airliners, etc., from scratch.
And then, of course, there is China, whose economy dwarfs the US’. Go to YouTube and look up the channel “Inside China Business.” Listen, and weep for the US and Europe. The party is over. Time to go home.
The Mirage of Conquest without paying was NATO moving East as it gutted all defense industries and indeed their militaries and this certainly includes the United States.
Yes, Russia has only 2 Rotary Forges. But America only has one at Watervliet Arsenal. It’s old and due to be replaced in 2026. Now, as it happens, Watervliet is in the midst of a stunning modernization set to be ready in…2038. Truly we can move so fast when we need…but Russia of course can move faster.
Here, have a study of the known shortfalls of our cannon manufacturing as of May 2023.
Mirage of conquest indeed.
…Is a contorted metric weakly related to reality.
Well… one needs more than a single grain of salt with that.
And 100,000 soldiers, the same stories used to tell. Yet somehow it did not add up to the observable results.
Oh dear. This only lacks the spooky story of Spanish Armada being a crusade of Spanish Inquisition to conquer and purge poor innocent Puritan England for heroically protecting the Dutch… or Hitler’s secret plans for conquest of Brazil (after of failing to occupy the entire France).
Biden’s handlers thought they could defeat the Houtis, but didn’t realize the Houtis don’t care about the strategic deployment of pronouns and cat videos.
@Whomever: Is the factory completely borked by dysfunctional anti-patterns? Maybe the machine can make the barrel in a short time, but the humans are leaving the machine idle.
@Bob Sykes: Preach, brother.
@VXXC, @Freddo: Sad but true.
Regarding uranium:
Build a French type nuclear central. It uses low enriched.