Putin’s invasion has irreparably harmed Russia’s interests in ways that cannot be compensated for with any amount of territorial gains — even taking the entirety of Ukraine would not change the failure of this war. Beyond Russia’s immense sacrifice of lives and equipment, Putin’s gamble has brought economic and strategic failures that are impacting his citizens today, and will continue to in the long term.
International Weakness
On the international stage, Russia has not achieved any of its initial goals, and several have become less attainable than ever. First, Putin’s hope of converting Ukraine into an obedient satellite state with a puppet regime (à la Belarus) has ended in disaster. Second, his nonsensical maligning of NATO’s expansion has backfired: rather than containing the alliance, the war has solidified two more members into the coalition and increased the number of NATO states on Russia’s border. Following these developments in military security, the West has also successfully undercut Russian cultural influence in the region by drawing Moldova and Ukraine toward the EU.
Facing unprecedented alienation and losing confidence in its ability to endure this war of attrition, Russia has been forced to trade with the two most sanctioned nations on Earth: North Korea and Iran. The former has sold Moscow as many as 5 million artillery shells and several dozen ballistic missiles, while the latter has shipped hundreds of thousands of shells, hundreds of ballistic missiles, and thousands of drones. Resorting to these partnerships is an embarrassment for Russia. These nations share nothing other than their status as pariahs, horrendous human rights violations, and hostility toward the US. If Putin wanted to cozy up to North Korea, he would have done it 25 years ago. His desperation is even more obvious with Iran. Since entering office, he backed the opposition to Iranian-aligned factions in the Yemeni and Sudanese civil wars. Additionally, he continued a brutal occupation against the Muslim population of Chechnya — hardly sending a message that would appeal to an Islamist theocracy. Russia is only cooperating with these regimes out of necessity.
Russia has also grown far more dependent on the Chinese government. China has singlehandedly kept Russian production of ammunition and shells afloat by becoming their primary supplier of nitrocellulose (the main component of gunpowder). Other raw materials provided by China include ball bearings for building tanks and complex electronics for drones. The CCP has also supported Russia’s war effort with various vehicles, including excavating equipment for digging trenches, along with dirt bikes and off-road golf carts for troop transport. These are all “dual use” items that could theoretically be used for non-combat purposes, and this plausible deniability has allowed China to work around Western sanctions.
The Chinese government has also dodged accountability by using non-sanctioned countries to smuggle material into Russia. Including indirect shipments through Central Asia, China has gone from providing 25% to 56% of Russia’s imports since the war began. The lack of consequences for this loophole is remarkable considering that its execution hasn’t been remotely subtle: as one example, Kyrgyzstan now accounts for 90% of Russia’s supply of Chinese ball bearings, and has increased its imports by 1500%.
An Economic Mess
This trend of outsourcing coincides with a slew of red flags for the Russian economy. Evidently, Western sanctions have been insufficient to stop the invasion or suffocate Russian manufacturing. Despite these shortcomings, they’ve guaranteed that no one in Russia can ignore our message that Putin’s war is unacceptable. Tellingly, Moscow stopped releasing economic growth data after initiating the war. Still, there are endless indications that Russian citizens are struggling heavily, which means the nation feels our intolerance for Putin’s disregard for international law.
The scale of this cost is almost unbelievable. According to The Telegraph, Putin announced that he would “impose the largest tax rises on Russians since the 1990s” to squeeze out greater military funding. This policy lines up with what The Wilson Center reported last fall: Russia’s war expenditure was more than “2.5x the pre-war average,” which equates to $73 billion annually. Compared to American military spending, that might sound conspicuously affordable, but it’s important to remember that figures on this topic have an amplified impact because Russia is poor. The entire country’s GDP is equaled by Florida alone. More than a fifth of its population lives without indoor plumbing. There’s a clear reason why the Russians never made it to the moon.
Further, Russia’s historical precedent gives this spending far greater significance. Between the fall of the USSR and its war against Ukraine, the Russian government only dedicated 4% of GDP to military spending. In the past couple years, that rate increased to at least 6%, with some estimates as high as 7.5%. Decisive commitment from the Biden administration may have gotten the ball rolling to recreate what Reagan accomplished with the Soviets: baiting them to strain their economy until it shattered.
Many Russians are correctly terrified by these implications: according to the Institute For The Study Of War, 800,000-900,000 people have fled from Russia (roughly a quarter of which entered Serbia, which is an ominous sign that warrants discussion of its own). This exodus has no doubt escalated brain-drain from the country, compounding problems for those who are too poor to leave or who accept enough of the Kremlin’s propaganda to ignore the writing on the wall. The permanent loss of young workers — both those who fled the country or were lost on the battlefield — is yet another reason why Russia’s economy might never fully recover, even after the war ends.
Say Goodbye to Trade
Along with the reduced labor force (from a population with a steadily dropping birth rate), several signs point toward Russia limping into a bleak future for international trade. Before the war, Russia came in second place as the world’s largest exporter of both oil and military equipment. At roughly the two-year mark of the invasion, the Pentagon reported that Russian oil export capacity was cut by 14% thanks to Ukrainian strikes on refineries. The EU’s refusal to buy from Russia has further damaged its oil revenue, contributing to Moscow’s announcement that its figures about oil and fuel production are now considered state secrets. The prospects of arms exports in years to come are even more discouraging for Russia: Ukraine has shown the entire world how Russian weaponry is of starkly inferior quality compared to Western counterparts.
Ammunition exploding inside T-72 tanks has blown countless turrets into the air, a spectacularly fatal problem completely absent from the German Leopard, British Challenger, or American Abrams tanks sent to Ukraine. Russia’s prized S-400 air defense system has failed to reliably intercept ATACMS ballistic missiles, HIMARS rockets, or Storm Shadow cruise missiles — all of which have performed phenomenally. In contrast to S-400s, the only reported shortcoming of the US-provided Patriot air defense system is a shortage of interceptor missiles. Russian artillery crews have burned through ammunition and suffered casualties at extraordinary rates, resulting from their wide use of howitzers with primitive designs and unguided shells. Meanwhile, the Ukrainians have enjoyed far higher mobility and precision with their self-propelled artillery systems and advanced Western munitions.
This trend spans across virtually all categories of equipment: analysts have now learned that they broadly underestimated the effectiveness of Western arms and overestimated Russia’s. Moving forward, Moscow’s customers will likely only be regimes that lack both the political flexibility to buy from the West and the industry to build domestically. Securing another newsworthy contract with India or Turkey seems hopeless. Saudi Arabia and Egypt once saw flirting with Russian arms sales as a backup that could sidestep Western political leverage, but this interest is declining as the compromised effectiveness grows more apparent. Simultaneously, Western equipment has sold at record-highs.
The grim future of Russia’s weapon exports comes with an exciting implication, one that goes beyond deteriorating international influence: the revenue from past sales heavily contributed to funding for arms development. This is why, in four years of mass production, Russia has only made twenty Su-57 stealth fighters, the most advanced jet in the nation’s inventory. Moscow planned to build these fighters with someone else’s money, but no one wanted to buy them. With less cash available for programs like the Su-57, Russia will be stuck with its current arsenal of dysfunctional weaponry for longer.
The Free World is Rooting for Ukraine
More generally, the shrinking demand for Russian arms has coincided with unprecedented opposition to all forms of business with Russia, not for concerns about quality, but for political reasons. This is perhaps the most significant way that Putin’s war has changed the world — people view Russia differently. In 2021, Americans didn’t really care about Russia. Even a decade earlier, Mitt Romney was mocked for describing them as our greatest threat. It was just an alcoholic mafia-state continuing a 30-year streak of irrelevance after its defeat in the Cold War. At worst, it was a boogeyman half-heartedly blamed for Hillary losing in 2016. Now, it’s understood as Europe’s most menacing threat since Nazi Germany.
Similarly, most of the US certainly didn’t care about Ukraine. To the majority of Americans, it was some random Eastern European country vaguely known for being cold, poor, and corrupt. This indifference was most overtly displayed in 2014, when the forced annexation of Crimea prompted minimal outcry from the US. Ever since the nation came under full-scale attack, however, Ukraine’s public image has transformed into the frontline of the West, shielding our liberal democratic allies from war-hungry Russian expansion. Western Europe is no longer content to overlook Russia’s atrocities and buy its oil. Kyiv has established infrastructure to continue growing closer to the West, such as replacing aging Russian military equipment with Western systems, and inching ever closer to joining NATO.
Putin’s invasion got his country neck-deep in problems reaching far beyond the battlefield. Even if the sanctions are lifted, Russia’s economy will have to grapple with an irreversible manpower drain and reduced exports for both oil and arms. The future of Russia’s security is flimsier than before the war as NATO has grown farther to the East, Western Europe is dialing up defense spending, Russian arms development programs have been critically set back, and the free world’s hatred of Russia has been reenergized to its highest point since the Cold War. Finally, Moscow’s aggression has undercut its influence on the international stage: as the EU expands, association with Russia is now perceived as unacceptable, and the Russians have compromised their autonomy by increasingly depending on foreign support — a change with no signs of passing. When the war eventually ends, it will be an oversimplification to determine victory based on who controls Ukraine. There is no longer any possible outcome that would be a success for Russia.
Alex Lee ‘25 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. He can be reached at alex.b.lee@wustl.edu.