Is Russia Headed for Economic Ruin in 2025? The Fallout of Prolonged Warfare

Thanks for your thoughtful reply. I agree that things are certainly economically bad for average Russians citizens and will continue to get worse. But as long as it does so gradually, they'll remain cowed, grumble and go along. On the hopeful scenario, the danger point will come if Putin no longer has sufficient resources to keep co-opting those in positions of power and their number grows too quickly for Putin to keep killing the ones who become problems.

Underneath the yacht-hiding oligarchs there's a large strata of sub-yacht minigarchs and they aren't happy. Their ill-gotten gains elevate them far above the common Russian but they don't have an oligarch's wealth to soften the impact of embargos. They can't easily jet-set off to international playgrounds anymore and replacement parts for their BMW are starting to cost more than a Prada. Their wife is bitching about not feeling safe to visit their seaside condo in Crimea and even their mistress has moved to a timeshare model with multiple patrons.

If this malaise gets too deep for too long, disloyalty festers. Not disloyalty to the country but to the illicit system that's permitted limited latitude to pillage the economy at every level in exchange for perpetuating the system. If the lower rungs in the pyramid start working together in ever-larger ad hoc schemes to restore their take to what used to be, which is more than the system can now permit, the whole pyramid gets brittle. First, it just starts crumbling around the edges here and there but when wide shocks hit the system it starts triggering landslides caused by the illicit system fighting itself over the diminishing spoils trickling down. It's manageable but costly. A lot of people who weren't that high up start getting disappeared. Enough that everyone else notices. Too many to just chalk up to being too stupid, too greedy or too unlucky.

Once that reaches nearer the base of the pyramid, if multiple large shocks happen to hit at once, the disparate landslides could coalesce into an avalanche. The stagehands keeping the pretense going stop playing along and start mostly playing for themselves. Too many of them to keep the grocery shelves in Moscow stocked. It's worse in the provinces and once reliable regional governors aren't so reliable anymore. Stopping that requires tanks in regional capitals, more than one at a time. Pretty soon, the Kremlin starts running short of the most loyal internal security troops, the ones you can count on not only to open fire on civilians but shoot at local troops with guns. Eventually they have to start sending troops that aren't much more loyal than the locals they're putting down.

When the system starts swaying, Kremlin elite outside the inner circle get worried. When the instability continues to grow most get scared, but a few get opportunistic. And some of them start talking. Then the talk creeps into plotting. And this is how the end always comes. At first, slowly - and then all at once.

Obviously, we're nowhere close to any of that but Prigozhin's folly was a small preview of what's possible. So, I doubt it'll happen but I'm hopeful.

Your comment reminded me of Russian propagandists talking the possibility of a new civil war in the US.

It is a core component of my mental model. Everything has a time horizon: people, institutions, investments, etc. To understand influence potential/runway, time horizon * influence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_horizon