The Inertia of Russia’s War

SEVA GUNITSKY is George Ignatieff Chair of Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Toronto. JEREMY MORRIS is Professor of Russian and Global Studies at Aarhus University, Denmark. Most analyses of how to end the war in Ukraine focus on the intentions of one man: Russian President Vladimir Putin. This assumes that the person who single-handedly launched the invasion can also single-handedly stop it. But after more than four years of conflict, Russia’s economy and society have been reorganized around war, creating a powerful set of domestic incentives that makes ending the war difficult, and even dangerous, for Russia’s president. The Kremlin has made the war the central organizing principle of social and economic life, and the Russian state has been transformed by the war in turn. The country’s shadow economy, labor markets, regional budgets, social hierarchies, and political incentives have all been reordered around the conflict. In the process, the war has produced a self-sustaining institutional and economic order that constrains even Putin. Russia’s fiscal and industrial base has become structurally dependent on military spending, so much so that entire regions and sectors cannot survive without it. Combat pay and expanded defense wages have given millions of Russians in depressed regions their first real income gains in years. The regime cannot roll back these changes without exposing the country’s vast inequality or without creating a large class of aimless, incomeless veterans. And an expanding shadow economy—one made up of smuggling and lax customs enforcement—now keeps consumer goods flowing into a sanctioned country, spawning new commercial interests and supply chains around the war that cannot easily be reversed. This does not mean that peace is impossible. Most Russians, in fact, would welcome an end to the conflict. But it does mean that any serious effort to end the war must reckon with these invisible forces. Stopping the fighting now would mean economic dislocation, social upheaval, and a political reckoning the regime is not prepared to face. Moscow, in other words, has stumbled into a war trap that no one designed and no one can easily dismantle. Contrary to popular belief, most Russians have not benefited from the invasion. It is true that as the defense budget tripled over the first two years of conflict, the Russian economy grew and wages rose. But what looks like wartime prosperity is what the geographer Natalia Zubarevich calls the “law of small numbers”: percentage gains that seem impressive only because the starting point is so low. Real wages did rise, by official count, by about eight percent in 2023 and nine percent in 2024. But even after those gains, the median Russian wage in 2024 was only around 56,000 rubles a month (roughly $600). Growth then slowed sharply in 2025, to just 4.4 percent. And the official inflation rate over these years—7.4 percent, 9.5 percent, and 5.6 percent, respectively—is likely understated. Meanwhile, the top five percent of Russians hold roughly 75 percent of all the country’s wealth, a figure that is worse than in the United States (where the top five percent hold around 60 percent of the wealth). The gains of Russia’s military Keynesianism, where they exist at all, are unevenly distributed, accruing primarily to those working in or near military production. Since the start of the war, the number of working pensioners has risen sharply, and the tax system has been methodically redesigned to extract more from those who have the least. The state hasn’t imposed an inheritance tax in two decades and property taxes are negligible, but the value-added tax, which was 18 percent a few years before the war, rose to 22 percent in 2026. It now funds nearly half the federal budget. This is not a system designed to share the bounty of wartime spending. To ordinary Russians, the benefits of the wartime windfall increasingly look like a bait and switch. The promise that sacrifice would be rewarded, and that war spending would deliver what Russia’s economic policy never had, is already colliding with reality. But that does not mean that Moscow can simply shut off its wartime economy, or that doing so would prompt the kind of economic growth the invasion has failed to deliver. Instead, war has so transformed the economy that it might collapse without it. Consider, for instance, consumer imports. Thanks to sanctions, Russia’s shadow economy has expanded to keep such goods flowing into the country’s markets. Sanctioned goods and counterfeit products enter the country from China, Turkey, and Central Asia through improvised networks in which bribes, deliberate undervaluation, and misclassification have replaced the formal customs procedures. The Russian government also tolerates outright smuggling in order to help the economy fill gaps that domestic production cannot meet. Entire sectors of retail have gone gray with the state’s tacit blessing, since the

The Inertia of Russia’s War

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