Russia’s economy has been battered by sanctions and high inflation, but there is no chance of a major economic crisis occurring anytime in the next three to five years, says a new authoritative report from CASE.

The authors of the report are amongst the keenest observers of Russian economics. Sergey Aleksashenko is a renowned Russian economist who served as Deputy Finance Minister of Russia from 1993 to 1995. Dmitry Nekrasov held various positions in Russia’s Federal Tax Service and Presidential Administration during Dmitry Medvedev’s years in the Kremlin. And Vladislav Inozemtsev is a famous Russian economist in exile who is the founder and director of the Center for Post-Industrial Studies and former professor at the prestigious Higher School of Economics in Moscow.

Inozemtsev has been well ahead of the curve, being the first to predict how the Russian economy is cooling as the military Keynesian effects start to wear off in August. The theme of Russia’s growing economic problems has been take up by many of Russia’s opponents and culminated in a recent article from opposition publication Meduza predicting that Russia faces a wave of bankruptcies in 2025 thanks to the soaring cost of borrowing.

But in his latest paper, Inozemtsev takes some of the wind out of the sails of this pessimistic outlook. The reports general conclusion is that “Russia has been able to withstand the blow caused by the Western sanctions due to a combination of factors, including its well-developed market economy, its indispensable position as a supplier of primary commodities to the global market, highly professional responses by its government officials, and the West’s inability to isolate Russia on the international stage.”

“An unbiased assessment of Russia’s economic capabilities presented in the report excludes almost any chances of a serious crisis caused by internal factors in at least three-to-five-years perspective,” the report concludes, running counter to the predictions that Russia’s economy will run into a brick wall in 2025.

Growth without development

Russia’s economy was expected to collapse after the extreme sanctions were imposed in 2022. And indeed, the first few months were a shock. But during the summer it unexpectedly boomed and in 2024 it has been the European economies that have fallen into recession as the boomerang effect of the sanctions begins to bite. The West underestimated how fast and how successfully Putin could reorient his trade to the Global South and how deeply integrated Russia is into European economies.

Since mid-2023, the Russian economy has undergone important structural changes: military spending has increased, the geography of foreign trade has changed and the citizens’ real disposable incomes have grown as wages are driven up by a chronic labour shortage. Together, all this has provided the Russian economy with strength and stability and made it capable of meeting the needs of Kremlin’s military machine in the years to come while providing the necessary financial resources for funding welfare programmes on a scale preventing an increase in protest sentiments, the authors say. The flourishing oil trade means Russia has plenty of money, but the war has killed off meaningful progress.

“The current stance can be described as a “growth without development”, being characterised by a quantitative increase in the volume of production of long-mastered products, an expansion of the service sector, and limited modernisation of infrastructure without significant technological progress.

Indeed, in many respects Russia’s economy has gone backwards. CBR Governor Elvira Nabiullina warned companies at the start of the war they might need to go back “two generations of technology” to keep their factories running.

And even more worrying for the global economy, sanctions have created a new class of Bandit Counties that champion massive violations of intellectual property rights, illicit foreign trades and the use of non-traditional forms of international settlements.

“The Kremlin sees opportunities for institutionalising this model and is laying it down as the basis for its geopolitical claims, trying to establish itself as a leader of a “non-Western” community of nations.

Getting it wrong

The authors point out that analyst keep getting Russia wrong, overestimating the power of sanctions, underestimating the quality of the country’s economic leadership and its ability to remake its markets in the face of sanctions.

In April 2022 the World Bank predicted Russia’s GDP would decline by 11.2% by the end of the year, but the final estimate came to only minus 2.1%. In 2023, the Russian economy grew by 3.6% against the January IMF forecast of 0.3%; and in 2024 its growth could achieve 3.8-4.0%, while at the start of the year international experts gave a figure of just 1.3%. These are not small mistakes. They belie a deep misunderstanding of what is happening in Russia, the authors argue, and lead to very poor policy recommendations.

“We believe this disconnect is largely subjective, reflecting essential features of three main groups of analysts.

“The first group consists of long-time Russia specialists who view current events through a Soviet-era lens, interpreting Putin’s dictatorship as an attempt to restore the Soviet system.

“The second group includes analysts who work for Western governments or NGOs, and feel compelled to propose sanctions and restrictions, projecting confidence in their effectiveness.

“The third group is made up of experts with Russian backgrounds, including those former politicians who despise Putin and are convinced of his regime’s imminent collapse.

“The deep biases of these groups hinder objective assessments of the Russian economy’s current state and prospects,” the authors opine.

Sanctions don't work because the “international community” is in reality only the handful of counties that make up the Global North, and even in Europe, within the EU itself, the willingness to impose sanctions is weakly followed or enforced. Turkey’s propensity to continue to act as a way-station for trade with Russia, Austria and Hungary’s continued imports of Russian gas and Germany’s luxury carmakers that continue to export top of the range cars to Moscow via Minsk are only a few of the manifold examples of how sanctions are being undermined. The West’s failure to get China and India on board and refusal to join the regime by the real “international community” of the Global South, which makes up 90% of the world’s population, blows a major hole in the sanctions regime.

Another miscalculation is to put all the growth at the feet of the military-industrial sector. The civilian sector has also flourished. Several things have gone into this growth but among the most important was Russian businesses reacted to sanctions by investing heavily into retooling factories to replace hard-to-obtain Western technology, and booming consumption fuelled by the rapid rise in real disposable incomes.

In 2023, the largest increase in gross value added was recorded in the hotels and catering enterprises (by 10%), in the information and communications sector (10%), in financial and insurance activities (8.6%), in wholesale and retail trade (7.3%) and in construction (7.0%), which reflects an increase on the share of final consumption expenditures in GDP to 68.7% from 64.9% in 2022, including the share of household expenditure to 49.8% from 47.4%.

“It seems that the development of the Russian economy in the last two years, as well as the real effect of sanctions, should have led to a re-evaluation of the quality of the expertise used by policymakers – but this has not happened yet,” the authors say.

Russia’s robust growth

The introduction of the twin oil price cap sanctions at the end of 2022 and start of 2023 were also misunderstood. When the budget figures were released in March 2023 and showed a massive deficit for 2022 and collapsing tax revenues in January 2023, the oil sanctions were hailed as huge success. However, the numbers were misleading.

“Bureaucratic factors became more important: the excessive strengthening of the ruble exchange rate under the influence of paramount currency restrictions and the Ministry of Finance’s sluggishness in changing the methodology of determining the price of oil for tax purposes [which used to be based on the price of the sanctioned Urals blend, but was changed to a Brent benchmark],” the authors explain.

“When these factors ceased to have an effect, budget revenues stabilised and soon began to increase rapidly, outpacing economic growth – the Ministry of Finance began to collect an “inflation tax” of additional revenues from VAT, profit tax and personal income tax, caused by a significant excess of the inflation rate over what was anticipated in the draft budget,” which bne IntelliNews reported on at the time and also discussed in an oil podcast, but was not well understood by most commentators.

In 2023 the Ministry of Finance had to dip into the National Welfare Fund (NWF) for RUB3.46 trillion to cover a 17% of the budget shortfall. In 2024, the budget spending to date is fully funded by revenues – although it may not stay that way, as typically 20% of all spending usually happens in December. Currently, the official forecast for the deficit is 1.7% of GDP of around RUB3 trillion, increased from 0.8% earlier in the year. For 2026, the Ministry of Finance is expecting the budget deficit to be flat.

“One should add that the Russian government’s debt is insignificant by modern standards,” say the authors. Debt is expected to reach 18.1% of GDP by the end of 2024, which leaves a huge space for domestic borrowing. The Ministry of Finance is planning to issue RUB4 trillion of domestic debt in 2024 (nearly double pre-war levels), tapping the estimated RUB19 trillion of liquidity in the domestic banking sector. That is enough money to continue Putin’s war in Ukraine for years.

The growth of real disposable incomes during the war was an even bigger boon, as it came after the longest period of their fall in Russian history – from 2014 to 2021 – ironically caused by the chronic labour shortage as men were bled away from the labour pool to fight on the frontlines. In three years since the start of the aggression against Ukraine, this figure will grow by at least 17.5% (4.0% in 2022, 6.9% in 2023 and, according to the government forecast, about 7% in 2024).

Domestic consumption has become a bigger growth driver than the booming raw material exports. It has created a new War Middle Class and is fuelling activity in the civilian segment of industry. At least until mid-2024, the rate of income growth accelerated (the maximum figure of 8.1% was recorded in the first half of this year) with ever higher pay going to soldiers, who earn three times the average salary.

The growth of incomes is part of the reversal of Putinomics that war has brought with it. Pre-war the Kremlin effectively ran an austerity budget, starting in about 2012 when Putin launched a drive to modernise the military. The CBR hoarded cash, building up a huge $600bn reserve, debt was paid down and investment into non-strategic sector was muted. Since the war started, the Kremlin has opened the spending spigot and money has poured into wages and investment, as much as is needed to get the job done. From mid-2023 to mid-2024, the Kremlin paid RUB3 trillion in military salaries, equivalent to the entire budget deficit.

While many commentators have pointed to the huge military salary bill as a weakness, the Kremlin doesn't appear to think so. The current 2025-2027 budget proposal keeps military spending at 6% of GDP and this is not seen to be excessively high, but the current budgetary structure looks sustainable over a three-year horizon, maintaining the massive military spending. What is spent on salaries can be offset to a large extent by what is earned on taxing consumption and growth. Already the non-oil part of the budget revenues is easily outstripping those from oil.

A dramatic U-turn in strategy, the reversal of Putinomics has unleashed years of pent-up growth. Another side-effect of the spending is to undo some of Russia’s legendary income inequality, as the poorest regions have been the biggest winners of the Kremlin’s largesse, as that is where most of the military factories are located as a legacy of the Cold War. Putin stressed the importance of balanced investment into both civilian and military parts of the economy in his guns and butter speech in May and more generally, the Kremlin continues to push its National Projects 2.1 agenda aimed at improving the lives of the average family.

“With the outbreak of the war, a trend in the transformation of social policy became especially noticeable: the efforts of the authorities and budget funds are directed at those Russians who either belong to less well-off social strata,” say the authors, “or do not show a tendency to emigrate.”

“It should be noted that in Russia a significant part of both individuals and businesses does not experience profound economic discomfort either from Putin’s aggression against Ukraine or from the Western nations’ reaction to it,” the authors add. “The main effect of sanctions has so far been felt by the upper middle class, which has historically taken the most critical stance vis-à-vis Vladimir Putin and his policies.”

And the upper middle class are actually making money from the strain the economy is under. Sky-high interest rates are threatening SMEs, but they have also become a cash cow for the middle class, which are depositing their cash in banks for the interest income that can be earned. Over the first nine months of 2024 retail deposit soared by 53.8% year on year and companies are also placing so much of their cash in deposit accounts the CBR is currently planning to impose special restrictions on corporate deposits in order to keep this cash in circulation.

Sale of the century

“The first and most important circumstance is the free market character of the Russian economy, which has been underestimated by analysts,” the authors argue.

Most of Russia’s detractors have tried to paint Putin as reverting to Soviet control. The famous Yale University report that predicted Russia’s economy was headed into oblivion, mentioned the word “Soviet” 19-times, although few modern economic commentators make any reference to the Soviet Union today. The report was debunked by bne IntelliNews at the time, and by Russia’s performance since.

As Putin established control over Russia’s largest corporations, the idea of the “étatisation” of the Russian economy, and consequently about its growing similarity to the old Soviet system, spread amongst the Western expert community. It was argued that the state controls 100% of the railway and pipeline infrastructure, and that by 2018 the share of state-owned companies in overall corporate revenue had reached 63% in the oil and gas industry, 79% in the machine-building sector and 92% in banking. The observers therefore arrived at the conclusion that Russia’s economy could collapse just as easily as the Soviet one once did.

But this ignores the fact that half of Russia’s economy is privately owned and that even the leading state-owned enterprises operate in highly competitive environments. As part of Putin’s hybrid ZAO Kremlin model, the state purposely sets up two big state-owned companies to directly compete against each other and also encourages privately owned business to also keep their feet to the coals. It has been a successful model that ensures both state control over key sectors but also efficiency and competitiveness in the leading state-owned enterprises.

“Many large state-controlled corporations (one may just look on the banks) operate in a highly competitive environment, acting as if they were owned by private capital,” the authors conclude.

The Kremlin’s changes to the regulations after sanctions were imposed – most importantly the legalisation of “parallel imports” that undid a decade of intellectual property rights rules – that opened up a plethora of new opportunities to sell famous brands royalty-free.

Likewise, the departure of scores of foreign brands, many of which simply sold their Russian businesses to their Russian managers, was probably the largest transfer of property in Russia’s modern history. What was in effect the appropriation of decades of FDI has also opened huge opportunities for entrepreneurs as they took over businesses worth billions of dollars at knock-down prices.

In just the car sector – by far the worst hit of all the sectors by sanctions – all the Western brands have left but Russian carmakers and the leading distributors have taken over their businesses. The Renault-Nissan sold the largest car concern in Russia Avtovaz for just one ruble, while the sector as a whole has completely recovered after production came to a complete standstill in 2022. The team that took over the McDonald franchise claim its replacement Vkusno i Tochka (Tasty. Period) is now more profitable and its predecessor. There are similar stories in nearly every sector of the economy.

The Yale report claimed the departing international companies had revenue that was equivalent to 40% of GDP, but this revenue didn't leave the country; it was simply taken over by Russian businessmen.

“No less important is the fact that property became the main reason for non-resistance to the authorities, since fears of losing it perfectly disciplined the Russian entrepreneurs. In other words, the private and market nature of the Russian economy made it much more resilient than the Western policymakers had expected,” the authors wrote.

The commodities backstop

Russia’s economy has always been strong thanks to the bedrock of the commodities subsidy. Even during the chaotic 90s, Russia has suffered from multiple crises, but the economy has always bounced back relatively quickly and each crisis did progressively less damage than the last one.

“Despite a probable slowdown in economic growth in the second half of 2024, Russia looks safe from the collapse of the existing economic model in the near future: the budget remains balanced, and real disposable incomes are expected to grow further. Of course, the increased military spending provokes growing inflation, but for now it is kept within single-digit numbers,” the authors argue.

This resilience is thanks to the subsidy the country earns from the export of things like oil and metal. The best way to understand this is from the so-called non-oil deficit. For all of Putin’s reign until the war in Ukraine the headline budget has been in surplus, but if you magically remove the oil and gas revenues then the non-oil budget has been around -4% of GDP in the non-crisis years. In other words, the Kremlin has used the oil and gas income to subsidise the rest of the economy. In times of crisis the non-oil deficit can blow out to -13% at its most extreme in the past, as the Kremlin taps its cushion of cash to ease the pain.

Non-oil and gas budget deficits 2022-1H24 (RUB trillion)
	2022	2023	1H24
total revenue	27.9	25.5	14.5
oil & gas revenue	11.6	8.8	5.7
non-oil & gas revenue	16.3	16.7	8.8
total expenditure	31.2	29.7	15.5
nominal GDP	151.5	160.5	80
deficit nominal *	-3.3	-3.2	-0.2
deficit% GDP *	-2.3	-1.9	+0.25
non-oil & gas deficit nominal	-14.9	-13	-6.7
non-oil & gas deficit% GDP	-9.8	-8.1	-8.4
source: Ministry of Finance * the numbers don't add up merely by subtracting just two kinds of revenue from expenditures, as the government has additional sources of income.

As the table shows, the government continues to rely on its raw materials subsidy to cushion the cost of the war by running a non-oil budget deficit of around 8% of GDP. This is a high number, but not the most extreme non-oil deficit Russia has ever run. For comparison, in 2020 during the pandemic the government ran a 9.8% of GDP non-oil deficit, equivalent to RUB10.4 trillion.

Put in other terms, the war in Ukraine is now stressing the government’s finances less than coronavirus global pandemic did.

Russia’s oil and gas revenues occupies the most attention, but Russia exports a cornucopia of raw materials and commodities. Another miscalculation the Western sanctions has made is how deeply these inputs are integrated with the global economy.

As of 2021, in addition to the export of more than 7.8mn barrels of crude and refined oil per day, it also sold 240bn cubic metres of natural and liquefied gas, 227mn tonnes of coal, 43.5mn tonnes of steel, 37.6mn tonnes of mineral fertilisers, 49mn tonnes of grain, as well as large volumes of timber, aluminium, nickel, uranium and many other commodities, which collectively accounted for 78% of all exports and were worth a whopping $385bn in 2021. This made Russia the world’s largest supplier of crude and primarily processed raw materials.

As bne IntelliNews has reported, the vast majority of the sanctions on Russia have failed to make much of a dent in the export business. Russia has either found new markets in Asia for things like oil, or it has offered discounts to win over new customers. At the same time, the West has turned a blind eye to the daisy chain of transhipments of Russian commodities or the more obvious transubstantiation of say Russian crude oil into Indian petrol that allows Russia to continue to trade.

Despite all the introduced restrictive measures, Russian exports decreased from $491.6bn in 2021 to $425.1bn in 2023, or by a mere 13.5%.

“Overall, this creates a trend that is alarming for the West and highly significant for Russia: Russia is not simply “falling into China’s embrace” the authors wrote. “Rather, Moscow is transforming into a centre of an “alternative model of globalisation,” operating outside the frameworks of Western-controlled institutions and established rules. This trend could prove far more dangerous than the much-discussed “export of corruption” to Western countries… As recent years have shown, the use of unconventional payment systems, the export of pirated products, and the smuggling of goods from Western companies – all of these practices are much easier to implement than previously assumed.”

“Viewing all of this as merely a  way to circumvent sanctions is extremely short-sighted, as the Kremlin has set its sights on fundamentally undermining the existing system and has reasonable grounds for hoping to succeed,” the authors conclude.