If the war ends without gains and sanctions remain, Russia is left in a place that doesn’t collapse overnight but slowly unravels. The economy can grind forward on raw resources, rail freight, and patchwork trade with Asia, yet the resilience has cracks everywhere. Refineries hit by drones and starved of spare parts limp along, sometimes leaving regions short of fuel. Supply chains stretch thin, medicines go in and out of stock, and imported technology arrives slower, more expensive, and often less reliable. In the cities, life continues – food is still in the shops, electricity mostly flows – but the reliability is gone. The sense grows that everything costs more, takes longer, breaks sooner.
This erosion in material life bleeds into the moral fabric. People know the war achieved nothing except a generation of maimed and dead. The official talk of victory collides with the private knowledge of waste, and that gap breeds cynicism. Trust drains away, not only in the state but in institutions generally. Families pull tighter around themselves; the wider civic horizon recedes. Corruption feels less like a distortion and more like the whole operating system.
The return of veterans sharpens the fracture. Tens of thousands of men come back scarred, restless, struggling to slot into a civilian rhythm that no longer makes sense to them. With too few resources to absorb them, they form their own worlds – some slipping into gangs and paramilitary groups, others simply drinking and erupting at home. Their presence carries the war’s atmosphere into the streets and kitchens, making the brutality ordinary. Children grow up with it in the background, and empathy dulls.
Put together, it’s less a single great collapse than a cascading weakening of pillars. Fuel shortages trigger price spikes, budget deficits erode wages, and competence leaks away as specialists leave or burn out. Institutions can no longer mask the decay. Russia doesn’t stop functioning entirely, but it begins to function in fragments – pockets of relative stability surrounded by wider zones of stagnation and distrust. The future narrows to weeks and months; the long view feels like a joke.
The real damage is not just economic or logistical but existential: the sense that sacrifice brought nothing, that the country cannot recover what it lost in people, trust, or direction. That is how decline becomes permanent – not through sudden ruin, but through the slow acceptance that things will never again be whole.