COMMENTARY: Four to Five Trillion Extra Rubles: Moscow Is Burning Its Future to Hold the Front

COMMENTARY: Four to Five Trillion Extra Rubles: Moscow Is Burning Its Future to Hold the Front

Introduction: the budget of headlong flight

A figure beyond comprehension

Four to five trillion additional rubles. Let us take a moment to let this figure resonate in all its excess. According to Bloomberg, relayed on June 23, 2026, this is the increase in war spending that Russia is planning for the current year, on top of an already gargantuan military budget. At the exchange rate of summer 2026, this represents approximately 40 to 50 billion additional dollars to finance a war that has been bleeding the country for more than four years. This is not a reasonable budget adjustment — it is the sign of a frantic headlong flight that reveals the panic of military planners and the victory obsession of a leader incapable of admitting the failure of his imperial adventure.

Meanwhile, the Russian budget deficit was exceeding 80 billion dollars according to United24 Media of June 23, 2026, and Russian government bonds were plunging with yields reaching 15% — an eloquent signal that financial markets, even those still operating within the Russian economic space, no longer believe in the medium-term solvency of Putin's regime. The arithmetic is relentless, brutal, and definitive: Moscow is burning its future to hold its front.

My commentary without ambiguity

I am not here to endlessly qualify or to offer both sides of a debate in which I have long taken a position. I am a columnist, and my role is to say what I think with clarity and responsibility. What I think about these 4 to 5 additional trillion rubles: they are simultaneously evidence that sanctions and military support for Ukraine are working — they are forcing Russia to spend ever more to maintain a military position that is deteriorating — and the signal that Putin is prepared for every budgetary folly to avoid political humiliation. This cocktail — growing pressure and irrational determination — is the most dangerous one imaginable.

This commentary is a deep dive into the logic behind these delirious Russian budgetary decisions, into their consequences for ordinary Russians, and into what they mean for the Western strategy of support for Ukraine. No complacency, no unfounded optimism, no defeatism. Just the analysis of an economic situation that is deteriorating for the worst of regimes for the best of reasons.

What 4–5 trillion rubles mean when you look at the real numbers

Contextualizing the sum within the Russian economy

To understand what 4 to 5 trillion rubles represent in the Russian economy, a few reference points. Russia's annual GDP is approximately 130 to 140 trillion rubles. These 4 to 5 additional trillion therefore represent between 3 and 4% of the entire annual GDP, added to existing military spending that already exceeded 6 to 7% of GDP. Cumulatively, the Russian military effort potentially reaches 10% of GDP — a level not achieved in Russia since the arms race years of the Cold War.

These figures must be set against the country's social needs. Russia suffers from aging infrastructure — roads, bridges, rail networks, hospitals, schools — that would require massive investment. Pensions are chronically insufficient in many regions. Public health, degraded well before the war, now faces both war wounded and a lack of resources. Every ruble devoted to additional missiles is a ruble withdrawn from these fundamental needs.

The political decision that conceals strategic panic

The decision to increase military spending by 4 to 5 trillion rubles in a context of an 80-billion dollar deficit cannot be explained by sound economic logic. It is explained by desperate political and military logic: the Russian army in Ukraine needs more resources to compensate for its considerable losses, to reconstitute ammunition stockpiles, to equip and train newly mobilized recruits, and to maintain offensive pressure across a front of thousands of kilometers.

These military needs are real and pressing. But the way they are financed — through additional debt, through deficit monetization, through drawing on regions already drowning in debt — reveals the scale of the desperation. An army that needs 4 to 5 trillion additional rubles to hold a front it was supposed to conquer in a few weeks according to Putin's initial plans is an army that has suffered losses and material shortfalls far beyond what planners anticipated.

The IMF, Kiel, and the markets: three converging signals

The IMF at 0.8%: a revision that says more than it seems

The IMF's downward revision of Russian growth forecasts to 0.8% is a signal that should not be minimized. The IMF, as an institution, is generally cautious in its analyses and tends to avoid overly alarmist conclusions that might create market panic. When the IMF revises downward, the underlying situation is generally worse than the revision suggests. 0.8% growth in an economy that devotes potentially 10% of its GDP to military spending is economically catastrophic once you remove the effect of military stimulus.

Put bluntly: if military spending represents approximately 10% of GDP and total growth is only 0.8%, this means the civilian sector of the Russian economy is in a recession of around 8 to 9%. Nine percent civilian recession, hidden beneath military stimulus — this is what the "structural exhaustion" described by the Kiel Institute looks like. It is not visible in the headlines, but it is the economic reality lived by ordinary Russians who do not work in armaments factories.

Bond markets do not lie

Russian government bonds yielding 15% are the most brutally honest signal about Russia's economic state. Sovereign bonds are supposed to be the safest financial instruments in an economy — securities whose repayment is guaranteed by the state's fiscal power. When these securities require a 15% yield to attract buyers, it means that investors — even those operating on Russian markets under the constraint of local legislation — profoundly doubt the medium-term solvency of the Russian state.

These 15% include an inflation premium — because investors anticipate that future inflation will erode the real value of their repayments — and a risk premium — because they are not certain of being repaid at all. Together, these premiums say: we no longer trust the Russian state to honor its financial promises in the medium term. That is a market judgment worth more than any official declaration from Moscow's finance ministry.

Russian regions under the weight of debt

When Russian federalism reveals the economic fracture

One of the least reported but most revealing aspects of the economic impact of the war is the financial situation of Russia's regions. According to information from June 22, 2026, Russian regions are "drowning in debt" because of the war. This statement reflects a structural reality of Russian federalism: regions depend on financial transfers from the federal government to balance their budgets, and these transfers have been reduced or redirected toward military priorities.

Simultaneously, the regions bear costs induced by the war that the federal government does not fully compensate: receiving and treating wounded soldiers, supporting families of killed or wounded soldiers, economic reconversion of local industries affected by sanctions, maintaining public services amid a workforce shortage from mobilization. These hidden war costs, absorbed by regional budgets that lack the means to finance them, create growing fiscal pressure on local authorities.

Regional discontent as a fragility vector

Russia is an immense country, with deep regional inequalities. Some regions — notably those endowed with natural resources — are relatively prosperous. Others — notably certain regions of Siberia and the Caucasus — live in very difficult economic conditions even in peacetime. The war worsens these inequalities: regions that contribute proportionally more soldiers — often poor, rural, ethnically non-Russian regions — bear a heavier demographic and economic burden, with fewer resources to cope.

This potential regional discontent is a political fragility that Putin watches carefully. It partly explains why the regime maintains such a sophisticated apparatus of repression and why any public expression of opposition to the war is criminalized. Repression does not suppress discontent — it conceals it until the breaking point. The history of Soviet regimes shows that this point can be reached rapidly and unpredictably when tensions accumulate sufficiently.

Economic mobilization: what the Kremlin says and does

The narrative of "economic victory" over sanctions

The Russian government has developed a narrative according to which the Russian economy not only resists sanctions but overcomes them, thus demonstrating the "resilience" and "strength" of Russia in the face of the hostile West. This narrative is carefully constructed for domestic consumption and for international audiences receptive to the argument of Russian economic sovereignty against the Western "economic weapon."

This narrative rests on selectively chosen elements: nominal GDP growth (which hides the civilian economy in deep recession), the nominal stability of the ruble (maintained by strict capital controls and very high interest rates), low unemployment rates (which reflect military mobilization and forced conversion to the defense industry, not a healthy economy). Each of these indicators is real in its narrow domain but misleading when presented as evidence of a healthy economy.

The reality of capital controls and their consequences

One of the most revealing measures of Russia's economic fragility is the maintenance of strict capital controls. These controls — which limit the ability of businesses and individuals to convert rubles into foreign currencies or to take capital out of the country — were imposed after the start of sanctions in 2022 and have not been lifted since. They reveal that without these controls, capital would massively flee Russia, which would collapse the ruble and catastrophically worsen inflation.

Capital controls have their own economic cost: they discourage foreign investment (even from non-sanctioning countries), complicate international commercial transactions, and create price and incentive distortions that reduce economic efficiency. They are a short-term survival tool that aggravates "structural exhaustion" in the medium term.

Armaments workers: reluctant heroes or victims

Working conditions in Russia's armaments factories

Russia's defense industry, mobilized to produce the ammunition, missiles, tanks, and drones needed for the war effort, employs hundreds of thousands of workers operating under particularly constraining conditions. Testimonies gathered by independent Russian journalists in exile describe work weeks of 60 to 80 hours, extended nights, intense psychological pressure to meet unrealistic production targets, and wages that are higher than the national average but insufficient to compensate for the degradation of living conditions.

These workers are presented by propaganda as heroes of national production, comparable to the "Stakhanovites" of the Soviet era. This comparison is more revealing than it intends to be: Soviet Stakhanovism was also a form of coercive social pressure, an ideal of forced labor dressed up as voluntary achievement. Workers in Russia's armaments factories in 2026 put in overtime not out of patriotic enthusiasm but often out of economic compulsion or hierarchical pressure.

Economic mobilization and its human limits

Economic mobilization for war inevitably runs into human limits. Human bodies and minds cannot function indefinitely at full capacity without consequences for physical and mental health, productivity, and production quality. Production errors in pressurized armaments factories — defective ammunition, poorly executed welds, incorrect assemblies — are difficult to quantify but contribute to the degradation of Russian military capabilities.

These human limits are another form of structural exhaustion that the Kiel Institute identifies: an overworked labor force produces less efficiently over the long term than a well-treated and motivated workforce. War wears out its own human infrastructure, not just its physical equipment.

Defense spending through the lens of human rights

The money for missiles and the money for hospitals

The decision to devote 4 to 5 additional trillion rubles to the war rather than to social needs is fundamentally a values choice: Russia chooses missiles over hospitals, tanks over pensions, drones over schools. These budgetary choices are not abstract — they translate into preventable deaths of people who could have been treated, into less well-educated children, into elderly people in growing precarity.

Russia has immense social needs. The healthcare system, degraded by decades of underinvestment and worsened by the exodus of Western-trained doctors, is critically short of resources. Pensions are insufficient to ensure a dignified old age in many regions. The educational infrastructure of rural areas is in decay. These problems are not resolved by 4 to 5 trillion additional rubles in armaments — they are aggravated by this decision.

The moral responsibility of Russian leaders

I want to explicitly name what all these budgetary decisions represent from the standpoint of political responsibility: Vladimir Putin and the members of his government are making the deliberate choice to impoverish their own population in order to finance an illegal war of aggression. It is not an external constraint forcing them to do so — it is a political decision for which they bear full moral and political responsibility.

The Russian people, in their great majority, did not choose this war. Millions of Russians oppose it — some openly at the risk of their freedom, others silently out of fear of repression. These Russians suffer the economic consequences of a war they did not want. The distinction between Putin and Russia, between Kremlin decision-makers and the ordinary population, is essential to avoid falling into a Russophobia as unjust as it is strategically counterproductive.

China as an economic lifeline: how far?

The Russia-China partnership and its limits

China is Russia's main economic lifeline under sanctions. Russo-Chinese trade has exploded since 2022, with Chinese imports partially compensating for unavailable Western goods, and Russian hydrocarbon exports at a discount fueling the Chinese economy. This partnership has allowed Russia to avoid the total economic asphyxiation that sanctions would have caused without this buffer.

But this partnership has its own limits and its own costs for Russia. China buys at discounted prices and sells at marked-up prices, exploiting Russian dependency. It refuses to supply lethal weapons directly to avoid running into American secondary sanctions. And it maintains an equidistance that allows it to preserve commercial relations with the West while economically supporting Russia. This support is real but self-interested, conditional, and cannot substitute for the totality of the economic relations Russia had with the West.

The danger of economic vassalization toward Beijing

Russia's growing dependence on China creates a dynamic of economic vassalization that even Russian nationalist strategists find troubling. Historically, Russia has always resisted being in a position of dependence on anyone — this is a fundamental component of Russian strategic identity. Progressively becoming Beijing's economic satellite is a geopolitical humiliation that Putin cannot present as a victory, even with all the sophistication of his propaganda.

This progressive economic vassalization is one of the most ironic and most lasting aspects of the strategic failure of Putin's Ukrainian war. In seeking to extend Russian influence, he has created the conditions of Russian dependence on a power that has no interest in Moscow's emancipation. The predictable Russia of the Cold War — a major military power industrially autonomous — is transforming into an economic appendage of China.

The debt trajectory: where is Russia headed in ten years?

The accumulation of irreversible imbalances

Economists who study debt trajectories of states at war note that certain imbalances, once accumulated beyond a certain threshold, become difficult to correct without violent crises. Russia is accumulating these imbalances at an alarming pace: growing budget deficit, rising public debt, degradation of physical and human capital, profound sectoral distortions. These imbalances will not disappear with the end of the war — they will constitute the economic legacy that Russia will have to manage in the post-Putin era.

Russia's post-war economic reconstruction will be an immense challenge, comparable in scale to the post-Soviet transition of the 1990s — but without the Western aid that accompanied that transition. Western countries, which might have contributed to Russian reconstruction in a peaceful post-Cold War scenario, will have no incentive to do so in a scenario where Russia emerges from a war of aggression that it lost or from which it withdrew without a peace agreement satisfactory to its victims.

What the 4–5 trillion rubles will cost in ten years

The 4 to 5 trillion rubles spent in 2026 to finance the war do not magically disappear once spent. Financed by the deficit, they are added to Russian sovereign debt. This debt will have to be repaid with interest, in a context where rates are high and the country's fiscal capacity is reduced by accumulated economic distortions. The real cost of this budgetary decision is not measured in 2026 but in 2030, in 2035, when future generations of Russians will have to pay accumulated interest charges.

This is the literal meaning of the expression "burning one's future": these expenditures are resources that Russia consumes today at the expense of its future capabilities. Every trillion rubles borrowed to pay for missiles today is a trillion rubles that cannot be devoted to building hospitals, training engineers, or maintaining infrastructure in ten years. Putin governs for today at the expense of tomorrow — and it is his population that will pay the price.

The European Union and the 21st sanctions package: the pressure continues

Twenty-one packages: why keep going?

The proposal for a 21st sanctions package by the European Union, reported by Daily Finland on June 27, 2026, raises a legitimate question: if twenty packages have not compelled Putin to stop the war, why would the twenty-first? My answer is that this question poses the problem poorly. Sanctions do not aim to produce an immediate spectacular effect — they aim to maintain and worsen a cumulative pressure that progressively reduces the economic and financial room to maneuver of the Russian regime.

Each additional sanctions package fills new gaps, closes new circumvention channels, and adds layers to the structural exhaustion documented by the Kiel Institute. The 21st package is not designed to single-handedly change the situation — it adds to the combined effect of the previous twenty to maintain continuous pressure. Stopping sanctions because they have not yet produced a sufficient effect would be equivalent to stopping chemotherapy because the cancer has not yet disappeared after a few cycles.

The oil embargo and Baltic pressure

The Baltic states, according to the Kyiv Post of June 27, 2026, maintain strong pressure on the EU to accelerate the oil embargo on Russia. Their argument is strategically sound: oil still represents Russia's main source of external revenues, and as long as these oil revenues continue to flow in — even at a discount via India, China, and other non-sanctioning countries — the war financing capacity will be preserved.

The difficulty is political: a complete oil embargo on Russia would have consequences for world energy prices that would affect European consumers. In countries where the cost of living is already a major political concern, agreeing to pay more for energy out of solidarity with Ukraine is a politically difficult decision. The Baltic states, which have accepted this cost, have greater moral legitimacy than countries that have refused it to ask their partners to do the same.

What this means for the strategy of support for Ukraine

Economic pressure as a complement to military support

The 4 to 5 trillion additional rubles of Russian military spending illustrate a fundamental strategic truth: the economic pressure of sanctions is only effective combined with military pressure that forces Russia to spend ever more. If Ukraine were holding its positions with far fewer resources, Russia would not need to increase its spending. It is precisely because the Ukrainian army effectively resists and inflicts growing costs on the Russian army that the latter needs additional resources.

This logic is important for decisions at the Ankara summit: every dollar of arms delivered to Ukraine is a multiplier of the economic pressure from sanctions. The more Ukraine is capable of destroying Russian tanks, missiles, and aircraft, the more Russia must spend to replace them, the wider its deficit grows, the faster its structural exhaustion accelerates. Military support for Kyiv and economic pressure on Moscow are the two blades of a strategic pincer.

The long haul as the terrain of victory

If the combined strategy works, victory will not be a military lightning bolt — a spectacular Ukrainian counter-offensive that liberates all the territory in a few weeks. It will be a progressive exhaustion of the Russian capacity and will to maintain the war, until the point where Putin or his successors conclude that a peace agreement acceptable to all parties is less costly than the continuation of the conflict.

This scenario demands that the West maintain its cohesion and support over an indeterminate duration — several years, perhaps a decade. This is a demanding test for democracies with short electoral cycles and public opinions that grow impatient. But it is the only realistic path toward a peace that is not a disguised capitulation of Ukraine before Russian aggression.

The West's moral obligations in the face of this data

Reading economic data as a call to action

The Russian economic degradation we document in this commentary is not merely analytically interesting — it is morally significant. It says that the Western strategy of economic pressure and support for Ukraine is on the right track. It also says that Putin is not invincible, that the economic decisions he makes have real costs, and that these costs are accumulating in a direction that can eventually change the Kremlin's calculations.

In this context, releasing the pressure — by weakening sanctions, by reducing support for Ukraine, by granting Moscow an economic respite — would be a strategic mistake and a moral betrayal. A strategic mistake because it would allow Russia to breathe, reconstitute its reserves, and start again with renewed force. A moral betrayal because it would send Zelensky and the Ukrainian people the message that their heroic resistance is sacrificed on the altar of Western fatigue.

What the leaders gathering in Ankara must understand

The leaders gathering at the Ankara summit on July 7–8, 2026 have a historic responsibility. They have clear economic data on the trajectory of the Russian economy. They have military analyses on the state of the Ukrainian front. They have the commitments of their treaties on collective defense. And they have Zelensky's example, who has proved that a determined people can hold out against a larger aggressor if its allies support it.

The decision they will make at Ankara — to strengthen or weaken the commitment, to maintain or ease sanctions, to expand or reduce support for Ukraine — will be one of those moments that history judges. Not in the summit speeches, which are always solemn and committed. But in the concrete decisions, the implementation timelines, the real amounts of commitments and their translation into verifiable actions.

The budgetary power struggle within the Russian leadership

Tensions between economic technocrats and military hawks

The announcement of four to five trillion additional rubles in military spending did not happen without tensions within the Russian power structure. The Bank of Russia, led by Elvira Nabiullina, has been fighting a rearguard action since the invasion to limit the inflationary consequences of war spending. On several occasions, she has raised key rates to levels that would have strangled any other economy. These decisions, difficult to make in the face of a security apparatus demanding unlimited resources, testify to a real tension between the economic technocrats and the military hawks of the Kremlin.

The Russian economists and analysts who dare to express reservations about the budgetary trajectory — rare and careful in their public formulations — signal the same reality: Russia cannot maintain military spending equivalent to 7–8% of GDP indefinitely without provoking either a major inflationary crisis, or a collapse of public services, or both simultaneously. This impossible equation forces the Kremlin to juggle with increasingly painful choices.

The sectors sacrificed to finance the war: health, education, infrastructure

The budgetary reallocation in favor of the military-industrial complex is necessarily done at the expense of other budget items. Cuts in regional health budgets have been documented by independent Russian media — those that have not yet been shut down or whose journalists have not yet fled. Provincial hospitals lack medications, equipment, and staff. Civilian infrastructure — roads, bridges, water and sanitation networks — suffers from chronic underinvestment that worsens every year of the war.

The education sector is not spared. Universities and research institutes, already weakened by the exodus of teachers and researchers since 2022, see their budgets compressed while military schools and defense-related technical training programs receive increased resources. This deformation of human capital will have long-term consequences on the Russian economy's capacity for innovation and competitiveness. The Kremlin sacrifices the future to hold the present — a choice that defines all authoritarian war economies.

Oil and gas markets: the Achilles' heel of Russian financing

Hydrocarbon dependency and the fragility of the Russian model

More than 40% of Russian federal budget revenues depend on taxes and royalties on hydrocarbon exports. This structural dependency on oil and gas makes the Russian economy extremely vulnerable to fluctuations in world energy prices. When Brent and Ural prices — the Russian crude sold at a growing discount — are high, revenues comfortably cover military spending. When prices fall, the deficit mechanically worsens and budgetary choices become even more painful.

The oil price cap imposed by the G7 at 60 dollars per barrel, even imperfectly applied, has contributed to reducing Russian oil revenues relative to their potential level. The creation of a "shadow fleet" of tankers to circumvent these restrictions has partially mitigated the impact, but at the cost of considerable logistics and insurance expenses that reduce net margins accordingly. The incomplete effectiveness of the cap perfectly illustrates the challenges of sanctions implementation in a globalized market.

The redirection of exports toward Asia: opportunity or dependency?

Faced with the closure of European markets, Russia has massively redirected its hydrocarbon exports toward Asia, primarily China and India. This diversification has made it possible to maintain significant export volumes, but at the cost of a discount on prices charged to Asian buyers — who have perfectly understood their advantageous bargaining position and exploited it without scruple. Russia is no longer in a position to dictate its terms; it is now the Asian buyer who sets the price.

This redirection also has infrastructural limits. Russian export pipelines and terminals were built for European markets. Adapting them to Asian markets requires considerable investments — Power of Siberia 2, expansion of Arctic LNG terminals — whose realization depends on technologies and equipment now under sanctions. Russia finds itself caught in a vice: it needs investments it can no longer finance with the partners capable of realizing them.

Conclusion: the ruble does not lie, Putin does

Arithmetic as the ultimate judge

Putin's speeches about the resilience of the Russian economy, the futility of sanctions, and Russia's unlimited capacity to finance its war run up against a reality that economic arithmetic cannot twist: 80-billion deficit, bonds yielding 15%, 0.8% growth despite 10% of GDP in military spending, indebted regions, brain drain, exhaustion of physical capital. These figures are not political constructions of the hostile West. They are the economic reality of Russia in 2026.

The 4 to 5 trillion rubles that Moscow burns to hold its front are the most brutal expression of this reality: Russia is spending its future to pay for a present that costs it ever more and delivers ever less against the objectives it set for itself. This arithmetic always ends up imposing its laws — even on the dictatorships most determined to deny them.

Ukraine holds, the West must hold too

Volodymyr Zelensky and the Ukrainian people are holding. Against all expectations, with a resilience that commands admiration and respect. They are holding with limited resources, immense human losses, and permanent uncertainty about the sustainability of Western support. This tenacity is the foundation on which the Western strategy of economic pressure can work. But this foundation erodes if the West — at Ankara and beyond — does not maintain its own commitments with the same constancy.

Moscow is burning its future to hold the front. Whether we hold our own line of support for Kyiv is the variable that will determine whether this combustion eventually suffocates the Russian war machine. The 4 to 5 trillion rubles are proof that pressure is working. The Ankara summit must be proof that the West will not let go.

By Maxime Marquette, columnist

Columnist's transparency note

My positioning and its effects on this commentary

This commentary is deliberately partisan. I support Ukraine, I criticize Putin's economic policy, and I advocate for the maintenance of sanctions and Western support for Kyiv. These positions have been clearly stated from the outset. The reader seeking a neutral analysis of the Russian military budget will find more detached sources — my role here is to take a position with the available data.

The figures I use — 80-billion deficit, 4 to 5 trillion rubles, bonds yielding 15%, 0.8% growth — come from real sources dated from June 22 to 27, 2026. They are factual within their respective scopes. Their interpretations and projections are my own.

What I acknowledge of my uncertainties

I cannot predict with certainty how Putin will behave in the face of economic degradation. He may decide to negotiate, to escalate, to repress further, or to find new resources I am not thinking of. The history of authoritarian leaders in difficult positions is full of surprises — not always in the direction that liberal analysts prefer.

I also acknowledge that my pro-Ukrainian convictions may lead me to overestimate the impact of sanctions and to underestimate Russian resistance capacity. I try to correct this bias by relying on sources that, like The Economist, refuse easy optimism about imminent collapse. But the corrective is probably not perfect.

Sources

Primary sources

Ground News/Bloomberg — Russia to increase war spending by additional 4–5 trillion rubles — June 23, 2026

United24 Media — Russia's budget deficit tops 80 billion — June 23, 2026

The Economist — Russia's war economy has problems but is not about to crash — June 22, 2026

RBC-Ukraine — Russia's economy has reached a dead end — June 26, 2026

Secondary sources

Euromaidan Press — EU keeps full Russia economic sanctions wall standing to 2027 — June 26, 2026

Kyiv Post — Balts press EU to accelerate Russian oil embargo — June 27, 2026

Daily Finland — EU proposes 21st package of sanctions — June 27, 2026

DN.gov.ua — Russian regions drowning in debt due to war — June 22, 2026