this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2024
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Probably not, because Russia will cut other spending or increase taxation or something prior to that. They're going to want some amount of reserves.
That being said, what's probably interesting to most is constraining Russia's spending on the war, and that happens if Russia isn't willing to let reserves fall below a given point.
There’s only so many shell games they can play before the house of cards starts to come down. They are HURTING economically and financially. It’s not sustainable for them. This whole war was a giant gamble, and the longer it goes, the worse the odds for Russia. Granted, they’re not great for Ukraine either as time progresses, but they don’t really have a choice in the matter. As long as Ukraine can hold out reasonably well for the foreseeable future, I’m actually pretty optimistic for them in the long run.
So I don't know enough about how sustainable the thing is to evaluate this myself, but there's some woman whose name I can't remember, but who has shown up on a number of interview panels with Michael Kofman (who is usually doing the hard power side of things) and Dara Massicot. She specializes in the economic and political-economic side of things in Russia, and every time she's come up, she's said more-or-less that at the level of burn that Russia's doing, it's sustainable. Doesn't mean that it's a good idea for Russia to do so, but that Russia's not going to explode economically as long as the desire to keep doing what they're doing is there; that's not a bottleneck as things stand.
Let me see if I can find her name.
kagis
Alexandra Prokopenko at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center.
https://carnegieendowment.org/people/alexandra-prokopenko?lang=en¢er=russia-eurasia
Let me see if I can go find something somewhat-recent where she's talking about it.
EDIT: Yeah, here's a 2-month-old video with a DW interview, "How Long Can Putin Afford to Wage War in Ukraine?". Haven't seen this one. Lemme watch through it, put a summary up.
EDIT2:
Sounds like she's saying that it can be continued for a while, but at some point, Russia will have to draw back on some of its priorities.
Condensing this a bit:
EDIT3: For context, going from memory, I was reading some historical data graphing historical estimates for how much the Soviet Union's peacetime military spending was during the Cold War, which is a question that produced a surprisingly-wide range of estimates from different institutions, something like a factor of two -- without a market economy, it's hard to determine what percentage of the economy is actually going towards the military. But under Brezhnev, IIRC something like 15% of GDP was within the bounds of estimates.
kagis
https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistory/comments/17ksd0q/how_big_was_military_spending_in_the_soviet_union/
https://nintil.com/the-soviet-union-military-spending/
Now, that high level probably hurt the Soviet Union...but it's also true that they kept it up for quite some time. And that was peacetime spending. If Russia were to be able to do WW2-level spending -- and I'm not sure that that will be politically-acceptable in Russia, nor for it to be sustainable, and keeping in mind that the Soviet Union was also receiving stuff like Lend-Lease assistance during that period, and that ain't happening in this conflict:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1333250/wwii-military-spending-share-income/
This has a peak of ~60% for the Soviet Union.
The problem is not if Putin can finance the war, but how much and what he has to cut to do so. That is going to massivly increased the felt burden for the average Russian in the coming months.