Nearly all of Russia’s weapons have been made in the Soviet Union. It is able to repair them, but for many unable to develop new once and produce them in quantity. As soon as the stockpiles have been destroyed it is going to be nearly impossible to rebuilt them.

Even worse Russia’s population is falling. The number of births last June was at a record low. Many regions reported double digit drops compared to a year earlier. As far as I can tell, they stopped publishing data after that. That is what happens, when you have a lot of young men emigrate your country and even more importantly your economy is a dumpster fire. Thanks to a lack of Western medicine this seems to get even worse. In Russia life expectancy for a 15 year old boy is worse then in Haiti. In 2021 Russia’s population shrunk by a million people due to Covid. It seems like this is not going to be the only time that happened. Russia is shrinking. If it does not get Ukraine’s population to fuel the next war, it will have a huge problem. That is especially true, due to it no longer receiving migrants.

We see massive infrastructure failures all over Russia. Rolling blackouts become common and district heating systems fail. Russia currently has no money to fix this, which means it is going to get even worse. Industrial production besides war related products has dropped of a cliff. The only thing keeping the Russian economy alive is the military industry. For the rest we see sky high interest rates and high inflation. This means stagflation has already started. Gas revenues are down a lot and oil revenues are dropping. At the same time the war chest is half empty. As soon as that goes down Russia is going to cut back even more on infrastructure.

So I honestly doubt Russia comes out of this hole. The only things going for Russia are nukes and oil. The rest just points to a long term structural decline. Natural population decline, awful economy and complete lack of technical innovation as all the talent moves abroad. Even a stalemate is a loss for Russia in this war.