Veronika Prokhorenko21:05, 14.02.23

The Russian budget is significantly inferior to the resources with which the West is ready to support Ukraine.

The Russian economy will not withstand the pressure of Western sanctions and prolonged battles with the Ukrainian army – it will collapse.

Such an outcome for Putin’s “economic machine” was predicted by Mikhail Zadornov in an interview with Forbes . He was one of the last finance ministers of the Russian Federation under Boris Yeltsin (he held the position during the default in 1998), and also at one time headed two of Russia’s largest state-owned banks. 

Zadornov noted that now the Russian budget allocates about 4% of its GDP to the army, but in comparison with Washington’s spending on its defense sector, this is only one tenth of the US military budget.

“And if we add up the resources of those countries that start supplying weapons to Ukraine, and the total amount of resources that they can put up if the conflict is dragged out, then, believe me, we can put it in a column, these are absolutely incomparable values,” he said.

The former minister believes that now the Russians are being presented with an illusion about the ability of the Russian Federation to independently produce certain products of the West. Zadornov says that all attempts by Russia to isolate its economy and work for the domestic market will fail.

“The fact that we can produce everything ourselves, even for a while, is of course an absolute illusion or some kind of political slogan,” he says.

Zadornov predicted stagnation for Russia in critical areas of development. In particular, oil production, chemical industry and forestry.

Russian President Vladimir Putin destroys the Russian economy

Recall that a full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine from the first day of the war reduces the assets of Russian oligarchs . During 2022, the richest Russians lost $47 billion due to the unjustified invasion of Ukraine, as the media found out in their investigation. Already towards the end of 2022, the losses of Russian oligarchs approached $100 billion.

As experts from the Center for Macroeconomic Analysis and Short-Term Forecasting (CMASF) recently noted, the economy of the aggressor country is in for a serious crisis due to the war in Ukraine . Even with the most favorable forecast, Russia’s GDP in 2023 will decline by around 2 percent. At the same time, the most negative scenario assumes a decline in the Russian economy up to 6%.

Earlier, the Financial Times found that Putin was fully aware that an invasion of Ukraine would kill the Russian economy. He was warned about this by the head of the Russian “Sberbank” German Gref and the chairman of the Central Bank of the Russian Federation Elvira Nabiullina . 

(C)UNIAN 2023