Kyiv Post

Most Western analysis still treats Russia like a consumer-state: prices rise, living standards drop, public patience breaks, and the system cracks. But the Kremlin isn’t built to run on broad public consent. It runs on extractive revenue, coercive control, and a narrow circle of beneficiaries who have every incentive to keep the machine going. That’s why sanctions, while still important, often get oversold as a straight line to internal collapse. Jonathan Fink, host of the popular YouTube channel Silicon Curtain explains to Kyiv Post’s Jason Jay Smart that they raise costs and friction across the economy, but they do not automatically threaten the people who actually decide, and the regime can absorb levels of loss that would end governments in democratic systems.

This is also why Moscow’s strategy is designed as an endurance contest. Attrition on the battlefield is paired with attrition against Western attention spans, budgets, and political cycles. The stabilizer inside Russia is not public enthusiasm, it is elite incentives and the bureaucracy and security apparatus that profit from wartime redistribution and the reshuffling of assets. The real inflection point usually arrives when elite interests take a direct hit or when the cash-and-control mechanisms that fund the inner circle start failing. If you want policy that works over the long term, you have to target regime durability and elite incentives rather than betting on predictable mass backlash. Different system, different breaking point.