The Price of a Zero: The Russian Economy on Life Support

Our readers are familiar with Vladislav Inozemtsev’s work on the “economics of death” (deathonomics) in wartime Russia. Pierre Raiman offers a wide-ranging reflection on this mechanism. The death economy is the hallmark of Putinism, a new form of totalitarianism where terror is replaced by the market. But this neo-totalitarianism is a dead end, “Putinism is trapped—too committed to turn back, too exhausted to move forward, unable to change gears. All that remains is inertia—fiscally unsustainable, demographically suicidal, yet no one has the authority to halt it and it is in nobody’s interest either.”

The essence is the state. The state is like the digit 1; people are the zero that multiplies it tenfold.

Vasily Grossman, Everything Flows

I define the economy of death as a system in which death becomes the most profitable way to use a human life.

Vladislav Inozemtsev, Deathonomics 2.0

In a chapter of Everything Flows, a posthumous novel that Vasily Grossman wrote in the final years of his life, a Ukrainian woman recounts to a former Gulag prisoner the famine caused by Moscow in 1932–1933. She remembers the wheat dumped directly onto the ground for lack of silos, rotting in the autumn rain, the dust rising around the villages as they were emptied. She remembers a peasant who went mad, screaming that the sky was burning, that the earth was burning—and she clarifies: the sky wasn’t burning; it was life that was burning. Then she remarks, almost in passing: “The essential thing is the state. The state is like the digit 1; people are the zero that multiplies it tenfold¹.”

This arithmetic formula that lays bare the totalitarian state is chilling. It says that people, on their own, are worth nothing—that they only gain value when backed by what precedes them in the written number, whose value remains 1, never their own. It also says, without saying so, that this is Ukraine during the Holodomor. First, wheat for the state. Then, people.

A century later, it is a different Ukraine. An exiled Russian economist, Vladislav Inozemtsev, defines Putin’s war economy as a system in which death becomes the most profitable way to use a human life. This is not a metaphor, it is a calculation: the family of a 35-year-old contract soldier killed at the front receives more than he would have earned in thirty years.

Between the wagon hauling grain from the starving villages of 1932 and the bank transfer arriving in the account of a widow in Buryatia in 2026, the regime carries out an operation whose logic remains the same: stripping people of their intrinsic value to deposit it into its own account. What has changed is the method. Grain was seized; lives are now bought. The Ukrainian peasants of 1932 did not consent to die for Stalin; the contract soldiers of the Russian Federation sign up for Putin.

I.

In the fall of 2022, faced with the failure of its lightning invasion and the unpopularity of the “partial mobilization” decreed in September, the Kremlin invented a market. Enlistment bonuses are nothing new, nor are the payments made to families. What is new is the scale: a state sets the price of its own citizens’ deaths at a level that exceeds the value of their entire civilian lives. Rather than forcing men to go to the front, the regime buys them. In the fall of 2022, recruits were offered a monthly salary of 195,000 rubles and a death benefit of 10.5 million. By 2024, under pressure from the number of casualties and competition between regions, the amounts had multiplied: the regional signing bonus, initially a few hundred thousand rubles, rose to 2 to 4 million depending on the region; the death benefit averaged 15.2 million². Combining the salary, bonuses, and compensation, the family of a 35-year-old man killed after a year of combat receives approximately 14.5 million rubles³—more than he would have earned by working until age sixty. Inozemtsev published his first article in July 2023⁴. The concept was translated into sixteen languages; the Wall Street Journal and Fortune picked it up.

Death, the most profitable way to use a human life

The invention is cynical and formidable—doubly effective. Men come, sign up, go to the front, and the flow of replacements fills, for three years, losses that would have exhausted an army of conscripts. Within a few months, the war ceases to be a problem shared by all Russians and becomes the concern of only a fraction of the population. Though numerous in numbers, they fade from daily life in Moscow and St. Petersburg. The system makes no secret of whom it recruits: official instructions specify that “special attention must be paid to individuals with significant debt, those who have been declared insolvent, and those who receive no income and pay no taxes⁵”.

For two and a half years, the system worked. Then, imperceptibly at first, it began to falter.

Inozemtsev’s latest article, published on April 6, 2026⁶, marks a turning point. The cost of a soldier at the front has quadrupled in less than three years, but the gap between military pay and civilian wages has narrowed—from more than three times in the fall of 2022, it is now only two. Inflation has eroded the appeal of compensation, while the labor shortage—the most severe since the fall of the USSR—is driving up civilian wages. And, above all, the pool of recruits is drying up. Putin himself, receiving mothers of fallen soldiers, lets slip the logic of the system: their sons, he says, would likely have ended up as alcoholics or died in an accident⁷. It is rare for a head of state to assert so bluntly the superfluity of the men he sends to their deaths.

Figures for the first quarter of 2026 confirm the tipping point. 90,000 casualties in three months; a record 35,351 in March, or 1,140 per day. Over the same period, “only” 80,000 recruits. The balance, for the first time, is negative; the army is shrinking. The system is paying an increasingly high price for a resource it wastes. The Ministry of Finance releases funds, the Ministry of Defense spends them, men die. The regional official who sets the bonuses does not decide on tactics at the front. The commander who launches an assault wave does not see the budget. This fragmentation of responsibility is no accident: it is the condition for the system’s functioning.

II.

Hannah Arendt had a name for what the Nazi and Soviet camps produced: superfluous human beings, whose existence had become indifferent to the system⁸. Giorgio Agamben, half a century later, extends this analysis through the concept of “bare life⁹”: a life reduced to its biological dimension, beyond the realm of law and the sacred, which can be eliminated without constituting a crime and which does not even merit the rite of sacrifice. For Arendt and Agamben, it is the state that generates the superfluous —by decree, by classification, by the stroke of a pen that excludes.

But Arendt set a precondition: the destruction of the “common world”—that space where people reveal themselves to one another through speech and action. Totalitarianism does not begin with the camps; it begins with the narrowing of this space. Russia’s trajectory bears the mark of this: the assassination of Anna Politkovskaya, the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko, the death in custody of Sergei  Magnitsky, the Pussy Riot trial, the assassination of Boris Nemtsov, the dissolution of Memorial, the convictions of Vladimir Kara-Murza and Aleksandr Skobov¹⁰, the poisoning and subsequent assassination of Alexei Navalny. The common world has not been annihilated as it was under Stalin—it persists in exile, in digital interstices, in the courage of a few. But it has been ravaged enough that, when deathonomics takes effect in the fall of 2022, the market of death encounters no organized resistance.

Neither Arendt nor Agamben had envisaged that superfluity could be produced by the market—and that the victim would consent to it, calculation in hand. It is in this space—between coercion and calculation—that deathonomics takes root.

III.

Inozemtsev’s calculation expresses, in the cold language of economics, what Arendt formulated in that of philosophy: the man sent to the slaughterhouse is superfluous. His death produces more value than his life. The system converts him into consumable and depreciable raw material.

But Arendt conceived of a superfluity decreed from above—classification, decree, exclusion, assignment to a proscribed category. Deathonomics has no one to designate: the Kremlin opened a window, and the kleptocracy¹¹ had prepared the men. Two-thirds of the dead come from localities with fewer than 100,000 inhabitants, areas that are home to less than half of the Russian population¹². The Buryats, the Tuva, and the Kalmyks are overrepresented—people already relegated outside the “common world” before the first shell fell on the Donbas. This desolation is not a passive legacy: Putinism has sustained it. Oil money, captured by the presidential circle, has flowed only to the major cities; the rest, kept in a state of underdevelopment, is available, ready to sign. The mafia economy creates the conditions of possibility for the economy of death—it is the same system, grasped at two points in its logic.

It is this Russia—that of the zeros, in Grossman’s sense—that provides the human fuel for deathonomics.

The “contractual” enters a space Agamben would recognize: a contract without end, without an exit mechanism, and involving “extrajudicial liquidations” by its own army. The front is an open-air camp where one becomes a war criminal before being killed, without this constituting either a crime or a sacrifice—just a number. But Agamben’s homo sacer —the outcast of the law—was seized by power; the contractor signs. His consent is bought, not extorted. It is this veil of contractual “freedom” that makes the system more insidious than terror. The families who receive the compensation do not protest; they buy cars, pay off loans, renovate houses. Death has become a way of life.

Great works of fiction often inhabit the fringes of history, which they foreshadow. Kazuo Ishiguro, in Never Let Me Go¹³, envisioned a nightmarish society that raises human beings to harvest their organs—and, through education, makes them consent to their own mutilation. Suzanne Collins, in The Hunger Games¹⁴, depicts poor districts that each year send their children into a deadly spectacle—filmed, sponsored, and paid. These dystopian, implausible scenarios are being realized and brought to fruition by Putin. The Buryats are not chosen by lottery; they sign up. They are not raised in an English boarding school; they languish in their oblasts until the registration window opens. The fable has become policy, and the nightmare, a commonplace.

Simone Weil, a Hellenist, reread the Iliad in the summer of 1940 in defeated France: the ancient poem had just regained its relevance. She titled her essay Poem of Force and wrote: “From the power to transform a man into a thing by causing his death proceeds another power, far more prodigious, that of making a thing out of a man who remains alive¹⁵.” A profound insight into the living: Force also transforms into a thing those who live under its threat. Inozemtsev builds on Weil and echoes Grossman when he speaks of “the transformation of economically negligible lives into tangible financial assets¹⁶.” The contractual entity is a listed item, bought, consumable before being killed. The commodity-thing precedes the corpse-thing. But where Weil conceived of force as a relationship between two bodies, deathonomics accomplishes the same—turning a living being into a thing—through the abstraction of price: Force is mediated by the interplay of supply and demand in the flesh market. And the official who sets the premiums, the banker who finances forced loans, the commander who orders the assault—each deals with numbers that do not bleed. No one is responsible for the totality of the Evil produced; all participate in it.

IV.

Deathonomics is not Putinism—it is its revealer, the path through which the regime discovered how to militarize the state while lulling society to sleep. In 1944, Hannah Arendt, in the midst of writing The Origins of Totalitarianism¹⁷, described Kafka’s stories as architectural plans that lay bare the structure of the apparatus before it rises¹⁸. Deathonomics lays bare the invisible structure of Putinism: an apparatus without an articulable rationale, which perpetuates itself. Putin rules like the Kafkaesque emperor in The Great Wall of China¹⁹: he is the visible center of a runaway machine.

Stalin read the lists of those to be shot; Hitler moved divisions that no longer existed around in his bunker. The Stalinist form of terror, like the Hitlerian form of total war, did not survive their authors—because the symbolic center and the operational center coincided in them. Putinism may have invented something else: a dissociation of the two centers. Putin is the face, deathonomics is the machine, and the machine would continue if the face were to fade away. Should we see this as the most accomplished form of bureaucratic totalitarianism—one in which even the dictator becomes superfluous within his own apparatus?

Karl Jaspers was right to write that communism, fascism, and Nazism are not totalitarianism but merely the forms it has already taken²⁰; what has been unfolding in Russia since 2022 is shaping a new form—recognizable by three inversions.

The first concerns consent. Varlam Shalamov’s prisoners did not choose Kolyma. The cold, hunger, and forced labor seized them, bending them like dwarf pines—and Shalamov vehemently refused to allow any meaning to be found in this degradation²¹. The 2026 contract signatory, however, signs up.

Classical totalitarianism deprived its victims of any capacity for action; deathonomics turns this capacity against them and adds a double moral destruction unknown to the camps in this form: consent to one’s own downfall and participation in the crimes of a war of aggression. The man who signs up does not merely consent to die—he consents to kill and become a criminal.

The second inversion concerns ideology. Nazism and Stalinism required the masses to believe—in race, in history, in a mission. Deathonomics requires nothing more than a bank transfer. This does not mean that the regime operates in a vacuum of meaning²². It recycles the debris of a nauseating imaginary—the cult of May 9 and the mystical, manipulated magma of the Immortal Regiment²³, the anti-Ukrainian racism that reduces a people to the insult of ukrop²⁴, and that is enough. The Buryat mother who receives fifteen million rubles for her son’s death does not see it as a prize, but as recognition of a sacrifice. But deathonomics is not a structuring system—it is a drug, an anesthetic that lulls rather than mobilizes.

Can Putinism incite fanaticism? On the margins, yes —in militarized schools, in methodically cultivated hatred. But this flame remains superficial, because no one at the top is burning. Fanaticism, even when fed by lies and evil—that of a Goebbels, of an Andrei Zhdanov—required an inner fire to sustain its combustion. Yet no active faith, no mysticism drives the siloviki—except the one they manufacture for others. Putinism does not burn: it calculates, buys consent, manufactures indifference, stokes hatred, protects its power, but it does not produce the flame without which there is no total mobilization.

Hence the third reversal. The totalitarianisms of the 20^th Century saturated the public sphere with politics; Putinism empties it. And deathonomics is the instrument of this indifference: by transforming war into a private transaction between the state and its dispossessed, it frees urban, solvent Russia from the burden of thinking. Nazism sorted by race, Stalinism by class and ethnicity—intentional categories whose terror stemmed from the fact that one could, overnight, be cast among the condemned. Deathonomics sorts by the market, and the market sorts the poor. It is a neo-totalitarianism in which the integrated population is seemingly spared—and this is what sustains passivity.

Vasily Grossman explored the link between progress and serfdom in Russia. Deathonomics is its most recent form: “progress” is the Kremlin’s ability to wage war without mobilization; the serfdom of men from Buryatia and elsewhere who die in Ukraine so that Moscow may live in peace. They are not eliminated by the Nazi death industry nor by the grind of Kolyma, but by drones and “cannon fodder assaults”—random destruction, managed as a flow. Toward what horizon? The Thousand-Year Reich and classless society had the cruelty to promise a future. Putinism promises nothing. Deathonomics serves its own continuation—and nothing else.

V.

If the mechanism is jammed, can the Kremlin change its tune? Replace the market with terror, indifference with fanaticism, transaction with mobilization? The temptation is evident in the regime’s actions: propaganda in schools, the Time of Heroes program that claims to forge a caste of warrior-citizens²⁵. Attempts to build from above what society does not produce from below, which run up against four barriers that the system itself has forged.

The first is flesh. Classical totalitarianisms could consume millions of lives because natural demographics and imperial expansion made up for the losses. Russia in 2026, with a fertility rate below 1.4, is already losing several hundred thousand inhabitants a year, even without war. Putinism devours, like an ogre, human capital that can no longer be replenished.

The second is money. Deathonomics is expensive, but a general mobilization would cost infinitely more — salaries, equipment, logistics for millions of men. The system was designed to avoid mobilization—resorting to it would be an admission of the regime’s failure. It would also break the implicit pact that underpins the passivity of urban Russia: war is someone else’s business; Moscow can sleep soundly. 

The third is meaning. You cannot mobilize an entire nation for a cause that the regime itself is incapable of articulating. The front line has not moved much in four years. What would one put on mobilization posters?

The fourth is the most ironic: it is the very success of demobilization. For twenty-five years, the system has taught Russians political indifference. But passivity is not a habit one can simply shake off. It is a crease in the soul etched by centuries. The Russian Empire and the Kremlin have produced a population of apathetic people: it cannot demand that they become a population of fanatics.

Putinism is trapped—too committed to turn back, too exhausted to move forward, unable to change course. All that remains is inertia—fiscally unsustainable, demographically suicidal, yet no one has the authority or interest to halt it.

VI.

Varlam Shalamov had seen what the Gulag did to men. Broken beings whose suffering produced no meaning²⁶. Deathonomics will produce its own broken beings, but of a different kind—hundreds of thousands of men who had little or nothing before enlisting, who earned more in a few months on the front lines than in years of civilian life, and who return to regions incapable of offering them anything comparable. Where does a man go who has been paid to kill, whom nothing outside of war employs, and who no longer knows how to live elsewhere? And when he is maimed? The Kremlin knows how to compensate a widow, not how to heal the soul of an amputee.

By the end of 2025, at least a thousand civilians had been murdered in Russia by veterans returning from the front²⁷. The Kremlin knows this, and the temptation arises to permanently station troops in military towns—not out of operational necessity, but because reintegration is impractical. The product remains toxic, especially away from the front lines. The promises made to soldiers become acquired rights, and acquired rights become budgetary burdens.

But the system will also leave something else behind: regions that have become dependent on the money of death. In Transbaikal, Tuva, and Yakutia, bank deposits surged after recruitment campaigns, only to plummet once the funds were spent.

Inozemtsev observes a culture of commercial death taking root in peripheral Russia: getting killed for money and killing to get it²⁸. In Kolyma, death produced nothing. Here, it pays, and these transactions create a deeper dependency. Ending the war would mean eliminating the most effective redistribution mechanism peripheral Russia has ever benefited from. War has become a social program. Withdrawal would be as painful as continuation. The war against Ukraine is the first large-scale use of deathonomics; there is no guarantee it will be the last. The Wagner network in Africa was already the testing ground for an exported economy of violence.

VII.

The economy of death functions like a drug²⁹, simultaneously a death market, an instrument of war, and a mode of governance whose trajectory is partly predictable. It stimulates the economic organism it destroys.

Why has the system sustained growth for so long? Because death money flows where it is spent the fastest. Bonuses, paychecks, and compensation reach families who consume them immediately. The flow irrigates local businesses and markets in depressed regions. Inozemtsev observes that, conversely, the returns on major state projects are dwindling: a few commercial aircraft produced instead of the hundreds announced³⁰, no tangible results in electronics, and lagging AI³¹. Deathonomics fuels “growth without development³²”.

It is a Keynesianism of blood: a demand-driven stimulus fueled by death. But the model rests on a hypothesis: that men consumed by the front lines are economically unproductive and superfluous. As long as the system recruited from among the unemployed, the indebted, the convicted—Grossman’s “zeros”—the calculation holds: their deaths inject money without reducing productive capacity. But as the pool dries up, recruitment moves up into the working classes. Every contract worker snatched from a factory or a construction site no longer subtracts a zero—it subtracts a fraction of actual capacity. The money from their deaths continues to flow into consumption, but production contracts. The mechanism reverses: what once sustained growth begins to destroy it. This is the moment when the drug wears off but continues to consume more and more flesh.

Data from the spring of 2026 allows us to pinpoint this tipping point. Ninety thousand losses in a single quarter. Sixteen regions increase their subsidies; others reduce theirs by a factor of five. The Central Bank maintains a very high interest rate. The Sovereign Wealth Fund is running dry. The cycle continues, and deathonomics does not predict a sudden collapse. It outlines an irreversible deterioration: the moment when the price of a zero rises to the point of threatening the equilibrium of the digit 1.

Vasily Grossman wrote that Russia had never been able to sever the link between progress and serfdom. Deathonomics is the most recent form of this link—perhaps the darkest, for it no longer even promises progress. It consumes lives in exchange for money, in a cycle with less and less room for maneuver with each turn, leading nowhere but to its own reproduction.

The price of a zero, in the spring of 2026, is 14.5 million rubles. The price is rising. The supply is drying up. And in the fields of Ukraine, men are dying every day. Not to win a war—but so that the mechanism may continue. A mechanism that has no other purpose than to perpetuate itself through war.

1. Vasily Grossman, Tout passe, trans. J. Lafond, Paris, Calmann-Lévy, 2023 (Anna Sergeyevna’s account of the Ukrainian famine). The original Russian expression (ноль без палочки, literally “zero without a stick”) is a common idiom referring to less than nothing. The literal translation of the phrase is “ The first thing is the state. And the people are zero without a stick.” Jacqueline Lafond’s French translation (L’Âge d’Homme, 1972) explains this idiomatic expression through an arithmetic and conceptual image of totalitarianism [Editor’s note].
2. Vladislav Inozemtsev, “ Deathonomics 2.0: Why the System Is Beginning to Show Signs of Weakness,” Desk Russie, April 6, 2026 (translated from Russian; original on Riddle Russia, March 10, 2026); and “Russian ‘Deathonomics’: The Social, Political, and Economic Costs of the War in Ukraine,” IFRI, Russia. Eurasia. Visions No. 141, February 2026.
3. Georgi Kantchev and Matthew Luxmoore, “The ‘Deathonomics’ Powering Russia’s War Machine,” Wall Street Journal, November 13, 2024.
4. Vladislav Inozemtsev, “Putin’s ‘Deathonomics,’” Riddle Russia, July 10, 2023.
5. Recruitment instructions cited by Inozemtsev, IFRI, op. cit., p. 25.
6. Vladislav Inozemtsev, “Deathonomics 2.0,” op. cit.
7. Vladimir Putin’s meeting with soldiers’ mothers in Novo-Ogarevo, November 25, 2022. Wording reported and analyzed by Françoise Thom, Putin’s Total War, À l’Est de Brest-Litovsk, Paris, 2026.
8. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, III: The Totalitarian System (1951), notably Chapter XII, “Ideology and Terror, a New Type of Regime”: “Totalitarianism does not tend toward a despotic rule over men, but toward a system in which men are superfluous.”
9. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer. I: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1995), trans. Marilène Raiola, Seuil, 1997.
10. Collective op-ed, “In Russia, Alexander Skobov Pays a Huge Price for Speaking Out Loud and Clear,” Le Monde, April 13, 2025.
11. On Putin’s kleptocracy: Karen Dawisha, Putin’s Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia?, Simon & Schuster, 2014. See also Anders Åslund, Russia’s Crony Capitalism, The Path from Market Economy to Kleptocracy, Yale University Press, 2019, and Catherine Belton, Putin’s People, William Collins, 2020.
12. Mediazona and BBC News Russian, “Four years of war. 200,000 confirmed dead…”, February 24, 2026.
13. Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go (2005), trans. Anne Rabinovitch, Éditions des Deux Terres, 2006 (adapted for film by Mark Romanek in 2010).
14. Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games, trilogy, 2008–2010 (films: Gary Ross, 2012; Francis Lawrence, 2013–2015).
15. Simone Weil, “The Iliad or the Poem of Strength,” Les Cahiers du Sud, no. 230–231, December 1940–January 1941 (signed Émile Novis—an anagram of Simone Weil); reprinted in La Source grecque, Gallimard, 1953.
16. Vladislav Inozemtsev, Moscow Times, November 5, 2025, cited in IFRI, op. cit. under the headline: “Arise, the Wretched of the Earth! The Capital of an Insignificant Life.”
17. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, op. cit.
18. Hannah Arendt, “Franz Kafka: A Revaluation,” Partisan Review, vol. 11, no. 4, Fall 1944; Arendt wrote this essay at the very moment she was developing the research that would become The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). She describes Kafka’s stories as model-building—architectural blueprints.
19. Franz Kafka, The Great Wall of China (1917, published posthumously in 1931), in Complete Works, Vol. II, ed. Claude David, Gallimard, Pléiade, 1980. “That emperor is infinitely far from us… Our villages are so far from the capital that no news reaches us, and even if it does, it arrives far too late; it is already outdated.”
20. Karl Jaspers, “The Struggle Against Totalitarianism,” 1954, in Philosophical Essays: Philosophy and the Problems of Our Time, trans. Laurent Jospin, Petite Bibliothèque Payot, 1970.
21. Varlam Shalamov, Kolyma Tales, trans. Sophie Benech, Luba Jurgenson, and Catherine Fournier, Verdier, 2003, and in particular “On Prose” (1965), in the volume.
22. See Michel Eltchaninoff, Inside Vladimir Putin’s Mind, Actes Sud, 2022.
23. Galia Ackerman, The Immortal Regiment: Putin’s Holy War, Premier Parallèle, 2019.
24. A sort of Russian equivalent of the slur raghead but used to refer to Ukrainians.
25. “Time of Heroes” (Время героев) program, announced by Vladimir Putin on February 29, 2024, and coordinated by Sergei Kirienko: formation of a new “elite” recruited from among veterans, intended to fill regional and federal leadership positions. 44,000 applications, 83 selected in the first session. See Sergei Korolev and Andrei Gorelikov, Moscow Times, September 24, 2024; Novaya Gazeta Europe, “Heroes of their time,” December 11, 2024.
26. Tales from Kolyma, op. cit. See in particular “Typhoid Quarantine,” “Sentence,” “The One-Armed Man.”
27. Vladislav Inozemtsev, “Russian ‘Deathonomics’: The Social, Political, and Economic Costs of the War in Ukraine,” op. cit.
28. This characterization summarizes Inozemtsev’s analyses; see “Russian ‘Deathonomics’,” op. cit.
29. Vladislav Inozemtsev, Desk Russia, April 6, 2026.
30. Vladislav Inozemtsev, “Russian ‘Deathonomics’,” op. cit.
31. Georgi Kantchev, “Putin Wanted AI Supremacy. Now Russia Is Struggling to Stay in the Race,” Wall Street Journal, December 7, 2025.
32. Vladislav Inozemtsev, “Russia: Growth Without Development,” Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), December 15, 2025.