January 1, 2025: At a high school in the northwestern city of Arkhangelsk, high school students have been using 3-D printers to produce grenade components for Russian soldiers in Ukraine. The government is encouraging Russian civilians to help out any way they can to provide Russian soldiers equipment and components they need. The Russians are emulating what the Ukrainians were doing even before the war started, especially when it came to homemade drones. Children make weapons components and adults are encouraged to collect winter clothing and other equipment for soldiers. Calling on civilians to supply the troops that the government can’t afford to provide is traditional in Russia. Local and Republic governments in 2022 and 2023 had to supply uniforms and equipment for raw recruits from their areas. Government-supplied equipment is subject to loss or substituting inferior items because of corruption. All of this is a desperate effort to close the capability gap between Russian forces and those of the NATO coalition.

One reason Russia is still fighting in Ukraine is to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO. Russian military experts believe that the American and NATO military superiority over Russia is greater than it was during the Cold War. That explains why many Russians support Russia threatening to use its nuclear weapons and special operations subterfuge and deception forces to achieve anything against foreign enemies. While this has proved to be useful in explaining how the current Russian government will somehow do the impossible and rebuild the ancient Russian empire, it has not worked in practice. Despite that, the current Russian leadership has kept trying.

In 2014 Russian leaders began using a new term, New Russia, to describe what they were doing in Ukraine and, without saying so, planned to do elsewhere. The objective was to restore the old Russian Empire built by the czars over several centuries, taken over by the communists in the 1920s and then lost by the communists in 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed. This caused half the Soviet population to leave for newly formed, or re-formed, nations. Current Russian leaders, especially Vladimir Putin, are quite explicit in describing this loss of empire as the greatest tragedy of the 20th century. Many Russians agree, although most of the people in the 14 new nations created from the wreckage of that empire do not. Nor do most Russian neighbors.

Officially Russia denies all this ill will but the restoration of the centuries old Russian Empire remains a popular goal among Russians, whether the state controlled media puts a spotlight on that or not. Ukraine was always a key component of that empire and Russians wants it back. To do that the cost, in political, financial and military terms has, so far, been higher than expected.

While rebuilding the empire is popular inside Russia it has terrified and united the rest of Europe and led to a growing militarization effort. Russia’s economy cannot match the rest of Europe and as Europe revives its military power Russia will be at a disadvantage there as well. While Russia has nuclear weapons, so does France and Britain. Then there is the United States which has the largest GDP on the planet as well as nuclear weapons, large armed forces and is the primary supplier of weapons for Ukraine.

Meanwhile Russia has a very embarrassing problem in the former parts of the Soviet Union that were not mainly Slavs. This means Central Asia where the locals, mainly Turkic and other non-Slavs always resented Russian domination. The ethnic Russian minority left in the 1990s and now the number of locals who can speak Russian is rapidly shrinking. Since the early 1990s, these unwilling provinces of the former Russian empire have lost between a third and half of their Russian speakers. Next to Poland there are the Baltic States where the favorite second language is now English while in the east it is Chinese and English. During the Soviet years the majority of the locals could speak or at least understand some Russian. The speed with which that disappeared was amazing, and demoralizing for Russians.

Russia still has a lot of non-Slav minorities and these minorities have higher birth-rates than the ethnic Russians. For centuries Russia, which was rebranded as the Soviet Union in the early 1920s, was considered a threat to its neighbors in part because of its larger population. But since the Soviet Union fell apart in 1991 the remaining Russian population has been in decline. Twenty years after the Soviet Union collapsed, the Russian population implosion was getting worse. Currently Russia has the 11th largest economy in the world but without more local or foreign investments and fewer sanctions the economy will shrink. Meanwhile the workforce is also disappearing as couples are not having enough children. Poverty rates fell from 29 percent of the population in 2000 to just under 12 percent in 2012 and 11 percent in 2024. A major reason for the change was the collapse of world oil prices in 2013 when it went from 166 dollars a barrel to $44 dollars in 2016 and $23 in 2020. At the end of 2024 it was $70 a barrel. That spotlights another economic problem, expanding non-oil and gas industries so Russia can cover its oil production costs, which are currently $69 dollars a barrel.

The government insists that growing international sanctions, imposed because of Russian aggression in Ukraine, are manageable. But many of the economic experts on the government payroll disagree and as long as they disagree only with the handful of officials who make the final decisions, they keep their jobs. Details of these disagreements eventually leak out and disclose the obvious problem with the government promising more than the current economy can provide. Increasing taxes is difficult because it creates unpopular increases in the cost of living at a time when more people have less to spend. Another contentious issue is popular demand that the government go after the many businesses that evade taxes, often on a massive scale. This is possible because there are so many corrupt officials and a tolerance for the use of gangster-style violence to intimidate officials into going along with criminal scams.

The government prefers short term fixes that create long term problems. Most of the Russians this policy hurts have not been born yet so this approach tends to be favored by rulers who are willing to sacrifice the future to preserve the current power. For Russia this policy seems to be leading to Russia falling apart rather than rebuilding the old empire. The core problems for Russia are lack of maintenance of, well, everything, and the widespread corruption which limits the formation of new businesses as well as discouraging investments in current or new businesses by both foreign and Russian investors. In addition Russia is becoming more dependent on oil and gas exports. These commodities are suffering from falling prices and increased foreign competition. Unlike Western politicians, who have less corruption and vigorous growing economies, Russia lacks the potential for turning its current dilemma around. As more Russians become aware of that they will, as they did in the late 1980s, they seek other solutions.