Oh, look. The check engine light finally flickered to life on the Kremlin’s jalopy. After years of the Western media gasping at the ‘resilience’ of the Russian economy—a resilience largely built on the frantic, sweat-drenched efforts of technocrats who would likely be jumping out of windows if they weren’t so busy cooking the books—the machine is finally sputtering. It turns out that you can only run a country on a diet of military-grade stimulants and raw spite for so long before the engine starts coughing up chunks of its own cylinder head. For the uninitiated, the news that Russia’s economy is slowing down isn't just a minor statistical adjustment; it is the sound of reality finally catching up to a nation that decided it could trade its long-term future for a few more miles of charred earth in the Donbas.

Let’s talk about the ‘miracle.’ For a while, the Kremlin’s propaganda machine—and its unwitting allies in the Western press who love a ‘scary villain’ narrative—pretended that sanctions were about as effective as a ‘keep off the grass’ sign in a riot. But the resilience was always a mirage, a fever dream fueled by record defense spending. When you dump nearly 40% of your budget into making things that explode, your GDP looks fantastic right up until the moment those things actually blow up and take your workforce with them. Vladimir Putin has managed to create a textbook case of a war economy that is currently eating itself. The labor market is less of a ‘market’ and more of a desperate scramble for warm bodies, as the country’s able-bodied men are either busy being human speed bumps in a trench or have fled to Georgia to write code for startups that actually have a future.

Then there is the interest rate. The Russian Central Bank recently hiked rates to a staggering 21%. In a normal country, that’s not an interest rate; it’s a cry for help. It’s the economic equivalent of trying to stop a runaway train by throwing a grand piano onto the tracks. Elvira Nabiullina, the Central Bank chief who is arguably the only person in Moscow who understands basic arithmetic, is currently performing the fiscal version of open-heart surgery with a rusty spoon while a room full of sycophants screams at her about Peter the Great. You can’t lower inflation when the government is printing money to pay for tanks, and you can’t grow an economy when the only thing being produced is sorrow and scrap metal.

The West, of course, is watching this with its usual brand of performative concern and hypocrisy. We love to talk about the ‘devastating’ impact of sanctions while we quietly buy Russian oil through three different intermediaries in India and Turkey, paying a premium just so we can feel better about our moral standing. It’s a global theater of the absurd where everyone is lying to everyone else. The Russian people, meanwhile, are rediscovering the joys of the Soviet era: rising prices, vanishing goods, and the crushing realization that their leaders view them as nothing more than fuel for the fire. The ‘money machine’ was never a machine at all; it was a pyramid scheme built on fossil fuels and the stubborn refusal to admit that the 19th century is over.

As the growth slows and the costs of the ‘special military operation’ continue to balloon, the Kremlin is running out of levers to pull. They’ve burned through the rainy-day funds, they’ve taxed the oligarchs until the yachts started getting smaller, and they’ve cannibalized the civilian sector to keep the munitions factories humming. The result is an economy that is structurally broken, a hollowed-out husk that is one oil price shock away from a total collapse. It’s almost poetic, in a dark, nihilistic sort of way. Putin wanted to restore the glory of the empire, but instead, he’s managed to recreate the stagnation of the Brezhnev years, just with more Telegram channels and better-dressed billionaires.

In the end, this isn’t just about economics; it’s about the inevitable entropy of a kakistocracy. You can ignore the laws of finance just as easily as you can ignore the laws of gravity, but eventually, you hit the ground. The sputtering we hear now isn’t a temporary glitch. It is the death rattle of a system that prioritized the ego of one man over the survival of a nation. As the machine grinds to a halt, the only question left is who will be crushed under the gears when it finally stops turning. Don’t expect a happy ending; in this story, the only thing that’s truly ‘resilient’ is the stupidity of the people in charge.