Behold the Russian economy, a terminal patient currently sprinting a marathon because the doctors have replaced its blood with pure adrenaline and military-grade amphetamines. The world’s financial voyeurs are currently staring at the Kremlin’s spreadsheets with a mixture of confusion and suppressed horror, noting that despite the 'besieged' nature of the motherland’s finances, the numbers are twitching in ways that suggest life. The 'good times' are officially dead, buried in a shallow grave alongside any hope for a rational geopolitical future, yet the corpse of the Russian market remains remarkably warm to the touch. This is the miracle of the 'War Keynesianism'—a strategy that involves burning your own house to the ground just to keep the living room warm for ten minutes.

The most delicious irony of this entire farce is the 'strong wage growth' being touted by analysts who clearly haven't stepped foot in a provincial tractor factory recently. It turns out that when you send several hundred thousand able-bodied men into the demographic wood-chipper of a 'special' territorial dispute, and another few hundred thousand of the cleverest ones flee to Georgia or Kazakhstan to avoid becoming fertilizer, the supply of people capable of operating a spreadsheet or a lathe drops significantly. In the simplistic, moronic world of supply and demand, this is a win. If you are one of the few remaining Russians who isn’t currently sitting in a trench or a prison cell, you are suddenly a hot commodity. You can demand more rubles—rubles that are increasingly worth less than the paper they are printed on, but more rubles nonetheless. It is the Black Death model of economic stimulus: when half the village dies, the survivors get a pay raise. Truly, a triumph of the human spirit.

Meanwhile, the Russian military-industrial complex is currently acting as a giant, cannibalistic parasite, devouring every scrap of national resources to produce tanks that have the lifespan of a Mayfly once they reach the front. This is 'growth' in the same way that a tumor is 'growth.' It adds to the GDP, sure, but it doesn't actually produce anything that anyone can eat, wear, or use to improve their miserable existence. It is an economy of explosions. You take raw materials, you pay people inflated wages to turn them into steel boxes, and then you send those boxes to be converted into scrap metal within forty-eight hours. The money circulates, the factories hum, and the national debt remains manageable only because nobody is allowed to ask questions without falling out of a high-altitude window.

Then there is the Central Bank, led by Elvira Nabiullina, the only adult in a room full of toddlers who have found a box of matches and a canister of gasoline. She keeps raising interest rates to levels that would cause a mass heart attack in any Western capital, desperately trying to prevent the ruble from becoming a decorative wall covering. She is the frantic janitor trying to mop up a flood while the Kremlin keeps the taps running at full blast. The Western analysts, those credentialed ghouls who treat human misery as a data point for their Bloomberg terminals, are fascinated by her 'resilience.' They ignore the fact that a 'resilient' economy that requires 19% interest rates just to stay upright is not an economy—it’s a hostage situation.

Of course, we must not forget the hypocritical cacophony from the West. While European leaders strike poses of moral outrage and talk about 'crushing' the Russian machine, they continue to shuffle paperwork that allows them to buy Russian gas through Indian middlemen or 'shadow fleets.' The sanctions are a Swiss cheese of loopholes, designed to let politicians pretend they have a conscience while ensuring their voters don’t have to pay five euros for a loaf of bread. The Left wrings its hands about the humanitarian cost while the Right quietly wonders if they can buy some discounted Siberian timber. Everyone is lying. The Kremlin lies about its prosperity, the West lies about its efficacy, and the Russian worker lies about his satisfaction as he trades his future for a handful of debased currency.

Ultimately, Russia is transforming into the world’s most heavily armed gas station with a terminal identity crisis. Having been evicted from the European country club for bad behavior, it is now desperately trying to convince China that they are 'equals.' China, for its part, is happy to treat Russia as a vassal state, providing cheap electronics and mid-tier cars in exchange for the firesale of an entire nation’s natural resources. This is the 'clinging on' that the headlines mention. It is the slow, agonizing descent of a former superpower into a footnote of history, buoyed only by the fact that it is currently too big and too violent to fail all at once. The good times didn't just end; they were liquidated, and the only thing left to celebrate is that the wages for the survivors are high enough to afford the vodka needed to forget the entire ordeal.