Russia Is Not Collapsing
Fri 10:21 am +00:00, 2 Oct 2026
Source: https://sonar21.com/russia-is-not-collapsing-a-reply-to-con-coughlin/
[NOTE: The image on the right shows the area of Moscow known as Moscow City. I stayed in the Novotel hotel in that complex of buildings.]
Con Coughlin’s September 30 column in the Telegraph tells readers that Vladimir Putin’s decision to raise defense spending is a “desperate gamble” that could end with Russia following the Soviet Union into economic collapse. It is a familiar story. Western commentators have been predicting Russia’s economic implosion since the first sanctions packages in 2022. What the story lacks, as it did then, is evidence.
I have just returned from my eighth visit to Russia since 2023. I have walked the streets of Moscow and St. Petersburg, eaten in their restaurants, and sat in their traffic. I saw no sign of the turmoil Coughlin describes. Restaurants and shops were full. Businesses are thriving. The highways are clogged with cars. That is not what an economy on the brink of collapse looks like.
What actually brings governments down
Coughlin rests his argument on a historical analogy, so let us test it against history. Governments have been brought down by economic collapse, but the record shows that collapse alone is rarely enough. The pattern is consistent.
In February 1917, wartime inflation and bread shortages put the workers of Petrograd in the streets, and the tsar fell when the garrison refused to fire on the crowds. In 1789, a bankrupt French crown and record bread prices brought down the monarchy. Indonesia’s Suharto resigned in 1998 after the Asian financial crisis destroyed the rupiah, set off riots and led the army and his own ministers to abandon him. Argentina’s President De la Rúa fled by helicopter in 2001 after a bank freeze and default emptied people’s savings. Sri Lanka’s president fled the country in 2022 after default left the nation without fuel, food and medicine.
Every case shares three ingredients: shortages of basic goods that ordinary people can see and feel; inflation or currency collapse that wipes out the pay of soldiers, police and civil servants; and a ruling elite or army that decides the leader has become a liability. Where those ingredients are missing, regimes survive even severe economic pain. Germany’s hyperinflation of 1923 did not bring down the Weimar Republic.
Now look at Russia. There are no bread lines and no fuel queues in Moscow. The security services are paid and loyal. And there is no sign of an elite revolt; the Duma elections just concluded without incident. None of the conditions that have toppled governments in the past is present.
Russia is not the Soviet Union of 1991
Coughlin’s Soviet analogy collapses on contact with the facts. The Soviet Union of the late 1980s faced a collapse in oil prices, empty shelves, a fixed and unconvertible currency, and mounting foreign debt. Russia in 2026 faces the opposite in every respect.
Start with oil, which Coughlin barely mentions. Russia’s Urals blend is trading around $110 a barrel. Brent, the global benchmark, was about $97 on October 1. Russian crude is selling at a premium to Brent, a reversal of the steep discounts that sanctions were supposed to impose permanently. With the Gulf’s sour crude cut off by the war with Iran, the world needs Russian oil.
Then consider the government’s balance sheet. Russia’s state debt is projected at 21.7% of GDP in 2027, a fraction of Britain’s. Russia’s fiscal strain is real: the 2026 deficit forecast has doubled to 3.2% of GDP, and Moscow is raising taxes, including a new windfall levy on metals and mining companies. But a country with debt around a fifth of its economy has room to borrow that most Western governments would envy.
Most important, Russia’s authorities have shown they will act. When inflation threatened in 2024, the Bank of Russia raised its key rate to a record 21% and held it there, accepting slower growth to protect the purchasing power of ordinary Russians. It worked. Inflation stood at 6.2% as of September 14, and the central bank has been able to begin cutting rates. That is the opposite of the late Soviet pattern of printing money and hiding the consequences behind empty shelves.
The economy is growing slowly, not collapsing. The Ministry of Economic Development expects GDP growth of 0.6% this year, with real household incomes rising 0.8% and unemployment at a historically low 2.3%. Coughlin claims household incomes are falling. The data say otherwise.
The casualty figures
Coughlin asserts that Russia has suffered 1.5 million casualties, including 500,000 dead. These figures come from Ukrainian and British government estimates, and Coughlin presents them as fact. They are contradicted by Mediazona, an independent Russian outlet that is no friend of the Kremlin. Working with the BBC’s Russian service, Mediazona has confirmed by name the deaths of 258,989 Russian military personnel as of September 21. Its statistical estimate with Meduza, based on Russia’s probate registry, put the total at about 352,000 through the end of 2025. Those are grim numbers, but they are far below the 500,000 Coughlin cites, and they come from the most hostile credible source available.
The Russian military officers I have interviewed, including Gen. Apti Alaudinov, emphasized that Russia’s tactics have been deliberately designed to minimize Russian losses, and they believe that approach has succeeded. Nor did I see any protests against the war or its casualties during my visits. A society bleeding half a million young men in a war it rejected would not look like the Moscow I saw last month.
The Ratcliffe warning
Coughlin makes much of CIA Director John Ratcliffe’s August trip to Moscow and his reported warning of a Soviet-style collapse. But this “CIA report” rests on a single anonymous diplomat quoted by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Secretary of State Rubio later described the trip as largely routine. An anonymous account of a private warning is not evidence that the warning was correct. It is evidence that Washington would like Moscow to believe it.
Why Russia is spending more
Coughlin asks a fair question: if Putin is serious about ending the war, why raise defense spending by 27%? The answer is not desperation. As I have written, Moscow’s position has hardened since mid-September, and Putin has made clear that any return to negotiations will be on Russia’s terms. A state that expects to win a war of attrition, and is outproducing Europe in shells, drones and missiles, funds the war it intends to finish. That is a strategic choice, made from a position of fiscal room that Britain itself does not enjoy.
Governments fall when people cannot buy bread, when soldiers go unpaid, and when elites abandon the leader. Russia today has full restaurants, crowded highways, paid soldiers, low debt, falling inflation and oil selling above Brent. Coughlin has mistaken fiscal strain for collapse and repeated Western casualty estimates as fact. The Soviet Union collapsed because its economy could not deliver for its people. On the evidence I have seen with my own eyes, Russia’s economy is delivering.
