HOW FOUR YEARS OF WAR HAVE CHANGED RUSSIA / THE ECONOMIST

How four years of war have changed Russia

The fighting in Ukraine has reshaped everyday life

Photograph: AP

Amiddle-aged man in camouflage gets on a bus in central Moscow. 

He is holding a plastic bag that contains a bottle of vodka and a can of beer. 

Slightly swaying, his eyes blurred, he sips alternately from each container. 

He surveys the other passengers and says to no one in particular, “Keeping up the defence. 

Keeping up the defence.” 

The passengers look away. 

They are keen to avoid eye contact with a protagonist of Russia’s “special military operation” in Ukraine.

Many Russians try to ignore the war, which began four years ago this week—but that is getting harder. 

There is no sign of an impending breakdown, political or economic. 

But even Vladimir Putin’s repressive regime cannot paper over the many ways in which the war impinges on everyday life. 

Simply moving about the country, the reminders are frequent. 

Defence systems intended to foil Ukrainian drone attacks also confuse the satnavs of cars in Moscow and other cities. 

This “spoofing” can make GPS devices think they are 50 kilometres from their actual location. 

Drivers must study routes in advance, use paper maps or ask for directions.

Air travel is another headache. 

Fears of drones and other military concerns prompted more than 500 airport closures last year. 

Sanctions prevent the import of spare parts for planes made by Airbus and Boeing, which account for 90% of passenger flights. 

Last year there were 800 breakdowns—more than triple the tally of the year before. 

Some airlines are refurbishing old Russian-made jets, although these also often suffer breakdowns.

Even moving from street level to the upper stories of buildings can be a challenge, for similar reasons. 

Many lifts are made abroad, and spare parts are hard to find. 

When some Muscovites, angered by frequent breakdowns in their apartment block, recently started interrogating the lift repairmen about the shoddiness of their work, they retort by looking up as if towards an invisible overseer and saying, 

“You’re asking the wrong people.” 

The implication was that lasting repairs are impossible while the authorities prioritise the war over more quotidian concerns.

Net loss

Communications are becoming harder by the day. 

After months of restrictions, YouTube and WhatsApp are now completely blocked. 

Telegram, a message app and one of the main sources of information not controlled by the state, is being throttled—prompting complaints even from members of the Duma, Russia’s supine parliament. 

People are being pushed to use a state-backed rival, Max, which comes preinstalled on all new smartphones and tablets and is presumed to facilitate government surveillance. 

In theory, access to many Western websites remains possible, but in practice internet service providers allow only a useless sliver of their data to load. 

Top10VPN, a VPN-review service, counted 58 regional or national suspensions of the internet last year, with an average duration of 25 days (see chart 1).

The economy has held up surprisingly well. In late 2021, before the war began, economists reckoned that Russia would grow by about 2% a year in 2022-24. 

In the event, it grew slightly faster than this, despite the conflict and severe Western sanctions, as oil exports boomed and the government opened the fiscal taps. 

In 2025 growth slowed sharply, to perhaps 0.6%. 

Yet unemployment remains extremely low, at 2%. 

Consumer confidence, meanwhile, remains near an all-time high, according to data from Levada, an independent pollster.

The aggregate numbers, however, obscure the fact that the economy has fundamentally changed. 

Joblessness is so low in large part because Russia’s war machine has sucked up manpower, and hundreds of thousands of Russians have fled the country. 

Growth in 2023 and 2024 was heavily reliant on largesse from the state, not only in terms of spending on the military but also on infrastructure and welfare.

Hire for guns

Cities like Izhevsk, in the Ural Mountains, home to the Kalashnikov Group, a big arms manufacturer, are booming. 

Property prices are rising and new restaurants are opening up. 

Other parts of the economy are doing less well. 

Russia, filled with brainy nerds, had hoped to compete in the ai race between America and China. 

In practice it is nowhere to be seen. 

Sanctions have restricted access to cutting-edge chips, while many of the country’s best scientists have left. 

Who has heard of GigaChat, an AI chatbot developed by Sberbank, Russia’s largest bank?

The civilian economy shows signs of malaise. 

The number of new businesses registered last year was the lowest in 14 years, and fully 20% lower than in 2024. 

Wage arrears have doubled over the past year to 2.2bn roubles ($29m), much of them in the construction industry. 

Samolet, a giant property developer, is struggling to service its debt and has asked the government for a rescue. 

Avtovaz, Russia’s biggest carmaker, is operating its factories only four days a week.

Even those with means are not immune to the economic upheaval. 

Because of sanctions, goods that used to be imported from the European Union, or made by Russian joint-ventures with Western firms, have been replaced by Chinese substitutes (see chart 2). 

The result is shuttered factories and less choice for consumers.

There are plenty of drags on the private sector, such as a big rise in corporate tax last year. 

But a big disincentive to invest has been a wave of expropriations that has gathered strength as the war has dragged on. 

It started with foreign firms that left Russia at the start of the war. 

Their assets were quickly seized and redistributed. 

For example, the Russian operations of Danone, a French yogurt maker, were sold for a song to a nephew of Ramzan Kadyrov, a militia leader and Kremlin crony.

The asset grab soon expanded to Russian business. 

The latest case is Moscow’s Domodedovo airport, which was once valued at $5bn. 

The authorities confiscated it from its owner and sold it at auction for less than $1bn—half the asking price—to a subsidiary of Sheremetyevo airport, which is linked to Arkady Rotenberg, one of Mr Putin’s cronies. 

Even unluckier is Vadim Moshkovich, one of Russia’s richest men and owner of Rusagro, an agricultural conglomerate that is a tempting target for kleptocrats. 

Russian court rulings forced him to redomicile the firm from Cyprus to Russia. 

Last year he was jailed for fraud. 

The company is being eyed by an entity headed by Dmitry Patrushev, the minister of agriculture and son of Nikolai Patrushev, a former intelligence chief and member of Mr Putin’s inner circle. 

“Why would I invest and expand if it will be taken from me tomorrow?” an entrepreneur asks.

In the 2010s Russian prosecutors filed no more than one expropriation petition a year. 

Since the start of the war more than 500 firms had been expropriated, most of them Russian-owned. 

They include hotels, shopping centres, pasta factories and distilleries. 

A year ago Igor Krasnov, the prosecutor-general, boasted to Mr Putin that he had recovered 2.4trn roubles “for the benefit of the state”. 

A few months later Mr Krasnov was appointed the chief justice of Russia’s Supreme Court.

The war has deformed the legal system in many ways. 

People who join the army are routinely cleared of past crimes, no matter how depraved. 

Verstka, an online media outlet, has counted 1,112 court cases, including prosecutions for murder and rape, that have been suspended or dropped because the accused have signed military contracts. 

As part of the standard benefits package for new recruits, Mr Putin has granted soldiers immunity from prosecution while in service for relatively serious crimes, including theft and battery.

Some soldiers remain violent after returning home. 

Over the past four years around 1,000 people have been killed or injured by participants in the war, according to Verstka.

Half of the murders were committed by ex-convicts recruited to the army from prisons. 

Although such offenders are usually tried and returned to prison, they often receive lenient sentences.

More than 150 men from Revda, a 60,000-person suburb of the city of Yekaterinburg in the Urals, have died in the war. 

Last year two sisters, aged nine and seven, were run over and killed outside a supermarket after a car skidded off a slippery road and ploughed into the store. 

The driver was a 37-year-old corporal, drunk and on drugs, who had recently returned home from the front.

He had had his licence revoked three times in the past, but all the associated penalties had been annulled owing to his participation in the war.

Killing has also been sanctified by the Russian Orthodox Church, which has proclaimed the invasion of Ukraine a holy war and sent thousands of priests to the front, both to rally the troops and, in some cases, to fight themselves. 

At least 300 priests are believed to have signed a contract with the Ministry of Defence, receiving the same privileges as veterans.

From the start of the war Kirill, the church’s patriarch, has promised that sacrificing one’s life in it will wash away all sin, even for the unrepentant. 

(In contrast, an anti-war protester who displayed a sign reading “Thou shall not kill” was detained and fined for “discrediting the Russian army”.) 

Alexei Uminsky, a parish priest who left Russia after being defrocked for praying for peace instead of victory, told the media, “The patriarch has removed responsibility for killing in the war.”

In spite of the church’s enthusiasm, enlisting new recruits is getting ever harder. 

Many are men in their late 30s and 40s from small towns or villages in remote parts of the country with few skills or prospects. 

“They saw the special military operation as a way to catch up with their more socially advanced compatriots in terms of living standards,” explains Vladimir Zvonovsky, a sociologist from Samara. 

A signing-up bonus that reached 2.5m roubles in 2024 in some parts of the country (regions competed to please Mr Putin by providing lots of recruits) could be used as a deposit for a mortgage. 

Wages of 200,000 roubles a month was five times their average salary. 

It seemed a rational choice, often made together by a family.

More risk, less reward

Yet this calculus is looking ever less appealing. 

For one thing, many soldiers say they signed a contract for a year without realising that Mr Putin had approved a decree giving the army the authority to extend such contracts until the end of the war. 

They also did not expect to fight on the front line. 

Meanwhile, their income has been less bountiful than they had hoped, both because of years of high inflation and because survival often involves paying officers hefty bribes to avoid the most hazardous operations. 

If they are lucky enough to return home, they are shunned, not feted as the propaganda had promised. 

“I’ve been screwed” is a common refrain.

Resentment is also building among relatives of new recruits. 

“While our men are being destroyed there, we’re being squeezed here,” a woman says. 

“Every day brings new fines, bans, taxes and laws voiding property rights. 

Prices go up constantly. 

We collect humanitarian aid for the front, while officials throw parties.” 

The apparent ineptitude of Russia’s generals does not help: “A country with a normal army would have wrapped this up in one or three months, not dragged it out for three and a half years. 

He [Mr Putin] fucked everything up completely.”

The result is a shortage of recruits despite huge spending. 

According to Re:Russia, a network of analysts with its headquarters in Vienna, the army’s bill for manpower has gone up from 3trn roubles in 2024 to more than 4trn in 2025—around 2% of GDP. 

Nearly 40% of that is payments for deaths in service. 

Yet Russian casualties, thought to be some 1,000 men a day, may exceed the army’s intake.

A looming presence / Photograph: Anastasia Romanova

It is hard to be sure about the death toll and the labour market, since the government has become extremely secretive about demographic data—a sure indicator of grim news it is determined to conceal. 

In 2024 Mr Putin suspended official government population surveys until 2029. 

Alexei Raksha, a demographer who raised the alarm about the blackout, has been declared a “foreign agent”.

Presumably, the death of many Russian men in Ukraine and the flight of many others abroad to escape military service has exacerbated the decades-long shrinkage of the workforce. 

At any rate, the government is recruiting foreign workers to alleviate Russia’s labour shortage. 

It has made this task harder for itself by dragooning lots of existing migrant workers from former Soviet states such as Tajikistan to fight in Ukraine. 

An attack by Tajik terrorists on a shopping centre in Moscow in 2024, and the harassment of migrants that followed, has further deterred flows from Russia’s near-abroad. 

Instead the authorities are importing labour from Cuba, India, North Korea and Sri Lanka. 

Last year it issued 240,000 work permits to foreigners.

The war is also likely to be accelerating the decline in Russia’s birth rate. 

In 2023, before Mr Putin halted the release of data, the fertility rate (meaning the number of children a typical woman would have over her lifetime) fell to 1.3—the lowest level since 2006. 

According to a survey by Russia’s Higher School of Economics conducted that year, nearly a third of Russians have decided to postpone or completely abandon plans to have a baby because of the war in Ukraine and the worsening economic situation.

To help sustain the birth rate, the Duma in 2024 banned the promotion of childlessness. 

A zealous regional governor, eager to satisfy Mr Putin’s call for more babies, offered money to school-age girls if they got pregnant. 

Several regions are restricting abortions in private clinics. 

School-sponsored public forums on VK, Russia’s main social-media network, are being flooded with natalist slogans like “Want to start a new life?

Just have a baby!” and “Student years are a window for reproduction”. 

Just as the Russian Orthodox Church has blessed the war, its priests have been enjoined, along with bureaucrats, to denounce abortion and promote pregnancy.

Ordinary Russians are not passive in the face of this onslaught. 

Many have downloaded VPNs, for instance, to escape digital censorship. 

But they are getting gloomier: some 60% expect this year to be harder than last, pollsters say. 

According to Russia’s official statistics, diagnosed cases of anxiety and depression rose 21% from 2020 to 2024. 

Prescriptions of antidepressants were up 18% year-on-year in January.

Last year many Russians had hoped that Donald Trump’s return to office would bring the war to a swift end. 

People started to think about what they would do when the war stopped, says Elena Panfilova, a columnist for Novaya Gazeta, a much harassed online media outlet. 

That optimism has ebbed away: “Everything has frozen and turned into a grey, viscous paste consisting of bombing and shooting, bargaining and lying, restrictions and repressions.” 

As another woman puts it, “I feel like an insect stuck in amber. 

Life goes on outside but your own lifetime is frozen.”

“People now realise that even if the war were to stop, things would not get back to how they were before the war and worry they will get worse,” Mr Zvonovsky says. 

If nothing else, when the war machine grinds to a halt, the upheaval caused by the wholesale reallocation of labour and capital will be brutal. 

Pollsters routinely find that the vast majority of Russians want the war to end. 

In December a majority also told Levada that they paid little or no attention to how the war was progressing. 

Like passengers on a Moscow bus, they are trying not to think about the men in camouflage.