Russia’s economy is finally cratering. Can we get a better deal for Ukraine?

Andrew Sullivan

Dec 13, 2024

One of the more remarkable attributes of our president-elect is his preternatural luck. It’s not every candidate who gets to run against Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris. And it isn’t every president who gets to pick three Supreme Court Justices, whose prosecutors are fantastically corrupt or inept, and who will return to power just as the huge infrastructure investment by his predecessor is beginning to filter through the economy, and as disinflation continues.

But in foreign affairs, Trump has in some ways hit the jackpot. As he contemplates regaining power, the two most devoted adversaries of the US — Russia and Iran — are in crisis. The sudden collapse of the hideous Alawite dictatorship in Syria has crippled Russia’s interests in the Middle East and beyond, especially in Africa. Meanwhile, Israel’s decimation of Hamas and Hezbollah in the wake of October 7 has pushed Iran into a humiliating and increasingly isolated defensive crouch.

But it’s with Russia that an opportunity now beckons. Yes, it’s the economy, stupid. Militarily, the Kremlin has been sustaining minor momentum in the Donetsk region, and will likely consolidate some territorial gains before Trump’s inauguration. But for the first time, after the disappointment of the last two years, the “crippling” economic consequences of Western sanctions are beginning to limit Putin’s ability to keep fighting indefinitely.

Russian inflation, fueled by massive war spending, is now 8.9 percent and rising. To counter this, interest rates are now over 20 percent and may go higher before too long — a death spiral for almost any business. Economic growth, which held up remarkably well until now, is forecast to plunge to a meager 0.5 percent in 2025. Far from reducing military spending by 21 percent for 2025 as they had planned, the Russians are now having to raise it by 25 percent, to a full 6 percent of GDP.

Conscription — along with more than 600,000 casualties — has made labor shortages intense in Russia. The labor crisis has even hit the militarily critical arms industry:

Sergei Chemezov, the close Putin ally who heads Russia’s state arms conglomerate RosTec, warned at the end of October that if rates remained at current levels, “practically a majority of our enterprises will go bankrupt,” and he said Russia could be forced to curtail arms exports. […] Andrey Gartung, head of the Chelyabinsk Forge and Press Plant, said in early November at an economic forum that key branches of mechanical engineering could “collapse.”

In other words, the idea that Russia always wins wars of attrition may have exceeded its expiration date. It’s increasingly a question of math, as Fareed noted this morning:

Two scholars, Marc DeVore and Alexander Mertens, note in Foreign Policy that “Russia is losing around 320 tank and artillery cannon barrels a month and producing only 20.” Citing open sources, they note that Russia has lost almost 5,000 infantry fighting vehicles since its 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Russian defense contractors can make only around 200 a year.

How to handle this sudden collapse of Russian economic resilience? With nimbleness and pragmatism, it seems to me.

I’ve long been more in line with Trump’s instincts here than I am with the Biden neocons’, and I’d like to see a settlement of the Ukraine border and an end to the gruesome slaughter before too long. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t take advantage of Russia’s new weakness to get the best deal for Ukraine that we can. There may be a way, in fact, to intensify the sanctions that have begun to bite:

In recent months, more than 90 percent of Russian crude oil exports have been transported to China and India via a shadow fleet of more than 400 tankers. […] The Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) could take this fleet offline by sanctioning individual ships, as it already has with 53 oil tankers. […] Together, the United States, the United Kingdom, and the European Union have sanctioned 118 tankers, and officials have enough information on the rest to take quick action.

With Orbán set to be replaced as EU president by Poland’s Donald Tusk next month, the last restraints protecting Putin’s economy will go. And there’s another way to weaken Russia. If the Saudis were to use this moment to increase oil production and drive gas prices down — and they’ve made some noises to that effect — Moscow would really be in the shitter. And we could drive a much harder bargain for Ukraine.

Can Trump pivot a little? In a Truth Social post, he seemed to get it:

There was no reason for Russia to be [in Syria] in the first place. They lost all interest in Syria because of Ukraine, where close to 600,000 Russian soldiers lay wounded or dead, in a war that should never have started, and could go on forever. Russia and Iran are in a weakened state right now, one because of Ukraine and a bad economy, the other because of Israel and its fighting success … There should be an immediate ceasefire and negotiations should begin … I know Vladimir well. This is his time to act.

Two good things: he understands that Russia needs an end to the war in the near future; and that Putin is the one who has to make the move. Who knows what a final border deal could look like? A partition on current armistice lines, with Western security guarantees for Ukraine, or EU membership, is the obvious and inevitable endpoint. But the tougher the sanctions and the worse the Russian economy gets, the better the deal we will get.

Trump has huge leeway to reach a settlement. I just hope he understands that at this point, we have no need to be magnanimous. Or to rush.

New On The Dishcast: Christine Rosen

Christine is a columnist for Commentary and a co-host of The Commentary Magazine Podcast. She’s also a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a fellow at UVA’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture. The author of many books, her new one is The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World.

Listen to the episode here. There you can find two clips of our convo — on algorithms killing serendipity, and smartphones killing quiet moments. That link also takes you to a lot more commentary on the popular episode with Anderson Cooper on grief, complete with dog pics. And readers continue the discussion over Ukraine, Biden’s pardon, and transgender topics.

Money Quotes For The Week

“It was a pleasure to have dinner the other night with Governor Justin Trudeau of the Great State of Canada,” – Donald Trump.

“The thing that drove me crazy was seeing how the lives of young gay, sometimes autistic, children were being destroyed on the altar of trans activism … and meeting young people who had effectively been sterilized. It’s horrific,” – Kemi Badenoch, the new British Tory leader, on child sex reassignment.

“Dear White People, I don’t know why I feel the need to keep talking to you. I don’t know why part of me still has hope for you and for us. Some of you are too far gone,” – Jamaal Bowman, outgoing congressman.

“The anti-corporate psycho killer, caught in a Mickey D’s after being made on camera in a Starbucks. Let’s savor the irony,” – Jeff Blehar.

“He’s the asshole that’s going to die in prison. Congratulations if you want to celebrate that. A sewer is going to sewer. That’s what social media is about,” – John Fetterman on the CEO killer.

“We need some Black vigilantes. People want to jump up and choke us and kill us for being loud? How about we do the same when they attempt to oppress us?” – Hank Newsome, co-founder of New York BLM.

“Porn featuring violence against women is also extremely popular among women. It is far more popular among women than men. I hate saying that because misogynists seem to love this fact. Fantasy life isn’t always politically correct,” – Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, data scientist.

“AI has been a censorship machine from Day One. It is 100% intentional. This is how you end up with black George Washington at Google. These companies were born woke. They were born to be censorship machines … So if that AI — call it what you want: woke, biased, censored, politically controlled — you are in a hyper-Orwellian, China-style, social-credit-system nightmare,” – Marc Andreessen.

The Excusing Of Political Violence

Like everyone else, I was glued to the news about the shooting of UnitedHealthcare’s CEO, Brian Thompson. But as it all shook out, the greater meaning of the story seemed to me to evaporate. Luigi Mangione is clearly mentally ill, and this explains all of it. He wasn’t obsessed with health insurance abuses; had no personal beef with Thompson or his company; but decided to act out this deranged fantasy anyway: “The parasites had it coming.”

The only deeper meaning is the way in which so many, primarily on left, celebrated this murderer and his deed. Lambasting an industry is one thing; cheering the symbolic murder of an innocent representative of that industry is quite another. And there’s a glibness to the celebration of violence on social media that is only held by those who have never personally experienced actual violence.

And this demonization of individuals like Thompson — and wishing violence upon them — is not new. It’s a cancer on social media, and can lead to actual violence against real human beings. To wit: the hounding of the writer Jesse Singal by trans activists. The tactics these people use — outright lies about his work, outrageous smears, despicable vilification — reflects the degenerate, illiberal, irrational nature of the transqueer movement, and its quintessentially fascist temperament.

So when Singal gingerly joined Bluesky this week, the social media platform now embraced by the woke, the reaction was immediate and insane. One poster wrote: “Jesse Singal. 2 to the chest. 1 to the forehead a little less than an inch above the nasal bridge.” To which another replied: “I like to imagine him slowly and methodically beaten into pulp with a tire iron.” Another: “I hope someone United Healthcares his ass.” And this kind of rhetoric has been directed at Jesse for years. Why? Because he is a meticulous, brave, and relentless reporter who deserves a Pulitzer — if they meant anything anymore — for his exposure of reckless sex reassignments of children with gender dysphoria.

The illiberalism in this increasingly pagan culture is deepening. We need to call it out more forcefully than ever. Before someone else is shot in the back.

The View From Your Window

Flamingo Beach, Aruba, 1.28 pm

Dissents Of The Week

A reader writes:

While I appreciate your piece on the Hunter pardon as a thought piece set in the olden times, I feel like what you’re saying isn’t relevant for our times now. You are right about the use and abuse of pardons, but what Biden did will not change anything with Trump. Sure, Trump will say, “Well Biden did it” — but he will do with the pardon what he wants to regardless of what Biden did or didn’t do.

Trump has flat-out said he is out for revenge, and his picks for Justice and the FBI support that. Just because he didn’t go after Hilary Clinton doesn’t mean he won’t go after others now. So I think Biden did need to protect his son.

Another dissent:

I appreciate that your critique of pardons extends beyond Joe Biden to Trump, the American people, and the Founders, in that order. I agree. But what about it? The solution can’t be that Democrats scrupulously behave themselves while Trump and the GOP run riot over the rule of law, dismissing special prosecutors and FBI directors — impeachable offenses at one time — while quashing Trump’s own indictments and treating pardons as bribes or payoffs for bribes. (Out of curiosity, did you red-card Trump when he preemptively pardoned Stone and Manafort, or was the Death of the Republic not looming then?)

Any limit on the pardon power is going require a bipartisan consensus. How is that going to develop against a practice that routinely benefits one side and one side only?

This is precisely the logic of republican degeneration. Another reader quotes me:

Did the founders really “provide a nearly unlimited pardon power”? The Constitution merely says, “he shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.” Seems like a lot of room for SCOTUS interpretation, were a pardon to be challenged in court — which, to my knowledge, has never happened.

And another:

You wrote, “[Trump] may not follow through — he didn’t with Hillary — but even the threat carries consequences.” He absolutely followed through with his threats against Hillary and had her investigated throughout his whole first term. It went nowhere because there was no wrongdoing.

One more dissent from a “longtime reader and occasional emailer, and one time we met at Burning Man”:

I’m also a professor of Roman history. I’m not above Rome-US comparisons, but I have to say I was a bit disappointed in yours this time. The basic errors of fact aside (two-year term limits for consuls? not quite — rather, in theory, at certain points, you could only hold the office’s one-year term once a decade), I think your overall view lacks nuance. “The Roman Republic” is very much an ideological construct of the first century BCE and masks a huge amount of conflict and change over time. I suggest adding Harriet Flower’s Roman Republics to your reading list. It’s short and persuasive and does a lot to counteract a view of Roman history that basically comes from Cicero.

Another sends a correction: “Velleius Paterculus — the historian you quoted — was Roman, not Greek.” Please keep the dissents coming: dish@andrewsullivan.com.

Mental Health Break

The German version of the old Muppet Show intros:

In The ‘Stacks

• What’s next for Syria? What’s the fate of the refugees?
• The Unabomber is back in the news. Erickson writes, “few Democrats seem capable of condemning violence without adding a ‘but.’”
• “Insurance companies aren’t the main villain of the US health system,” explains Noah Smith.
• Matt Yglesias wants to finally retire the “Medicare For All” debate.
• After getting ample help from NYC, “Jordan Neely needed to be institutionalized,” argues Josh Barro.
• The VA is funding its first psychedelic study since the ‘60s — for MDMA.
• David Catanese compiles “the absolute worst election takes of 2024.”
• Hispanic backlash against the Dems is “not as bad as you think — it’s worse,” says Ruy Teixeira.
• Alvin Bragg is still innovating — with Trump’s sentencing.
• Yascha Mounk on “democracy’s defenders turning into its gravediggers” — in Romania.
• On the latest from France, Henri Astier asks, “How did chaos emerge from a system built to ensure stability?”
• Kemi Badenoch sits down with Bari Weiss.
• Lukianoff, contra Haidt, opposes the Kids Online Safety Act.
• “Men have abandoned reading,” writes Liza Libes, “and the publishing industry has abandoned them.”
• Dan Savage revisits “The Urban Archipelago” 20 years after publishing it in The Stranger.
• Alex O’Connor pleads, “Please, Stop Playing Music Everywhere.” Amen.
• Uber-lefty Owen Jones starts a ‘stack.

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