Putin's Nukes Are Out the Window

He did all of this.... on his own.

Sanctions are useless—no, senseless. That’s the term the Kremlin is pushing now. Wrapped in that same senseless propaganda is a new claim: Putin expects Ukraine’s defenses to collapse within two to three months.

I’m not sure how many newsrooms—The Times, The Post, or the rest—will bother dissecting this latest twin blast from the Kremlin. Hopefully, someone on the desk will spare five minutes for a basic Google search, because here’s the reality: July marked the third consecutive month of falling Russian oil revenues.

Russian economic planning for 2025 was so wildly overconfident that now the government is preparing to offload gold from the National Wealth Fund just to keep the lights on. Odds are, the selling has already started.

This mess is entirely self-inflicted—a Kremlin production starring Putin and his table full of yes-men. Even after the West shifted gears last October and tightened sanctions, the Russian Finance Ministry built its 2025 budget assuming oil would average $70 a barrel.

• Problem: Brent crude barely crossed $70 all year.

• Bigger problem: Russian Urals crude trades at a 15% discount to Brent.

Ouch.

And where did the decline start? With Britain’s “One-Screw Roll” policy, introduced last October. That single coordinated tightening move hit Russian energy revenue hard. Europe followed suit. The result? A steady revenue collapse since then—and there’s still more room to tighten the vise.

In response, Putin’s ministers have been slashing state spending aggressively since January 2025, trying to plug the gap. But the hole keeps widening.

Russia’s flagship state-backed mortgage program—offering homebuyers loans at just 8% while the central bank rate hovered at 21%—has been scrapped. The result? New residential developments collapsed by 26% in the first half of 2025.

It didn’t stop there. The federal agriculture budget was slashed by nearly 60% compared to 2024. And state subsidies for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) dropped 43% in just the first quarter.

Across the board, the Kremlin is pulling financial support from the real economy—housing, farming, and business—all sacrificed to keep the war machine running

The list goes on—and the cuts are brutal. Putin is shaking the state for pennies to fund the war by the billions. At this stage, even a modest rebound in oil revenues would be a lifeline for Russia’s struggling war economy. And that’s exactly what Putin was betting on: a recovery in the oil market.

But it never came.

Instead, July marked the third consecutive month of falling revenues. Year-over-year, oil and gas income is down 19%—a staggering shortfall for a government that built its war chest on fossil fuel exports.

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The shortfall is now so severe that Putin has been forced to crack open what’s left of the National Wealth Fund—roughly $35 billion on paper. No one knows the exact figure anymore, but what everyone does know is this: the Kremlin’s plan to avoid touching the NWF has collapsed. Their financial firewall—meant to prevent a run on the ruble or the banking system—is now breached.

Putin, naturally, is worried shitless about one thing: if the United States follows the EU’s lead and tightens sanctions even further, his economy could be pushed over the edge. So, in predictable fashion, the KGB has been tasked with whispering into the ears of Western media—spinning the line that sanctions are useless and Russia’s war economy is indestructible.

Ah—how cute.

But here’s a question for the Kremlin: If the sanctions are so useless, then which mouse has been nibbling away at your red bars?

More on NWF

Sanctions have always been—and will remain—a core weapon in dismantling the Russian war machine. If sanctions hadn’t eaten into Russia’s oil and gas revenue, the National Wealth Fund wouldn’t be scraping the bottom of the barrel. Putin wouldn’t be preparing to cut war spending from $150 billion to $100 billion. He’d still be throwing everything at the front—more missiles, more conscripts for the meat grinder, and more Ukrainians killed in their sleep.

So let’s cut the bullshit.

And here’s something worth noticing: most of the key data—on the NWF, oil revenues, and quarterly fiscal numbers—is still being published by Russia’s own Finance Ministry. Why? Why not just fake it?

Well, they are cooking the numbers. But not too much. Because if the books look too fake, the oligarchs and elites get nervous. And if they get nervous, capital flees—and with it, millions of Russians. Once that dam breaks, anything can happen.

So the Kremlin is trying to preserve just enough credibility to keep the system from seizing up. Capital flight has already surged since June, but it hasn’t yet hit the threshold that freezes the economy in place. That alone tells us how terrified the Kremlin is—not of NATO, not of Zelensky, but of their own oligarchs and the billions they’ve stashed in Russian banks.

Now think about this.

How much time would pass between Russia dropping a tactical nuke in a no man’s land—say, deep in a forest—and its economy going into free fall? If India even paused Russian oil purchases for three months after that, it would be over.

That’s the scenario with a “non-lethal” nuclear detonation.

The oligarchs will not spend the rest of their lives rotting in Western prisons for Putin.
They’ll move against him. The Russian economy is one drop away from implosion. The nuclear card? That window has long since closed—and now it’s being welded shut.

Naturally, given everything above, Putin is deeply anxious about the next round of American sanctions—or any Western attempt to tighten the economic noose further. The pressure is building. And while it's still unclear what the Trump administration intends to do, one thing is obvious: they’re burning up Saudi Arabia’s phone lines, pushing for higher oil output.

The kingdom still holds around two million barrels per day in spare capacity—a volume that, if fully unleashed, could drive down global prices and crush what’s left of Russia’s energy-based revenue stream. I don’t think that’s the immediate goal. But the strategy is clear: keep raising output gradually while the larger game of policy chess unfolds on the global board.

As for Trump’s threats—“50 days to sanctions” or “10 days to impact”? I don’t buy them. It’s classic Trump theater: dominate the headlines, center himself in the frame, control the narrative.

But that uncertainty must not paralyze Europe.

Brussels is now shaping its 18th sanctions package. This one needs to land hard—especially on the oil and gas sector, the only artery still feeding Putin’s war machine. Enough of the slow drip. The impact must be blunt, undeniable, and immediate.

Indian and Chinese companies actively enabling Russian energy exports must face consequences. Some would have evaded sanctions—fine. Find them. And if direct sanctions are off the table, make them pay the difference. If they profit from sanctions arbitrage, tax them, block their Western market access, or call them out publicly. Silence is no longer an option.

And what about the dark fleet captains—the ones piloting ghost ships, transferring Russian oil in the shadows, operating with shell companies and false flags? Sanction them personally. Ban them from Western ports. Freeze their assets. Blacklist them from doing business with any Western firm for the next decade.

No more soft edges.

Because here’s the truth: Putin is no longer a strongman—he’s a gambler with fewer chips and thinning cash, sweating every new round of sanctions. His empire is one oil shock, a few Saudi decisions, a string of missed payments, and a handful of oligarch betrayals away from collapse. Hit him in a compressed window, and the economy will topple. Stretch it out, and the limp will grow more visible.

We don’t need nukes to break him.

We just need to keep squeezing.

Harder. Faster. Relentlessly.

Let Europe deliver the next blow. Let America decide when and how it wants to join. Either way, the war economy is wobbling. And when it falls, it won’t be slow.

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