The Day Putin’s Shortcut to Victory Collapsed

The Kremlin’s quiet plan to carve up Ukraine through Trump’s pressure just died. Now, Russia faces a much harder road ahead.

On Friday, when the Russian central bank met, Chief Elvira Nabiullina decided to keep interest rates parked at 21% — exactly where they've stood for the past six months.

In that same six months, Russia has lost more than 250,000 troops. Not that Putin gives a damn about Russian lives. But those bodies have to come from somewhere, and they are drawn straight out of the workforce. After suffering a shortfall of 5 million workers in 2023, Putin the Great has now consumed another 1 million hands in 2024 — and he’s still chewing through them at the same pace.

With a sustained collapse in the labor pool, there was exactly a zero percent chance that inflation could have stabilized while the central bank sat on its hands. Prices only had one direction to go — up. Now, by keeping rates frozen again, they’ve guaranteed inflation will rise even further.

The central bank should have raised rates. They didn’t. They chose to risk spiraling inflation in order to protect corporations from collapsing under credit stress. The Russian economy is still standing, but only because war spending props it up — and the deficits are quietly being papered over by draining the National Wealth Fund.