Letter to the Editor - The Breaking Point: Assessing the Worsening Economy in July 2025 and the Costs of War

Sir:

As usual, your article with the above-captioned title is well-written, clear and persuasive, taking a highly complex subject and organizing and extracting the essentials. For friends of Ukraine, it is all good news.

But please permit me to do a bit more than play devil’s advocate.

For me, as for many others, the essential point is: Will this economic decline allow Ukraine’s limited defensive resources to end Russian occupation?

The main reason which leads me to skepticism toward your article’s conclusion (though I wish to believe it) is that since 2022, we have been reading how economic sanctions, advanced Western equipment or clever Ukrainian military innovation will be “game changers” in this war. But none was; maybe together they will be. But the trend has been the same: attritional warfare à la WW-I with occasional high-power blasts at Ukrainian civilians or Russian military infrastructure.

In short, all the “Russia doomsday” prognoses have been wrong.

Please forgive me, but I tend to believe that Russian tolerance for suffering, and the leadership’s willingness to exploit it, including through domestic terror tactics, will not permit even significant, “irreversible” Russian economic decline to change their war policy.

My conclusion: battlefield results will determine the outcome of this war.

‎

Keep up body punches to the Russian economy and supply chain. If it hurts their military performance, then that is a good outcome. Hungry Russian consumers or frustrated Russian business managers are, I think, not even a tertiary factor in the Kremlin’s war policy. (And recalcitrant oligarchs have a penchant for falling out of windows.)

Sincerely yours,

Rome