Vladimir Putin promised Russians a revival of national greatness. What he has delivered instead is a second-rate Soviet rerun — complete with doctored statistics, oil-fed illusions, and an economy rotting beneath the surface.
This week’s data from Moscow’s own statisticians — the manufacturing PMI falling yet again — strips away the Kremlin’s propaganda. Russia’s factories are not “rebounding” or “adapting” to sanctions. They are breaking down. Orders are drying up, supply chains are strangled, and even state-owned firms are running on fumes. It is the same decay that killed the Soviet Union, accelerated by one man’s vanity war.
Putin’s so-called “sovereign economy” is neither sovereign nor an economy. It is a war machine with a GDP figure attached, sustained only by oil smuggling, conscripted labour, and forced optimism. Industrial “growth” comes from weapons factories running night shifts. Civilian industry is suffocating.
The Kremlin calls this resilience; economists call it delusion. Defence now consumes nearly one-tenth of Russia’s GDP — the same ratio that bankrupted the USSR in the 1980s. The new Russia is burning its seed corn to look strong. And like the Soviet empire before it, it mistakes production quotas for progress.
Factories are producing artillery shells instead of cars. Engineers have been drafted into military plants. Inflation rises, wages stagnate, and consumer goods vanish. The central bank is printing roubles faster than it can invent excuses.
It is Brezhnev’s USSR, but with better graphics.
Propaganda and Paranoia in Equal Measure
What is collapsing in Russia is not only output, but trust. Putin’s ministries suppress real figures, massage the data, and arrest anyone who says the obvious — that the economy is dying from within. Officially, unemployment is low; in reality, hundreds of thousands are on “involuntary leave.”
The Soviet habit of make-believe lives on. When the system fails, the bureaucrats blame “external sabotage.” When the shelves empty, they talk of “temporary difficulties.” When the ruble crashes, it is “the result of Western hostility.”
But the real saboteur is Putin himself. He has turned Russia into a military plantation where conscription is economic policy and propaganda replaces accounting.
A Superpower Built on Sand
Every illusion rests on oil. Russia’s “shadow fleet” — that armada of re-flagged, uninsured tankers shuttling crude under false names — props up the war budget. Without it, the Kremlin could not pay its soldiers or subsidise its puppet regions. Yet even this lifeline is fraying. Western regulators and insurers are closing loopholes. The ships are ageing, uninsured, and dangerous — floating metaphors for Putin’s rule.
Like the late Soviet Union, today’s Russia pretends to modernise while sinking into dependency. It leans on China for trade, on Iran for drones, and on smugglers for spare parts. The more Putin shouts about “sovereignty,” the more he mortgages it away.
The Ghost of 1989
The parallels with the 1980s are too glaring to ignore. Then, as now, the Kremlin boasted of “stability” while the economy ossified. Then, as now, the empire clung to military prestige as living standards collapsed.
The Soviet Union ultimately died not from Western subversion but from arithmetic. You cannot fight a global war, subsidise an empire, and run a command economy forever. Putin is discovering the same truth — with fewer ideologues but far more accountants watching.
His problem is not NATO. It is the same terminal disease that consumed the USSR: the inability to tell the truth. The Soviet Union collapsed when its own people stopped believing the lies. Putin’s Russia is halfway there.
Europe’s Opportunity — and Its Test
For Europe, the lesson is not just that sanctions work — though they clearly do — but that patience does too. Russia’s decline is not dramatic, but inexorable. Each month brings fewer resources, fewer workers, and more desperation.
The task now is to hold the line, close the loopholes, and expose the hypocrisy. Every Greek-owned tanker that hauls Russian oil, every Western insurer that quietly underwrites the shadow fleet, prolongs the agony. Europe’s role must be merciless clarity.
Putin’s economy, like his regime, is an edifice built on fear and falsehood. It can survive repression for a while. But in the end, even dictators cannot bully mathematics. The rouble cannot be intimidated, the factories cannot be lied to, and the laws of supply and demand do not salute the Kremlin flag.
When this system finally falls — as it must — it will not be NATO that brought it down, but the same force that crushed the Soviet one: the dead weight of its own lies.
Greek-linked tankers and Russia’s shadow fleet: where does EU enforcement go next?
Click here for more News & Current Affairs at EU Today
Main Image, Facebook.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
