Russia Will Be Paying for Its War on Ukraine Long After It Ends

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1. *SS from Bloomberg News:*

   Russia will be paying for its invasion of Ukraine for years to come even if the fighting ended tomorrow, as the government plugs a widening gap in the military budget with increasingly costly borrowing.

   As US President Donald Trump pushes for a deal to end the war, the future bill for Moscow keeps growing. In one of the final bond auctions of the year, the government on Wednesday issued 108.9 billion rubles ($1.36 billion) in debt known as OFZ, taking the total for 2025 so far to 7.9 trillion rubles, sharply surpassing the previous record set in 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic.

   Back then, the central bank’s key rate was as low as 4.25%, while it reached a record 21% a year ago. Even after the Bank of Russia began cutting borrowing costs in June, to 16.5% now, money has remained extremely expensive for households, businesses and the state.

2. Copium at full speed

3. One of under appreciated problems Russia is creating is within banking sector. Loads of toxic unviable loans on banks balance sheets. Official numbers are high but hidden spending that building up a time bomb.

4. The debt that Russia took on to fight this war that exists as a simple figure on some balance sheet is a tiny fraction of the total amount of “borrowing from the future” that Kremlin has been doing.
   The real debt is in millions of people being taken out of an already collapsing demographic pyramid, in surrendering a lion’s share of the civilian economy to China, in total abandonment of any effort to develop an economic model more sophisticated than taking stuff out of the ground (and even that is now ailing), not to mention the long-term effects of cuts to healthcare and education, the deferred infrastructure maintenance and less tangible costs like the regime’s loss of legitimacy that fighting this war that nobody understands incurred necessitating a tighter and more costly apparatus of control over the population.

5. Same for Europe

6. Can’t the Russian government just print money and inflate the debt away? How else will they pay the debt

7. They wont pay anything, they will be under new management, the chinese managament.

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