Russia’s imperialist economy is a case study in the principle of combined and uneven development.

By FLORENCE OPPEN

Russia today is an imperialist state resulting from an uneven industrial development. Russian monopoly capital relies disproportionately on its military apparatus to exert dominion in particular regions and areas abroad and does not have the capacity to contest U.S. hegemony on a global scale. The economy of the Russian Federation was built on the foundation of the Soviet workers’ state, first degenerated by decades of bureaucratic Stalinism, and then rapidly privatized in the 1990s following the collapse of the USSR.

The 1990s were economically chaotic for Russia and spelled a rapid decline in living standards for the Russian proletariat. Western investment into the Russian economy did not result, however, in its wholesale subordination because by the early 2000s, the crony capitalists of the Yeltsin era were displaced by oligarchs from Putin’s intelligence milieu. The latter proceeded to integrate into a bourgeoisie closely blended with the state, which was rewarded with public bank financing and procurement contracts, and direct state protection.

The bloody wars on Chechnya and the Caucasus allowed Putin’s consolidation of political power. The Russian state under his grip began to actively advance the concentration and expansion of Russian monopoly capital, primarily in the former Soviet Republics, i.e., parts of Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia, but also in other countries. It also established an authoritarian regime that increasingly recovered and promoted the old Russian empire ideology to carry out its economic and political expansion.

The imperialist Russian state that was rebuilt after capitalist restoration is reminiscent of the nature of the earlier imperialist Russian state prior and during World War I and of other historical latecomers to periods of inter-imperial rivalry, such as Germany 1871-1945, which was similarly “forced” to use military might to break into British and French imperial domains. Since the collapse of the USSR, the Russian military has repeatedly taken again the role of reactionary gendarme in response to any dissent to Russian rule in its near abroad. The Russian state sought to defeat any popular movements for liberation or labor actions for better working conditions that would challenge the economic annexation of its semi-periphery. To that end it established the Collective Security Treaty Organization in 2002 to institutionalize its control.

In its short existence thus far, imperialist Russia has brutally intervened to maintain its control in its near abroad: Chechnya (1994-1996, 1999-2009), Tajikistan (1992-1997), Georgia (2008), Ukraine (2014, 2022). Yet Ukraine is not the only country that has recently been rocked by the overextension of Russian imperialism, such as Kazakhstan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Abkhazia, Serbia, and Bosnia.

The Marxist theory of imperialism and combined and uneven development

Today there are different uses of the term “imperialism.” Some use it to describe pecking orders among world powers, or as a synonym for hegemony; others theorize it as a synonym of aggressive military tactics or as a form of domination based on controlling surplus-value chains (following world-system theories). The value of the Marxist theory of imperialism, first sketched by Lenin and much enriched afterwards, aims to document the specific mechanisms of capitalism that lead capitalist states to economically intervene outside their borders, and eventually give way to military intervention to secure their investments. While the essence of imperialism, “the dominance of monopolies and finance capital” and their relentless push to divide and redivide the world, has remained intact, the form of imperialist domination of the world has changed over time. Indirect semi-colonial rule has largely supplanting formal ownership of colonies on the part of imperial powers.

The analysis and history of imperialist states must be understood as part of the process of uneven and combined development of world capitalism, breaking away from dogmatic and monolithic stageist theories. Each country follows a unique path and is always embedded in multiple contradictions. In the introduction to the German edition of “Permanent Revolution” (1930), Trotsky explains that the “abstract type of national capitalism” does not exist in reality—nor thus an abstract type of imperialism. Most of those who deny the imperialist character of China and Russia today do so because they measure these countries against U.S. imperialism in the post-World War II epoch, which they implicitly elevate to an abstract norm of what an imperialist state must be. They do not compare the new imperialisms to Belgium, Spain, or Australia, which would complicate their mechanistic logic.

National capitalist state formations—whether of semi-colonial, independent, or imperialist countries—are better understood as “national peculiarities,” as historical social formations that exist embedded in a multitude of social relations. They represent “an original combination of the basic features of the world process,” they are “nothing else but the most general product of the unevenness of historical development.” Trotsky considered national formations as concrete totalities, not as variations of an abstraction national type: “It is false that the specific features are ‘merely supplementary to the general features,’ like warts on a face.

Lenin and Trotsky analyzed the emergence and development of world imperialism from the early 20th century to World War II. Theirs was an imperialist world order in crisis, much like the one the world embarked on in the 21st century. In both periods, unequal and diverse imperialist states, each with different strengths and resulting from a varying combination of economic transformations, were vying to assert their world hegemony, in a context of increased competition and military aggressions. In his preparatory Notebooks for Imperialism, Lenin insisted on analyzing imperialist states as embedded in a totality—a dynamic world order with living inter-relations amongst states, consisting of complex relations of subordination, domination or codependency. Individual imperialist states were never considered separately from their given historical context or measured to abstract criteria or norms.

In 1916, Lenin saw huge gaps in terms of industrial, military, and financial means between powers like Russia and Japan and those like Britain and the United States. Notwithstanding these gaps, Russia and Japan were still considered as imperial powers, which were capable of developing monopoly industries, exporting significant amounts of capital, and subjugating their near abroad. Imperialist states were classified according to their ability to impose their rule on their own. While Great Britain, Germany, and the United States had risen to be “fully independent” powers, Russia and Japan were defined as “not fully independent” imperialisms. The contradictions inherent to dependent and uneven imperialisms such as the Russian one are not an exception to the Marxist theory of imperialism. The anomaly, rather, has been the uncontested world domination for several decades of a single super-power, the United States.

The historical unevenness of Russian imperialism

Today, Putin’s regime is reminiscent in its character and historical role to those played by Russia in the early 20th century. At the time, the Bolsheviks defined Russia as an imperialist state that lacked the capacity for action completely independent of greater imperialist powers because of the relative weakness of its industrial monopolies and of its banking capital, as both were partially controlled by European finance capital.

In “Imperialism,” Lenin described Russia as a “modern capitalist imperialism” that was “enmeshed, so to speak, in a particularly close network of pre-capitalist relations.” The Russian state compensated for this lesser economic development with the outgrowth of the Tsarist military apparatus, which allowed it to dominate weaker nations that surrounded it. Prior to its destruction in the Russian Revolution, the Tsarist empire made numerous military incursions against the remaining independent territories of Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia as well as militarily pushing into the Ottoman Empire’s crumbling sphere of influence and attempting unsuccessfully to attack Japan in 1904. The Second Russo-Japanese war for the control of the Korean empire and parts of Manchuria led to a mass insurrection of working people in Russia.

The 1905 revolution was sparked by mass poverty and unemployment, increased political repression by the Tsarist regime, and the growing forced mobilization and losses in the war. Close to a million peasants and workers were drafted to serve on the front, and around 70,000 died. Nicholas II was forced to capitulate and sign a peace deal with Japan in order to squash the mass uprising at home.

Putin’s coming to power revived similar dynamics. The chaotic capitalist restoration in the 1990s was followed by the centralization of bourgeois forces and the development of monopolies and outward expansion of foreign investment starting in the early 2000s. Russian monopolies were dependent on Russia’s military apparatus to maintain and expand their accumulation by imposing deals on former Soviet republics of Russia, which became its semi-colonies. The weakness of Russian financial capital, primarily concentrated in industrial sectors of low added value such as energy and mining, led Russian imperialism to claim its regional area of influence through extra-economic measures, by imposing in those countries despotic semi-colonial regimes that would secure trade agreements and debt deals benefiting the Russian oligarchy and obstruct any competition from the Western monopolies.

Today, Putin’s Russia cannot play a completely independent role, even in its immediate environment, without associating itself with a power whose financial strength paves the way for maintaining the subordination of weak states. Russia first developed an economic partnership with Germany, and increasingly pivoted to privilege its ties with China, and also Iran and North Korea. These latter relationships allowed Russia to navigate through the U.S. and EU imperialist sanctions and maintain its geopolitical strength. Despite its relative weakness vis-a-vis the top independent imperialist powers, Russia has managed to successfully subordinate its semicolonial periphery (parts of Eastern and Central Europe, the Caucasus, and the Central Asian republics), but it cannot aspire to contest the independent imperialist powers or to establish itself as a world hegemon.

From capitalist restoration to imperialist development

The modern Russian state was born in the death throes of the Soviet Union. The collapse of the USSR was a chaotic event. The effective dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 was followed by a struggle for power of different sectors of the emerging bourgeoisie, which led to a failed coup attempt against Mikhail Gorbachev. His successor, Boris Yeltsin, engaged in a “shock doctrine” program of drastic economic reform, mass privatization, free trade, abolition of price controls, and other such measures, with the backing of the IMF, World Bank, and U.S. and European governments. This move did not come, however, out of the blue. It was prepared by the growing economic dependence of the USSR in the 1980s, the rapid rise of its external debt, and its growing position as a producer of oil and gas in the world division of labor, moving away from its role as an industrial power.

The restoration of capitalism in Russia meant a drastic setback to its forces of production. The country went from being the second world economic power to a country reduced to the export of commodities. Russia began to experience a process of foreign investment aimed at reducing Russia to a semi-colony. Foreign investors predicted incredible returns on investments in Russia; in 1995 the Wall Street Journal projected potential gains of 2000 percent in three years. Ownership of the privatized companies, however, by and large was seized by Russian ex-bureaucrats turned oligarchs due to restrictions on direct foreign purchasing of Russian assets. Enormous state-owned companies like Norilsk Nickel, Yukos, and Sidanko were sold for a tiny fraction of their value to the new oligarchs – purchased with public money that had been stolen and transferred to private bank accounts; in essence “the Russian people fronted the money for the looting of their own country.

This oligarchic acquisition and accumulation of assets ensured, however, that the main share of the wealth in Russia remained in the hands of Russian players, not their foreign partners. After the failure of the August 1991 coup attempt and subsequent dissolution of the KGB, many former KGB members went into the private sector or the black market, with significant institutional advantages from their seed funds and political connections. Where they did not become oligarchs themselves, they served as muscle to secure the market positions of oligarchs, constituting a new Russian ruling class very closely linked to the old state surveillance apparatus.

The results of this shock program were catastrophic for the Russian economy and society as a whole. From 1989 to 1998, Russian GDP fell by 45 percent, income inequality massively spiked, and the mortality rate grew with an additional 700,000 deaths per year. Real wages fell by a third and unemployment increased by 8 percent. The number of Russians living in poverty rose from 2 million in 1989 to 74 million by the mid-nineties. On the international level, the state was weakened and lacked influence. When the Clinton administration pushed forward NATO’s expansion into Eastern Europe in the 1990s, Yeltsin could do little more than offer ineffectual complaints and then resignedly declared that “Well, I tried.”

Putin came to power with a promise of ending the chaos of the Yeltsin years and restoring the Russian empire. Throughout the early 2000s, the Russian economy recovered, helped by a rise in the price of oil and gas. During Putin’s first two terms, Russian GDP rose by 70 percent. In public, Putin initially challenged the power of oligarchs, declaring that he would “rid Russia of the oligarchs as a class.” In practice, however, the investigations and persecutions were directed only against his political opponents; oligarchs with connections to Putin remained unimpeded and, in fact, became billionaires. Overall wealth became even more concentrated in the hands of the elite; from 1991-2011, the wealth of the richest fifth of Russians doubled, while that of the poorest fifth of Russians fell by half.

The rise of Russian monopolies under Putin

Putin’s rise to power ensured the continuation of the privatization of state companies and the constitution of a few industrial monopolies in key sectors through a process of vertical integration. Some of these corporate monopolies, such as Gazprom or Lukoil, developed enough to become transnational companies. This process was led by members of the former Soviet bureaucracy who had turned into a bourgeoisie. It was paralleled by a fast process of centralization of capital and ownership. To encourage the formation of big monopolies, the Russian government stimulated a process of merger and acquisitions, which went from 398 in 2004 for a total volume of $25 bn to 3684 operations in 2010 for a volume of $109 bn, the peak year of acquisitions. Polish economist Marek Dabrowski argues that today, as a result, the ownership of Russian companies is “highly concentrated,” with “an average controlling stake amounting to 57.6 percent.”

In the course of the post-restoration privatization process, some sectors of the economy remained formally “state-owned enterprises,” even though they are managed by bourgeois sectors who indirectly accumulate the profits privately. The Putin regime pushed a state plan of selective industrialization to recycle the strategic advantages developed by the previous Soviet state, focusing on fossil fuels, mining, arms industry, and nuclear energy production. Some energy companies today are fully private, such as Lukoil, and others such as Gazprom and Rosneft are partially owned by the Russian state (40-50 percent) and by private shareholders. Chemical, steel, and mining monopolies are all controlled by Russian private capital.

The reason Putin focused first on the concentration of fossil fuel industrial production is Russia’s abundance in natural resources. The country grew to become the second largest producer of natural gas, accounting for 12 percent of the global supply. Before the war in Ukraine it produced 13 percent of the world’s crude oil, and 11 percent of refined oil products, and it has large supplies of metals. Furthermore, Russia is the first producer of palladium, which is needed for electronics and catalytic converters, and the second producer of cobalt, used in some EV batteries, and also of gallium, one of the rare earths now highly coveted to boost AI capabilities. In addition, Russia is one of the phosphate production leaders and has a booming agrochemical industry.

The most prominent Russian monopoly company remains Gazprom, the world’s largest natural gas company, which controls nearly a fifth of the world’s known gas reserves. The expansion of Gazprom, Novatek, and Rosneft into Eastern Europe and Central Asia is linked to the control of oil and gas fields as well as nuclear energy infrastructure, and more importantly to the absolute control of its regional distribution. These companies are also the owners of key routes and pipelines to the Western and Eastern markets. Until 2022, 35 percent of the gas and oil imported by the EU came from Russia. With the Ukraine War, Russian energy monopolies found new markets such as China and India. In the first months of 2023 for example, Russia overtook Saudi Arabia as China’s top oil supplier.

Russian monopolies occupy a significantly more limited role than those of China’s, or other major imperial powers. In 2024, Russia had only five companies—Gazprom, Lukoil, Rosneft Oil, Sberbank and VTB Bank—on the Fortune list of the 500 largest world companies by revenue. This puts it well behind imperial powers like the UK (17), France (24), and Germany (29); and even farther from the leading ones, the U.S. or China, with over 100 companies each. In this regard, Russia fits into the range of smaller imperialist powers, such as Denmark (2) and Sweden (1) or Italy (5).

Russian imperialism and its near abroad

Russia today is an imperialist state without the economic weight of China or even of Spain, yet it is actively exercising its influence in its near abroad. In Eastern and Central Europe, Russia exerts its economic domination through its energy monopolies and debt. It also holds powerful military, economic, and political influence over much of the Caucasus and Central Asia. The last case is a very good example of how Russian imperialism exercises its domination.

Before the break-up of the USSR, the Central Asian republics were heavily subsidized by the Soviets. Russian subsidies in the various Central Asian republics were a very large portion of their GDPs. After the collapse of the USSR, the subsidies continued in anticipation of a growing acceptance of capitalist Russian hegemony. A 2011 study concluded in 1992 that Russian subsidies still amounted to 25.1 percent of Kazakhstan’s GDP, 22.6 percent of Kyrgyzstan’s, 42.3 percent of Tajikistan’s, 67.1 percent of Turkmenistan’s, and 69.2 percent of Uzbekistan’s. As the newly independent republics tried to break away from dependence on Russia, the subsidies were removed. Central Asian republics lost subsidies amounting to $40 bn. Funds unpaid to the old USSR in energy or arms sales became external debt owed to Russia, which in return appropriated Central Asian infrastructure and production facilities in payment through debt-for-equity swaps. The new debt dependence allowed Russia to further its grip over energy supply, pricing, markets, and transportation in the region. It also led to “security” arrangements against “terrorists” to bring Central Asian republics into line with its own specific needs.

Under Putin, the decision to charge European market prices for gas to Central Asian energy importers had a dramatic impact, just as it had in Armenia. Meanwhile, the weakness of the economies of the Central Asian republics sent millions of migrant workers into Russia. Their remittances amounted to sizable portions of some Central Asian republics’ GDP. This made it possible for Russia to begin to use the stick of tightening immigration regulation to get Central Asian republics to join the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU), a trade bloc created in 2014, which favors Russian interests and today encompasses 183 million people and a combined GDP of $2.4 trillion.

Russia’s imperialist war on Ukraine since 2014

Putin’s military aggression against Ukraine is to be understood as the most egregious manifestation of Russian imperialism. In 2014, Putin’s seizure of Crimea and a small portion of the Donbass was a response to the threat to Russian investments and political interests in Ukraine, as well as responding to the need find an escape valve for the internal crisis of his regime, with an opposition movement that began in 2011-2012 and that gathered tens of thousands in the streets. Eight years later, Putin carried out the invasion and occupation of 20 percent of the southeast of the country. Throughout, the beneficiaries of this military intervention have been the monopoly capitalist owners of the sectors of military production and natural resource extraction.

Russia exerted a major influence on Ukraine since its recovery from the 1990s economic collapse. Prior to the 2014 Maidan revolution that overthrew Yanukovych, Russia was the dominant political and economic force in the country, despite the entreaties of the European Union. Ukraine was subjected to economic dependency on Russian energy, which quickly turned into a financial dependency. In 1991, Ukraine bought “60 percent of its gas and almost 90 percent of its oil from Russia,” and was only able to cover one-third of its own energy needs while relying on Russia for the rest.

In 1993, Russia imposed a fivefold increase to the price of gas, and in 1996 it doubled it again to reach world market prices—and so began the massive indebtedness of Ukraine. To secure repayment Russia began to use debt-for-equity swaps in which Russian companies acquired shares in Ukraine’s industrial production and gas transport facilities. By 2012, Ukraine could no longer pay the high prices demanded by Russia, and with the IMF this time refusing any financial support, Ukraine turned again to Russia to get an even bigger loan to repay its debt of $2 bn from Gazprom. Out of the total $10 bn in foreign debt to be paid by 2021, Ukraine owed only $3.7 bn to the IMF—the rest was to Russia, mostly to Sberbank.

The 2014 Maidan democratic movement was in part a contestation to this financial extortion backed by Russian political intervention in Ukrainian affairs and widespread corruption. It was quickly backed by the U.S. and EU and was disastrous for Russia when the favorably aligned Yanukovych government collapsed. In response, Putin intervened to secure its debt repayment by seizing the Crimean Peninsula and parts of the Donbass. According to The Washington Post, Ukraine “harbors some of the world’s largest reserves of titanium and iron ore, fields of untapped lithium, and massive deposits of coal. Collectively, they are worth tens of trillions of dollars.” The Russian occupation of southeastern Ukraine aimed, among other things, to seize part of these resources as well as its steel industry and agricultural resources.

The 2022 invasion was just a continuation of the same imperialist annexationist plan, given the lack of reaction to the 2014 aggression. Putin became emboldened and accelerated his plan to restore the old Russian empire. Ahead of the new aggression, Putin had prepared the country economically to better resist EU and U.S. sanctions by easing itself out of its public deficit and accumulating foreign currency stocks. He also boosted Great Russian nationalism and anti-Western sentiment and proclaimed that the Ukrainian nation did not exist. The regime embraced the old imperialist claim that Russia’s “natural” area of influence had been encroached by NATO expansion, and that the country had a legitimate right to reclaim it.

As Ukrainian socialist Hanna Perekhoda explained, the denial of a Ukrainian nationality by the Russian regime and the global far right is nothing new. Russian imperial ideology and the first attempts at “russification” began in the 18th century. These were further developed in the late 19th century, when the Russian elites pushed for the forced assimilation of the “Little Russian” Ukrainians and the “White Russian” Belarusians into the “Great Russian” nation of Russian people, setting a goal similar to that of the German unification movement and other European pan-nationalist movements. The subordination and integration of these neighboring East Slavic-language nations into self-conscious Russians was seen “as a crucial measure for maintaining the Empire’s competitiveness.” This old nationalist-imperialist ideology, which was thoroughly opposed by the revolutionary socialist movement at the turn of the 20th century, is on the rise again since Putin’s arrival to power in 2000.

Putin’s war economy

Putin has used the new Ukraine war to further consolidate the state’s grip on the major strategic sectors of the economy and further its imperialist consolidation. The imposition of a war economy allowed the government to mobilize unprecedented state resources and authority to advance in the concentration of strategic monopolies for the war effort—overriding private decision making when necessary.

A 2024 report indicates that “regions with large concentrations of machine-building industries in particular have benefited from drastically increased public procurement of military equipment” and that “some poor regions in Russia’s Far East have benefited from an increase in transport infrastructure investment, as Russia tries to redirect its foreign trade more towards China.” In fact, around 40 percent of the government budget is spent on the war. The Swedish Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) estimates that Russia’s total military expenditure in 2024 reached 7.1 percent of its GDP in 2024 (for comparison, it was 5.4 percent in 2015).

Furthermore, while most previously state-owned assets were privatized in the 1990s, in January 2023 Putin established as a priority for public prosecutors the return of all strategic enterprises such as fossil fuel, military-industrial, chemical, and agricultural production to state control. The goal was to form more competitive monopolies supervised by the state, following the Chinese model. It is calculated that “in the military-industrial complex alone, 15 strategic enterprises with a total value of … about $4 bn have been returned to the state by March 2024.” In several cases, these re-nationalizations involved assets privatized over 30 years ago. In many cases, Putin has proceeded by using court-mandated asset seizures. In others, the deals are made by the Kremlin.

The Wall Street Journal reported last November [2024] that Putin was planning a “mega-merger” of the largest three oil companies of the country, to better redress the sanction-induced losses of Gazprom and be able to better compete in the market. Under this plan, state-backed Rosneft Oil would absorb both Gazprom and Lukoil, making it “the world’s second-biggest crude producer, after Saudi Arabia’s Aramco, pumping almost three times the output of Exxon Mobil.”

The two main weaknesses of Russian monopoly capitalism remain its weak financial capital and its underdeveloped industry. In the last 30 years, and despite the efforts to develop domestic manufacturing with higher value added, Russia has not reached a more balanced industrialization. Russia’s production of equipment and consumer goods is very low and has for decades relied on imports. Economist Michael Roberts estimated that in 2023 “mining accounted for around 26 percent of gross industrial production” and three industries—extraction of crude petroleum and natural gas, coke and refined petroleum products manufacturing and basic metals manufacturing—made up more than 40 percent of the total.

In the past, the attempts to develop the auto and aerospace industry have not led to fruition. The only progress has occurred in the successful development of some agricultural industrial sectors, allowing Russia to rapidly reduce food imports on selected products, and the investment in nuclear energy production. Putin used the war economy to invest in import substitution sectors such as “mechanical engineering, which includes manufacturing finished metal products (weapons), computers, optics and electronics, and electrical equipment.” These efforts, however, seem not to be enough. Although the war and sanctions have increased the domestic demand for manufacturing, military Keynesianism alone is not likely to overcome the structural unevenness of Russia’s industrial development or increase its long-term productivity.

Furthermore, Russia cannot support this war effort indefinitely without sustained greater outside support. Its reserves are dying off, Gazprom is suffering new losses, and the country is facing an acute labor shortage because of the war effort. A total of 1.5 million Russians have been mobilized to the front, and more than a million Russians have left the country. Russian employers estimate a deficit of 2.5 million people to work in key industries.

More importantly, social and political contradictions in the country are increasing. Putin’s onslaught has caused at least 830,000 Russian casualties and increased poverty. There are between 13 million and 18 million people living below the poverty line, and a cumulative grocery inflation of 24.6 percent. Russian working people are becoming increasingly harmed by the war, and it is not out of the question that a combination of factors could trigger cracks in Putin’s rule.

Changes and contradictions of Russian imperialism

Russian imperialism is still dynamic compared to its Western rivals. Its GDP grew 3.6 percent in 2024, which is more than the UK (0.6 percent), the EU (0.9 percent), and the U.S. (2.8 percent) and is projected to grow 2.5 percent in 2025. This is in large part because Putin managed to brutally squash any emerging dissent to the war to impose his war economy policies. He was also able to increase military recruitment among Central Asian migrants and oppressed nationalities, who had less means to resist. His regime is increasingly authoritarian and allied with far-right forces. In the first month of the invasion, more than 15,000 antiwar protesters were arrested in Russia and censorship laws were introduced banning any critiques to the military aggression or of the Russian army war crimes. Those in violation face up to 15 years in prison.

Despite prognoses that Russia would be crushed by the Western economic blockade, Russian imperialism benefited from the fact that the European market was heavily dependent on its fossil fuel energy, and thus slow to partially delink from it. As sanctions began to impact gas sales, Russia developed new economic deals with China, Iran, and other partners. In 2024, however, the EU still imported $7.6 bn worth of LNG from Russia. This year, Ukraine issued a report calculating that Russia has made €847 bn in fossil fuel revenue since the beginning of the war despite Western sanctions, mostly through crude oil sales to its new commercial partners. This is because Western sanctions have been implemented with several deliberate loopholes, such as allowing some minor Russian banks to still use the SWIFT banking system to trade with Europe, or the use of intermediary countries such as Turkey, Serbia, or Bulgaria to allow commercial exchanges between Russia and Western powers resorting to a “dark fleet” of more than 500 uninsured vessels. In addition, state control of banks has managed to protect Russian finance capital from sanctions and blockades and increase their profits.

Another major development is the growing relations between Russia and China. Trade between both countries has increased 64 percent since 2021, which has allowed Putin to keep the war economy afloat during the war. Russia has exported half of its oil and petroleum to China, and Chinese goods account for 38 percent of Russian imports. In particular, China has provided 63 percent of the Computer Numerical Control machines that sustain the Russian war machine. While both powers have mutual interests in these exchanges, their relations remain uneven and sometimes contradictory. Both powers also compete for zones of influence like Central Asia. China, for example, is building the China-Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan railway in 2025 to be able to take over Central Asian markets which Russia considers under its sphere.

Similarly, the Ukraine War has pushed the Kremlin to tighten its relations with its partners in the Middle East, especially after the fall of Assad, a loyal ally. Despite this blow, Putin aims to keep its two military bases in Syria. As the war with Ukraine started, Iran provided more than 2000 drones to Putin. This allowed Russia to buy time to ramp up its domestic drone production and even localize the manufacturing of Iranian drones. In 2025, a free-trade agreement between Iran and the Russia-led Eurasian Economic Union was concluded, and both countries began to integrate their national payment systems. That said, in terms of economic partnerships to resist the Western sanctions, the relations with Türkiye and the UAE are more significant that those with Iran.

The most salient fact, however, is that militarily Putin has not managed to defeat the Ukrainian resistance and quickly win the war as expected. Working people in Russia have been dragged into a prolonged war that is also depleting the country’s resources and rapidly increasing inequalities. The Russian army has suffered significant setbacks and more human losses than Ukraine. It had to ineffectively resort to North Korean soldiers to further staff the front lines. The Ukrainian people, however, have risen to the occasion and resisted heroically for more than three years despite the repeated betrayals of their government.

The class struggle remains the defining factor that will define the future of Russian imperialism. The turning of the economy towards war production, which has allowed some strengthening of economic sectors, has not solved the continuing unevenness of Russian imperialism. Therefore, future military aggressions against Ukraine or other neighboring countries that would challenge Putin’s rule are still on the table. The correlation of forces could change if a more formal bloc between China and Russia were to develop. In the meantime, the solidarity with all the peoples oppressed by Russian imperialism, with an independent class-struggle program, remains an utter necessity. The latter is key to reinvigorating the struggle of the Russian working class against their despotic rulers.

Photo: Vladimir Putin, the Russian Orthodox Patriarch and various ministers and soldiers attend a V Day memorial at the Kremlin Palace in 2000.