Putin’s Reserves on the Edge

It is getting difficult to hide

Not sometime in 2025.

Not sometime in 2026.

Gone are the days when projections spanned more than a year.

Now, we have a clear timeline: fall 2025. That’s when Anders Åslund, a Swedish economist and leading expert on the economic transformation of post-Soviet states, predicts Putin will run out of liquid reserves.

According to Åslund, Russia is reliant on a single source of financing: the National Wealth Fund (NWF). He notes that the NWF’s liquid reserves “have fallen from $117 billion in 2021 to $31 billion at the end of November. This amount can only cover three-quarters of the projected budget deficit in 2025.

By then, budget cuts will be unavoidable. Meanwhile, the demands of a war economy could also lead to price controls and rationing — reminiscent of old Soviet-era policies. As the risk of financial collapse grows, Russia’s strained economy will impose serious limitations on Putin’s ability to sustain his war”.

Moscow Times, The Financial Times, The Economist, and nearly every independent media outlet have drawn the same conclusion: Putin does not have the money to fund the war through 2025. I arrived at this conclusion back in November.