Economist: Putin Has Broken The Back Of The Russian Economy

Ending the war won't help.

Independent Russian economist Igor Lipsits has voiced an extremely gloomy assessment of his country's future, stressing that after February 24, 2022, Russia has lost the opportunity to return to its previous state. According to him, the consequences of the war have been so devastating that the state is now doomed to move on a downward trajectory, writes "Dialogue".

"Russia, even having stopped fighting, will no longer return to point zero, from where it can go to the same beautiful distance where it was going before February 24, 2022. That's it! It has broken its backbone and will continue to crawl on crutches along a miserable road and will not come to good things," Lipsits said.

He emphasizes that the Kremlin, despite the depletion of the economy, will continue to invest resources in the war, siphoning off money from the civilian sector and increasing the poverty of the population.

Lipsitz notes that Russian dictator Vladimir Putin is eager to maintain military spending at all costs, but the real situation is out of his control.

"Putin will try, of course, as much as he can, to finance the war indefinitely, taking money from the civilian economy and driving the mass of Russians into misery, into poverty. But the only issue is that he does not control the economy - the economy lives by its own laws. And Russia's economy is already in extreme trouble," the expert said.

He draws attention to official statistics: the growth that the Kremlin claimed last year has disappeared.

"Look, even Rosstat has been giving a zero growth rate for the last few months. Not 4.3 percent, as Putin told us last year, but simply 0! This is the picture," Lipsits said.

The situation will worsen, he said, and Russia will soon face not just stagnation, but decline: "And it will only get worse from here on, it will no longer be zero, but a fall."

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