I think you are at least half-right about Putin’s motivation for the war; certainly, he is looking for a way to cover the severe, long term economic problems that Russia has been experiencing since even before he nominally took over and which it cannot escape from without evolving out of the export-focused petrostate that it is. I don’t think he specifically intended to blame Western economic sanctions but rather just to use the war—excuse me ‘special military operation’—as a mask for austerity measures, perhaps assuming that control over the Donbas region and ultimately a land bridge to Transnistria and around the north Caspian would give Russia new access to gas reserves and routes to expand gas and oil exports. That this hasn’t worked out the way he intended was kind of predictable and indicates that people within Russian government who were advising him were either too fearful of his wrath to provide constructive criticism, deliberately wanted the effort to fail, or possibly some combination of both.
I think the believe that popular sentiment will cause radical reform in Russian governance is at best hopeful pleading. There is a certain segment of the population agitating for this but not an especially powerful one, and the aging Russian population seems inclined toward strength and ‘unity’ (even if they have to bomb Ukraine into the Stone Age to annex them) rather than freedom and choice. Russia has gone through two periods of major civil unrest in the 20th century in which it briefly appeared that more egalitarian elements would advance the system, and in both cases they reverted to brutal authoritarianism. I don’t want to be so presumptuous as to say this is the default Russian culture but certainly the people who lived through ‘reforms’ in the ‘Nineties see little advantage to ‘democracy’ (such as they had it) and generally prefer living under a strong leader who keeps the economy going at some functional pace even if it does mean living with endemic corruption.
It’ll take another twenty or thirty years that demographic of the Russian population to die out enough that newer voices can dominate, and by that time the economic impacts of the population crash may literally render Russia a decaying ‘Third World’-type nation that is exploited for its natural resources by its more economically secure neighbors. There is a reason that young, bright Russians have been fleeing the country for the last decade to settle elsewhere because Russia literally has no bright future regardless of who is in control.
Being an ag producer is certainly a firm basis for an export economy, but it has substantial limits to growth even assuming that ag production drops elsewhere. Energy has been the economic driver of the latter half of 20th Century (and really, since the beginning of the First Industrial Revolution) because the demand for energy just keeps growing well beyond population scale, while demand for agricultural products is essentially linear with population (and will start to decline once world populations start going down). Russia has vast energy resources but has been largely inept at effectively tapping them or using them as a resource to capitalize other industries they way that, say, the Nordic Countries have with North Sea oil.
There are definitely ways to build a portfolio of sustainable energy technologies that can (mostly) replace petrofuels, and if we had a Manhattan Project-style effort to develop them they could probably be ready for deployment in wide scale in about 15-20 years. If we’d started working this problem circa 1990 at the end of the Cold War, turning the defense budget toward sustainable and renewable energy (again, with the eye toward energy independence as a national security issue) we could have almost complete energy independence now and the ability to export or license those technologies to the rest of the world. The US energy-govenment-military complex elected to not do that because it would be to disruptive to the status quo, and now here we are. I agree those would have major impacts upon petrostate economies, but a) not our problem, b) we could provide alternatives to those states in the form of licensed technologies or financing industry conversions, and c) all of this would be preferable to facing the existential crisis of energy scarcity and global climate change that scientists in the field have been warning about for forty years, but again, too much change to contemplate so we pushed ahead with business as normal.
Anyway, Russia isn’t having any of that. They are going to keep being Russia as long as possible and crack down on independent thought and reform because they’re even more frightened of that than the West is. That is my prediction, for what it is worth, although I also predicted that Putin wasn’t actually going to invade Ukraine because it would be a stupidly counterproductive thing that would devastate Russia economically even if it succeeded, and he ignored my opinion and did it anyway ‘cause he’s a big poopie-head.
Stranger