The longer this war drags on, the deeper—and more permanent—the wound it carves into Russia will be. Some damage is ugly but transient. Take out a power plant and, painful as it is, it will be rebuilt. Electricity is too essential not to be. Take out a military complex and, if there is no money to rebuild it, national pride takes a hit, a few uniforms sulk, and life eventually moves on.
But there is another category of destruction, and that one is terminal.
If you destroy facilities that only ever existed because Soviet economics made them possible in the first place—because cost did not matter, because lives did not matter, because efficiency was a bourgeois distraction—then rebuilding them is not a matter of bricks and steel. It requires a cold reassessment of whether they ever made sense to begin with. And most of the time, they did not.
Many oil and gas fields in Russia were never economic. Not marginal. Not “challenging.” Flatly uneconomic. Their development costs were absurd, their operating conditions borderline extraterrestrial. Fields producing in cold, pressure, and isolation that would make any Western project team quietly back out of the room. The market could never have justified them. Ever.
But the Soviet Union did not care. If the leadership decided something would be built, it was built. Money was an abstraction. Human lives were a rounding error. Economics was replaced by willpower and coercion, and for a while that worked—if you define “worked” as producing output while slowly killing the system that enabled it.
That system has been gone for more than three decades now. What remains is a bureaucratic fossil animated by habit and corruption. Russia today does not have the institutional muscle, the capital discipline, the engineering depth, or the political tolerance for pain required to rebuild those structures once they are gone.
If the war breaks them now, chances are they stay broken. Not all of them—but enough. Enough to matter.
So say goodbye to Russia as a significant oil exporter. Not tomorrow. Not with a bang. But through a long, grinding fade-out as fields die, infrastructure decays, and no one steps up to pour obscene amounts of money into assets that never made sense in the first place.
Some systems can be repaired. Others were only ever held together by a regime that no longer exists.
