"The Kremlin Will Finish The Economy."
- 26.03.2026, 9:11
Russian industry fell for the second month in a row.
Russian industry ended February in the negative, Rosstat reported on Wednesday. After falling 0.8% in January, the country's output contracted 0.9% last month, and the cumulative total for January-February saw industry lose 0.8% of output, The Moscow Times wrote.
Of the 28 industries tracked by Rosstat, 22 were in recession. While mining rose 0.7 percent in two months, factories and plants in the non-resource sector cut output by 2.9 percent.
The decline in metallurgy, which began last year, accelerated to a 15.1 percent collapse - more than doubling from January (-6.6 percent). Food production, which fell last year for the first time in 15 years, declined another 2%. The chemical industry (-0.5%) and oil refineries (-1.2%) went into negative territory, while the production of domestic clothing, which the authorities expected to replace foreign brands, collapsed by more than 17% - a record since April 2020.
Even the output in the military sectors began to decline: the production of "finished metal products", to which the state statistics refers bombs and shells, in February was 1.9% lower than a year earlier.
The Russian economy enters 2026 with "clear signs of fatigue," says Senika Parviainen, chief economist at the Bank of Finland's Institute for Developing Economies: a military boom paid for by trillion-dollar injections into defense plants has deprived civilian sectors of resources; mobilization and mass emigration have exacerbated demographic problems and created a shortage of personnel, while huge spending on the war has unbalanced the budget.
"The choice to raise taxes, tighten regulation, nationalize, take away property, limit the inflow of labor from outside and hugely regulate the economy <�...> will lead to a worsening of the economic situation," warns economist Vladislav Inozemtsev. According to Rosstat, Russian GDP shrank in January for the first time since 2023, by 2.1%. In all likelihood, the economy will end the first quarter and, apparently, the first half of the year in negative territory, experts at the Central Institute for Economic and Monetary Policy predict.
The violence against economic life cannot be continued forever, especially as the rapist gets a taste for it and ruins entire industries for the pleasure of the Kremlin towers, Inozemtsev says: "It is necessary to give the Kremlin a chance to make all possible mistakes. And it will kill its own economy better than sanctions."