- Putin is repeating a Soviet-era mistake that is destroying Russia’s economy, Poland’s foreign minister said.
- Speaking in Davos, Radoslaw Sikorski said Putin was spending too much on the military and bankrupting Russia.
- “He was very adamant that this mistake not be repeated. And he is doing just that,” he said.
Russian President Vladimir Putin is copying Soviet-era approaches that bankrupted the USSR and that he criticized, according to Poland’s foreign minister.
Speaking on a panel at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Thursday, Radoslaw Sikorski said “Putin is repeating the mistakes of the Soviet leadership” regarding his invasion of Ukraine.
“The Soviet Union faced the West and lost,” he said.
Sikorski said Putin “is on record saying that under Brezhnev, the Soviet Union overspent on the military and bankrupted the country.”
He said Putin was “very adamant that this mistake not be repeated. And he is doing just that.”
Leonid Brezhnev, who led the Soviet Union from the 1960s until his death in 1982, is credited with failing to reform the USSR and leading it into a period of stagnation, with global tensions rising due to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.
Putin has, in the past, complained about the economic condition of the USSR.
In February 2024, Putin vowed to avoid a similar economic situation and said the West was trying to drag Russia into an arms race. He said it was the same tactic the West used “successfully” against the Soviet Union, and that between 1981 and 1988, “the Soviet Union’s military spending reached 13 percent of GDP.”
In 2025, Russia plans to spend 6.3% of its GDP on national defense, its highest level since the Cold War. Meanwhile, ddefense costs will compensate 32.5% of its federal budgetfrom 28.3% in 2024.
Sikorski said Russia under Putin “has taken over all of Europe, antagonized countries that were previously friendly or neutral,” reflecting its Soviet-era isolation.
Sikorski pointed to the Nordics as an example, which include Sweden and Finland, both of which joined NATO as a result of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Russia’s invasion has been condemned across the West and has resulted in sanctions being imposed on Russia and Western companies pulling out of the country.
Since launching its full-scale invasion in February 2022, Russia has restructured its economy to prioritize its war effort and is spending huge sums on its military.
Inflation in Russia has risen as its labor supply has shrunk and the value of the ruble has fallen
Anders Åslund, a Swedish economist and former fellow at the Atlantic Council, said Russia’s financial reserves could run out before the end of the year.
The economy of the Soviet Union collapsed in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and finally dissolved in 1991.
Sikorski’s comments echoed a warning by the managing director of the International Monetary Fund in February 2024, who said Russia’s economy was “roughly what the Soviet Union looked like.”
Alexander Kolyandr, a financial analyst and non-resident senior fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis, also told BI in December that for Russia’s economy “the overall trend is quite bleak”.
“I would say it’s a general stagnation similar to what the Soviet Union had in the early 1980s.”
However, other economists say Russia does not appear to be heading for a Soviet-style collapse and that some parts of its economy look encouraging.
Julia Svyrydenko, Ukraine’s economy minister, also said in Davos that Ukraine’s economy had fared better than Russia’s, but that sanctions against Russia should be strengthened to weaken the country ahead of any peace negotiations.