- Putin is repeating a Soviet-era mistake, which is ruining Russia’s economy, Poland’s foreign minister said.
- Speaking at Davos, Radoslaw Sikorski said Putin was overspending on the military and bankrupting Russia.
- “He was very insistent that this mistake should not be repeated. And he’s doing exactly that,” he said.
Russian President Vladimir Putin is copying Soviet-era approaches that bankrupted the USSR and that he used to criticize, 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 Soviet leadership” in regards to his invasion of Ukraine.
“The Soviet Union took on the West and lost,” he said.
Sikorski said that Putin “is on the record saying that under Brezhnev, the Soviet Union overspent on the military and bankrupted the country.”
He said Putin was “very insistent that this mistake should not be repeated. And he’s doing exactly 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 increasing global tensions due to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.
Putin has, in the past, lamented the economic state of the USSR.
In February 2024, Putin pledged 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 “successfully” used against the Soviet Union and that between 1981 and 1988, “the Soviet Union’s military spending amounted to 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, defense spending will make up 32.5% of its federal budget, up from 28.3% in 2024.
Sikorski said Russia under Putin “has taken on all of Europe, has antagonized countries that were previously friendly or neutral,” mirroring 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 resulted in sanctions levied 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 efforts and is spending huge amounts on its military.
Inflation in Russia has risen while 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 Soviet Union’s economy collapsed in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and it finally dissolved in 1991.
Sikorski’s comments echoed a warning by the managing director of the International Monetary Fund in February 2024, who said that Russia’s economy was “pretty much what the Soviet Union used to look like.”
Alexander Kolyandr, a financial analyst and non-resident senior scholar at the Center for European Policy Analysis, also told BI in December that for Russia’s economy “the overall trend is pretty grim.”
“I would say it’s overall stagnation akin to what the Soviet Union had at the beginning of the 1980s.”
However, other economists say Russia doesn’t appear to be moving toward a Soviet-style collapse, and that some parts of its economy appear encouraging.
Yulia Svyrydenko, Ukraine’s economy minister, also said at Davos that Ukraine’s economy had fared better than Russia’s, but that sanctions on Russia needed to be strengthened to weaken the country ahead of any peace negotiations.
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