Russia will collapse tomorrow – and invade Europe in five years

Russia is about to collapse. The economy is cracking at the seams. Sanctions have finally worked. Oil refineries are going up in flames one after another. Ukrainian drones have paralysed half the country. There is no petrol, no money, and soon there will be no soldiers left either. The regime is living out its final months, and after the coming elections the Kremlin will have no option left but another mass mobilisation.

This is the Russia we are shown in the western press.

But turn the page of the very same newspapers, and suddenly an entirely different Russia appears. No longer is it a half-ruined country barely capable of continuing the war: it is a terrifying military machine, preparing to storm into the Baltic states, march on Poland and challenge the whole of Europe within a few years.

Of course, we do not expect bourgeois propaganda to be logically consistent. But this contradiction is far too revealing to ignore.

The key to understanding this hysteria is provided by representatives of the western ruling classes themselves.

NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte put the matter with almost exemplary frankness. Explaining why NATO countries must raise spending to five percent of GDP, he said that governments could preserve their current levels of spending on healthcare and pensions – but in that case they had “better learn to speak Russian”.

It would be difficult to find a clearer explanation of the function that the ‘Russian threat’ performs today. Angry at the rising cost of living? Russia. Public services falling apart? This is no time to ask awkward questions – Russia is about to invade! More spending cuts to build new arms factories? Putin is at the gates!

In the picture presented to people in the West, Russia has to be weak enough to convince everyone that sanctions are working, aid to Ukraine is delivering results, and another few hundred billion euros will finally finish the job. At the same time, it has to be strong enough to explain why those same governments must year after year convince workers to accept that there is less and less money for hospitals, education, housing and pensions.

Anti-Russian rhetoric has become an extraordinarily convenient political weapon for the European ruling class. It allows them to present the crisis of their own capitalist system as the product of an external threat, and militarisation as a technical necessity for which there is simply no alternative. 

Responsibility for years of stagnation, expensive energy, collapsing public services, deteriorating living standards and the increasingly precarious position of millions of workers dissolves into the image of an enemy in the East.

Today, images of burning oil refineries are presented by the western press as some of the most convincing evidence of Russia’s impending collapse. This time, behind the spectacular images, Ukraine’s campaign has indeed caused a real problem. By the end of August, following a new wave of Ukrainian strikes, Russian gasoline production had fallen to around 80,000 tonnes per day, against summer demand of roughly 115,000 tonnes – only enough to cover around 70 percent of domestic needs.

Images of burning oil refineries are presented by the western press as some of the most convincing evidence of Russia’s impending collapse / Image: kremlin.ru, Wikimedia Commons

However, the state moved fairly quickly to restrict exports, increase imports and redistribute fuel between regions. There are queues at petrol stations in many parts of the country, and people sometimes have to turn up early in the morning or late at night to fill their tanks. But this can hardly be described as total collapse. 

This crisis is not simply because of the drones. The problems of the Russian fuel market began years before the present war. Fuel crises occurred in 2011, 2018 and 2023. 

Russia’s oil industry is concentrated in the hands of a handful of giant vertically-integrated corporations. They control extraction, refining, a large part of transportation, and their own networks of petrol stations. Between them and the final consumer stands another whole layer of commercial capital – traders who extract nothing and produce nothing themselves, but make money by controlling the movement of fuel that has already been produced.

The result is an almost grotesque picture. Society possesses the oil, the pipelines, the refineries, the engineers and the workers capable of producing enormous quantities of fuel. Yet the moment refining capacity falls or the expectation of a shortage appears, the whole system begins to have temporary problems.

Long before drones began striking refineries, the state had to create a so-called ‘fuel damper’ mechanism. This is a system in which the state uses public money to compensate oil monopolies for the profits they ‘lose’ selling fuel to Russian consumers instead of exporting it at higher prices. Taxes have been spent to pay for these ‘lost’ profits over many years. 

Now that the closure of the Strait of Hormuz has blocked off refined products from the Gulf, it has become even more profitable to export rather than sell on the Russian market.

In other words, we have seen this disruption because Russia – one of the largest oil-producing countries in the world – produces fuel not to satisfy social needs, but for profit. This is capitalism. It really is that simple.

This is why Ukrainian strikes have been able to produce any significant effect at all. Not because Ukraine has somehow acquired the miraculous ability to destroy the Russian economy. But because it is striking a system that already contains its own contradictions.

In this sense, the present fuel crisis is not proof of the power of Ukrainian weapons. It is proof of the vulnerability of capitalist production itself.

The targeting and burning down of Ozon and Wildberries warehouses by Ukrainian drones – spectacular images of which have been eagerly circulated as evidence that the war is finally ‘coming home’ to the Russian economy – are even weaker ‘proof’ of Ukrainian military success.

Ukrainian drone strikes may inflict damage and impose some costs on Russia, but they have not changed the strategic situation on the battlefield / Image: fair use

Whatever military value such targets are supposed to have, destroying a warehouse full of consumer goods does not bring the Russian economy one inch closer to collapse. What it does produce is dead and injured workers – and spectacular columns of smoke that can be shown on television and presented by Zelensky as another devastating blow to Russia.

The attempt to turn this into a theory of financial collapse is even more bizarre. The argument is the following: Wildberries has financial obligations to VTB Bank, a huge Russian bank linked to the state. Therefore burning a Wildberries warehouse will somehow set off a chain reaction capable of bringing down the Russian economy.

It is not an economic analysis or an argument at all. It is financial domino theory for people who have never seen a balance sheet. If setting fire to the warehouse of a company that owes money to a state-owned bank were enough to collapse a major capitalist economy, revolutionaries could throw away Capital and start studying warehouse directories instead.

There is a serious distinction between a strike that damages critical refining, power or transport capacity, and a spectacular attack whose principal strategic product is a video clip. Marxists cannot confuse the two. A burning warehouse may make excellent propaganda. For the workers killed inside it, however, there is nothing symbolic about the result.

On the other side of the front, the Russians are inflicting destruction on an altogether more massive scale. They are not only using fleets of light-weight drones, but barrages of cruise and ballistic missiles, as well as glide bombs. Unlike the Russians, who have continually improved their air defences, the Ukrainians are now virtually defenceless against this assault, their western allies having exhausted their stockpiles of air defence missiles.

Russia has systematically attacked Ukraine’s energy, industrial, transport and shipping infrastructure. According to the Ukrainian government, previous Russian strikes damaged or destroyed capacity responsible for around 80 percent of Ukrainian power generation, while the power deficit reached roughly six gigawatts. By the beginning of 2026, the estimated cost of repairing the damage to the energy system alone stood at around $64-70 billion.

The consequences cannot be measured simply in megawatts destroyed. They mean electricity and heating outages, factories forced to stop production, disruption to railways and urban infrastructure, and mounting costs for businesses and the state. And, of course, this is having a devastating effect on morale and support for the Zelensky regime. We are already seeing a huge crisis inside Ukraine. 

Ukrainian drone strikes may inflict damage and impose some costs on Russia, but they have not changed the strategic situation on the battlefield – at least, not in Ukraine’s favour.

According to the western papers, the next act of Russia’s collapse has already been scheduled for September.

On 20 September, elections to the State Duma will take place in Russia (the first since the war began). As they approach, a familiar picture is once again emerging in the western world: supposedly, the Kremlin is just waiting for the polling stations to close before announcing a new mass mobilisation; that will push the growing discontent with the war over the edge, presaging an immediate political crisis, and then an uprising. 

On 23 August, Volodymyr Zelensky claimed that after the elections, Putin intends to mobilise another 300,000 people, and that in 2027 Russia supposedly plans to recruit another 500,000. In western propaganda, a claim made by one side in a war about the intentions of its enemy is transformed into “reports of an impending mobilisation”, then “fears of mobilisation��… After a few more rounds of repetition, the reader is presented with an event that has practically become an inevitability – all that remains is to wait for the date.

According to the western papers, the next act of Russia’s collapse has already been scheduled for September / Image: kremlin.ru, Wikimedia Commons

The facts, however, tell a different story. Since the partial mobilisation of 2022, Russia has recruited more than 1.3 million contract soldiers and continues to replace its losses primarily through this mechanism.

People do not always go to war because of deeply held ideological convictions. Russian capitalism uses its own social inequality to fill the ranks of the army. Huge signing bonuses mean something entirely different to a well-off resident of Moscow than they do to a worker in a poor region, someone buried in debt, or someone whose civilian job pays several times less. What is a weakness of Russian capitalism from the standpoint of the working class – regional inequality, debt, insecurity and the absence of prospects – becomes an advantage for the state when it comes to waging war.

No less popular in the West is the idea that rising prices plus military casualties plus mobilisation plus an unpopular government must somehow automatically equal an uprising. All that is missing is the exact date and the weather forecast for the day it will take place.

Marxism has never had anything in common with this kind of mechanical thinking. Millions of people can grow poorer for decades, the state can wage an unpopular war, and the ruling class can stagger from one crisis to another – none of this, by itself, produces a revolution.

An economic crisis creates contradictions. War sharpens them. Falling living standards can radicalise the masses. But between the objective crisis of capitalism and revolution stand the class struggle, changes in mass consciousness, organisation and political leadership.

Social contradictions are indeed accumulating in Russia today. But they are doing so very slowly and gradually. The Russian state has demonstrated a far greater capacity to adapt to the war than it was ever given credit for by the ruling classes of the West. The Russian economy has a powerful industrial and technical inheritance from the days of the Soviet Union, and the regime occupies a favourable position, manoeuvring and balancing while supporting China in its imperialist confrontation with the United States. 

At home, meanwhile, it retains support because many people see it as the only force capable of protecting the country from the threats constantly coming from NATO leaders.

Russian propaganda does not even have to work particularly hard or invent especially fantastic lies. It only has to point to what the gentlemen in the British Parliament are discussing, or to the countless summits where money is allocated for strikes that hit Russian civilians.

If Russia fails to collapse after the September elections, the western reader already has the next scenario waiting for them. In three years, five years, seven at the absolute most, Russia will attack NATO.

This claim has been repeated so often that it has gradually ceased to sound like a prediction and has acquired the status of an established fact. But read carefully, and the whole construction begins to fall apart.

When Rutte was directly asked whether the five-year timeframe was based on Russian plans for an attack or on an assessment of Russia’s military capabilities, he referred specifically to military assessments. If NATO does not increase arms production and military spending, Russia could, within several years, acquire the capability to successfully attack the alliance.

Russian propaganda does not even have to work particularly hard or invent especially fantastic lies / Image: kremlin.ru, Wikimedia Commons

Denmark is a revealing example. Its own military intelligence explicitly states that there is currently no threat of a regular Russian attack on the Kingdom. Yet Denmark is expanding its military presence in the Arctic and calling for a stronger NATO presence there. The reason becomes obvious when we look at a map: with control of Greenland and the Faroe Islands, Denmark is an Arctic power, with a direct stake in controlling strategically vital North Atlantic routes, including the GIUK gap. Behind the rhetoric of the ‘Russian threat’ lies a far more concrete struggle over the Arctic, its resources and the logistical routes connecting North America, Europe and the North Atlantic.

What is colliding in the Arctic is not Good and Evil. It is the material interests of capitalist powers.

Russia is interested in the security of its Northern Fleet, access to the Atlantic, the Northern Sea Route, Arctic resources and the defence of its enormous northern territory. The United States is interested in controlling North Atlantic communications, early-warning systems, missile defence and restricting the room for manoeuvre of Russia and China. Denmark is defending its own position as an Arctic power. NATO is interested in controlling its northern flank. And China, finally, is seeking access to Arctic transport routes and resources.

War is an extraordinarily expensive and risky instrument of policy. The Russian ruling class enters into conflict where it believes the vital interests of Russian capitalism are at stake and where it calculates that the balance of forces offers an acceptable outcome. American, German, British and Danish capital operate according to the same fundamental logic: the defence of their own interests.

Ultimately, this is not only a question of Russia, Ukraine, elections, petrol or the latest predictions of war with NATO. It is a question of our own method.

We do not need Marxism in order to find a few convenient quotations from Marx and then paste them onto a picture of the world that bourgeois journalists have already drawn for us. Dialectical analysis demands that we examine phenomena in their development, their interconnections and their contradictions. It does not allow us to seize upon one convenient fact, tear it out of the whole and declare it proof of a conclusion prepared in advance.

A refinery is burning – therefore Russia is collapsing. Military spending is rising – therefore world war begins tomorrow. Living standards are falling – therefore revolution comes the day after tomorrow. This is not materialism. It is a caricature.

That is precisely why we must treat the ready-made picture of the world manufactured daily in thousands of articles in the bourgeois press with enormous suspicion. The media do not float somewhere above society. They belong to someone. They exist within definite class relations.

We must not force reality to fit our hopes. If the Russian regime is stable, we must say that it is stable, irrespective of what our wishes are. If sanctions have failed to produce the results that were promised, we must admit it, even if that creates cognitive dissonance for a western reader who has been told they are working. 

It is not enough for a revolutionary to know what is being written about the world. Our task is to understand how the world actually works – so that we can change it. 

Young people everywhere are already beginning to see through these bourgeois lies. This is only the beginning.