I owe you a plain statement of what I mean by failure, because the word does a great deal of work and I do not want it to do more than I intend.

A state is a human instrument. It is not a nation, not a culture, not a church, and not the sum of a people. It is a machine that is built, in the words of the American preamble that I have spent years defending, to secure the blessings of liberty for those who live inside it. Judged by that purpose, a state succeeds when the people subject to it can imagine a better life for their children than the one they inherited, and it fails when they cannot. This essay is an argument that the Russian state, as it is presently constituted, has failed at that task by almost every measure that matters. It is also an argument, and I want to be unambiguous about this, that the failure belongs to the state and the system, not to the Russian people, who are its victims and not its authors.

So let me take the three tests in order. Can the state secure its people’s future? Can it provide for their material life honestly? Can it defend them without consuming them? Russia fails all three.

The first test: a nation that is disappearing

Begin with the simplest number, which is the number of people.

At the start of 2025, Russia counted 146.1 million residents, excluding the four occupied Ukrainian regions. In that same year, deaths exceeded births by 545,100, a natural decline that has been running since 2016 and that the coronavirus years only deepened. The total fertility rate, the average number of children born to each woman, fell to 1.416 in 2023, far below the 2.14 that a population needs just to replace itself. The Russian Academy of Sciences itself, in a presidium resolution adopted in October 2025, forecasts a population of 143.3 million by 2030, 140.96 million by 2036, and 138.77 million by 2046, and it does not count the occupied territories in that figure (RAS No. 172, 2025).

The academy’s own conclusion, rendered from its Russian text, is a confession: the country’s demographic situation is characterized by declining birth rates, a shift toward small and single-child family models, an excess of deaths among the working-age population, and, in the end, a decline in population within the medium term, without counting the occupied territories. This is not my characterization. It is the Russian state’s own scientific establishment, describing its own demographic future.

A state that is shrinking in absolute terms is a state that is losing the people who pay for everything: the young, the workers, the parents of the next generation. No amount of pro-natalist subsidy has reversed it, and the academy’s own recommendations read as an inventory of failed measures, from cash payments to mortgage subsidies to televised campaigns that glorify large families. The mechanism of the decline is not mysterious, and it is not primarily about money. It is about a future in which young Russians no longer believe.

There is a signal buried in that same resolution that deserves to be read twice. The academy notes that, as of April 2025, demographic information in Russia is closed, and that the last data available for full analysis ends with 2023. A government that hides its own mortality figures has stopped pretending that the numbers can be governed, and has begun the quieter project of not letting anyone look at them.

The second test: a captured economy

Then ask whether the state can provide honestly for its people, and the answer is a machine that extracts rather than builds.

Russia’s federal budget drew 30 percent of its revenue from oil and gas in 2024, down from nearly 50 percent a decade earlier but still the single largest source of state finance (Yermakov, 2025). That dependence is not a strategy; it is a ceiling. A petro-state cannot diversify into what its people need, because the rents from the well pay the men who would have to reform it, and reform requires breaking the very arrangement that funds the state.

The war has made this worse, not better, and the honest accounting is now available. Russia’s economy grew 4.1 percent in 2024, an apparent robustness that was manufactured by government spending on the war and by a depreciating ruble, with inflation reaching nearly 10 percent by the end of 2024 and the central bank raising interest rates above 20 percent to suppress it (Yermakov, 2025). By 2025 the artificial stimulus had run out: growth collapsed to 0.6 percent, the federal deficit widened from 1.7 percent of GDP to 2.6 percent, manufacturing declined, and the country had zero companies in the world’s hundred most valuable technology firms (CSIS, 2026). Russia is spending roughly half its budget on the armed forces, the military-industrial complex, internal security, and debt service, and that spending produces few lasting assets and almost no productivity.

Now lay the two failures side by side. The state is spending half of everything it has on a war while its population declines and its fertility is the lowest in its modern history. It is burning its future to finance its present. And it does so through an apparatus that its own anti-corruption monitors describe as among the most captured on earth. Russia scores 22 out of 100 on the 2024 Corruption Perceptions Index and ranks 157th of the 182 countries assessed (Transparency International, 2025a). Transparency International attributes that slide in part to the war, writing that Russia “used its invasion of Ukraine to further entrench authoritarianism, with the state suppressing dissent, redirecting resources to sustain its military agenda, and eliminating independent voices” (Transparency International, 2025b).

A kleptocracy can be stable for a long time. What it cannot be is good at the thing a state exists to do, because the people who run it are paid not to fix it.

The third test: a war against its own people

The third test is the sharpest, because the clearest measure of a state’s failure is what it does with its own young men.

Since February 2022, Russian forces have suffered nearly 1.2 million casualties, including as many as 325,000 killed, between the invasion and December 2025. No major power has suffered anywhere near those numbers of casualties or fatalities in any war since the Second World War (CSIS, 2026; Sauer, 2026). To put the figure in the terms Russia’s own history would recognize: Russian battlefield deaths in Ukraine are more than 17 times greater than Soviet deaths in Afghanistan, 11 times greater than in the two Chechen wars, and more than five times greater than all Russian and Soviet wars combined since 1945 (CSIS, 2026).

And they have bought almost nothing. In its most prominent offensives, the Russian army advanced at an average rate of between 15 and 70 meters per day, slower than the Allied advance at the Somme, and it gained less than 1.5 percent of Ukrainian territory since the start of 2024 (CSIS, 2026). The strategic goal, the subjugation of Ukraine, remains exactly where it stood on the first day, and the price of pursuing it is paid in the demographic currency that the first section of this essay counted. The men killed are drawn disproportionately from the same thinning cohort that the country could least afford to lose.

Here is the sentence I keep returning to, and it is not mine. “Despite claims of battlefield momentum in Ukraine, the data shows that Russia is paying an extraordinary price for minimal gains and is in decline as a major power” (CSIS, 2026). A great power is one that can convert its resources, human and material, into security and prosperity for its people. Russia can convert neither. It has the landmass, the minerals, the energy, and the educated population that other nations only dream of, and it has spent a full generation of them on a war of choice that its own propaganda cannot describe as won.

What “failure” does not mean

I said at the start that the failure is the system’s and not the people’s, and I want to defend that claim rather than gesture at it, because it is the line that separates an argument from a slur.

The Russian people are not the authors of their state. Under a government that closes its demographic data, eliminates independent media, prosecutes thousands of its own citizens for dissent, and has driven hundreds of thousands of its most educated young people into exile, the ordinary Russian is a subject, not a sovereign. When the state fails, the failure is not theirs to carry. They carry the cost of it: the sons buried, the savings inflated away, the future foreclosed. That is precisely the point. A state that fails its people is a state that has failed, and the people are what it failed.

This matters because there is a temptation, in writing about Russia from outside it, to slide from a critique of the government to a contempt for the governed. That slide is not only unjust. It is strategically blind, because it is exactly the reasoning that the Russian state uses to justify its own repression, and it hands the regime the one argument it most needs: that the outside world despises Russians as such. The honest position is harder and it is the only one worth holding. The regime is the enemy of its own people before it is the enemy of anyone else.

What a citizen of the earth owes

I began with the framing that I am, before any flag, a citizen of the earth. That framing obliges me to say what follows from the judgment rather than to stop at the verdict.

The first obligation is accuracy. A state that is failing should be described as failing, and described with the real numbers, because wishful thinking in either direction misleads. The Russian state is not ten feet tall, and it is not on the verge of collapse; it is a brittle machine that has spent its reserves and is running on the last of its demographic and financial slack. Precision about that is a kindness to everyone who has to plan around it, in Kyiv and in Warsaw and in Washington and in Moscow.

The second obligation is to separate the state from the nation, and to act on the separation. The people who flee the country, who refuse the mobilization, who keep the language and the literature and the memory alive in exile, are the ones who will determine what Russia becomes after the machine that failed it. They deserve more than our pity. They deserve our attention, because the Russia worth hoping for is not the one that rebuilds the same empire under a different flag. It is the one that finally builds a state that serves the people inside it rather than feeding on them.

The third obligation is the Stoic one, and it is the reason I keep returning to the phrase “citizen of the earth.” I cannot reform the Russian state. It is not within my power, and the discipline of the thing is to know that and to stop trying to hold the world I cannot move. What is within my power is to keep the record straight: to insist on the numbers, to refuse the ethnic contempt that the powerful find so useful, and to hold the line between the government that failed and the people it failed. That distinction is the whole of the essay. A state that cannot secure its people’s future, cannot provide for them honestly, and cannot defend them without consuming them has failed. The task for the rest of us is to say so clearly, and never to forget those against whom the failure was committed.

Sources

PRH | huffmanwrites.org | © Philip Huffman