By Sumantra Maitra, The American Conservative, 1/20/23

Finland’s prime minister Sanna Marin recently went on record saying that the Ukraine war might only end with Russia completely out of the country. “The way out of the conflict is for Russia to leave Ukraine,” she stated. “That’s the way out of the conflict.” The video ended with a smug nod towards the obsequious press gaggle.

Marin is, needless to mention, not the only one. Kaja Kallas, the prime minister of Estonia, recently wrote, in an essay full of Wikipedia-level references to Churchill, Reagan, and FDR, that “as the prime minister of Estonia, a frontline NATO country that endured half a century of Soviet occupation, I know what peace on Russia’s terms really means. Russian peace would not mean the end of suffering but rather more atrocities. The only path to peace is to push Russia out of Ukraine.”

“Although the Soviet Union eventually collapsed, its imperialist ideology did not,” Kallas went on, adding that “in Estonia, our history books were rewritten after the end of Soviet rule, but the same did not happen in Russia.” One minor detail was missing from the admitted revisionism. Kallas is the daughter of Slim Kallas, the former deputy chief editor of the Communist Party of Estonia and the member of the Supreme Council of the Soviet Union—practically Soviet royalty.

Per Plato, a functioning republican polity depends on linguistic clarity. We must therefore untangle the euphemisms “peace on Russian terms” and “pushing Russia out” as we deliberate American foreign policy. The former phrase implies any concession or acknowledgment of a status quo in a situation where either side is unable to fully conquer or reconquer per the post-Soviet boundaries. Given the unlimited flow of Western weapons and cash, Ukrainian war aims continue to shift, from defending Kiev, to reconquering the Donbas, to marching on to Crimea. The latter euphemism is relatively simpler, it denotes pushing Russia out of all of Ukraine, including Crimea and the Donbas, by any means necessary.

Ukrainians and their lobbyists have already started to lay the rhetorical groundwork of persuading Anglo-Americans to take the war to Crimea. For example, former Ukrainian defence minister and current Atlantic Council fellow Andriy P. Zagorodnyuk recently argued,

Kiev and its allies must press on, battling until it can make Moscow hand over Crimea via negotiations or until Ukraine has forcibly pried the peninsula from Moscow’s grasp. Doing so is the only way to inflict the kind of major defeat Russia must experience if it is to abandon its imperial ambitions and start abiding by international norms and laws. The United States and Europe should understand that they, too, will benefit from a total Ukrainian victory. It could mark the permanent end of Russian aggression, breathing new life into the liberal world order.

But what about Russia’s nuclear redlines regarding Crimea? Zagorodnyuk: “The world can never rule out the chance that Russia will use nuclear weapons, especially when it is governed by Putin…other concerns about Ukraine’s ability to retake the peninsula and nuclear attacks are all at least somewhat overblown. After consecutive months of battlefield success, it is clear that Ukraine has the capacity to liberate Crimea.” Ah.

That idea suffers from a minor but notable disadvantage. It is insane. The war isn’t over, and Ukraine isn’t winning. The country cannot run a day without being supported by foreign backers, so much so that its government and pension fund are paid for by American taxpayers. Ukraine and Russia both desire to press on. Only one side of the two is, however, completely dependent on foreign generosity, thereby transferring escalation leverage to its great power donors. To translate that into non-academic international relations speak: Those who pay control the play.

At the time of writing, Ukraine and Russia are stuck in a meat-grinder of a town known as Bakhmut, with Russia aiming—so far as can be inferred without process tracing—to end the Ukrainian fighting male population, regardless of the cost. Russian military doctrine has reverted back to norm, and Russian strategic elite, in other words, are Russianing: throwing bodies to the pile. Muzzle-to-muzzle conflict is a disadvantage for Ukraine, simply because while Ukraine can have as much money and weaponry as it wants, for now there is no Western cavalry coming over the hill.

The Russians are already preparing another three hundred thousand conscripts, and if they decide to go for one more round of partial mobilization, they will end up having a million men in arms around the time for spring and summer offensives. British analysts are already concerned about weapons stockpiles, and Americans are concerned about flawed Ukrainian toe-to-toe strategy. And given that, despite repeated attempts of chain-ganging, Europe or America will not directly commit to the war, the long-term attrition rate in this case favors those with more men, i.e., Russia.

That simple cost-benefit analysis is, however, considered to be risky “around the corner for European and trans-Atlantic unity” by Nathalie Tocci, director of the Institute for International Affairs in Rome. Jessica Berlin, another European analyst, channeled her inner Sanna Marin to a concern of a larger NATO–Russia nuclear war by adding “Yes, war between NATO & Russia would be a doomsday scenario—for RUSSIA. That’s why the Kremlin wants to avoid it at all costs. When their hyperventilating TV propagandists threaten to nuke Piccadilly Circus it’s to scare western voters into appeasement. Shame it works on you [shrug emoji]”

It escapes a normal mind what part of mutually assured destruction allows a shrug. Being deterred from a nuclear war isn’t appeasement. Deterrence goes both ways. The entire Cold War was predicated on mutual deterrence. Ukraine’s interest is to defend Ukraine, and, in order to do that, attempt to maximize Western involvement. Western interest is to avoid nuclear war, insolvency and overstretch, while bleeding Russia. Those interests are fundamentally incompatible, and at some point they will come into play in opposition to each other. That point is approaching soon. One doesn’t need to be pro-Moscow to claim that not all wars in peripheral theaters deserve a forward involvement. At the risk of innuendo, the effort to speak loudly and carry someone else’s big stick by figures such as Marin and Kallas is intolerable. It is a grating combination of sanctimony, arrogance, historical ignorance, philosophical ineptitude, and ceaseless demand. An astute analyst once referred to this phenomenon as Girl-Boss militarism, a combination of revolutionary globalism, feminism, and neo-conservatism, added to empty, catchphrase-filled “mic-drop” politics. It is toxic when Hillary Clinton does it. It is insufferable when done by leaders of American protectorates mimicking an overzealous but dependent foederati, often far more fanatical than Rome herself.

By Gordon Hahn, Russian and Eurasian Politics Blog, 1/30/23

We are entering the most dangerous phase of the NATO-Russian Ukraine war up till now. The West is undertaking a major escalation in the war by increasing the lethality of weapons it is supplying Ukraine to include tanks and the largest tranche of military equipment supplied to Kiev so far. Meanwhile, Russia is on the verge of an offensive on the background of slow but steady gains in the east, taking Soledar, moving into Vugledar (Ugledar) and the outskirts of Bakhmut (Atemevsk), threatening Ukrainian forces with operational encirclements in several areas. Russia now has available in and around Ukraine 5-600,000 regular troops, almost none of which have been used so far, with Moscow having been relying on the DPR and LNR forces, the Wagner troops, Chechens, and massive attacks from the air by artillery, rockets, drones and such in previous phases of the war.

The false myth that Russia is losing the war is being exposed for the propaganda lie it has always been, risking the loss of public support in the West. That exposure is leaving the ‘king even more naked’ as the Russian offensive gradually gains steam over the next two months. Russia was not militarily defeated in Kharkiv and Kherson when it retreated from those places. In the latter case, there seems to have been a tacit agreement between Moscow and Kiev that Russian troops would withdraw behind the Dnepr, and Kiev’s forces would not harass them much at all and the agreement appears to have held. In both cases, Moscow decided to withdraw forces because it was badly outnumbered and sought to avoid a fight and high casualties. Russian forces have been making steady progress over the last few weeks, recently taking Soledar. They are in the process of establishing operational encirclement around Bakhmut as well as Avdiivka and have moved deeply into Mariinka and Vugledar (Ugledar); all of which could trap 10,000s of Ukrainian troops. More importantly, the offensive that is slowly ramping up will consist of larger combined force operations that is most likely to more resemble actual all-out total war than the hitherto ‘special military operation,’ though I expect some considerable continuing restraint to preserve civilian and Russian military lives as much as is possible. Whether the offensive will include a ground and/or air assault on Kiev and an attempt to encircle and/or in intensive bombing campaign targeting Zelenskiy and the government infrastructure – thus far left to be – is impossible to know for sure, but is likely.

NATO is now openly at war with Russia and intensively escalating that war. This is not Russian propaganda; it has been a poorly held secret for months. NATO and the US provide: all of the kinds of lethal weapons; strategic, operational, and tactical intelligence; means of communications; and strategic and operational planning as well as tactical and weapons training. Polish and perhaps Rumanian and other state’s soldiers have been fighting out of uniform in Ukraine against Russia. NATO has also organized Belarusian and Russian opposition units that are fighting Russia and allied forces in Ukraine.

The ‘NATOization’ of the Ukraine war and the effort to organize opposition military forces against Moscow and Minsk is making it more likely that Russia will pressure Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenka to bring Belarusian forces into the war along with Russia’s own units deployed there, if only as part of the Russian-Belarusian ‘joint Union force’. Lukashenka could put up little resistance, especially if it appears that Russia’s efforts are failing or, more obviously, if Ukrainian or Polish elements were to undertake some sort of operation on Belarus’s territory. Clearly, Lukashenka’s prospects for retaining his hold on power decline sharply should Russia lose this war, given the likely repercussions for Putin’s rule in the event.

Moscow may soon decide that since NATO countries are legally definable as combatants it has the right to respond in some way. Responses could include: financing terrorist attacks, sabotage, destroying non-Russian oil and gas pipelines, rejecting all international copyright law, targeting staging sites in Poland or Rumania from which supplies and newly Western-trained troops are transported to Ukraine—who knows, maybe all of the above. That could provoke open NATO-Russian warfare on European and Russian territory, which is already being hit by the Ukrainians using US missiles.

If the escalation stops with the new wave perhaps there will not be any such Russian responses, but Western ‘appeasement’ is unlikely. War is in the air from Washington to Warsaw to Moscow.

The always insightful Colonel Douglas McGregor is wrong when he says that in Washington they do not understand that Russia is a country that can and if need be will mobilize its entire population if its leadership perceives a threat sufficient to warrant it (www.youtube.com/watch?v=K74GonVNYO4&ab_channel=JudgeNapolitano-JudgingFreedom). They understand this full well in DC and hope to force Putin to engage such a mobilization and trap Putin in a quagmire – regardless of the costs to Ukraine — with everything else that will entail for Russia’s economic efficiency, residual freedoms, and political stability in the long-term. In other words, they hope to saddle Putin with a war that will ultimately destabilize the political system and lead to his downfall. The time frame in such thinking is probably connected with the next Russian presidential election scheduled for 2024. Elections are focal points that often spark ‘color revolutions’ such as Ukraine in 2004, Georgia in 2005, and the failed 2012 white ribbon protests in Russia. This is the idea driving the West’s foolhardy strategic escalation of the war and complete lack of interest in cultivating peace talks. The foundational drive is that any talks will fail if Washington and Brussels do not agree to end NATO expansion at least in the case of Ukraine; something the West is unwilling to do. This is why I have been calling the ‘special military operation’ or ‘Russia’s war in Ukraine’ the NATO-Russian Ukraine war.

The West now also is risking the great danger that what remains of the Ukrainian state will be destroyed for the goal of removing Putin from power. But any fall of Putin from power will change neither Russian resistance to NATO expansion and Western color revolutionism (regime change policies or ‘democracy promotion’) nor the startegies and tactics Moscow uses to carry out that resistance. Washington has a dearth of knowledge about or willingness to acknowledge and incorporate into policy Russia’s long history of being targeted by Western powers for political interference and manipulation and military intervention and invasion and the resulting centrality of security vigilance in relation to the West in Russia’s political and security culture. And destruction of the Ukrainian state will eliminate the prospect of stabilization through the transformation of Ukraine into a neutral buffer zone between NATO and Russia, a prospect that should be acceptable to all sides, including Kiev, after this terrible war.

The absence of American statesmanship – really, the presence of American anti-leadership, even international subversion – is bringing catastrophe. Washington should be pressing both sides to negotiate not just be sending more, more and still more lethal weapons to Kiev. This is a criminal abandonment of leadership that risks us all with World War III and nuclear conflagration. It is perhaps more and surely deeply disturbing – and certainly must be raising red flags in Moscow – that there is a senile, arrogant, corrupt American president threatened by congressional investigations and perhaps impeachment for crimes he and his son committed, who is deciding how far the West’s involvement in the NATO-Russian war in Ukraine should go. The possibility that Joe Biden is not in charge or is being profoundly manipulated by a coalition of Washington Democrat Party-state and globalist radicals is no more comforting.

Overall, the script is one that seems to have been written in Hollywood if not in Hell itself. Can Humankind or Heaven amend a happy ending? I am having my doubts.

How will 2023 play out? Aside from all that has been said above for the moment, 2023 is unlikely to see an end to the war. Russia’s offensive will be methodical and likely slowly grind down the Ukrainian army. The influx of large quantities of Western weapons — tanks, armored fighting vehicles, armored personnel carriers, and much more, including it seems also jet fighters — could stall that offensive but is not likely to prevent a Russian military victory on the ground. However, the costs to Russia (not to mention Ukraine!) in blood and treasure will be far greater than previously. This combination of Russia’s attainment of a position of strength on the battlefield and rising human, financial, and political costs could create a willingness in Moscow to more earnestly pursue ceasefire or a more general peace settlement at the year’s end.

2024 might see a settlement involving Moscow’s core demands: no NATO expansion to Ukraine, recognition of Crimea, Donetsk, Luhansk, and at least part of Zaporizhe and Kherson Oblasts as Russian territories, and de-nazification of Ukraine. But Ukraine and the West would need a face-saving compensation. If Moscow’s forces drive to the Dnepr, then confining Russia’s territorial gains to the already annexed territories would constitute one Russian compromise. Kiev could receive Western security guarantees (imbedded in a new overall European security architecture) and war reparations in some form. But all this seems unlikely at the moment, and one senses it is more likely there will be escalation up to and including NATO’s direct involvement. After all, it is already a NATO-Russian war.

RT.com, 1/19/23

The extrajudicial execution of Denis Kireev in March 2022 was due to a lack of coordination between security services, a top aide to Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky said on Thursday. Mikhail Podoliak was responding to a Wall Street Journal feature describing the 45-year-old banker as an asset of Ukrainian military intelligence, who supposedly helped save Kiev from Russian attack.

Kireev was killed on March 2 last year. His body was dumped on a Kiev sidewalk “with a bullet hole in the back of the skull,” according to the WSJ. Ukrainian media reported at the time that the country’s security service, the SBU, had “clear” evidence Kireev had committed high treason. The military intelligence, however, said he “died protecting Ukraine.”

The 45-year-old banker’s violent end was brought into the spotlight again by the WSJ, which interviewed Kireev’s relatives and associates, as well as the man he died working for – General Kirill Budanov, the head of Ukraine’s military intelligence (GUR).

The banker was loyal to Kiev, raising funds for Ukrainian “volunteer brigades” fighting in Donbass after 2014, and “enjoyed playing the 007 role,” according to his friends and associates. Budanov said he had recruited Kireev in 2021 because of his business contacts with Russia, and received useful information from him for months before the conflict escalated.

“If it were not for Mr. Kireev, most likely Kiev would have been taken,” Budanov told the WSJ.

Kireev came to Budanov on February 23 and said Russia would “invade” the following day, with the primary objective to seize the Antonov Airport in Gostomel, near Kiev. The tip “gave Ukraine a precious few hours to shift troops to counter the Russian assault” and ultimately disabled the airport, saving the capital, according to the general.

Budanov said he had asked Kireev to attend ceasefire talks in Belarus, because he personally knew two members of the Russian delegation. He was photographed at the talks, and the SBU got suspicious. The night before the second round of talks, Kireev received a call from the SBU’s top counterintelligence officer, Alexander Poklad. Poklad had asked for a meeting, Kireev’s security detail told the WSJ.

Kireev had told his bodyguards he might be arrested and instructed them to not intervene. They dutifully disarmed when the SBU surrounded them outside St. Sophia Cathedral. Kireev was bundled off into a SBU minivan. His corpse was found about 90 minutes later.

The GUR arranged for a hero’s burial and Zelensky posthumously gave Kireev a medal for “exceptional duty.” The WSJ also noted that the SBU leadership was purged in July 2022. During an interview with an Estonian outlet on Thursday, Podoliak commented on the WSJ story by blaming Kireev’s death on miscommunication.

“Those were the first days of the war. His killing is due to the fact that there was no unified coordination between security structures. There were certain claims against him, they did not have time to settle these claims in a dialogue format,” Zelensky’s aide said.

“ISIS are little children compared to the Kiev regime,” said Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova, commenting on Podoliak’s explanation and referring to Islamic State terrorists.

By Marlene Laruelle, Russia Post, 1/18/23

The Russian Constitution explicitly bans the establishment of a state ideology, though calls for one have been regularly made by politicians, cultural figures and ideological entrepreneurs. Since the beginning of the war against Ukraine on February 24, 2022, the Russian Presidential Administration has launched myriad initiatives related to what looks like shaping a new state ideology: new repressive legislation, massive censorship in culture, a more rigid interpretation of tensions with the West and of Soviet history, new mandatory patriotism classes at schools and universities, new history textbooks, etc. Yet the Russian state functions in a highly co-creational manner, with supply by the government trying to answer what it interprets as society’s demand or at least acquiescence.

But what do Russians think about a new state ideology? For the first time, we have at our disposal a survey exploring the bottom-up demand for state ideology. In spring 2021, the LEGITRUSS telephone survey conducted by VTsIOM asked a nationally representative sample of 1,500 Russians: “Does Russia need a state ideology?” (Rossii nuzhna gosudarstvennaia ideologiia ili ne nuzhna?). In the affirmative answered 79%, while 14% said no and 7% were not sure. The fact that the survey was conducted before the war gives us some insights on what the population might support in terms of ideology, even if surveys should generally be taken with caution (issues include self-censorship, framing of the questions, etc.).

Large in the sense that, depending on where one draws the line, a majority of Russians strongly (73%) – or even very strongly (58%) – subscribe to a set of national-conservative attitudes, values and policy preferences; relatively coherent in the sense that all of these attitudes, values and policy preferences overlap and strongly correlate positively with one another; and politically salient in the sense that an index aggregating these factors has a very large independent predictive effect for voting behavior, with high approval of Putin.

Who supports what state ideology?

The 79% of respondents who said that Russia needs a state ideology were able to select (or write in) up to two things that should form the basis (osnovnoi element) of the state ideology. The distribution of responses is as follows:

Note that the percentages add up to over 100%, since all categories but the first two (no ideology; don’t know what ideology) can overlap with others. We then summed up the different answers into four broad ideological categories: (1) Western; (2) communist; (3) Russian-universal (“combination of universal human [obshechelovecheskii] and traditional Russian [traditsionnye rossiiskie] values”); and (4) a “national-conservative” group consisting of statism (gosudarstvennost’), Eurasianism (“orientation toward both Europe and Asia;” “Orthodox Christianity and Islam”), “traditional Russian (rossiiskii) values,” Orthodoxy, and tsarism/monarchism.

The proportion of those rejecting the principle of a state ideology (14.2%) is close to the share of the population that is regularly identified by the Levada Center as the “anti-Putin” segment of Russian public opinion, at least as it existed before the war. Those wishing for a Western state ideology make up only a small number (5.4%), likely in part because most of those favoring a Western model of development are against the notion of a state ideology and therefore represented in the 14.2% of “rejectionists” mentioned above. Demographically, support for a Western state ideology is linked to higher education and seems to repel those in difficult material conditions – probably because they interpret a Western orientation as neoliberal shrinking of public services or because poorer Russians are more likely to depend on television as a major source of news, and therefore more likely to repeat anti-Western messaging.

The number of people calling for communism (8.5%) as a state ideology is lower than the electoral results of the Communist Party, confirming that the Party’s support is a way to criticize the incumbent United Russia and not a vote of conviction for Marxism-Leninism. And indeed, at the regional elections of September 2021, United Russia lost parts of its mandates in 30 regions to the Communist Party. Demographically, support for a communist state ideology is negatively correlated with Russian ethnicity, which seems to confirm the existing literature on ethnic Russians seeing the Soviet Union as having favored minorities at the expense of ethnic Russians – a classic claim made by Russian nationalist figures since the 1960s.

A quarter of respondents did select (albeit mostly alongside national-conservatism) the idea of a “combination of universal human and traditional Russian values.” This is perhaps a universalistic inheritance from Soviet communism and/or the social democracy of the perestroika period; for years, it was also central to Putin’s own discourse before the shift toward the narrative of “Russia against the West.”

Still, those who selected one form of national-conservatism or another make up the majority. Demographically, that choice correlates with higher age, having children, living in the North Caucasus, and – negatively – with living in a city whose population is greater than one million.

What does this national-conservatism mean in practice?

For instance, Russians take a fairly conservative/traditional position on an array of sexual-family matters. The mean position among all respondents with regard to the four questions, on a scale of 0 (most liberal-progressive) to 1 (most traditional-conservative), is .70.

Secondly, Russians are moderately supportive of a variety of national-conservative policies and organizations: mandatory study of Orthodox culture in primary school; military education in school; military-patriotic youth educational organizations; Orthodox activists; and Cossack and other nongovernmental formations that cooperate with the police.

That support is clearly marked by age: the older, the more supportive. Policies and institutions coming from Soviet times, such as military education and youth patriotic organizations, gather the highest support, from 50% to 85% of the population depending on the age cohort. Orthodox education, Orthodox activists and Cossacks are less popular but still able to gather support of 60% or higher among the older generations, versus only 30-60% in the younger groups.

We should also note that opinions on these matters correlate with ideological preferences more or less in ways one would expect. Supporters of Western ideology oppose all five, while supporters of national-conservative ideology support all five. “Communists” support the military-patriotic elements but oppose (albeit not quite with statistical significance) the more Orthodox or “tsarist” (i.e. Cossacks) elements – except for mandatory Orthodox culture education, which they support.

Thirdly, we can calculate a NatValue index based on preference for state ideology, where:

-fully national-conservative ideologies (“Russian,” statist, White) have a value of 1.0;

-Eurasian and universal-Russian ideologies related to national-conservatism have a value of 0.5;

-Western ideology has a value of 0;

-Communism and uncategorized ideologies are discounted.

To this can be added the values Russians see as fundamentally Russian (rossiiskii or russkii does not result in any difference), the main ones being patriotism (.83), Orthodoxy (.71), and collectivism (.71) on a scale of 0-1, as well as pride in being citizens of Russia – ranged on a scale of 0 (not proud) to 1 (very proud), the average position is .77.

If we put together all these elements, we see that these five categories are rather strongly correlated with one another.

If these five categories are then averaged (each weighted equally) to generate a single master index of national-conservatism, the average score is .69 on a scale of 0-1. Thus, depending on whether the cutoff is set at .6 or .7, the result is that either 73% or 58% of the population can be categorized as largely adhering to a set of national-conservative beliefs, values and ideology.

Asserting the Russian public’s lack of ideology, as is commonly done by observers, should be done with caution. Average citizens do not share any highly intellectual doctrine; few if any are reading Ivan Ilyin or Alexander Dugin or have even heard of them. But this clearly does not mean that they have no ideology in the sense of worldviews, sensibilities, shared interpretations, beliefs or values.

In that sense, there indeed seems to be a majority public opinion that is at least partly synchronized with the national-conservatism promoted by the Kremlin. One can debate whether it is “top-down” or “bottom-up,” deep-seated in citizens due to shared collective and individual experience or constructed by media narratives. But the popular support for it is there, and it should be taken into consideration if we want to understand much of Russian society’s defensive consolidation in wartime.

Another important takeaway is that the Kremlin knows what it is doing in shaping its propaganda message: the Presidential Administration is fairly expert at tapping into existing perceptions and reinforcing them.

This paper emanates from the research project “Values-based legitimation in authoritarian states”, financed by the Research Council of Norway, project number 300997’.

Bloomberg Business Week, 1/18/23

For many young Russians, the barrage of sanctions that severed their country’s ties with large swaths of the global economy was a good reason to leave. For Viktoriya Shelanova, a 37-year-old social media manager in Moscow, it was an opportunity to start a business selling water sports apparel.

An exodus of foreign brands following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has resulted in shortages of goods in practically every sector. When Viktoriya’s sister Julia, an avid wakeboarder, struggled to find a neoprene vest, the two set out to find a manufacturer in China, a country that has maintained friendlier relations with the Kremlin.

They identified a factory in Guangdong province that produces sports gear for several big US companies and sent a request for samples via WeChat, the Chinese messaging service. Less than two months later they received a delivery of 20 vests. Once they’ve chosen the ones they like best, they plan to start ordering them in batches of 100 to sell in Moscow, and to the water sports parks that have sprung up in recent years as wakeboarding gained in popularity. “We think there will be huge demand, and there’s no competition at the moment,” Viktoriya says by phone from Moscow.

Many commentators have compared Russia’s current economic isolation with that of the Soviet era. Yet it’s more reminiscent of the 1990s, when the collapse of communism left gaping holes in supply chains, forcing consumers and entrepreneurs to find creative ways to fill them.

Avito, the Russian equivalent of Craigslist, is full of people offering to import foreign-brand apparel from abroad: Search for Gucci and you’ll pull up 173,000 listings. New supply chains have sprung up to bring in iPhones and other Western tech gear via former Soviet countries.

Franchise owners are coping with the exit of multinationals by selling products with similar packaging and logos but slightly different names. Krispy Kreme doughnuts are now called Krunchy Dream, Starbucks is Stars Coffee, and Pizza Hut is now Pizza N (a play on the fact that the Russian N looks like an English H).

One enterprising Russian national, who asked not to be identified, has set up a company in Dubai that has a license to import gold. Russian companies buy bullion and ship it to him, and he sells it to jewelry makers in the United Arab Emirates. After pocketing 40% of the profit, he uses the proceeds to buy car parts, or whatever else is needed, which are then transported to Russia.

It’s all part of what Kremlin officials call the “mobilization economy.” Speaking in March, shortly after an initial round of sanctions took effect, Russian President Vladimir Putin said: “There’s only one way out of the conditions that we currently find ourselves in, and that’s to give maximum freedom to people who are conducting business.”

Regulations that banned so-called parallel imports, a term that applies to branded goods brought in without the trademark owner’s consent, have been dropped. The Ministry of Economic Development’s website advertises low-interest-rate loans for entrepreneurs in certain lines of work as well as moratoriums on inspections.

That isn’t to say sanctions aren’t causing pain. Used Toyotas and BMWs fetch higher prices than they did when they were new. (Good luck tracking down a replacement transmission if your foreign-made car breaks down.) More than a quarter of Aeroflot’s planes have been grounded because they’ve been cannibalized for parts for aircraft that are still flying.

A Bloomberg Economics study that compared Russia with South Africa in the 1960s through the ’90s, when the latter faced sanctions over apartheid, concluded the economy faces “a significant slow-burning drag as barriers to trade and capital flows choke competition and add inefficiency.” The Russian economy contracted 2.7% last year, according to Bloomberg Economics estimates, and is set to shrink an additional 2.5% in 2023.

Russia’s statistical agency stopped publishing detailed trade data after the invasion of Ukraine, but imports are estimated to have fallen by as much as 23.5% last year, from $380 billion in 2021, according to the central bank. Deputy Prime Minister Denis Manturov predicted in September that the value of parallel imports would reach at least $20 billion by the end of 2022.

As many as 1 million Russians fled the country in 2022, to escape economic hardship and the threat of men being called up to the front. For those who remain, daily life is slowly changing as many of the big global brands wind down operations. So far only about 5% of international companies that were in Russia before the war have completely pulled up stakes, according to a database created by Kyiv School of Economics. But more than half have curtailed operations or halted new investment.

Some multinationals, like Apple Inc. and Inditex, the parent of Zara, made a swift exit following the invasion. Others, like Reckitt Benckiser Group Plc, whose portfolio includes products that are household names the world over, including Enfamil baby formula and Durex condoms, along with British American Tobacco Plc, maker of Dunhill and Pall Mall cigarettes, announced plans to exit but haven’t yet followed through.

Danone SA, the biggest dairy producer in Russia, announced it would be exiting the market in October. It’s still unclear whether the new Russian owner of its production plants will have the right to sell Activia yogurt or other Danone brands.

Consumer-product giants Unilever Plc and Mondelez International Inc., both of which have plants in Russia, say they’re only supplying Russian consumers with essential products, though those include Cornetto ice cream and Milka chocolate.

For some categories of goods, Chinese brands have rushed in to fill the vacuum. Xiaomi Corp. was Russia’s bestselling smartphone maker in 2022, dethroning Samsung, and three of the top five brands were Chinese, according to M.Video-Eldorado Group, Russia’s biggest consumer electronics retailer.

The market for designer clothes and accessories is thriving despite sanctions. After the European Union banned exports of luxury items costing more than €300 ($324) each to Russia in March, sales surged at stores in Dubai and Turkey, two countries that have maintained direct flights to Russia, according to Claudia D’Arpizio, a partner at Bain. The consultancy estimates that Russians purchased about €7 billion of personal luxury goods in 2021, both at home and during travels abroad, representing up to 3% of the global luxury market.

While European luxury conglomerates have shut down their stores in Russia, they’ve yet to decide whether to permanently exit the country. In October, Jean-Marc Duplaix, chief financial officer of Kering SA, owner of Gucci and Saint Yves Laurent, said maintaining a presence in Russia helped the group “protect” its trademarks there.

As for the Shelanova sisters, the two aren’t planning to stop at neoprene vests. They’re thinking of expanding into wetsuits and have started investigating which Chinese factories produce for the big US brands. “We’ve already found the one that makes wetsuits for Roxy, but we’re looking for other companies as well,” says Julia. “We’d like to create our own brand.”