By Ben Aris, Intellinews, 9/25/25

Russia’s Ministry of Finance (MinFin) presented the 2026-2028 budget on September 24 that keeps spending flat and introduces a number of new taxes to fund a ballooning budget deficit and cuts military spending for the first time in three and half years of war.

Not all the details were released, but most of the main parameters have been made public and the draft is scheduled to be submitted to the State Duma by September 30.

The MinFin said its draft federal budget for 2026–2028 will remain “balanced and sustainable,” while prioritising defence, security and social support for families of participants in the war in Ukraine, TASS reported on September 24.

“The draft budget preserves conditions for growth in real wages and household incomes,” the ministry said in a statement, adding that allocations for housing and family support would increase alongside defence expenditure.

The budget will be closely scrutinised after US President Donald Trump claimed he has studied the Russian economic situation and discovered it was very “BAD”, calling it a “paper tiger”, as part of an abrupt U-turn on Ukraine during the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) in New York this week.

The main change in the new budget is sharp changes in the GDP growth outlook: 2.5% in 2025 instead of 1%; and 1.3% instead of 2.4% in 2026. This brings the Ministry of Economy’s estimates closer to the Bank of Russia’s current forecast for growth of 1-2% in 2025 and 0.5-1.5% in 2026.

After three and half years of war, the Russian government is under growing pressure to fund its “Special military operation” (SVO) and its economic problems are getting worse. However, as bne IntelliNews reported in a recent deep dive into Ukraine and Russia’s budgets side-by-side, the Kremlin can fund its entire war effort using only internal resources – largely the issue of the Russian Finance Ministry’s OFZ treasury bills tapping the RUB20 trillion of liquidity in the banking sector.

Ukraine is, however, entirely dependent on external funding from its allies: it is short some $8bn-$19bn (depending on if there is a ceasefire) for 2025 and the unfunded gap in next year’s budget was just increased to $65bn by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), all of which will have to come from European partners this year, after the US sent no money to Ukraine since US President Donald Trump took office.

Russia’s MinFin is trying to spread the load with a mix of modest drawdowns from its rainy day National Welfare Fund (NWF), cutting spending, issuing more OFZ bonds and this year increasing VAT rates by 200bp that comes into effect on January 1, and the introduction of progressive income taxes for the first time in Putin’s 25 years of rule that came into effect this year.

Taken together, while this will be a painful year for Russia’s budget, the Kremlin is still well able to fund a continuation of the war for at least two more years based on its domestic funding resources, and probably much longer.

Revenues: Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin announced two key figures at the government meeting. According to him, federal budget revenues in 2026 will amount to RUB40.283 trillion, while expenditures will amount to RUB44.869 trillion. (chart)

This means that, adjusted for inflation, expenditures will remain virtually unchanged compared to 2025 (RUB41.469 trillion) and will be only 2% higher than last year’s 2026 plans, The Bell reports, which is unsurprising, as inflation was also higher than planned.

“Revenues will decline not only in real but also in nominal terms—both compared to this year’s planned figures and to the government’s 2026 plans adopted a year ago. The decline in revenues is due to deteriorating macroeconomic indicators,” The Bell said in a comment.

Russia’s economy has been slowing sharply thanks to the CBR’s unorthodox plan to artificially cool the economy to bring down inflation. The outlook for this year is for about 1% growth after two years of 4.3%, according to the CBR’s Main Directions of the Single State Monetary Policy mid-term outlook report released on September 3. However, growth will start to pick up again in 2026, according to the regulator’s basic scenario.

First military spending cuts: For the first time since the war started in 2022, Russia’s defence spending in 2026 will be reduced, according to data cited by Reuters, from RUB13.5 trillion to RUB12.6 trillion ($153.7bn, 5.8% of GDP). Moreover, it will be slightly lower than the 2026 plans set when the previous budget was approved a year ago (RUB12.8 trillion).

“Given that inflation has exceeded the plans, the actual reduction in defence spending will be even greater,” says The Bell. “However, expenditures under the adjacent budget line item “National Security and Law Enforcement” will increase from RUB3.56 trillion in 2025 to RUB4.065 trillion in 2026.”

Taken together there is still a slight decline: total defence and security spending will fall in nominal terms by 2.32% and more significantly in real terms by 6.68% from RUB17 trillion to RUB16.7 trillion ($203.3bn, 7.2% of GDP) due to inflation outpacing the security increase.

The rationale for the cut in defence, or at least the halt in its steady increases, is not clear. Some argue that now the Russian economy is fully militarised the need for continued heavy investment is falling away. Others say that steady progress on the battlefield has also taken the pressure off the need for more heavy spending. And at the same time, MinFin itself has been pushing for less military spending, simply to reduce the distortions to an overheating economy that will cause long-term damage that could undermine the campaign.

Deficit: the budget deficit has ballooned sharply on the back of unfettered military spending and falling revenues. The forecast has already been tripled from 0.5% set at the start of the year to 1.7%, or RUB3.8 trillion ($46.2bn), in the summer. (chart)

However, over the first eight months of this year it had already swelled to 1.9% of GDP, or RUB4.2 trillion ($51.1bn) blowing through the new official target….

By Darya Korsunskaya, Reuters, 9/18/25

Summary

-Russia wants to balance the budget while maintaining reserves

-VAT hike is under discussion, no decision yet

-Putin pledged no major tax changes before 2030

-Earlier VAT hike spurred inflation

MOSCOW, Sept 17 (Reuters) – The Russian government is considering raising the rate of value-added tax to keep the budget deficit in check and maintain reserves, four sources told Reuters, despite public assurances from President Vladimir Putin that there will be no tax rises.

The draft budget is expected to be submitted to parliament on September 29. Its key components are agreed with Putin beforehand and are unlikely to be significantly altered during the formal parliamentary debate.

Russia, in the fourth year of its war in Ukraine, has raised personal income and corporate taxes this year, but the government still had to triple its federal budget deficit estimate to 1.7% of gross domestic product (GDP) in May.

It is now set to exceed that target, according to an unnamed official quoted by state media this month. The 0.9% of GDP deficit for 2026 included in a budget law last year also looks likely to be exceeded.

INCREASE COULD HALVE THE PROJECTED BUDGET DEFICIT

Four sources close to the government confirmed a report this week by The Bell, a media outlet based outside Russia, that the government is discussing lifting the value-added tax (VAT) rate to 22% from 20% to curb the deficit.

The report did not specify a possible timeline for a decision but one of the sources told Reuters it was being considered for the 2026 budget as long as the budget rule which sets aside windfall oil revenues remains in place.

“How can the deficit be reduced while adhering to the budget rule? Only by raising taxes, because there’s hardly anything left to cut, either military spending or social spending,” one source said.

VAT accounted for 37% of federal budget revenues in 2024 and the possible increase could halve the projected 2026 deficit, according to Reuters calculations.

Russia’s economy has continued to grow despite tightening Western sanctions over the war in Ukraine. But GDP is expected to slow to around 1% from 4.3% last year and inflation remains above 8% in a country where much of the workforce and 40% of revenues now go to defence and security.

Government spending is the key driver of economic growth in Russia, and with Putin expressing displeasure at the economic slowdown and the need to continue financing the war of attrition in Ukraine, spending cuts are unlikely.

NO FINAL DECISION YET

Finance Minister Anton Siluanov has insisted that the budget rule, under which energy revenues collected above Russia’s target oil price, currently $60 per barrel, are directed to the fiscal reserve fund, will remain in place.

After Russia sent troops into Ukraine in 2022, Western nations prohibited insurers and maritime service providers from facilitating Russian oil exports unless they were below $60 a barrel. India boosted its Russian oil imports sharply but now faces pressure from U.S. President Donald Trump to halt them.

The Russian fund, which is separate to the country’s central bank reserves, currently has about 4 trillion roubles in liquid assets, which can also be used to cover the deficit. This year the government plans to tap the fund for 447 billion roubles.

Putin, who in 2024 pledged no major changes to the tax system before 2030 following the tax hikes, which were introduced in 2025, has asked the government on September 5 to increase revenues through higher productivity, not taxes.

The source who said there was little room for cuts in the federal budget, argued that military spending could not be cut and minor cuts in the social sphere would not help much.

“It is like shearing a piglet—lots of squealing, not much use. If we could cut 1–2 trillion roubles, sure, but you can’t cut amounts like that, they just aren’t there. You can trim a few million, maybe hundreds,” the source said.

GROWING CONCERN ABOUT THE BUDGET

A two percentage point 2019 VAT hike contributed 0.6 percentage points to inflation that year, according to the central bank, which has pledged to halve inflation to return it to its 4% target.

However, central bank governor Elvira Nabiullina cautiously backed a tax increase, saying after the September 12 board meeting that it was better to raise extra revenue than to widen the deficit.

She linked the size of the deficit to the central bank’s ability to cut rates further from the current 17%, a level economists see as too high to revive growth.

Putin has said that Russia’s low level of debt allows it to borrow more and that new debt should not be feared, but rates even for the government are around 13%, with interest expenses expected to reach 2% of GDP in 2025.

***

Russia unveils ‘muscular’ budget changes to counter sanctions, oil price falls

By Gleb Bryanski and Darya Korsunskaya, Reuters, 9/18/25

Summary

-Finance Ministry unveils measure to ensure reserve replenishment

-Measure to be included in the 2026 draft budget

-Ministry says the measure will boost resilience to sanctions

-Draft budget to be submitted to parliament on September 29

MOSCOW, Sept 18 (Reuters) – The Russian Finance Ministry announced a new measure on Thursday that it said was aimed at shielding the state budget from oil price fluctuations and Western sanctions targeting Russian energy exports.

Under the new initiative, set to be implemented next year, the government will lower the cut-off price for oil above which oil revenues go into the fiscal reserve fund to try to ensure that the fund is sufficiently replenished.

“To make our finances more resilient, we are proposing a reduction in dependence on various constraints, whether price-related or volume-related, in the budget’s reliance on oil and gas revenues,” Finance Minister Anton Siluanov said at a public forum.

RUSSIA’S OIL AND GAS SALES ARE EXPECTED TO FALL SHARPLY

The measure comes as Russia’s state oil and gas sales in September are set to fall, opens new tab by around 23% from a year earlier on lower prices and a stronger rouble, according to Reuters’ calculations.

The draft budget is expected to be submitted to parliament on September 29. Sources told Reuters that the government was considering raising the rate of value-added tax to keep the budget deficit in check and maintain reserves.

The Kremlin declined to comment on the VAT hike, with spokesman Dmitry Peskov saying that the government was handling the draft. Key budget figures are traditionally agreed with President Vladimir Putin before the budget is made public.

Putin, who met key cabinet members this week to discuss the budget, expressed displeasure at the slow pace of economic growth, which is expected to slow to about 1% from 4.3% last year.

MEASURE WILL STRENGTHEN RUSSIA’S BUDGET, SAYS SILUANOV

Siluanov has been seeking to restore the oil price mechanism, known as the “budget rule”, which was abandoned after the start of the war in Ukraine, although Russian media reported that he had pushed for a bigger reduction in the cut-off price.

Under the rule, the taxes resulting from when the price exceeds the agreed cut-off price go to the fiscal reserve fund, while the rest of the income is used to cover budget expenses. When the price falls below the cut-off level, the reserves are used to cover the resulting shortfall.

If the rule, first introduced by Siluanov’s predecessor Alexei Kudrin in 2004, is not in place, the budget can become more vulnerable when the oil price is going down.

Siluanov said the new measure would help to bring the share of energy revenues in the state budget down to 22% from about 25% in the first eight months of 2025, making the budget more “muscular”.

The fiscal reserves created under the budget rule carried Russia through several downturns and helped it withstand Western sanctions.

Siluanov said the cut-off price would be lowered by $1 every year to bring it to $55 per barrel in 2030. The cut-off price is currently at $60 per barrel.

The fiscal reserve fund, which can be used to cover the budget deficit, currently has about 4 trillion roubles ($48.25 billion) in it. The government this year plans to tap the fund for 447 billion roubles ($5.39 billion) to cover part of the budget deficit, which is expected to exceed 1.7% of GDP.

The 2026 draft budget set the average price of Urals crude at $59 per barrel, Siluanov said, implying that the fiscal reserves would not be replenished at the same cut-off price.

Speaking alongside central bank Governor Elvira Nabiullina, Siluanov paraphrased a quote attributed to Tsar Alexander III, that the army and the navy are Russia’s best allies, adding that sustainable finances were a third.

Nabiullina said a more balanced budget would enable the central bank to lower its key rate to an average of 12%–13% next year from the current 17%, a level economists and business leaders see as needed to spur faster growth.

($1 = 82.9000 roubles)

By Ben Aris, Intellinews, 9/16/25

“A crisis is drawing ever closer. It will break in Ukraine, but it won’t begin on the frontlines, where the country’s battle-weary brigades continue to impose a brutal cost on the Russian invader. The coming crisis is brewing in the West, where the US pullback and European hesitation now threaten a financial disaster,” Timothy Ash, the senior sovereign strategist at BlueBay Asset Management in London wrote in a note for Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) on September 16.

As bne IntelliNews reported, Ukraine faces the risk of falling off a financial cliff this year. The problem is that the government is short $8bn-$19bn to cover the projected deficit this year. The Finance Ministry has been warning for over a year that it needs more help from its Western allies to pay for the war. It is running a deficit of about $50bn a year and the projected unfunded short fall for 2026 is $37.5bn, but the International Monetary Fund (IMF) team in Kyiv this week for funding talks, said that it thinks Kyiv needs an additional $10bn-$20bn next year: Ukraine spent $97bn in 2025, but is on track to spend $120bn in 2026.

Where will this money come from? Raising it from Ukraine’s allies has become next to impossible now that the US has essentially withdrawn all support for Ukraine. As bne IntelliNews reported, Europe can’t afford to take over the burden of supporting Ukraine entirely on its own, as most EU countries are either in recession or approaching a crisis. The rising debt amongst the G7 countries has already caused a bond market storm and France’s government collapsed last week under the weight of an intractable 5.7% of GDP budget deficit. And both the UK and France are close to debt crises of their own that may end in a Greek-style IMF bailout. Coming up with an additional $58bn next year for Ukraine from EU coffers is no longer possible.

“IMF messaging suggests that its prior conclusions that Ukraine’s gross budget and balance of payments financing needs over the four-year duration of the program were just $150bn were way too optimistic,” says Ash. “The financing currently available is inadequate to meet Ukraine’s impending needs. A swift change of course is needed if a financial cataclysm is to be averted.”

Europe has committed just under $170bn to Ukraine since the start of the war – more than the US, which has spent just under $100bn, according to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy. On paper it is more. US President Donald Trump claimed earlier this year the US has committed over $350bn, but after Bankova checked the numbers the official allocations by Congress amounted to $196bn, but at least $100bn of that never arrived, Zelenskiy said in March. And since he took office, the Trump administration has sent next to nothing.

“Underpinning the Fund’s macro and financing framework was the assumption that the war would begin to wind down this year, and hence, Ukraine’s financing needs would also significantly reduce,” says Ash.

No end to the war in sight

That is clearly not going to happen. The ceasefire talks that kicked off in Riyadh on February 18 have gone nowhere after Russian President Vladimir Putin made impossible claims and Trump has flip flopped on the shape of the possible peace deal. As bne IntelliNews opined, there are two sets of talks going one: the Trump administration has threatened Russia with extreme secondary sanctions but at the same time kept the door open to sanctions relief and business deals to tap Russia’s mineral riches.

Since the full-scale invasion, Ukraine has been running budget deficits equivalent to $3bn-$4bn a month, most of which has been covered by IMF and Western financing. Assuming that the war would essentially end in 2025, the Fund had presumed the budget deficit and financing needs would more or less halve in 2026, and then fall to a fraction of this in 2027. “It was a heroic assumption, and it was wrong,” says Ash.

This problem has been apparent for a while, yet the IMF has yet to recalibrate its model that sets the agenda for the size of its funding programme.

It is becoming increasingly obvious that the Kremlin has no interest in peace talks, as it continues to make steady, albeit slow, progress on the battlefield. At the same time, after three years of heavy investment, its military production is now producing more materiel than it needs so that the process of restocking has begun as Russia starts to rebuild its military capacity. The peace talk efforts came to a definite end last week when presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov officially put ceasefire talks on hold on September 12.

The expectations are now moving towards a long war, which implies much higher long-run financing needs, says Ash. On September 11, EU foreign affairs chief Kaja Kallas said that she expected the war to continue for at least another two years. Others have speculated that Putin will simply continue until Ukraine collapses completely or Zelenskiy capitulates, however long that takes. Time is on his side.

A lot of attention has been paid to Russia’s economic problems, which are getting worse, but with inflation falling much faster than expected – the core macro problem – thanks to CBR governor Elvia Nabiullina’s unorthodox plan to artificially cool the economy, growth will slow this year before it starts to recover next year, according to the CBR’s latest outlook.

The Kremlin is also short of money. This year’s budget deficit is ballooning, but the government has already started a discussion on raising VAT and it also has some RUB20 trillion in banking sector liquidity to tap to cover a deficit of up to RUB5 trillion now expected for this year. In short, the Kremlin has access to enough money to keep the war up for several more years.

IMF’s blinkered approach

The IMF has acknowledged that its previous estimate was wrong. It now says that an anticipated additional $10bn-$20bn will be needed by its Extended Fund Facility (EFF) by the end of 2027. Ukraine’s Finance Ministry put the number at $37bn. “Both could prove significant underestimates,” says Ash.

Ash argues that both the government and IMF take a “blinkered” approach to estimating Ukraine’s financing needs. They focus only on budget and balance of payments requirements. That excludes the broader, but essential, military support. Using the data from the Kiel Institute of the World Economy, Ash estimates that the annual cost of the war to the West of supporting Ukraine has been nearer to $100bn annually— more than double IMF estimates.

Finding new IMF funding for Ukraine will have to clear several hurdles. It will need to get reassurance that it can be financed to get a sign off from shareholders.

“In other words, that the numbers add up. Even to meet the IMF’s narrow focus on budget financing needs, the West will have to come up with $20bn-$37bn in new funding, just to take the country to the end of the program in March 2027,” says Ash, and that means calculating on spending $100bn for at least another three years.

The Biden administration used to cover about 40% of Ukraine’s financing needs, but with the Trump administration now out of the game, this very considerable annual funding requirement will fall squarely on Europe.

“Europe cannot and will not pick up this bill,” says Ash. “The harsh political, social, and economic reality across the continent means there is no realistic possibility of Ukraine receiving such a long-term financing commitment. Europe is struggling with rising budget deficits, subdued growth, competing demands for defence and social needs, and a populist tide demanding spending at home. The situation is now serious.”

Ash speculates that the IMF shareholders might nix any proposal to even increase funding by another $20bn in the short-term, which would quickly precipitate a crisis. And would immediately raise doubts about Ukraine’s ability to continue its defence against Russian attacks.

“Europe needs a plan B, but in truth, that’s really now actually Plan A. For more than three years, Europe has ignored the very obvious solution to its problem,” says Ash.

CBR money

Ash, and many others, have been advocating for several years to seize the $300bn of frozen Central Bank of Russia (CBR) assets and use them to pay for the war. The idea came up again most recently at a meeting of EU foreign ministers in Copenhagen on September 1, but was ultimately rejected. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen also brought it up during her EU State of the Union address (video, transcript) on September 10, but said the idea was now off the table.

The problem is that the money is frozen, but technically it still belongs to the Bank of Russia. Confiscating it – taking ownership and spending it – as opposed to just freezing it, would undermine confidence in both the euro and the European banking system, say critics – something that central bankers in Europe are not prepared to do. In the meantime, von der Leyen has suggested that the money can be used more “creatively” and invested into some sort of “victory bonds” to generate more revenues. The profits from the assets have already been used to underpin a $50bn G7 loan for Ukraine, the Extraordinary Revenue Acceleration (ERA) scheme, but that loan is already nearly fully distributed.

While the EU leaders are very unhappy about seizing the CBR’s money, faced with the prospect of a Russian military victory in Ukraine, the pressure to grab those funds will clearly build steadily.

“All roads lead back to the issue of freezing, seizing, and using the $330bn in Central Bank of Russia CBR) assets in Western jurisdictions,” says Ash. “This money would amply finance Ukraine’s defence needs for a long war and send a powerful signal that Ukraine can ride out Putin’s long-war scenario and his own failing economy. This would increase the Kremlin’s risk in continuing its war of aggression, and quite possibly force it to the negotiating table.”

“Opponents of the need to seize Russia’s CBR assets have an armory of excuses, although none is very persuasive. Such arguments are, anyway, less effective the worse Ukraine’s financing dilemma becomes,” Ash argues, highlighting the dilemma that Europe is now facing. “And while these critics aim to explain what they think won’t work, there are no suggestions about what will.”

A crisis is coming

A crisis is drawing nearer. Relying on European taxpayer support is no longer sustainable. The political fallout from the drain on Europe’s economies and the ballooning deficits and debt is already visible, fuelling a popular backlash and the rise of the far-right parties in Europe. Germany’s AfD (Alternative für Deutschland) just tripled its share of the vote in a German regional election this weekend, taking 15% of the vote in North Rhine-Westphalia, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s home state. The AfD are now leading in the national polls. Similar things are happening in the rest of the EU.

“And yet the alternative of Ukrainian bankruptcy and defeat is a terrifying spectre for the continent,” says Ash. “If that happens, Europe would be faced by many, many millions of Ukrainians moving West, further straining its social, economic, and political fabric. The consequences get worse the more closely they are examined.”

Ash goes on to paint a grim picture of what Europe would look like if Ukraine loses: Europe’s two largest military industrial complexes would fall into the Kremlin’s hands; European defence spending would need to immediately rise to the 5% of GDP; budget deficits and borrowing needs would soar; interest rates across Europe would rise; and real GDP growth would slow.

“The opponents of seizing CBR assets, particularly Belgium, Euroclear, and the European Central Bank (ECB), need to detail their exact plan for the defence of Europe if Russia’s billions are left unused,” says Ash. For now, all we can see is blank faces — they have no plan.”

The flaw with this argument is that it assumes the only solution is to fund Ukraine to continue the war in the equally vain hope that the Russian economy will eventually collapse or that Trump will get back into the game and impose such tough sanctions on Russia, Putin will be forced to the negotiating table – an equally unlikely scenario.

In the short-term the only immediately available scenario that will end the war is that Zelenskiy accepts the terms that the Kremlin has laid out at the various rounds of talks this year along the lines of the failed 2022 Istanbul peace deal. It is effectively the Finlandisation of Ukraine where it gives up 20% of its territory, returns to neutrality, and promises never to join Nato. There are some tough choices ahead, and none of the alternatives are particularly palatable.

By James Carden, Substack, 9/14/25

The recent assassination of the Ukrainian neo-fascist politician Andriy Parubiy are a grim reminder of the far-right origins of the 2014 Ukrainian revolution — a revolution which eventually gave way to the full-scale Russian invasion of February 2022 and a war that has decimated the Ukrainian state.

At two key moments over the past 20 years, during 2004’s Orange Revolution and, a decade later, during the Maidan uprising, Ukraine’s nationalist political elites, at the urging of the American foreign policy establishment, sought to marginalize, stigmatize and eventually disenfranchise the substantial bloc of ethnic Russian citizens living in the country’s east and south.

That such an eventuality was possible (if not likely) was foreseen some 35 years ago by the last decent foreign policy president we’ve had, George H.W. Bush, who crafted a post Cold War policy based on (1) a refusal to rub Russia’s diminished fortunes in its face and (2) a wariness of re-awakening the poisonous sectarianism that so marked the politics of Eastern and Central Europe at mid-century.

Bush’s emphasis was on avoiding creating unnecessary crises within the post-Soviet space rather than provoking new ones (as subsequent Republican and Democratic administrations have chosen to do). As Bush’s secretary of state James A. Baker later wrote: “Time and again, President Bush demanded that we not dance on the ruins of the Berlin Wall. He simply wouldn’t hear of it.”

The nature of the Cold War had changed with Mikhail Gorbachev’s UN Speech of December 7, 1988. Gorbachev announced that the USSR was abandoning the class struggle that for decades served as the basis for Soviet foreign policy. In place of that, Gorbachev declared that Eastern European states were now free to choose their own paths, declaring that “the compelling necessity of the principle of freedom of choice” was “a universal principle to which there should be no exceptions.”

Gorbachev continued:

“…The next U.S. administration, headed by President-elect George Bush, will find in us a partner who is ready – without long pauses or backtracking – to continue the dialogue in a spirit of realism, openness and good will, with a willingness to achieve concrete results working on the agenda which covers the main issues of Soviet-U.S. relations and world politics.”

Initially, Bush and his team were skeptical of Gorbachev. In his memoirs, Bush’s National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft dismissed Gorbachev’s overture, writing that the speech “had established, with a largely rhetorical flourish, a heady atmosphere of optimism.” Scowcroft, echoing the analysis offered to him by the CIA, worried that Gorbachev would then be able to “exploit an early meeting with a new president as evidence to declare the Cold War over without providing substantive actions from a ‘new’ Soviet Union.”

The caution with which Bush and his team treated Gorbachev likewise was extended to the newly or soon-to-be independent states in Eastern Europe.

There was to be no dancing on the ruins of the Berlin Wall.

The diplomatic historian James Graham Wilson writes that Bush realized that a triumphalist approach on the part of the Americans might backfire. “Ok, so long as the programs do not smack of fomenting revolution,” Scowcroft wrote on a paper proposing ‘democratic dialogue’ in Eastern Europe.

***

Eventually, Bush accepted that Gorbachev was serious about reform and came to see him as a partner in ending the 40 year division of Europe. What changed?

September 18th marks 5 years since the death of the acclaimed Princeton University scholar Stephen F. Cohen, a leader of the “revisionist” school of Soviet history and author of a biography of Soviet leader Nikolai Bukharin that Gorbachev admired.* As such, it is appropriate to recount for future historians a little known episode that took place at Camp David in November 1989, a month before the first summit meeting between Bush and Gorbachev. The meeting played a role in convincing Bush to overcome the skepticism of his advisers displayed toward Gorbachev.

A young National Security Council aide named Condoleezza Rice (who became, a decade later, National Security Adviser and Secretary of State under Bush’s son) invited Cohen and Harvard University scholar Richard Pipes, a Polish-born anti-Soviet hardliner, to consult with the President. Pipes and Cohen were no strangers to one another, they were frequent sparring partners on television and radio.

As Cohen recalled in an oral history interview with Columbia University’s Harriman Institute in 2017,

I got a call from the White House from Condi [Condoleezza] Rice saying, “We want you to come to Camp David next week and we’re going to stage a debate between you and Dick Pipes for the president’s entire team,” Secretary of State, head of CIA, everybody, the vice president, “about Gorbachev and what we should do. Is this a trick by Gorbachev or should we seize this as an opportunity to end the Cold War?”

Cohen continued,

“I mean this was ridiculous. [Ronald W.] Reagan already thought he’d ended the Cold War, and when he left office in January 1989 he said so: “we ended the Cold War.” But there was this so-called long pause by the Bush administration.

“I had talked to Bush privately…about this. But Bush decided on a Camp David debate—because his administration was really split on this. Was Gorbachev an opportunity or a dangerous hoax? In 1989 they’re still debating this. So I went to Camp David. They obviously invited us because of this idea that there was the Princeton school and the Harvard school. Pipes was probably the leading American “hard-line” scholar of Russia. He’d been head of the B team, he’d been on Reagan’s national security council. He was really connected to the conservative movement in America. I, I guess, had the reputation of being sort of the left liberal position…

“But this event at Camp David was fascinating. Pipes and I each were given fifteen minutes, then we were interrogated by all these guys. I felt like Zelig. I’d seen these people only on TV— except for the President.”

Cohen had for years been wondering how it was that so many within the US establishment got Gorbachev wrong. Writing in the Los Angeles Times in 1987, Cohen noted that most American commentators had “maintained that Gorbachev represented nothing significantly new. Now they seem baffled. Such foggy perceptions prevent the United States from considering the equally historic possibility of a new kind of relationship with the Soviet Union.”

As it happens, Cohen’s concerns were shared by Reagan’s Secretary of State George Shultz, who also wondered how it was that top CIA Russia analysts such as Robert Gates got Gorbachev so wrong. Many years later, Cohen told me that at the meeting at Camp David, Bush directed Cohen to sit next to him at lunch, and, having seemingly rejected Pipes’ advice, told the group, “Steve is my kind of Russianist.”

Gorbachev believed that the Soviet Union was reformable, and that, some form of Union would and could go forward along social democratic lines. As the USSR teetered on the brink of collapse, Bush recognized the combustible reality on the ground. The most well-known expression of Bush’s policy towards the emerging post-Soviet states was made on August 1, 1991, during a speech to the Ukrainian Rada where he pledged that the US would take a ‘hands off’ approach. Bush told the audience that the US “cannot tell you how to reform your society. We will not try to pick winners and losers in political competitions between Republics or between Republics and the center. That is your business; that’s not the business of the United States of America.”

Bush also warned he would “not support those who seek independence in order to replace a far-off tyranny with a local despotism. They will not aid those who promote a suicidal nationalism based upon ethnic hatred.” (Andriy Parubiy was the embodiment of this brand of nationalism).

Not everyone at Bush’s State Department was pleased with Bush’s not-terribly-implicit criticism of Ukrainian nationalism—a nationalism, one hardly needs reminding, that reared its head in alliance with a rather rabid brand of German nationalism during the Second World War.

Jon Gundersen, then serving as US Consul General in Kiev, said in a 2012 interview with the Association for Diplomatic Training and Studies that,

“…I have a letter from Paul Wolfowitz, who was at the time the Assistant Secretary of Defense for international security policy.

“He was using our cables [Gundersen and his team in Kiev were pushing against Bush’s more cautious policy] against some at State who would say, “Well, we have to work with the Soviets and Gorbachev. Let’s not push it too much.” The Pentagon’s thinking, in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, was driven by military, not political objectives. If Ukraine becomes independent, the thinking was, Soviet forces would have to retreat a thousand miles from NATO and it would no longer be a strategic threat.

“And so they looked at it from a military perspective; they were less involved with arms control or other considerations. There were some in S/P , State’s Policy Planning Council, who agreed. However, most at State and the NSC [National Security Council] wanted to stick with the existing policy toward the Soviet Union.”

Bush, beset by neocons like Wolfowitz in the Pentagon and diplomats at State who had ‘gone native’ was also targeted by neocons in the media such as Robert Novak and William Safire. Safire was a Madison Avenue ad-man turned speechwriter for the disgraced Spiro Agnew, who later was to become the in-house neoconservative for the New York Times, derided Bush’s speech as “Chicken Kiev.”

Writing on August 29, 1991, Safire took a victory lap while panning Bush’s address. “Communism is dead,” declared Safire.

“…The Soviet empire is breaking up. This is a glorious moment for human freedom. We should savor that moment, thanking God, NATO, the heroic dissidents in Russia and the internal empire, and the two-generation sacrifice of the American people to protect themselves and the world from despotic domination.”

Needless to say, for Safire and his neocon brethren, not all despotic dominations were created equally.

The very nationalist impulses that Bush warned against were those that drove Kiev, in both 2004 and 2014, to attempt to nullify the votes of the Russian-speaking citizens in the southern and eastern parts of Ukraine. And more dangerously, political elites in Kiev (with close ties to the United States and Canada) embarked on a mission to join the NATO alliance. The US Ambassador to the USSR under President Reagan, Jack Matlock, says that he was “quite convinced that if Bush had been reelected he would not have [expanded NATO].”

But we will never know, because on Tuesday, November 3, 1992, Bush lost the presidency to Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton.

Ukraine’s embrace of nationalism and NATO had begun.

By Brian McDonald, Substack, 9/17/25

The announcement came on Tuesday with the matter-of-factness of a budget line, but the scale of it was closer to a civilisational wager. Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin sat at a rudimentary government meeting and said that President Vladimir Putin had signed off on what will be Europe’s largest ever high-speed rail project: more than 4,500 kilometres of new track, criss-crossing the country from Moscow to St Petersburg, Minsk, Yekaterinburg, Rostov, Krasnodar, Sochi, Nizhny Novgorod and Kazan. These trains will be built at home and capable of reaching up to 400 kilometres an hour, he added.

It’s obviously tempting for Russia’s passionate legion of detractors to dismiss such plans as a Potemkin promise, the sort of grandiose scheme floated in Moscow only to sink beneath its own concrete. And that’s especially true in today’s divisive climate, but look closer and the outlines are sharper than the cynics understand. What’s more, construction on the first leg (Moscow to St Petersburg) has already been underway since last year with completion targeted for 2028, so this clearly isn’t the stuff of long fingers.

The full scheme imagines four main arteries with the northern line from Moscow to St Petersburg the easiest to visualise, shrinking the journey from an already pretty fast four hours to barely two. The southern route is longer and more ambitious and will run from Moscow down through Ryazan, Lipetsk, Voronezh, Rostov-on-Don and into Krasnodar, before the hardest stretch of all… tunnelling to Sochi. Anyone who has sweated through the current circuitous crawl, four and a half hours to cover less than 200 kilometres as the crow flies, knows what a transformation this would be for the region’s potential. After all, the Kuban is the closest thing Russia has to a California or Andalusia but (much like its Spanish counterpart) it still remains relatively underdeveloped.

Then there’s the western branch to Minsk in Belarus, passing through Smolensk and Vyazma; a line that, in a very different political climate from today, could potentially plug directly into Western European networks via Warsaw to Berlin. And finally add the proposed eastern leg to Yekaterinburg, passing Nizhny Novgorod and Kazan, and a journey that today swallows 26 hours could be cut to around five. When you tie it all together, you’d be linking roughly 60 million people by high-speed transit, which in terms of sheer connectivity would be the most ambitious transport project ever attempted on the European continent.

That said, it would hardly be the first time that Russians dreamed big on the rails. Tsarist-era engineers once carved the Trans-Siberian across 9,289 kilometres over seven time zones, while the Soviets drove the Baikal-Amur Mainline through permafrost and mountains at enormous cost to reach Sovetskaya Gavan on the Sea of Japan. Russians have long measured their modernisation in these terms; in a country this vast, the tracks are understandably as much a symbol as a means of travel.

Many will naturally ask, “but why now?” Well, the easy answer is a desire for prestige, but this alone won’t shift earth by the tonne or finance kilometres of track and the deeper explanation here is providing employment given Russia has currently mobilised hundreds of thousands of men on wartime salaries. Quite obviously, in peacetime, many will not be needed in uniform and nor would it make sense to keep paying them to stand idle so a labour-intensive project like high-speed rail provides an obvious soft-landing pad… absorbing veterans, keeping unemployment down, and maintaining relatively high salaries while keeping them useful.

There’s also the question of stimulus, given that a scheme of this size would help to stave off recession by adding a few percentage points to GDP growth annually and in a best-case scenario, if sanctions ease, it could even drive a late Putin-era boom, so the political logic is as plain as the economic.

Furthermore, on the face of it, it appears Moscow can readily afford it, bar some unexpected ‘Black Swan’ event and Finance Minister Anton Siluanov reminded us only last week that Russia’s national debt is around 15% of nominal GDP. Even if he borrows another $200 billion it would still sit under 25%; a figure that wouldn’t raise an eyebrow in Western Europe, where governments gorge themselves on credit merely to keep welfare payments moving. Almost everything, too, will be built domestically, making the largesse an internal multiplier rather than a drain and where Russia lacks technical know-how, China can supply it given Beijing has already laid down some 50,000 kilometres of high-speed rail.

In reality, the ghosts that haunt projects like this are related to corruption rather than engineering and the spectre of the Sochi Olympics, with billions skimmed and the Western press laughing at the excess, hangs overhead. Yet many of the leading culprits of that debacle were jailed, a clear signal that theft on such a level won’t be shrugged off in future; and in fairness the city itself has been transformed with its population doubling in fifteen years. The Crimea Bridge (the longest in Europe, whatever your thoughts on the politics of it) was built quickly and serves as another reminder that Russia can, when pressed, deliver complex infrastructure feats.

The open question, of course, is whether the new rail scheme will follow the same discipline, and only time will tell. Realistically, the obstacles are formidable and temper any certainty: sanctions will complicate financing, the tunneling in the southern mountains will be technically punishing and total costs could run far beyond official estimates.

What makes the plan more striking is the vacuum elsewhere. Western Europe once thought in terms of ‘grands projets,’ linking peoples and economies with real vision but now it thinks in terms of expensive subsidies and empty slogans. Spain, for example, boasts a large and impressive high-speed network, but it’s fragmentary and underused while France long ago rowed back on its TGV ambitions and Germany’s infrastructure is falling apart, with visitors to last year’s European Football Championships left stunned at the decrepitude.

Moscow, by contrast, is sketching a line that could, if there’s sufficient Eurasian rapprochement, one day run all the way from London to Hong Kong. Today that sounds fantastical, but link Berlin to Warsaw, Warsaw to Minsk, Minsk to Moscow, Moscow to Yekaterinburg, and from there into Kazakhstan or Mongolia and down into China and the map begins to look possible. Politics would have to change beyond recognition, of course, but the geometry is already getting there.

So, is Russia really about to build Europe’s largest high-speed rail network? The sceptics will say no, while the realists will say: the first part of it for sure, and let’s see how the rest goes. The political need to absorb demobilised soldiers, the economic need for stimulus, and the strategic need to tie together a vast country… well, all these factors suggest it may well happen.

This is about more than a railway, it’s a bet on whether Russia can still dream big in an era when its Western European rivals no longer even dare to dream.