Is Russia’s war economy starting to crack?

The war in Ukraine is increasingly becoming a war about Russia itself.

After more than three years of attritional fighting, the central question is no longer simply whether Moscow can continue gaining territory in eastern Ukraine, but whether Putin can continue sustaining the economic, political and social pressures created by a war that was supposed to last days, not years.

Last week’s mass Ukrainian drone assault across Russia, including Moscow, offered a glimpse of that pressure becoming harder to contain. More than a thousand drones were launched across 14 Russian regions, the annexed Crimean Peninsula and the Black Sea in one of the largest attacks of the war.

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