While ordinary Russians lose their sons, their savings, and their future – while people die across Ukraine, Iran, and beyond – the men in the Kremlin are counting their windfall. The numbers are in. The verdict is damning. This was never about Russia’s security. It was always about their money.
Let us begin with the numbers, because the numbers are damning enough on their own.
In January and February 2026, Russia’s budget deficit had already consumed 91% of its full-year target. Oil revenues collapsed by 47.1% compared to the year before. The National Wealth Fund – the reserve cushion built from years of oil profits – was being drained at the rate of nearly 400 billion rubles per month. The Finance Ministry was preparing 10% cuts across every government function except the military. Economists were warning that the Kremlin had built its entire 2026 budget on an oil price fantasy of $59 per barrel.
Then, in late February, a war began in Iran.
Within weeks, Russia’s Urals crude jumped from roughly $45 to $75 per barrel. Oil and gas revenues that had collapsed now refilled. The deficit that was spinning out of control snapped back toward target. The United States — yes, the same United States that has been sanctioning Russia since 2014 – quietly issued a waiver allowing Russian oil to flow again at full price.
Russia did not fire a single missile in the Iran war. It lost no soldiers. It paid no price. It sat back, provided Iran with satellite data on American military positions, and collected billions. The Kremlin calls this geopolitics. The correct word is profiteering -and the commodity being traded is human lives.
THE NUMBERS: WHAT THE KREMLIN MADE FROM OTHER PEOPLE’S DEATHS
The Meduza investigation, drawing on official Russian Finance Ministry data and analysis by independent economists, lays out the arithmetic with brutal clarity.
Additional tax revenue per $10 oil price increase $1.63 billion
Per month, per Sergey Vakulenko, Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center
Additional revenue from a $40 price increase sustained for six months $38 billion
Vakulenko’s estimate – the Kremlin’s ideal scenario
Russia’s budget deficit in just January-February 2026 $42 billion
91% of the full-year target consumed in two months
Collapse in oil and gas revenues before the Iran war 47.1%
Compared to same period in 2025 – the Kremlin was financially bleeding
Russian defense and security spending in 2026 $204 billion
Planned. Protected. Untouchable. While everything else gets cut.
Everything else: healthcare, education, infrastructure, civilian economy $198 billion
The part that gets cut by 10%. The part ordinary Russians depend on.
Read those last two figures together. Military spending: $204 billion, fully protected and growing. Healthcare, education, the civilian economy: $198 billion, facing a 10% cut. In Putin’s Russia, the war machine is more important than the hospital. The soldier is more valuable than the teacher. The missile is worth more than the pension.
Russia’s pension replacement rate – the ratio of average pension to average wage – fell from 35-37% in 2012-2015 to just 25% by 2025. While the Kremlin earns billions from a Middle East war, Russia’s elderly are getting relatively poorer every single year. No one in the Kremlin mentions this. It does not fit the narrative of a great power ascending.
THE PLAN: HOW A FINANCIAL CRISIS BECAME A PRETEXT FOR WAR
Here is what the Kremlin will never say out loud but what the financial data makes impossible to deny:
The Russian state’s ability to fund its war in Ukraine was running out. Not slowly, not gradually – it was in freefall. In the first two months of 2026, the deficit had consumed 91% of the annual target. The National Wealth Fund, Russia’s emergency reserve, was being drained at a rate that would have exhausted it. The Finance Ministry was preparing emergency spending cuts. Economists inside Russia – not Western critics, but Russian economists at Russian think tanks – were warning that the math did not work.
Putin needed a rescue. He needed something that would flood the budget with cash without requiring him to stop the war, reduce military spending, or negotiate with the West on terms that would be publicly humiliating.
He needed oil at $100 a barrel.
And then he got it.
“The Kremlin doesn’t want a full-blown global recession that would crush oil demand. What it wants is a moderately prolonged conflict that keeps prices elevated.”
– Meduza, based on analyst assessments, March 2026
‘Moderately prolonged.’ That phrase deserves to sit with you for a moment. The architects of Russian economic policy are calculating the optimal duration of a war in the Middle East – a war in which hundreds of thousands of people have been killed, displaced, and traumatized – based on the oil price curve that best serves their budget projections. They are not praying for peace. They are modeling the revenue implications of continued carnage.
This is not speculation. This is what the economists quoted in the Kremlin’s own preferred analytical frameworks are saying, on the record. The war that is burning the Middle East is, to the men in Moscow, a line item in a spreadsheet – and right now, the numbers look good.
THE CIVILIANS: WHERE ARE THEY IN THIS STORY?
In the Kremlin’s calculations, in the Finance Ministry’s spreadsheets, in the Carnegie analyst’s formula of ‘$1.63 billion per $10 price increase’ – there is no column for the ordinary Russian.
Let us put them back in the story.
The Russian Pensioner
Russia’s replacement rate – the pension as a share of the average wage – fell from 35-37% in 2012 to 25% in 2025. In real terms, Russia’s elderly have watched their relative living standard collapse over the exact same period that Putin has been pouring money into military spending. The retirement age was already raised in 2018, over massive public protests. Now economists are openly discussing raising it again, because the war has killed so many working-age men that the pension system can no longer sustain itself.
The men who were supposed to be paying pension contributions are dead in Donbas, disabled in military hospitals, or fled abroad. The pensions that remain are worth less every year. The Kremlin’s response: protect military spending; cut everything else.
The Russian Worker
Russia’s Central Bank business climate survey turned negative for the first time since October 2022. Fixed capital investment fell 2.3% in real terms in 2025 – the first such decline since 2020. The interest rate stands at 15%, making credit ruinously expensive for ordinary businesses and households. Inflation runs at nearly 6%, eating into wages that are already compressed by labor shortages caused by mobilization.
The ‘economic overheating’ of 2024 – briefly celebrated by Kremlin propagandists as proof the sanctions hadn’t worked – was military Keynesianism: growth driven entirely by weapons production and army pay. That was not an economy thriving. That was an economy consuming itself, burning its future to fuel a present that serves the regime.
The Mother Whose Son Did Not Come Back
Russia does not publish its military casualties. The Kremlin criminalizes any attempt to count them. Independent estimates, pieced together from regional death notices, insurance records, and leaked documents, suggest Russia has suffered between 150,000 and 200,000 dead and hundreds of thousands more wounded since February 2022.
Each of those dead soldiers is someone’s son. Someone’s husband. Someone’s father. Each one was recruited with promises of heroism and financial reward – a few million rubles and the glory of serving the Motherland. The mothers who received the coffins received no glory. They received a grief that the Russian state has explicitly criminalized them from expressing publicly, because public grief is ‘demoralizing’ and ‘undermining the special military operation.’
The Kremlin has made it illegal for a Russian mother to say publicly that her son died for nothing. That is not just an atrocity of law. It is a confession: even they know the deaths are for nothing. Or rather – for something. For their budget. For their oil price. For their map.
The Ukrainian Civilian
And then there are the people who did not even choose to be part of Russia’s calculations – the Ukrainians. The people whose country Putin decided was not a real country. Whose identity he decided was not a real identity. Whose sovereignty he decided was an inconvenient obstacle to his historical project.
By early 2026, Ukraine’s energy infrastructure had been systematically destroyed over four winters of deliberate strikes. Hospitals bombed. Power stations demolished. Apartment buildings turned to rubble. A generation of young Ukrainians growing up in air-raid shelters, learning what an explosion sounds like before they learn to read.
These are the human costs of the policy that the Russian Finance Ministry is managing as a budget line. Every billion the Kremlin earns from elevated oil prices is another month of funding for the missiles that fall on Ukrainian cities. The connection is not metaphorical. It is financial. It is direct. It is intentional.
THE THEFT: WHO ACTUALLY GETS THE MONEY
There is one more dimension of this story that Russia’s propaganda machine works hardest to suppress: the question of who, specifically, enriches themselves from war.
The answer is not ‘the Russian state’ in some abstract sense. The Russian state is not an entity with interests independent of the men who run it. The Russian state is Putin, Sechin, the FSB, the generals, the oligarchs who pledged their billions to the war effort and will be compensated in political protection and state contracts.
Igor Sechin – The Man Who Designed the Shakedown
Igor Sechin runs Rosneft. He does not own it. He controls it – which in Putin’s Russia is better than owning it, because it comes with state protection and no personal financial exposure. When the Iran war sent oil prices past $100, Rosneft’s revenues soared. Sechin did not design the war. But he designed the mechanism to extract additional money from Russia’s oligarchs for the war – a letter to Putin proposing ‘voluntary contributions’ via war bonds, written the day before Putin asked the billionaires for money.
Sechin will not be writing a personal check. He built the system. Others pay into it. The benefits flow in ways that are never made fully public. This is how the Kremlin operates: the architects of the extraction do not bear its costs.
The ‘Voluntary’ Contributors Who Had No Choice
Suleiman Kerimov pledged 100 billion rubles – over $1 billion – reportedly on the spot, in the closed room, when Putin asked. Oleg Deripaska pledged as well. Both are under U.S. and Ukrainian sanctions. Both understand, with complete clarity, what they are funding.
They are not patriots making a sacrifice. They are men protecting assets worth tens of billions of dollars by demonstrating loyalty to the man who could strip those assets away tomorrow if they refused. Their ‘contributions’ are not charity. They are insurance premiums on their continued existence in Russian business life.
The war is the business model. The killing is the product. And somewhere at the top of this structure, sitting in a palace that his own government cannot officially acknowledge the existence of, is the man who built it.
THE STRUCTURAL LIE: THE WAR CANNOT FIX RUSSIA’S ECONOMY
Here is the final indignity – the last layer of contempt that the Kremlin shows toward the ordinary Russians it claims to be fighting for.
The Iran war windfall will not fix Russia’s economy. It cannot. Even the economists most sympathetic to the Kremlin’s management of the situation say so explicitly. Meduza’s analysis makes this plain: even if the oil price stays elevated and the budget deficit closes, the structural damage is beyond any windfall to repair.
- The civilian sector is hollowing out. The Central Bank’s business climate indicator has turned negative. Companies are contracting, not investing.
- Labor shortages are structural. Hundreds of thousands of working-age men are dead, disabled, or have fled. They are not coming back.
- The capital stock is deteriorating. Fixed capital investment fell 2.3% in 2025 – the first real decline since 2020. You cannot grow an economy by not investing in it.
- Inflation remains a persistent threat. At 15% interest rates, businesses cannot borrow to expand. Consumers cannot borrow to spend. The monetary transmission mechanism is broken by the very military spending that fuels it.
- Dependence on China deepens. Russia has reoriented its trade away from the West and toward Beijing. China does not offer Russia equal terms. It offers Russia terms that suit China – at a growing discount to Russia’s interests.
- The pension system is approaching crisis. War deaths, emigration, and demographic collapse mean fewer workers supporting more retirees. The retirement age will have to rise again. Those who survive the war will work longer for worse pensions.
‘They’re not cutting what was expanded – they’re cutting what’s left, and there’s not much left,’ an Economic Ministry official told The Bell. ‘Reducing spending will finish off what little remains of economic growth.’
This person works inside the Russian government. This is not a Western critic or a Ukrainian propagandist. This is a Russian official, speaking anonymously because speaking publicly would be dangerous, telling a Russian independent media outlet: we are cutting the last remaining tissue of a functional civilian economy to feed a war machine that has already consumed everything else.
The Kremlin told Russia that the war would be won in three days. Then three weeks. Then three months. It is now four years. In those four years, they have spent the National Wealth Fund, hollowed the civilian economy, killed or driven out hundreds of thousands of young men, raised the retirement age, cut healthcare and education, printed money until inflation eroded savings, borrowed at 15% interest until debt service consumed a trillion rubles a year – and now they are harvesting a windfall from a war in Iran that they helped enable, calling it a triumph, and asking their oligarchs to chip in for more. This is not governance. This is a pillage.
THE VERDICT
When historians examine this era – and they will, though Putin has spent considerable effort trying to ensure the history will be written by the victors – the question they will ask is not whether the economic damage was intentional.
The question they will ask is how the world watched it happen in real time and found so many reasons not to act decisively.
The data is not ambiguous. The motive is not hidden. The mechanism is documented. A man and a regime, facing financial collapse from the costs of a war of conquest, identified a set of global conditions that would rescue their budget, took steps to enable or encourage those conditions, and then reaped the financial harvest while ordinary people – Russian, Ukrainian, Iranian, and beyond — paid in blood, displacement, and diminished lives.
The oligarchs who fund this machine know what they are doing. The generals who prosecute this war know what they are doing. The officials who prepare the budget papers, who calculate the optimal oil price, who model the ‘moderately prolonged’ duration of Middle Eastern conflict – they know exactly what they are doing.
Ordinary Russians did not plan this war. They did not choose it. Many of them quietly oppose it and say so in the only safe way available to them: silence. Their savings have been eroded by inflation, their sons taken by mobilization, their future consumed by a budget that places a missile above a hospital bed and a tank above a pension. They are not the villains of this story. They are its most numerous victims. The villains are the men who made the calculations – who looked at a spreadsheet of global suffering and saw opportunity – and acted accordingly, without shame, without hesitation, and without the slightest apparent concern for the human beings whose lives they were spending as currency.
The world is burning. The Kremlin is counting the receipts.
History will remember who lit the match.
Key Sources
Meduza (meduza.io), March 26, 2026: ‘Soaring oil prices could bring the Kremlin billions – but they still won’t fix the Russian economy.’
Russian Finance Ministry: Official budget execution data, January-February 2026.
Sergey Vakulenko, Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center: Oil revenue per barrel calculation.
ACRA Rating Agency: Pension replacement rate data, 2012-2025.
The Bell: Quote from Russian Economic Ministry official on spending cuts.
Reuters: Russia Finance Ministry 10% spending cut instructions, March 2026.
Bloomberg: Budget sequestration estimates, March 2026.