Good day. And as I said earlier this year, when a system begins to fray, it rarely does so at the edges first. The fraying begins at the joints—where political narratives, economic realities, and military obligations converge. This week has made that convergence visible in ways that even the most disciplined Russian messaging cannot fully obscure.

For months, the Kremlin has maintained that the war economy is not simply functioning, but thriving—that Russia has adapted, that sanctions are a nuisance rather than a constraint, that new markets have replaced old ones, and that the country is engaged in a grand project of self-sufficiency. But the data emerging this month tells a different story. And it is one that cannot be massaged away by rhetorical flourish.

Oil and gas revenues, the backbone of Russia’s fiscal architecture, have declined sharply. This is not a fluctuation; it is a break in the trend line. Discounts demanded by India and China are widening again. Sanctions enforcement—long dismissed as ineffective—is tightening. The shadow fleet, once a clever workaround, is now a liability: slow, fragile, increasingly scrutinized, and costly to insure.

Add to this the strikes on refineries, the loss of storage capacity, and the repeated disruption of export routes, and we begin to see the shape of a structural problem rather than a temporary inconvenience. Russia can still sell oil, yes. But it must sell more to earn less. That is not adaptation; it is erosion.

Meanwhile, on the expenditure side, the demands of the war only grow. Mobilization may be partial, but the financial obligations are not. Equipment must be produced or imported. Contracts must be honored. Compensation must be paid. And while Russia has long prided itself on its ability to absorb hardship, the question is no longer whether it can endure, but for how long—and at what cost to its internal stability.

The political narrative is also shifting. State television speaks less confidently now about decisive victory and more about “long struggle,” “historical responsibility,” and “collective resilience.” These are not the words of a state in command of events. They are the words of a state preparing its population for disappointment.

Ukraine, meanwhile, continues to exploit Russia’s vulnerabilities with quiet precision. Its strikes are not symbolic; they are economic in intent and cumulative in effect. Each refinery hit, each ship delayed, each logistical disruption compounds the pressure on the Russian system. The power of Ukraine’s strategy lies not in spectacle but in arithmetic.

And this week, more than any other in recent memory, the arithmetic is visible. The illusion that Russia could simultaneously wage a full-scale war, maintain domestic stability, and present itself as a rising global power has begun to crack. What we are seeing now is the cost of that illusion coming due.

Future analysts may debate the precise moment when Russia’s war economy shifted from strained to unsustainable. Some will point to the refinery strikes, others to sanctions, others still to the internal contradictions of mobilization. But I suspect many will look back at this month—November 2025—and say: this was when the façade faltered, when the numbers stopped obeying the narrative, when the stability that had been projected began to dissolve.

The illusion lasted a long time. Longer than many expected. But illusions, when confronted by arithmetic, eventually collapse. This week, the collapse became visible.

This site is a rhetorical parody project. No part of it should be mistaken for Alexander Mercouris’s actual commentary.