How Four Years of The War in Ukraine Changed Russia

Four years of war changed how Russia works. Russians see their country differently now. Things that once felt solid before 2022 no longer seem relevant. Everything has shifted: the school curriculum, the criminal law, the ways people make money and the ways they lose it.

The war changed the logic of the system itself. It hardened some parts, hollowed out others, and pushed the country into a new shape that many still do not fully recognize. So if you want to understand what Russia is becoming, you have to look past the battlefield and into the machinery of power, property, daily life, and privilege that this war has quietly rebuilt.

Today I want to show you what four years of war have really done to Russia. Here is our roadmap:

• The Third Break — why this is the third great rupture in Russian history in just over a century.
• The War Economy — how one part of Russia now feeds on war while the other pays for it.
• The New Nobility — how privilege is narrowing around war, while everyone else becomes disposable.
• Property on Lease — why business no longer owns its assets but rents them from the Kremlin.
• The Front Comes Home — how war entered daily life inside Russia itself.
• Rule by Emergency — why planning is dying and improvisation is taking over.

The Third Break

To understand what the current war has done to Russia, we need to look at the background and see the broader context. Change becomes visible only when we can compare it with what the country has lived through over the past hundred-odd years.

And in that past, Russia went through two fundamental ruptures.

The first was 1917, when the old empire broke apart and the country was rebuilt as the Soviet system. That system rested on a radical idea: private property, at least in any meaningful sense, was not supposed to exist.

The state was supposed to plan and distribute everything. The population, in turn, was supposed to forget about private desires and personal comfort and devote itself to a radiant future that would arrive someday later.

This model had one real strength. It could mobilize resources on a huge scale.

It could force people into factories and giant projects. At an enormous human cost, it carried out industrialization. It built heavy industry, a huge army, and later a nuclear and space program. It could achieve dramatic, concentrated feats that looked impressive from the outside.

But it had a fatal flaw. It could not adapt.

Once humanity entered the post-industrial age, the Soviet system stopped being competitive in any real sense. Yes, it could still carry out individual prestige projects. It could build missiles. It could stage power. But it could not do what advanced societies increasingly needed most: organize flexible mass production, improve quality at scale, and foster innovation.

That is why the USSR could launch a man in space and still fail at something as basic as producing normal women's boots or cheap, reliable tape recorders in the quantities people actually needed.

Scaling quality requires a very different organization of labor, finance, management, supply chains, incentives, and feedback. The Soviet system was structurally bad at all of this because it did not trust individual choice, market signals, or independent initiative.

Then came the second break, in 1991.

The Soviet system collapsed, and Russia tried, awkwardly and greedily, to become something else: a post-Soviet capitalist state, half-normal and half-criminal, but still recognizably part of the modern world.

But the old elites did not really leave. They simply gave themselves permission to become rich. They allowed themselves private property, offshore money, luxury consumption, and dynastic wealth. But they never eased their grip on power. Never allowed an honest competition or real democracy, fearing that some outsider would defeat them.

This model was also deeply flawed. It remained corrupt, clumsy, and predatory. But for a while, it worked well enough because the system had one giant cushion: oil and gas rents. That powerful stream of income covered for bad decisions, weak institutions, and lazy management. As long as enough money poured in, the machine could keep moving. People in big cities got used to mortgages, cafés, online shopping, imported goods, cheap delivery, and the feeling that, however rotten politics were, life itself was becoming more comfortable.

That was the deal.

Now, Putin's war is producing a third break. And it is changing Russia's "operating system."

Why did this happen? Because a permanent ruler must constantly renew his legitimacy, his claimed right to remain in power forever. In dictatorships, that legitimacy usually comes from one of two sources. Either the ruler delivers major national projects that visibly improve life, as in Fascist Italy in the 1920s or Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Or he delivers sustained economic growth, as China did for decades.

In both cases, the message is: "I stay in power because under me, life gets better."

But permanent rule has a built-in poison. The longer one man stays at the top, the worse the quality of decisions becomes. Real feedback disappears. Systemic mistakes pile up. Growth slows, then weakens, then can vanish altogether. And with that, political support begins to rot.

At that point, the dictator is left with one final source of legitimacy: military victories.

That is why dictatorships drift toward war again and again. War becomes the last argument, the last performance of strength, and the last way to prove that the ruler is still necessary.

And once war begins, the logic changes completely.

Now it no longer matters whether ordinary people live worse lives or whether the economy keeps degrading. All of that can be sacrificed in the name of the country's survival, at least as the ruler defines it. But in reality, it is about his own survival. He cannot step down from power, because for him that would mean destruction. So he is willing to reorganize the entire country in whatever way is necessary to make his rule permanent.

That is the third break Russia is living through now.

The War Economy

The easiest way to misunderstand today's Russia is to look at a few numbers and stop there.

Industrial output rose. A factory is hiring. Some regions report growth. From far away, it can still look like motion, even strength.

But the key question is not whether Russia still produces things. The key question is: what kind of things, for whom, and at whose expense?

Today, Russia has, in effect, two economies.

One economy is tied to war. It serves the front, the military, and the industries that keep war alive. This includes the obvious parts — shells, missiles, armored vehicles, and drones. But it also includes the less glamorous layers underneath: logistics, uniforms, boots, machine parts, fuel systems, storage, and security. The endless ugly plumbing of sustained violence.

This economy gets priority. It gets state orders, political attention, funding, and access to scarce labor.

In 2025, military-related sectors were driving Russia's industrial output spike, while most civilian sectors were already showing weakness.

And then there is the second economy. The one that pays.

It is the civilian world that keeps losing people, credit, predictability, and room to breathe. This second economy does not disappear. But it becomes a cow that's being milked for the front.

That is the structural change.

For years, the Kremlin tried to preserve a kind of dirty balance. It allowed businesses to make money. It allowed people to consume and live comfortably. In return, it asked anyone to stay away from politics and never challenge the decisions made at the top. That felt like a fair deal for many Russians, especially those who lived through extreme poverty and literal starvation in the 1990s.

But now the state is breaking this deal because war eats too much. If more resources go into war production, something else must go without them.

And war production creates a very deceptive kind of prosperity.

If a missile factory is busy, that counts as output. If a tank plant hires more workers, that counts as employment. If a uniform supplier gets rich, that counts as business activity. But none of this converts into sustained prosperity or future growth. A missile explodes. A tank burns. A uniform wears out in a trench. That is why war can make an economy look active while making a society poorer.

And the longer this goes on, the more warped the structure becomes. Businesses learn that the surest route to surviving, and possibly even thriving for a while, is to align themselves with war. Serve the military supply chain. In a normal economy, firms compete to satisfy consumers. In a war economy, they compete to become necessary to the state.

That is a different civilization.

It changes incentives, ambition, and even dignity. A talented young person no longer asks, "What can I build?" but "Where can I certainly make decent money?" And decent money, as well as job certainty, is increasingly linked to force.

The New Nobility

When authoritarian systems run into trouble, they make no attempt to share pain fairly. Instead, they concentrate privilege.

That is the real social change war has produced in Russia. The post-Soviet system had a wide gray zone of beneficiaries. If you were connected, flexible, cynical enough, or simply lucky enough, you could still make a place for yourself. You could get contracts, build a comfortable business, buy property, and live a better kind of life than most people.

That world is narrowing.

The state no longer has the resources to protect everyone. It has to choose. And when authoritarian states have to choose, they choose the people who keep the regime alive in the most direct sense.

In today's Russia, that means the old privileged class is giving way to a narrower one: people tied to force. The siloviki. The defense industry. Military suppliers. The people who build, transport, finance, protect, or politically enforce the war machine. Their needs come first. Everyone else is becoming more disposable.

That is the meaning behind the internet crackdowns. Many people still treat them as a censorship story, and of course censorship is part of it. But they are more than that.

In March, Russia started a "great crackdown" on the internet, with repeated mobile internet blocks, pressure on Telegram and WhatsApp, and a wider attack on VPNs. This caused serious disruption, even hitting a domestic payment system after VPN blocking triggered technical problems.

That matters because it shows how the state now thinks.

If internet shutdowns hurt small businesses, that is acceptable.

If blocked platforms make life harder for ordinary customers, that is acceptable.

If payments fail, if online shops lose sales, if delivery services choke, if teachers, doctors, and freelance workers lose the tools they need to function — all of that is acceptable.

Why?

Because those people are no longer the social core the regime is trying to please.

The regime is now protecting a narrower class: the people whose loyalty and usefulness are tied directly to force. That is the new nobility.

The rest of society is still taxed, watched, mobilized, propagandized, and occasionally praised. But the system no longer pretends their well-being is a serious priority.

The Kremlin is doing that because authoritarianism always needs a class that stands to lose everything if the system changes. Once that class exists, it will fight hard to preserve the order that feeds it.

This is how such regimes survive: by making a smaller number of people depend so completely on the system that they will defend it against everyone else.

Property on Lease

After the collapse of the USSR, many in the West believed that once private property and wealthy people with serious resources appeared, the country would gradually become a democracy on its own. The logic seemed simple: great wealth requires secure property rights, honest courts, the rule of law, and personal safety.

And yes, big business did emerge. This was when the world met the crazy rich Russians, the oligarchs.

So it came as a major surprise to many that they could not stop the war, or even meaningfully influence its course.

Putin never really believed that big business in Russia had property rights that the state must protect. His instincts were formed in a different world. In that world, if a fortune was made in Russia, it was only made because the state allowed it. The state is a real owner who can reclaim that fortune whenever it wants.

That is the key to understanding Russian property today.

The Kremlin believes it owns everything in Russia. It owns all those companies that formally belong to private owners. And those formal owners are nothing but tenants. The Kremlin rents out the plants and factories to them as long as it sees fit.

And in wartime, it raises the rent.

Companies are expected to contribute to the war, directly or indirectly. In many regions, businesses are pressured to "donate" through official or semi-official patriotic funds.

Why is the state doing it?

Partly because it needs the money. But partly because Putin wants something else too. He wants to see that the war is not just his personal obsession. He wants it ritually affirmed as a national cause, one in which everyone must partake. Once you donate to a military cause, you are no longer just a private person who avoids politics. You have pledged allegiance. You have kissed the ring.

And if you do not kiss it enthusiastically enough, the state has many ways to remind you who is the boss.

Since the start of the war, around $50 billion worth of assets had changed hands in Russia. Most of these were seized by the state. In October 2025, even Russia's central bank pushed back against some of these seizures, saying the rights of shareholders had been violated. But that dissent had no consequences. No assets were returned to their past owners. No one was reimbursed for the damage.

That happens because businesses, even the largest ones, cannot really resist.

Business owners have no armies of their own. No private force strong enough to challenge the state. The law is not on its side. Moving abroad is easy if you run a Telegram channel. It is harder if you own a factory.

So what happens?

Businesses adapt. They perform loyalty and hope to earn safety by being useful. But a system like this doesn't do guarantees. The one who is useful today might still be sacrificed tomorrow when the wind changes.

The Front Comes Home

For a long time, the Kremlin offered Russians a comforting version of war.

Yes, there was fighting. But it was happening somewhere else, at the edge of the map, on a screen, in someone else's life. You could still drink coffee in Moscow, open a manicure studio in Kazan, order sneakers in Yekaterinburg, and pretend that politics was filthy but separate.

That separation is starting to collapse. War is no longer staying neatly over there. It is seeping into ordinary Russian life, piece by piece, until the distance between the front and the home front stops meaning very much.

Start with the drones.

Over the last year, Russian energy infrastructure, depots, airfields, and industrial sites have had to live with something that did not exist in normal business planning before: the expectation of aerial attack.

That changes everything.

If you run a company, you now have to think about the cost of shielding facilities and the risk of supply interruption. You might have to stop production because a power line is disrupted. Some of your staff might get injured or killed. Even where no strike lands, the system absorbs the cost of preparing for strikes.

War becomes a tax.

Then there is labor.

In February, Russia needed at least 2.3 million additional workers. This shortage, worsened by the war, was so severe that the country was pivoting to India for labor recruitment. And labor shortage means delayed construction, slower transport, poorer service, and more pressure on everyone still working.

People who are still willing to take jobs often fall for higher salaries and better job stability in the industries that serve the military. Civilian businesses simply can't beat those offers and lose the competition for labor. That's another way in which the front comes home.

Rule by Emergency

A normal state governs through routine.

It writes plans and allocates money. Bureaucracy is clumsy, slow, often stupid — but in a functioning country, it still gives ordinary people one precious thing: predictability.

Wartime Russia is losing that.

Once the plan dies, something else takes its place. Emergency rule.

That's when the normal chain of decision-making is constantly interrupted by improvisation from above. Whoever reaches the boss first, or pleases him best, can suddenly reshape the priorities. The lower levels are told, "Now we do it this way," and then left to clean up the mess.

This is a very expensive way to run a country.

It destroys planning because no one knows which rule will still matter next month. It destroys responsibility because nobody wants to own a decision that may suddenly become politically inconvenient.

You can feel this style not only in Moscow, but all the way down the chain. Regional officials spend more and more time reacting to disruptions they did not choose and cannot really prevent: labor shortages, infrastructure strain, internet shutdowns, sudden orders, transport problems, drone threats, public anger. Their job becomes less "develop the region" and more "keep the panic below the line."

That kind of state can survive for quite a long time, but it survives badly.

It becomes louder, more nervous, more arbitrary. It asks for sacrifice while offering less clarity. It speaks the language of urgency because urgency is now the main tool by which it justifies almost anything.

And once a country gets used to being governed by urgency, it becomes very hard to return to rules. Because rules set limits and urgency erases them.

Originally published at https://elvirabary.com on April 26, 2026.