Sanctions take time to bite. A lot of their infrastructure and industry uses western technology. They can no longet get that technology like spare parts, the people to operate on it etc (I think their oil drilling and pumling is based on western designs) When things break (and they will break, everything eventually does) they can't fix/replace it without overhauling the entire system, which will either force them to take IOU's to China, or just go without. The average consumer in Russia has also lost a lot of opportunity and products on the shelf. Russia also no longer trades, their currency looks great on the outside but the second they reopen to trade, that would drop quicker than concrete in the ocean.

It's a slow burn. Sanctions are only part of the equation. Politics in Russia, collapsing population, a run away kleptocracy, really it boils down to Putin trying to roll back the clock to the "Good old days" of the USSR. Their country's future died when that bastard took power because he's the worst combinations of a despot and a criminal enterprise.

Really the Petrochemical business is the only thing keeping them remotely solvent and Europe just opted out. They can sell it else where, but their market is going to be vastly reduced and the people who are left like India and China are taking advantage of the situation to force them to sell to them at prices more favorable to them and not Putin.

But what's really killing them is population collapse. Anyone who isn't dirt poor in Russia is leaving for pretty much anywhere else, particularly their skilled trades and educated work force. This is actually one of the reasons Putin is desperate to annex neighboring states. Russia needs bodies and they know it.

The people they *did* have who might have replaced the cohort that's aging out atm have either fled, or got chewed up in Putin's insistence on using Zap Brannigan's big book of war as his play book. It's a meat grinder that's killing their future.

Eventually Putin is basically going to turn the country into North Korea, or try to because they can't lose anymore bodies. They will put an insane amount of effort into policing their borders so nobody gets out or leaves. And that's not going to help either, men are dropping dead at 40 from alcoholism.

They are on the fast track to becoming a failed state and straight up TEOTWAWKI. There may not *be* a Russia by the middle of the 21st, and that's generous.

Yeah the Balkans are my read as well, massive fracturing into a bunch of bandit kingdoms and their local warlord Oligarchs. Humanitarian crisises, etc.

And then there's China, who I can see trying to take advantage of the situation. I get the feeling the "Roaring WTFs" decade hasn't hit its stride yet.