Chapter 1
An attrition war is decided as much behind the lines as at the front
An attrition war is decided as much behind the lines as at the front. Russia and Ukraine are both spending down finite stocks — money, men, and the public's willingness to keep going — and the side that runs short first loses the ability to continue whatever is happening on the battlefield. This is the ledger of that spending on both sides: each country's budget and funding sources, its manpower decisions and the economics behind them, the evidence about what its population will tolerate, and the governance moves that reveal strain or consolidation. Nothing here is a reading of morale or a forecast of collapse; it is the record of what each state has actually decided, spent and been told by its own numbers.
Chapter 2
Russia is fighting a war it can fund but no longer fund comfortably
Russia is fighting a war it can fund but no longer fund comfortably. Oil and gas, roughly half the federal budget before the invasion, have fallen sharply year on year, and the budget has run a deficit that by mid-2026 exceeded the whole of the previous year's. The state has reached progressively further for money — a value-added tax raised to 22%, suspended bond auctions, and draft legislation to move private pension savings — while the Kremlin's public position, stated by Vladimir Putin himself, remains that the economy is stable. On manpower, Moscow has so far avoided a second formal mobilisation since September 2022, relying instead on contract recruitment at rising cost; Ukrainian intelligence has warned repeatedly that a new wave is being prepared, and senior Russian figures including Dmitry Medvedev have denied it. Consent is the quietest of the three ledgers and the hardest to read: Russia's independent pollsters record support for the war drifting down and economic pessimism spreading, while the space to express any of it has narrowed to the point that the only registered party opposing the war has been struck from the ballot and its deputy leader imprisoned.
Chapter 3
Ukraine's constraint is the mirror image
Ukraine's constraint is the mirror image. Its own revenues cover the war but not the state: essentially all civilian budget spending is financed from abroad, which makes the reliability of external partners a war-fighting variable rather than a diplomatic one. That money now arrives through an increasingly institutional architecture — the IMF's Extended Fund Facility, the EU's Ukraine Facility, and the Ukraine Support Loan drawing on profits from immobilised Russian assets — and each of those channels attaches conditions, so reform progress in Kyiv translates directly into whether the next tranche lands. That architecture no longer covers the whole bill: the government's own accounting now puts the following year's uncovered gap above thirty billion dollars against an annual external need of about fifty, and the finance ministry has begun saying out loud that payments unrelated to the war may have to wait. Manpower is the harder ledger. Ukraine has lowered the conscription age, tightened penalties for draft evasion, and repeatedly reworked the rules that let critical enterprises exempt employees, balancing an economy that needs workers against an army that needs soldiers; mobilisation remains its most politically costly subject. Its wartime politics have been strained rather than closed: elections are suspended under martial law, and the sacking of a defence minister in July 2026 produced street protests and the largest shake-up of the military command of the war.
Chapter 4
The two ledgers are not converging on the same timetable
The two ledgers are not converging on the same timetable, and that asymmetry is the substance of the story. Russia's pressure is internal and gradual — a widening deficit, a shrinking energy windfall, and a slow erosion of stated public support, none of it yet forcing a decision. Ukraine's is external and scheduled, and it has begun to bite ahead of schedule: its financing holds through 2026 and falls short in 2027 by more than thirty billion dollars on its own government's reckoning, a gap donors could close and reform delays could widen, while the liquidity pressure has already reached the parts of the budget that are not the war. Three questions remain genuinely open. Whether Russia orders a formal mobilisation, and what its politics look like if it does. Whether the sanctions architecture — the enacted packages, the US bill moving through Congress, and the listings Brussels says are coming — measurably changes Russia's capacity to pay rather than merely its cost of doing business. And whether Ukraine's partners fund the gap they have already been shown — including whether the immobilised Russian assets that would cover much of it are ever moved from a legal question into a funding one.
And now
Polling in Russia’s first wartime Duma election opened on September 18 and closes on the 20th, with first partial results due from 1800 GMT. The Central Election Commission put turnout near 30 per cent after day one. In August the Supreme Court took Yabloko — the only registered party that had criticised the war — off the party-list ballot; debates ran in half-empty studios. The ballot runs for the first time in Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, where the occupying authorities claim more than 3.5 million voters and where voting began in late August. Nine Ukrainian rights groups urged residents to stay away; Donbas SOS says commission members are going house to house escorted by troops and that social payments are being made conditional on taking part. Brussels says it will never recognise the result, and notes no OSCE observers were invited. What follows the vote is the open question. Requests for emigration help are up nearly eightfold since the summer, tens of thousands of mobilisation notices have gone out, and an electronic summons register now triggers an automatic exit ban. Putin calls talk of a call-up ‘utter nonsense’ — the seventeenth such denial since June.
Where it stands today →