The Long Retreat: Why Russia Is Ceasing to Be a Great Power

By Matthew Parish

Wednesday 9 September 2026

There is something peculiar about the contemporary Russian state. She occupies more territory than any other country on Earth. She possesses thousands of nuclear weapons, enormous reserves of hydrocarbons and minerals, a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council and a formidable tradition of mathematics, engineering, literature and science. Her armies are fighting the largest European war since 1945 and her political leadership speaks incessantly of a multipolar world in which Moscow will once again stand alongside Washington and Beijing as one of the handful of capitals deciding the fate of mankind. Yet beneath this formidable exterior lies a different trajectory. Russia has been retreating as a Great Power for decades and the war in Ukraine, intended in part to reverse that retreat, may ultimately accelerate it.

The distinction between being dangerous and being powerful is essential to understanding modern Russia. A state can retain an extraordinary capacity to destroy things long after it has lost much of its capacity to shape the international system constructively. Russia remains exceptionally dangerous. Her nuclear arsenal alone guarantees that she cannot be ignored and her enormous territory, substantial armed forces, intelligence services, cyber capabilities, energy resources and willingness to accept risks that more prosperous societies might reject make her a formidable adversary. Nevertheless Great Power status, properly understood, involves something more. Great Powers create institutions, technologies, alliances, markets and cultural aspirations that cause other societies voluntarily to organise themselves around them. Increasingly, Russia does remarkably little of this.

The inheritance of an empire

Modern Russia inherited the diplomatic privileges and much of the military apparatus of the Soviet Union, but she did not inherit its underlying scale. The Soviet Union contained almost 290 million people when it disappeared in 1991. It incorporated Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltic states, the Caucasus and Central Asia and presided over an ideological and military empire extending deep into Central Europe. Whatever the economic defects of Soviet communism — and they were ultimately catastrophic — Moscow governed a continental system.

The Russian Federation that emerged from the wreckage was a different creature. She retained approximately three-quarters of Soviet territory and the overwhelming majority of the Soviet nuclear arsenal, but lost roughly half the Soviet population and enormous quantities of industrial, agricultural and strategic infrastructure. The disappearance of Ukraine was particularly consequential. Ukraine was never merely another Soviet republic. She contained major industrial centres, shipyards, aerospace industries, agricultural lands, ports and tens of millions of educated citizens. Once Kyiv ceased to be governed from Moscow, Russia’s western frontier moved hundreds of kilometres eastwards.

Much of Vladimir Putin’s foreign policy can be understood as an attempt to reverse this geopolitical catastrophe. The wars in Georgia, the seizure of Crimea, intervention in eastern Ukraine, political pressure upon Belarus and the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 have all been different manifestations of the same strategic anxiety: Russia discovered after 1991 that she remained too large to think of herself as an ordinary European state but had become too small to reproduce the Soviet geopolitical system. The Kremlin has therefore spent much of the twenty-first century trying to recover by coercion what Moscow could no longer obtain through attraction.

This has produced the central paradox of Putinism. The harder Russia has tried to restore her empire, the more rapidly many of her former imperial possessions have sought protection against her.

The demographic trap

Great Powers ultimately consist of people. Here Russia’s prospects are particularly troubling. The World Bank puts Russia’s population at approximately 143.5 million in 2025 and records negative population growth. This is still a substantial population, but it must be considered comparatively. Russia confronts a China of more than a billion people, an increasingly populous United States and European countries which, taken together through the European Union and NATO, represent hundreds of millions of citizens living in substantially wealthier economies.

Demography matters not merely because soldiers have to come from somewhere. Modern economies require engineers, scientists, doctors, entrepreneurs, technicians and taxpayers. An ageing and shrinking population imposes increasing welfare costs upon a diminishing productive workforce. Emigration can compound the problem because the people most capable of leaving are disproportionately young, educated and internationally mobile. War then imposes an additional demographic tax through casualties, disability and the diversion of young adults into military service and defence industries.

Russia can mitigate some of these difficulties through immigration, automation and productivity improvements. Yet those solutions expose another weakness. Productivity growth depends heavily upon institutions that encourage innovation, investment, competition and the movement of ideas. The World Bank identifies precisely these areas — state dominance, weak competition, skills shortages and limited international integration — as structural constraints upon Russia’s future growth. A state may compel a factory to manufacture artillery shells. It is much harder to command an economy to invent the next generation of semiconductors, artificial intelligence systems or biotechnology.

The hydrocarbon state

Russia’s second fundamental problem is the composition of her economic power. She possesses immense natural resources and this is genuinely a source of strength. Oil, gas, metals, minerals, grain and nuclear technology give Moscow important international leverage. Yet natural-resource wealth has also encouraged the Russian state to postpone the more difficult task of constructing a diversified, highly productive technological economy.

The comparison with China is revealing. Both Russia and China emerged from communist systems. China transformed herself into a manufacturing superpower integrated into global supply chains and subsequently began moving into sophisticated technologies, electric vehicles, batteries, telecommunications, artificial intelligence and advanced industrial production. Russia became substantially more prosperous after the Soviet collapse, but much of her international economic significance remained associated with extracting things from the ground.

This distinction becomes strategically important because technological revolutions compound power. A country that dominates artificial intelligence, semiconductor manufacturing, robotics or biotechnology creates industries from which further industries emerge. A country that exports petroleum receives money. That money can purchase weapons, infrastructure and political influence, but the underlying commodity does not necessarily generate an endlessly expanding technological ecosystem.

Nor has Russia escaped the consequences of war merely because sanctions failed to produce the immediate economic collapse that some Western observers predicted in 2022. Her economy proved considerably more resilient than those predictions suggested, which deserves acknowledgement. Yet resilience and healthy long-term development are different things. The World Bank estimates that Russian GDP growth fell from 4.9 per cent in 2024 to about 1 per cent in 2025 and projects medium-term growth around 0.7 per cent. By September 2026 the strains were becoming increasingly conspicuous: the budget deficit had widened, monetary policy remained tight and the government was confronting the accumulated costs of a prolonged war economy.

Russia is therefore accomplishing something impressive but strategically perverse. She has demonstrated that she can sustain a major war despite extensive sanctions. Yet she is doing so partly by directing an extraordinary proportion of national resources towards activities that destroy capital rather than accumulating it.

The terrible arithmetic of war

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was supposed to demonstrate Russian power. Instead it revealed the enormous price required to exercise it. SIPRI estimates Russian military expenditure in 2025 at approximately $190 billion, representing some 7.5 per cent of GDP. Russia’s federal military expenditure reached approximately 16 trillion roubles that year and the demands of the war contributed to economic overheating, inflationary pressure and fiscal strain.

This expenditure unquestionably produces military capability. Russia has adapted substantially since the failures surrounding Kyiv in 2022. She has expanded weapons production, developed drone warfare, improved battlefield techniques and demonstrated an institutional capacity to learn. It would be foolish to interpret Russian decline as meaning Russian military incompetence.

The deeper question is opportunity cost. Every engineer designing a guidance system for a missile is an engineer not developing a civilian export product. Every factory producing artillery shells represents industrial capacity that might otherwise manufacture capital goods. Every talented young Russian killed, injured, mobilised or persuaded to emigrate represents human capital unavailable for the next half-century. War expenditure can increase measured GDP because governments pay factories to produce weapons. It does not follow that it increases national wealth.

The imbalance becomes more striking when Russia is compared with the coalitions her behaviour has helped to mobilise. In 2025 Russia spent about $190 billion on her military. European NATO members collectively spent roughly $559 billion, while European military expenditure overall reached $864 billion. Russia’s strategic problem is therefore not simply whether she can maintain a formidable army. She must maintain one sufficiently formidable to intimidate a collection of states whose aggregate economic and technological resources greatly exceed her own.

That becomes progressively harder as those states rearm.

The resurrection of Europe

This may ultimately prove the greatest strategic error of the Putin period. For years Russia benefited from European complacency. Germany allowed much of her military capacity to deteriorate. European governments enjoyed cheap Russian energy while relying upon the United States for their ultimate security. NATO appeared politically uncertain and strategically underfunded.

The invasion of Ukraine transformed that environment. Finland joined NATO. Sweden joined NATO. Poland accelerated an enormous military expansion. Germany abandoned longstanding political assumptions about defence expenditure. In 2025 European military expenditure rose by 14 per cent, with Germany’s spending increasing by 24 per cent and Poland’s by 23 per cent. NATO members have meanwhile adopted substantially more ambitious long-term defence spending commitments.

Russia has therefore accomplished almost the opposite of what a rational imperial strategy would have prescribed. She has encouraged her neighbours to arm themselves, driven previously neutral countries into NATO and reminded European societies why an American security guarantee exists.

Empires generally flourish by dividing their opponents. Russia has been remarkably successful at uniting hers.

The loss of Ukraine

Nothing illustrates this strategic failure more powerfully than Ukraine herself. For centuries Russian strategic thinking treated Ukraine not merely as neighbouring territory but as an integral component of Russian civilisation and power. Without Ukraine, the historian Zbigniew Brzezinski famously argued, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire.

Whatever eventually happens to particular territories, the political transformation produced by the war is difficult to reverse. A country in which Russian language and Russian culture were once ubiquitous has developed a national identity increasingly defined against domination by Moscow. Millions of Ukrainians have experienced Russian missiles, occupation or bereavement. Generations may be required before that memory fades.

This is an extraordinary geopolitical loss. Great Powers usually seek friendly neighbours. Russia has transformed the largest country on her western frontier into a society whose national security doctrine is likely to revolve around preventing Russian domination for the foreseeable future. Even a favourable battlefield settlement cannot easily undo this. Territory may be conquered much faster than political legitimacy can be restored.

The Chinese embrace

Russia’s response to estrangement from Europe has been to turn towards China. This is understandable and in many respects successful. Beijing provides markets, manufactured goods, diplomatic support and an economic relationship capable of reducing the effectiveness of Western attempts at isolation. Russia is not internationally alone and predictions that sanctions would sever her from the world proved mistaken.

Nevertheless the relationship contains an uncomfortable structural asymmetry. China possesses the larger population, economy, manufacturing base, technological ecosystem and increasingly the greater conventional military potential. Russia contributes natural resources, strategic geography, military expertise and nuclear weapons. These are significant assets, but the balance between the two countries has shifted dramatically since the days when the Soviet Union regarded China as an impoverished junior communist power.

There is no reason to assume China seeks Russia’s destruction. Quite the opposite: a stable, friendly Russia is immensely useful to Beijing. But that may itself reveal the nature of Russia’s decline. Moscow increasingly risks becoming indispensable not as an independent pole of world power but as the resource-rich, nuclear-armed northern partner of a vastly larger Chinese economic system.

Great Powers traditionally fear dependence. Russia’s confrontation with Europe has increased her dependence upon China.

The institutional problem

Beneath economics, demographics and military affairs lies something still more fundamental. Russia has repeatedly struggled to create political institutions capable of separating the power of the state from the personality of its ruler. Imperial Russia revolved around the Tsar. The Soviet Union revolved around the Communist Party and, during its darkest period, Stalin. Contemporary Russia has become progressively personalised around Vladimir Putin.

Personalised regimes possess certain advantages. They can take decisions quickly. They can tolerate costs democratic governments might find politically unbearable. They can coordinate national resources towards a narrow strategic objective. Yet they have an ancient weakness: information deteriorates as it travels upwards.

Officials learn what the ruler wants to hear. Bad news becomes dangerous to report. Corruption becomes intertwined with political loyalty. Strategic assumptions cease to be challenged because challenging them may amount to challenging the sovereign himself. The disastrous opening stages of the invasion of Ukraine displayed several symptoms associated with such systems: implausible intelligence assumptions, logistical deficiencies and a striking underestimation of the adversary.

There is also the succession problem. Putin has dominated Russian political life for more than a quarter of a century. A system constructed around one man eventually encounters the unavoidable fact that no man governs forever. Institutionalised states possess mechanisms for succession. Personalised regimes possess courtiers, factions and uncertainties.

Nuclear immortality and conventional decline

There is nevertheless one decisive reason Russia will not become irrelevant. She possesses nuclear weapons. This distinguishes Russia from historical declining powers. Spain could lose her empire. The Ottoman Empire could be dismantled. Austria-Hungary could disappear. Russia cannot be treated in quite the same fashion because even a substantially weakened Russian state will retain the theoretical ability to devastate civilisation.

Nuclear weapons therefore give Russia a peculiar form of geopolitical immortality. They establish a floor beneath her decline. Russia may become poorer relative to China, Europe and the United States. Her population may contract. Her technological industries may fall behind. Her conventional military may become increasingly expensive to maintain. Yet no conceivable international order can safely disregard a Russian government controlling thousands of nuclear warheads.

The consequence may be an increasingly strange mismatch between status and substance. Russia may continue possessing the diplomatic and military privileges of a superpower while gradually losing the economic foundations normally associated with one.

What decline actually looks like

Great Powers seldom collapse neatly. More often they experience relative decline. Britain did not suddenly cease to matter when her empire disappeared. France did not become insignificant after losing Algeria and Indochina. They remained wealthy, militarily capable and diplomatically influential states. What changed was the relationship between their capabilities and those of rising powers.

Russia’s trajectory may be similar but harsher. She is unlikely simply to disappear, and predictions of imminent Russian collapse have repeatedly proved foolish. Russia possesses too much territory, too many resources, too much military expertise and too profound a tradition of statehood for such predictions to be treated casually. Indeed higher energy revenues or an end to the Ukrainian war could provide Moscow with periods of substantial economic recovery.

But relative power is merciless arithmetic. Russia must compare herself not with Russia ten years ago but with the societies around her. China is vastly stronger economically than she was when Putin first entered the Kremlin. Poland is richer and increasingly heavily armed. Northern Europe is more integrated into NATO. Ukraine has become militarised on a scale almost unimaginable before 2022. European defence expenditure is rising. Meanwhile the technologies most likely to define twenty-first-century power — artificial intelligence, advanced semiconductors, robotics, biotechnology and autonomous systems — are being developed principally elsewhere.

Russia is consequently running harder merely to preserve her relative position.

The final irony

The tragedy is that none of this was inevitable. Russia entered the twenty-first century with extraordinary advantages. She possessed a highly educated population, immense natural resources, a distinguished scientific tradition, nuclear weapons, permanent membership of the Security Council and access to European capital and technology. She could conceivably have become something resembling an enormous Norway: prosperous, formidable, culturally distinctive and commercially indispensable to Europe while maintaining strategic independence between East and West.

Instead Russia chose empire.

That choice has brought territory, fear and demonstrations of extraordinary military endurance. It has also brought sanctions, demographic losses, technological isolation, enormous military expenditure, dependence upon China, an enlarged NATO and the permanent hostility of much of Ukraine. The Kremlin sought strategic depth and discovered that coercion can make geography less secure rather than more so.

This is why Russia’s retreat from Great Power status is likely to continue even if she wins significant concessions in Ukraine. The underlying problem is not where the eventual ceasefire line is drawn. It is that Russia is consuming many of the assets from which future power must be constructed in order to defend an older conception of power based upon territory, military coercion and spheres of influence.

The twenty-first century increasingly rewards a different collection of attributes: human capital, technological innovation, productive institutions, financial sophistication, alliances and the capacity to attract rather than compel. Russia possesses some of these things, but her political system has concentrated overwhelmingly upon the instruments of coercion.

There lies the melancholy irony of contemporary Russian history. Russia remains one of the most formidable states in the world and may remain so for generations. She can destroy cities, disrupt governments, conquer territory and force herself onto the agenda of every major diplomatic conference. But the ultimate measure of a Great Power is not how much destruction she can threaten. It is how much of the future she can create.

Russia’s tragedy is that she has become exceptionally proficient at defending her past.