Certainly Russia's economy has difficulties. It has inflation roughly 9-10% and (dangerously low) unemployment around 1%. Russia's Central Bank key rate needs to be extremely high to fight its inflation because it is not as primary a lender as the US Fed for example - there's way more private lending. The inflation is caused by raising labor costs (due to unemployment), supply chain disruptions from sanctions, and weakening of the ruble due to printing of money to fund the war.

Thus far Russia's economy has grown substantially due to the war - expansion of its industrial base. This is factoring inflation in. What's happening right now is that Russian economic growth due to military industry is slowing down, and Russia is not likely to continue growing its economy at near the same rate.

Russia is most likely heading into an era of stagflation (high inflation and low growth). This isn't a collapse of the economy. It's not great, but its not a way to end the war.

One option could be to tank oil prices (into the $40/barrel range, currently $70/barrel range) and keep that for years. Due to Russia's reliance on energy income this would disrupt the Russian budget and it would either need to cut social spending or go into debt (e.g. to China) to continue without shelving social programs.

The point is that the Russian economy isn't on the brink of collapse. Due to the national security nature of a hostile military alliance at its doorstep, it's likely to make hard choices if put into such a situation (e.g. go into debt).

> Due to the national security nature of a hostile military alliance at its doorstep

Finland shares a massive border with Russia and joined NATO almost 2 years ago and what 'hard choices' have been made since? Please, do tell!

For sure this is destabilizing to the security of the region.

One war at a time though.

Hard choices? There are so many. One is that Russia had to deploy a large number of air defense systems to the Finnish border, and as a result didn't have enough for Ukrainian strike drones. This has resulted in far more penetration of Ukrainian drones into Russian oil refineries and ports than would have otherwise happened, and forced Russia to allocate both capital and manpower to manufacturer larger numbers of air defense systems. Similar tradeoffs happened in other areas. For example Russia built multiple new battalions intended to counter potential NATO operations over the border, but doing this overwhelmed military training sites, forcing its sites to be time-shared and its Ukraine soldiers to receive less training, and its the cost of the Ukraine war to be significantly higher.

Asking this question is like asking if there would be hard choices for the US if Mexico entered a security alliance with Russia or China. Of course there are.

> Thus far Russia's economy has grown substantially due to the war

A war economy is all fun and games while you have an ongoing war.

I don't disagree. I definitely wouldn't want to be invested (or living) there.

But the point is that "collapse" is very different from "spent a ton of money on stuff that got destroyed."

The economic pain just isn't that high to force capitulation.