# Russia > [!info] Gateway page > Orientation on Russia is here. Operations directed at the United States are at [[Russian Influence]]; the full historical cluster is at [[Russian History Hub]]. **Russia** is the foreign state this vault references more than any other, and the reason is not primarily military. It is that the Russian case supplies the working model — and in several documented instances the direct assistance — for a politics that wins power through elections and then hollows the institutions that would constrain it. Three things are worth holding separate, because collapsing them is the most common analytical error on this subject. **The state, the operation, and the model.** Russia as a country is one thing. [[Russian Influence]] — the funding, information operations and elite cultivation directed at the United States and Europe — is a second. The *template*, adopted by actors with no Russian contact at all, is a third. An American politician echoing a Kremlin talking point may be a paid asset, an unwitting amplifier, or someone who arrived at the same position independently because it serves the same function. The vault records the documented relationship where one exists and refuses the inference where it does not. **Continuity with the Soviet period is real but partial.** [[Soviet Union]] operated an ideological project with a universal claim; the current state runs a nationalist and Orthodox one whose export is directed at the right rather than the left. The tradecraft carried over — active measures, forgery, cultivation of sympathetic figures — while the content inverted. That inversion is why a movement built on anti-communism could become the more Russia-friendly of the two American coalitions within a generation. **The doctrine is written down.** [[Foundations of Geopolitics]] is the text the vault returns to, not because it is a secret plan being executed, but because it stated in the 1990s an explicit strategy of encouraging American internal division, racial and regional separatism, and isolationism — and because what it recommends is legible in what later happened. The hinge event is [[Ukraine]]. Russia's 2022 invasion, and the subsequent fight over American aid, split the American right along a line that had not previously existed: between a [[NATO]]-committed internationalist wing and a wing for which supporting Ukraine became a marker of establishment loyalty. That split is now one of the most reliable predictors of where an American figure sits on everything else. The caution the vault holds to: *Russian influence is a real, documented, indicted phenomenon and also the single most over-applied explanation in American political commentary.* Both halves of that sentence matter. Treating every convergence as evidence of direction produces an account that is unfalsifiable and, worse, that flatters the domestic movements it describes by making them someone else's creation. ## Economy and the US link | Indicator | Reading | As of | |---|---|---| | Real GDP growth | +1.0%, down from +4.9% in 2024 | 2025 full year, Rosstat preliminary | | Real GDP growth | +1.3% year on year, after −0.2% in Q1 | Q2 2026, Rosstat preliminary | | Inflation | 6.3% year on year | August 2026 | | Bank of Russia key rate | 14%, held | 11 September 2026; next meeting 23 October | | Military share of federal spending | about 44–46% | first half of 2026 (estimates vary) | | Central-bank assets immobilized in the EU | about €210B, €185B of it at Euroclear | frozen indefinitely since December 2025 | | EU/UK crude price cap | $44.10 a barrel | effective 1 February 2026 | | US goods and services trade | US imports $4.1B, exports $1.8B | 2025 | **A war economy running out of slack.** Military spending carried Russian growth through 2023–24. In 2025 it stalled at about 1%. The Bank of Finland's BOFIT found growth "again driven by industries linked to the war effort" while autos and machine-building shrank. The economy contracted 0.2% in the first quarter of 2026, according to Meduza's reading of Rosstat, then grew 1.3% in the second. Defense took 46% of federal spending in Q1 2026 by ISW's count of Finance Ministry data, and 43.8% across the first half by The Defense Post's (citing RBC-Ukraine). Inflation went back up to 6.3% in August. The Bank of Russia held its key rate at 14% on 11 September, its first pause since it began cutting in June 2025. **The Iran war was a windfall the sanctions regime let through.** The [[Iran War 2026]] oil spike helped Moscow's budget. Washington then loosened its own restrictions: Treasury issued a general license in March 2026 allowing sales of Russian seaborne crude, and repeatedly let it lapse and reissued it (see [[Russia and Iran Oil Sanctions Waivers 2026]]). It lapsed again on 17 June 2026. This page has not verified any reissue after that date. Europe went the other way. The EU and UK moved to a floating cap set 15% below the market price of Urals crude, cutting it from $60 to $47.60 and then to $44.10 from 1 February 2026. Reuters reported that the US was the one G7 member outside the moving cap. According to the same Reuters report, at most 30% of seaborne Russian oil still moves under the cap. The rest avoids it on the [[Dark Fleet]]. **The frozen reserves stayed frozen, and stayed unspent.** On 11 December 2025 the EU used Article 122 of the treaties, which needs only a qualified majority, to immobilize about €210 billion of Bank of Russia assets indefinitely. That removed the six-month renewal that Hungary or Slovakia could have vetoed. A week later the plan to lend those assets to Ukraine as a "reparations loan" failed. Leaders instead agreed on 19 December to a €90 billion loan funded by joint EU borrowing, with the Russian assets kept frozen. The Bank of Russia answered with a lawsuit in Moscow against Euroclear. **US–Russia trade is too small to be leverage, so the leverage became secondary.** Direct trade is tiny: about $4.1 billion of US imports and $1.8 billion of exports in 2025. Washington's economic pressure on Moscow has therefore run through third countries. Executive Order 14329 (6 August 2025) put an extra 25% duty on Indian goods, effective 27 August, because India buys Russian oil. Executive Order 14384 (6 February 2026) removed it from 7 February, citing India's commitment "to stop directly or indirectly importing Russian Federation oil." Two weeks later the IEEPA authority both orders relied on was struck down in [[Learning Resources v. Trump]]. See [[Secondary Sanctions]] for the instrument and [[India]] and [[Narendra Modi]] for the buyer. ## Where to go from here | Destination | What's there | |---|---| | [[Russian Influence]] | Operations directed at the United States — funding, information operations, elite capture | | [[Russian History Hub]] | The full historical arc, Kievan Rus to the present | | [[Soviet Union]] | The predecessor state and the tradecraft it bequeathed | | [[Foundations of Geopolitics]] | The doctrinal text and what it actually says | | [[Vladimir Putin]] | The figure | | [[Ukraine]] | The war that split the American right | | [[Post-Soviet States]] | The fourteen other former Soviet republics, and where each stands with Moscow in 2026 | | [[Wagner Group]] → [[Africa Corps]] | Deniable force abroad: Prigozhin's private army in Ukraine, [[Syria]] and Africa, absorbed by the state after the 2023 [[Wagner Group Mutiny]] | ## See also [[Soviet Union]] · [[Ukraine]] · [[NATO]] · [[Chinese Influence]] · [[Secondary Sanctions]] · [[Global Economy Hub]] · [[World History Hub]]