What If Russia’s Greatest Wartime Vulnerability Is Not Destruction, but Friction?
Russia remains the Largest Country on Earth. But Distance is Useful only while People Money Fuel and Authority can Move Across it. Ukraine may be Changing that Calculation
Hans Boserup
A country can become smaller without losing territory
Somewhere in Kuzbass, more than three thousand kilometres east of Moscow, a miner can finish his shift, go home and discover that the salary he has already earned still has not arrived.
Nothing on the political map has changed while he was underground.
The borders of the Russian Federation remain where they were yesterday, Moscow is still the capital, Kuzbass remains one of Russia’s great coal-producing regions, and the railways, roads, airports and financial networks that connect Siberia to European Russia continue to exist.
Yet something has changed, because the practical distance between that worker and the state that governs him has become slightly greater.
The difference cannot be measured in kilometres.
It appears instead in the growing difficulty with which labour is converted into wages, regional production into revenue, revenue into public services and decisions taken in Moscow into an ordinary life thousands of kilometres away.
That was the thought that stayed with me after reading Anna Danylchuk’s latest weekly brief from Ukraine.
She brings together stories that initially appear to belong in different newspapers:
unpaid miners in Kuzbass, warnings from Russian economists, unusually large movements into cash, repeated disruption of civilian aviation, attacks reaching Sochi and reports that some Russian men are becoming increasingly nervous about whether they will remain free to leave the country.
Anna sees these developments as signs of a Russia beginning to close from inside, and from her position as a Ukrainian living through the war it is understandable that she reads them as evidence that Putin’s attempt to destroy Ukraine is beginning to damage Russia itself.
Before accepting so large a conclusion, however, there may be another and rather more interesting question to ask.
Perhaps the important development is not that Russia is collapsing, but that moving through Russia, whether geographically, economically or institutionally, is becoming more difficult.
That would be something less dramatic than collapse, and for precisely that reason it may tell us more about the pressures accumulating inside an exceptionally large state.
In short
Russia’s enormous territory has traditionally offered strategic depth, resources and protection, but territory becomes power only when a state can move people, money, energy, goods and authority through it.
War, sanctions, economic strain and Ukrainian deep strikes are now placing pressure on several of those movements at the same time.
None of this proves that Russia is approaching collapse, and Russia has repeatedly shown a capacity to adapt that outsiders have underestimated.
The more useful question may therefore be whether the cost of keeping such a large country economically and politically connected is gradually rising.
Begin with the miner
Kuzbass is a useful place to begin because it prevents us from becoming distracted by drones, missiles and the spectacle of explosions.
The Kuznetsk Basin is one of the places from which Soviet industrial power once drew both coal and mythology.
Mines, railways, industrial towns and generations of families grew around the assumption that extracting coal was not merely employment but work performed in a region whose importance to the state was beyond doubt.
Anna describes miners who have gone for many months without receiving the wages they have earned and a coal industry in which several mines are under severe pressure.
She also points to the widening deficit in the regional budget.
Those facts are serious, but they should not tempt us into explaining everything through the war.
Russian coal has problems of its own.
Prices matter, foreign markets have changed, sanctions complicate trade, production costs have risen, and transporting coal across immense distances has always been expensive.
That complexity makes Kuzbass more useful to us, rather than less, because the question is not whether Putin personally removed a miner’s salary from an envelope and spent it on a missile.
The more revealing question is what happens when an existing industrial weakness encounters a state whose financial priorities have been transformed by a long war.
A mine does not have to close for the pressure to matter. A worker does not have to join a political opposition movement. A regional government does not have to challenge Moscow.
It is enough that wages become more difficult to pay, credit more expensive to obtain, transport more costly and regional authorities less able to choose where the next ruble should go.
When that happens, the distance between Kuzbass and Moscow changes even though no railway track has disappeared.
The connection still exists, but maintaining it requires more effort.
Kuzbass was built around movement. Coal had to leave the mine, reach the railway, cross thousands of kilometres and arrive at customers able to pay for it. The region’s strategic importance has therefore always depended not merely on what lies beneath the ground, but on the economic and transport connections that turn coal into national power.
Money also has to move
The next part of Anna’s newsletter appears at first to take us somewhere else entirely.
She writes about Russians withdrawing very large quantities of cash from the banking sector and about a wider anxiety surrounding banks, electronic payments, inflation and the possibility that private savings might one day become vulnerable to decisions taken by the state.
It would be unwise to turn every increase in the use of cash into evidence of panic.
There are many reasons why households may wish to keep more physical money.
Russia has experienced recurring internet disruption, electronic payments can become unreliable when communications are interrupted, and uncertainty itself changes ordinary financial behaviour without producing anything resembling a bank run.
What interests me is therefore not whether Russians are panicking, but what money represents when confidence becomes less complete.
Most of the time, money is almost invisible.
We leave it in accounts because we assume that the bank will be open tomorrow, that electronic payment will work, that our employer will transfer our salary, that our card will be accepted and that the state will continue to recognise the rules under which our savings were accumulated.
Trust allows money to remain still while our ability to use it travels with us.
Cash becomes more attractive when that confidence weakens, because cash is not merely money.
It is mobility kept close to the body.
It can pay for petrol when an electronic terminal does not work, support a family through a delayed salary, buy a railway ticket or provide a reserve when tomorrow looks less predictable than yesterday.
Nothing here requires us to believe that the Russian banking sector is close to failure.
The Russian Central Bank has repeatedly demonstrated considerable technical competence, and Russia’s financial institutions have adapted to sanctions more successfully than many early predictions suggested.
Yet adaptation itself consumes resources.
When households, companies, banks and public authorities all begin keeping larger margins against uncertainty, economic life acquires resistance.
The transaction still takes place, but it becomes slightly harder.
Once again, we encounter friction rather than collapse.
A large country must defeat distance every day
The airport brings us to the same problem from another direction.
For someone living in Denmark or the Netherlands, the temporary closure of an airport is disruptive, but alternative roads, railways and airports are usually within manageable reach.
Russia is different because its scale makes reliable aviation part of the machinery by which the country remains a single political and economic space.
Russia spans eleven time zones.
Its great industrial regions, administrative centres, ports, military installations and resource-producing areas are separated by distances that cannot always be overcome efficiently by road or rail. Aircraft therefore move more than tourists.
They move managers, officials, engineers, specialists, military personnel and the thousands of people whose ordinary economic activity connects distant regions to the centre.
This is why the increasing disruption of Russian civilian aviation deserves attention even when no civilian airport is being attacked.
Ukrainian drones travelling through Russian airspace oblige Russian authorities to close or restrict airspace while air defence responds.
Flights may eventually depart, aircraft may be diverted, passengers may merely spend a night they had not planned to spend in an airport terminal, and the physical damage may be negligible.
Yet the effect has begun before anything has been destroyed.
An airline that cannot predict whether a flight will leave on time must build uncertainty into its operations.
Passengers must allow for delay. Businesses must allow additional time for travel.
Insurers, foreign carriers and logistics companies must reconsider risks that previously seemed remote.
The economic consequence therefore emerges not only from destruction but from uncertainty.
Ukraine does not have to make Russian aviation impossible in order to alter its value. It is sufficient to make reliability more expensive.
For a country whose geography is itself one of its defining strategic characteristics, that distinction matters.
The map begins to change without moving
Once we look at Russia in this way, another kind of map becomes possible.
Imagine that we stop measuring the distance from Moscow to a regional city in kilometres and begin measuring it in the time, money and uncertainty required to reach it.
If a flight that normally takes several hours may be cancelled or diverted, the city has moved farther from Moscow in practical terms.
If fuel distribution becomes less predictable because refinery capacity or transport routes are disrupted, the distance grows again.
If employers have difficulty paying wages and regional budgets are under pressure, the political relationship between a distant region and the centre becomes more difficult to maintain.
Nothing has moved physically, yet the territory has become harder to traverse.
This is why territorial control and territorial cohesion should not be treated as the same thing.
A government can exercise formal sovereignty over a region while discovering that connecting that region economically and administratively to the centre requires steadily greater expenditure.
A state can retain immense strategic depth while consuming more resources merely in crossing that depth, and a government can add territory to the map while some of the movements that make its existing territory useful become less dependable.
Seen from this perspective, Russia’s enormous size has two meanings at once.
It remains a formidable advantage because resources, production and military assets can be dispersed across a vast space.
At the same time, every additional kilometre is a distance Moscow must itself overcome whenever it wishes to move people, fuel, money, instructions or security forces.
The same geography that makes Russia difficult for an enemy to penetrate also makes Russia expensive for Moscow to connect.
Sochi and the geography of normality
Sochi introduces yet another kind of distance, because states are held together not only by transport and money but also by expectations.
For many Russians, Sochi has represented something close to the opposite of war.
It is a resort city associated with the Black Sea, holidays, prestige and the 2014 Winter Olympics, when Putin used the city to display a Russia that had supposedly returned as a confident and prosperous great power.
Its political meaning depended partly on the assumption that whatever conflicts surrounded Russia, places such as Sochi remained securely inside another world.
That assumption is becoming harder to sustain.
Anna describes Ukrainian maritime drone operations reaching the port of Sochi after earlier Ukrainian pressure had already forced Russia to reconsider the safety of naval operations around occupied Crimea and Novorossiysk.
The strategic importance of an individual vessel can easily be exaggerated, but the location tells us something different.
The war has entered a part of the Russian mental map that was supposed to remain recreational rather than military.
This does not make the experience of Russians in Sochi equivalent to what Ukrainians have endured.
Ukrainian cities have been invaded, occupied and repeatedly bombarded, while Russia initiated the war.
The moral and legal distinction remains essential.
The psychological mechanism, however, is worth understanding.
A place once considered safely remote from the battlefield becomes a place where alerts, military activity or disruption must be considered when making ordinary plans.
The physical distance between Sochi and Ukraine has not altered, but its psychological distance from the war has.
Normality has become slightly more expensive to maintain.
Strategic depth has always contained a paradox
Russian geography has defeated armies before.
Napoleon discovered that distance could consume an invading force faster than battle.
Hitler’s armies encountered not merely Soviet resistance but roads, weather, railways, fuel requirements and immense distances that transformed every advance into a logistical problem.
Russia could exchange territory for time because the deeper an enemy moved into the country, the longer and more vulnerable the lines required to sustain that movement became.
That history gave strategic depth an almost mythical place in thinking about Russia.
Yet strategic depth has always contained a paradox that becomes easier to overlook when we imagine geography only from the invader’s perspective.
The same distances an enemy must cross must also be crossed by Russia itself.
A railway required by an invading army is also required by Russian industry.
Fuel needed by an advancing column is also required by Russian transport.
Communications that coordinate a military operation are also required to administer remote regions.
Russia’s size becomes power because the state has spent generations constructing ways to defeat its own geography.
Railways, pipelines, aircraft, financial transfers, regional budgets and communications networks transform an enormous territory into something Moscow can govern as one political space.
Ukraine cannot remove that territory, and it cannot make Russia geographically small.
It may, however, be learning how to raise the cost of overcoming the distances within it.
This is rather different from the simpler theory that enough factories, refineries, aircraft or military installations must be destroyed until the Russian economy suddenly breaks.
A refinery need not disappear entirely before reduced throughput matters.
A railway need not be permanently severed before delays create consequences.
An airbase need not be destroyed if aircraft must be dispersed and protected more carefully.
An airport need not be demolished if repeated closures make schedules unreliable.
The effects accumulate in the spaces between destruction and normality.
They accumulate as friction.
Russia learned this lesson in Ukraine first
There is an uncomfortable reason why Russia should understand this mechanism better than almost anyone.
Russia has spent more than four years attempting to impose precisely this kind of friction on Ukraine, although on a vastly more destructive scale.
Attacks on electricity generation, heating, railways, ports, industries and cities have repeatedly sought not merely to destroy particular installations but to make ordinary Ukrainian life more difficult and the Ukrainian economy more expensive to operate.
A transformer can be repaired, but while it is being repaired somebody must find electricity elsewhere.
A railway line can reopen, but passengers and freight have already been delayed.
An apartment building can survive a strike nearby, while thousands of people nevertheless change their behaviour because the next alarm may come during the night.
Russia has therefore tried to weaponise uncertainty as well as destruction.
For much of the war, however, there was an extraordinary geographical asymmetry.
Russia could create friction almost anywhere in Ukraine while most of Russia remained a rear area.
Ukrainians lived inside the physical geography of war, while many Russians experienced it primarily through television, inflation, mobilisation, sanctions or the disappearance of particular imported goods.
That distinction has not vanished, and Ukrainian suffering remains on an entirely different scale, but the distinction is becoming less absolute.
The rear is no longer quite as far behind the front as it once appeared.
Friction is not collapse
At this point it becomes especially important not to move faster than the evidence allows.
Russia has survived repeated predictions of imminent economic collapse since 2022.
Its trade has adapted, imports have found new routes, energy exports have continued to produce revenue, industry has been redirected towards military production, and the state has shown itself capable of transferring enormous costs onto businesses, regions and ordinary households.
Authoritarian governments can also tolerate inefficiencies that would produce immediate political consequences elsewhere.
They can suppress protest, alter regulations, move resources administratively and require weaker parts of society to carry burdens that more responsive political institutions might be forced to address.
For those reasons, unpaid miners in Kuzbass do not demonstrate that the Russian Federation is approaching disintegration.
More cash in circulation does not establish a banking panic.
Airport interruptions do not show that Russia is becoming ungovernable, and a maritime drone in Sochi does not mean that Russia has lost control of the Black Sea.
Perhaps the expectation of collapse is itself preventing us from recognising the more gradual development.
A state does not have to collapse before its strategic circumstances deteriorate.
It is enough that it must devote steadily more money, manpower, attention and organisational effort to producing the same degree of normality it previously achieved at lower cost.
A railway can still operate while becoming more important to defend.
An airport can remain open while becoming harder to schedule around.
A region can remain loyal while requiring larger transfers.
A bank can remain solvent while depositors become more cautious.
An industrial company can continue producing while credit, transport and labour become more expensive.
In each case the outward form survives.
What changes is the cost of preserving it.
The war Russia began in order to become larger
There is a final irony in looking at Russia this way.
Putin began this war partly in the language of territory.
Crimea had already been annexed, and after the full-scale invasion the Kremlin declared occupied areas of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson to be Russian.
Maps were redrawn, historical claims were invoked, and territorial expansion was presented as evidence of national restoration.
The measurement of greatness was geographical.
Yet territory has never been power by itself.
A state draws power from territory when it can extract resources from it, move goods across it, persuade people to remain in it, finance its administration, defend its infrastructure and connect distant populations to a political centre.
If acquiring additional territory coincides with rising transport costs, growing pressure on regional budgets, increasingly cautious financial behaviour and a requirement to defend installations ever deeper inside the country, the addition of square kilometres does not necessarily produce an equivalent addition of usable power.
Russia may therefore be confronting one of the stranger reversals of Putin’s war.
It went to war in part to become larger, while the consequences of that war may gradually make the territory it already possesses more expensive to connect.
Ukraine does not have to make Russia smaller for this to matter.
It may only have to make Russia’s size cost more.
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