Nine months ago the Kremlin faced what many in Western capitals assumed would be a big queeze: deeper sanctions, thinning access to technology, and the slow bleed of a grinding war. What followed instead was a striking demonstration of statecraft under constraint. Moscow tightened strategic alignments with Iran and North Korea, leveraged the diplomatic architecture of the non-Western world, redirected energy and finance eastward, and used the spectacle of an Alaska summit with the U.S. president to signal that Russia would not be written out of the great-power conversation.

Measured by the narrow metrics that the Kremlin values most, regime security, strategic leverage abroad, and a functioning war economy at home, the period amounts to a run of successes.

At a Kremlin meeting on Wednesday, Finance Minister Anton Siluanov said the Economy Ministry now expects the Russian economy to expand by at least 1.5% this year, with an official forecast of 2.5% for 2025. His remarks came as domestic fuel prices hit record highs following recent overnight Ukrainian drone strikes, according to reports.

Russia posted strong growth in 2023 and 2024 despite multiple rounds of Western sanctions after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, but momentum has slowed. Tight labor markets and high interest rates, introduced to tame inflation driven in part by record defense spending, are straining activity.

Siluanov told President Vladimir Putin that a balanced budget would give the central bank room to ease policy, making credit more accessible and channeling more funding to key sectors, which in turn could lift socio-economic performance next year. The economy grew 4.3% in 2024; the central bank currently projects 1–2% growth for this year. Putin said there are many variables in sustaining growth, but signaled his overall support for the approach.

From Isolation to Leverage: The Alaska Optics

The most visible throughline is the move from episodic coordination to structur with sanctioned peers. With Iran, cooperation matured from a transactional exchange of drones and munitions into a more layered relationship that includes reciprocal sanction-busting logistics, energy swaps, and shared workarounds in finance and shipping. The north–south trade corridor linking Russia to the Persian Gulf via the Caspian is no longer a blueprint in search of a purpose. It has become a relief valve for constrained supply chains, a route for dual-use goods, and a political signal that the old chokepoints can be skirted. In parallel, the security dialogue has deepened in Syria and the wider Middle East, where both capitals benefit from presenting themselves as dependable actors in a fluid regional order.

With North Korea, the bet is cruder and riskier but no less effective in the short term. Pyongyang provides volume at speed: artillery shells, rockets, and the sort of conventional stocks that a high-intensity land war inhales. In return, it receives food, energy, and selective technical support that strengthens Kim Jong Un at home and unnerves U.S. allies in Northeast Asia. If the Iran channel is about resilience in the face of Western technology denial, the North Korea channel is about tempo, replenishment, and political theater. Both relationships have the same strategic function. They distribute Russia’s dependency across multiple partners, raise the costs of any new sanctioning round, and advertise that ostracism has limits when a large non-Western audience is willing to transact.

Seen in that light, the Alaska meeting mattered regardless of outcome. A summit on U.S. soil, even in the absence of an immediate ceasefire, punctured the narrative of permanent isolation and restored a measure of parity in the optics that Moscow prizes. The signal to swing states and fence-sitters was clear: Russia can still extract high-level engagement from Washington while negotiating settlements that reflect facts on the ground. The signal to Europe was equally pointed. If the United States is prepared to explore a hard ceasefire that formalizes a new status quo, perhaps with security assurances routed through European capitals, the strategic center of gravity for the war’s endgame will no longer sit in Brussels.

Diplomacy, though, is only half the story…the other half is in the macroeconomics. The Russian economy did not collapse under sanctions. It adapted, re-priced, and re-channeled. A rapid, state-led shift to a war footing pulled idle capacity into the defense sector, backstopped wages in industrial regions, and pushed headline output higher even as inflation bit into household purchasing power. Fiscal policy turned expansive, with defense and security outlays driving demand across metals, chemicals, transport, and basic manufacturing. Oil revenue, discounted heavily to Asian buyers and moved via a proliferating “shadow fleet,” continued to fund the budget. Parallel imports replaced some sanctioned technologies, Chinese components filled critical gaps, and the financial plumbing reorganized around capital controls and the yuan.

None of this is cost-free. A war economy can raise growth rates while eroding productivity, tightening labor markets, and stoking price pressures. Skilled workers have left, demographics are unforgiving, and the technological frontier in semiconductors, machine tools, and advanced sensors is still moving away from Russian firms. Yet the Kremlin’s scoreboard is not built on OECD baselines. It asks simpler questions. Are factories busy? Are paychecks arriving in the strategic regions? Are the trains running with materiel to the front and metals to the ports? Are the lights on in the ministries that matter? Over these nine months the answers, uncomfortably for Moscow’s adversaries, have mostly been yes.

Abroad, Russia used the architecture of the non-West as a multiplier. BRICS enlargement, SCO choreography, and a carousel of energy, grain, and security agreements in the Middle East and Africa gave Moscow both audience and leverage. In the Sahel, post-Wagner structures restored a footprint that trades security services for access and influence. In Asia, the courtship of India on energy and payments gave Russia a durable buyer and a platform to hedge against over-reliance on China. Taken together, these moves do not restore the prewar economic geography, but they do approximate it well enough to blunt Western intent.

Critics will say the edifice is brittle, and they are not wrong. Over-dependence on a small set of partners is a structural vulnerability. Sanctions can be tightened on marine insurance, tanker ownership, and third-country trade. The gap between military output and civilian welfare widens over time, particularly if inflation stays elevated and imported technology grows scarcer. The “yuanization” of trade reduces financial fragility in the short run and increases strategic exposure to Beijing in the long run. The Alaska optics may age badly if battlefield dynamics shift or if European unity proves more durable than expected. All of these caveats matter.

Yet a nonpartisan assessment of the period on its own terms reaches a plain conclusion. The Kremlin set out three immediate objectives: stabilize the war economy, break diplomatic quarantine, and accumulate negotiating equity ahead of any eventual settlement. Through a fusion of coercion at home and opportunism abroad, it has advanced all three. That does not settle the long game of innovation, demographics, and legitimacy.

It does, however, explain why, in Moscow’s internal accounting, the last nine months look like a string of wins.