Full disclaimer: I’m no expert in geopolitics. I’m just an amateur internet reader on the topic.

I think 2026 will be the year China has to decide what it wants to do with Russia. Prior to this China was gaining significantly from sales to Russia of non-military and dual use products when eventually made it into Russian military supply chains through vast networks of brokers from Kazakhstan to Türkiye. Additionally China was able to take payment in oil and refined petroleum products negating global SWIFT restrictions imposed by sanctions.

Three things have change in December of 2025:

• Kazakhstan has now imposed strict controls on exports of dual use products to Russia via Kazak transport networks. This doesn’t mean that dual use products will never find a way to Russia, but instead they’ll have to resort to smuggling which is far less reliable and far more expensive to Russia. This is a major chokepoint for Russian logistics, but also means easy and consistent sales from China are now bottle-necked. The result is China will be moving far fewer goods to Russia.
• The Russian shadow fleet, has been targeted by Ukrainian special operators and drone pilots resulting in the loss of a number of tankers. Additionally the USA has seized a number of vessels through port in Venezuela which also served part of the shadow fleet network. The result of both of these things is that insurance costs have skyrocketed. Vessel and crew availability has plummeted. Crews are refusing to take on Russian shadow fleet work for fear of being blown up by Ukraine or seized by the USA. So this means China can’t get paid for any sales to Russia in any currency it cares about (oil) beyond a trickle through other means.
• Russia has pissed off Türkiye with consistent drone incursions into the nation. This is not good for Russia. Not only is Russia dependent upon Türkiye for avoiding sanctions, but also for regular access to the Black Sea through the Bosphorus Strait. While Türkiye has already restricted Russian military vessels transit years ago, it still regularly allows for Russian civilian/merchant traffic under the Montreux Convention rules. However, there are substantiated claims that Russia has been outfitting tankers in disguise. These tankers can containing drone launching platforms and carry GRU agents to perform asymmetric operations against NATO countries such as disrupting civilian air traffic. With the drone incursion, this might be enough for Türkiye to decide that even civilian tankers are military and deny them access to enter or leave the Black Sea. Just this week Türkiye scrambled a Turkish F-16 and shot down a Russian drone approaching the Türkiye coast. This is a shift in behavior from Türkiye in the past.

Where will Russia go when it has pissed off these vital intermediaries it absolutely depends on to continue the invasion in Ukraine?

End of 2026 Russia is going to be crumpled on the ground with Ukraine kicking them in the face to wake up so they can negotiate a ceasefire but Russia is way too fucked up to do anything coherent but lay there in the mud moaning in pain while taking drunken swipes with a knife at Ukraine in attempt to press the attack.

I do not honestly think Russia is capable of continuing to fight that long, especially if we are talking about large mechanized assaults, certainly not at this rate of attrition and also the rate Russia is training Ukrainian personnel to be ruthlessly effective at repelling their mindless assaults as their own soldiers learn nothing and then die.

Not to mention Ukrainian/European military technology is pulling far ahead of Russia while Russia doubles down on trying to make iterative improvements to fundamentally obsolete equipment and doctrine.

It will be a disaster for Russia if they continue to insist on losing for that much longer.

Some years back we had a company in Denmark called Nordic Feather, a very old company with a stellar reputation in every respect.
But suddenly one day, the CEO committed suicide apparently out of the blue. And after that it was revealed that he had been cooking the books for years, and the company had basically been bankrupt for a couple of years. But had been held up on bank loans and credits that were issued on false information.

Russia is in a very similar position today, the country has been cooking the books for years, and may in fact already be bankrupt. The budget for 2025 was made with an expected manageable deficit, but military expenses have been exceed by some 20-30% and income from oil and gas is only about half what they expected in the budget, because both sales and prices are down.

Where the Russian economy was in a weird limbo from 2022 to 2024 with a simultaneous combination of symptoms of recession and overheating, the overheating part is now long gone here by the end of 2025, and only the recession symptoms are left.
Increasing bankruptcies, and examples of mass factory layoffs, decreasing tax revenues and purchasing power.
Purchasing power is now so weak, it has actually caused inflation to go down on food!
Allegedly increased reports of infrastructure failures, are caused by shortage of skilled workers, and shortage of parts they used to import, and even sometimes caused by failures due to workers working on extreme overtime schedules.

I’m hoping the Russian economy and infrastructure will be so seriously strained by the end of winter, that the Russian federation collapses politically. For it to actually collapse economically will take a while longer. Russia has been selling a lot of gold and diamonds to keep things together economically. But Russia is REALLY close to be out of options, and when that happens, there will be no money for the government to pay for anything, we may see running the money press resulting in hyper inflation as the final attempt to extend the lifespan of the current government (Putin).
But for sure Russia has already been running on borrowed time for a while now.

Unfortunately, no matter what agreements are signed, it is highly unlikely that Russia will honor the terms. Putin has made it abundantly clear…he doesn’t believe that Ukraine has the right to exist as an independent nation.