Since the beginning of 2026, I have been noticing an unusual number of Russian travellers in places I would not naturally associate with Russian tourism. First in Turkiye, which has long been a corridor, but then increasingly in Southeast Asia: Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia. Not the occasional encounter you would expect, but a sustained, visible presence. Families with luggage in Bangkok, young professionals at coworking spaces in Ho Chi Minh City, groups at resort hotels in Phuket who seemed slightly too purposeful, slightly too aware that something might change soon.

That observation made me curious. Why now, and why at this scale? And the question naturally broadened: how is Russia actually doing, four years into a full-scale war? Not what the headlines say, but what the domestic dynamics reveal. Are there any real signals of the war approaching an end, something observable in consumer behaviour, in corporate decisions, in how elites are positioning themselves? And the question that always sits at the back of an investor’s mind: is there anything in Russia worth watching for when the country eventually becomes investable again?

I am quite sure there will be extraordinary opportunities when that day comes. Russia is a country with deep human capital in engineering and mathematics, an agricultural base capable of feeding half the world, and a corporate sector that has learned under extraordinary duress to run leaner than almost anyone thought possible. At some point, the wall comes down. When it does, the investors who have been paying attention will have an enormous advantage over those who wrote Russia off entirely.

This piece is my attempt to do that work now. Part I covers the economic fundamentals from 2016 through 2026 estimates across GDP, oil and gas, agriculture, and demography. Part II looks at the social and political fabric: morale, what elites are actually thinking about the war’s economics, the domestic consumption shifts, and what that remarkable tourism surge tells us about the psychology of the population. Part III examines eight companies, five MOEX heavyweights, two grocery champions, and one tech giant, and what their financials from 2020 through Q1 2026 actually reveal about the state of Russian corporate life.

Part I: The Economy: Growth, Distortion, and the Bill That Is Coming

Macro Overview: GDP, Inflation and Monetary Policy

Russia’s economic trajectory since 2016 looks, at first glance, far more resilient than the West had hoped for or expected. But peel back the headline numbers and you find a story of progressive distortion: an economy that went from commodities-dependent stagnation to war-fuelled overheating, now entering what looks like an extended soft patch that nobody inside the Kremlin seems fully prepared to manage.

Between 2016 and 2019, Russia grew at a modest pace, between 0.2% and 2.8% annually, with oil at relatively contained levels and the Crimea-era sanctions already baked in. The 2020 COVID shock was relatively mild by global standards (negative 2.7%), and the rebound in 2021 (plus 5.6%) was genuine, powered by commodity price recovery and pent-up consumption. Then came February 24, 2022.

The initial shock was expected to be catastrophic. The IMF had pencilled in a negative 8% contraction. What actually happened was a negative 1.4% decline in 2022, a rounding error compared to projections, followed by two years of 4%-plus growth in 2023 and 2024. The explanation is not that Russia’s economy was strong. It is that the war became the economy.

The federal budget for 2025 allocated 15.5 trillion roubles, roughly $160 billion, to national defence, representing 7.2% of GDP and 37% of total federal spending. Military-adjacent manufacturing grew by double digits in both 2023 and 2024. Defence sector workers now earn wages that pull labour away from civilian industries, creating an economy where a truck driver for a munitions factory out-earns an engineer at a consumer tech startup.

The cost of overheating became impossible to ignore by mid-2024. Inflation hit 9.5% by year-end, and the Bank of Russia raised the key rate to 21% in October 2024, a two-decade high. A gradual cutting cycle then began: from 21% down through 19%, 18%, 17%, 16%, 15%, and 14.5% in April 2026. As of April 2026, annual inflation stood at 5.6%, easing but still well above the 4% target. The Bank projects a return to target only in 2027.

GDP growth collapsed to approximately 1% in 2025, essentially flat, and Q1 2026 produced something striking: Capital Economics reports a negative 0.2% year-on-year contraction, Russia’s first since early 2023. The IMF revised its 2026 forecast upward to 1.1%, citing the boost from higher commodity prices following the Middle East conflict. The World Bank holds at 0.8%. The Central Bank holds its guidance at 0.5% to 1.5%.

Oil and Gas: The Pivot to Asia and Its Limits

Russia was, entering this war, the world’s second-largest crude oil producer, the largest pipeline gas exporter, and one of the three largest coal exporters. Its federal budget was approximately 40% financed by hydrocarbon revenues. What happened next was a forced, expensive, and only partially successful pivot.

Gas to Europe: between 2021 and 2025, Russia’s share of European gas imports collapsed from 45% to roughly 18%. Gazprom’s pipeline network, built over fifty years of patient diplomacy and infrastructure investment, became largely stranded. The last major transit route through Ukraine ended on January 1, 2025, when Kyiv chose not to renew the agreement. The consequences for Gazprom were severe enough to produce, in 2023, the company’s first annual loss since 1999.

Crude oil held up far better, thanks to the shadow fleet and the enthusiastic absorption of discounted Russian crude by India and China. Urals oil traded at a consistent $15 to $25 discount to Brent through 2023 and 2024, but volumes held. Russia continued producing approximately 9 to 10 million barrels per day. Oil and gas revenues to the federal budget rose 26% in 2024 year-on-year. The cracks widened sharply in 2025: Ukrainian drone strikes hit refineries at Ryazan, Volgograd, and Saratov, and targeted the Ust-Luga and Primorsk export terminals handling over 40% of Russia’s seaborne crude. The Urals price fell toward $50 per barrel against a budget assumption of $69.70, and oil and gas budget revenues roughly halved year-on-year in Q1 2026. The Iran conflict in 2026 has since pushed oil prices higher, providing some relief, and the IMF’s upward revision to Russia’s 2026 growth forecast explicitly cites this commodity tailwind.

The pivot to China via gas pipeline remains structurally incomplete. Gazprom reported that gas exports to China grew 24.8% in 2025 versus 2024, which is genuine progress. But China, as the buyer with alternatives, has no incentive to pay European-equivalent prices. The Power of Siberia 2 pipeline negotiations have faced persistent pricing disputes. For 2026, Russia’s domestic gas prices rose 8% year-on-year, which at least offers one revenue line insulated from geopolitical dynamics.

Agriculture: Russia’s Bright Spot, Now Fading

If there is one sector where Russia genuinely outperformed in the war years, it is grain. The 2022 harvest set an all-time record: 153.8 million tonnes of grain, including 104.2 million tonnes of wheat. Russia locked in its position as the world’s undisputed wheat export leader, shipping over 45 million tonnes in the 2022/23 season and a record 50-plus million tonnes in 2023/24. Egypt, Iran, Algeria, Turkey, and much of sub-Saharan Africa became structurally dependent on Russian grain at competitive, sanctions-exempt prices.

The 2024 harvest was the first warning signal: production dropped to roughly 126 million tonnes, with wheat at approximately 83 million tonnes, down due to drought and frost damage. The 2025 season extended the decline, with early harvest data as of late July showing volumes running 28% behind the prior year’s pace, with average wheat yields 4.5% below 2024 levels. Farmers, squeezed between input cost inflation and falling export prices, have been rotating capital out of wheat and into higher-margin legumes. Russia overtook Canada as the world’s top pea exporter to China in 2024. The 2026 forecast is for continued decline, with global wheat prices remaining low and input costs rising.

Demography: A Crisis Inside the Crisis

Demography is where Russia’s story becomes genuinely alarming over a multi-decade horizon. In 2024, only 1.22 million people were born in Russia, barely above the all-time low of 1.21 million recorded in 1999. Rosstat projects births declining by 3% to 5% per year going forward, with no meaningful recovery expected before 2029 to 2030. The total fertility rate, at 1.37, is structurally catastrophic. The natural population decline in 2024 was approximately 600,000 people, the steepest since the COVID peak of 2021.

Military casualties compound the demographic loss in ways the Kremlin actively conceals. Estimates by Russia Matters put total war-related casualties (dead and wounded) above 790,000 as of mid-2025. These casualties are disproportionately drawn from Russia’s ethnic minority regions, precisely the communities that historically had higher birth rates and were meant to offset natural decline in ethnic Russian regions. Roughly 800,000 people left Russia in 2022, young, educated, predominantly male, and most have not returned. The median age reached 40.3 in 2025, up from 32.2 in 1990. People over 65 now represent over 18% of the population.

The Atlantic Council has coined the term “deathonomics” to describe what happens in Russia’s poorest regions: sign-on bonuses plus KIA payouts create a system where dying in Ukraine can be more financially rewarding than living to retirement age. It is a macroeconomic stimulus programme built on human mortality.

Part II: The State of the War: Morale, Elites, and the Economy of Violence

A War Structurally Embedded in the Economy

After four years of full-scale war, Russia has developed something that feels less like a mobilised democracy at war and more like a hostage system. The war has created powerful constituencies who benefit from its continuation. Military-industrial contractors and defence sector workers, the security services whose budgets have never been higher, and the regional governors who use KIA payments as local economic stimulus all have structural reasons to prefer continuation. The New Eurasian Strategies Centre calculated in late 2025 that at least 102 Russian enterprises had been expropriated since the invasion began, worth approximately 3.9 trillion roubles ($43 to $44 billion). This is not just nationalisation; it is the creation of a new elite whose wealth is entirely contingent on the war’s continuation.

Russian public support for the war is real, but softer and more conditional than Kremlin propaganda suggests. The number of Russians who fully support the war has roughly halved since early 2022, while about 50% now want it to end in some negotiated form. The surveillance infrastructure, the legal exposure of anti-war speech, and the basic material reality that military service now pays well in a 2.4% unemployment economy all suppress public dissent. CSIS noted in its autumn 2025 analysis that Russian elites see a light at the end of the tunnel, buoyed by the Trump administration’s distancing from strong Ukrainian support and by perceived battlefield advantage.

What Elites Actually Think About the War’s Economics

The war is profitable for some and catastrophic for others, and the balance is gradually shifting. In early 2022, the oligarchic class was in shock. Many kept silent. By 2025, the picture is more complex. A substantial group of elites has become structurally dependent on the war economy: defence procurement contracts, military-linked subsidies, and access to expropriated foreign assets. For this group, as Russia Matters analyst Cynthia Rondeaux observed in December 2025, peace negotiations are not about security architecture. They are about commercial terms. Gennady Timchenko and Yuri Kovalchuk are reportedly positioning themselves to profit from whatever reconstruction settlement emerges.

But there is another group, more numerous than the Kremlin would like to admit, for whom the war has been economically ruinous: business owners who relied on Western technology, capital, or markets; regional entrepreneurs squeezed by 21% interest rates; manufacturers who cannot access imported inputs and cannot invest at borrowing costs exceeding their expected returns. The 2025 to 2026 interest rate cycle has crystallised this fault line. Magnit, Russia’s largest retailer by store count, posted its first net loss in over 20 years. Major industrials including Lukoil, MMK, Severstal, and Rusal have also recently reported losses.

The shrinking return on occupied Ukrainian territory is a theme that circulates, largely in whispers, among the more commercially minded members of the elite. The logic of territorial conquest was originally about industrial assets: Donbas steel mills, the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, the chemical facilities of Mariupol. What nobody adequately factored in was the systematic destruction that attends the seizure of those assets. Russia notionally controls the territory. But what it controls is rubble requiring reconstruction investment Russia cannot supply. The calculus of occupied city profitability has inverted.

Domestic Consumption and What It Signals

Inside Russia, the economy feels genuinely tight in some ways and artificially inflated in others. Wages in the military sector and defence manufacturing have been growing at 20% to 30% per year in nominal terms, fast enough to create a visible consumer boom in cities like Tula, Nizhny Tagil, and Yekaterinburg. But consumer spending nationally tells a more mixed story. Inflation at 9.5% in 2024, with food prices rising faster than headline CPI, hit pensioners and rural populations hardest. The government cut transfers to the Pension and Social Insurance Fund by 1.4 trillion roubles in 2025 to fund defence.

The import substitution narrative is partially true and partially theatre. In some categories, certain food products, basic industrial goods, and weapons, substitution has been real. In others, consumer electronics, automotive components, and industrial machinery, the replacement is more visible in government statistics than on store shelves. X5 Group’s Q1 2026 results offer a clean read on the state of consumer demand: revenue still growing at 11%, but net profit down 43% year-on-year as debt-servicing costs soar and margin compression bites.

Russians Are Travelling More, and There Is a Reason For It

This is the phenomenon that started my inquiry into Russia’s state of play, and the explanation turns out to be more revealing than the observation itself.

Russians made approximately 24 million outbound trips in the first nine months of 2025, a 6.75% increase year-on-year. They spent $49.7 billion on foreign travel in 2025, close to an all-time high. Summer tourism was up 20%, with Vietnam up 173%, Japan up 96%, Egypt up 40%, and the UAE posting extraordinary growth from Russian source markets. Per SberIndex data from January 2026, 25% of all Russian tourists now travel abroad, up from 20% in 2024. The implied spend per trip in 2025 was approximately $2,417.

What is driving the 2025 to 2026 surge specifically is not just pent-up demand or geopolitical rerouting. There is a specific anxiety underneath the numbers. The digital military conscription registry, launched after the partial mobilisation of 2022, has been progressively tightening. Electronic summonses now generate automatic travel bans: once registered, a conscript cannot leave the country until he physically reports to a military enlistment office. In August 2025, the Russian government extended the validity of conscription notices to a full year. In early 2026, Russia’s Foreign Ministry issued a global travel warning urging citizens to reassess overseas trips.

The consequence is a rush to travel while it is still possible. Many of these trips carry explicitly last-chance psychology, a family holiday in Phuket, a week in Dubai, a long stay in Vietnam, taken by people genuinely unsure whether the window will still be open next year. For investors trying to read Russian domestic signals: when a country’s citizens are accelerating their outbound travel out of fear rather than confidence, that is not a signal of stability. It is a signal of a society hedging against its own government’s next move.

Part III: Eight Companies: What the Numbers Actually Show

The eight companies I examine here include the MOEX’s largest constituents by market capitalisation as of 2020, two grocery champions that were regularly cited in emerging-market research at the time, and one technology company that represents perhaps the most compelling long-term story in the entire Russian corporate landscape. Together they offer a compressed version of what has happened since February 2022: one universal bank, two oil majors, one gas giant, one LNG pioneer, one classic private oil major, two grocery retailers, and one tech giant whose restructuring may have accidentally created the most interesting investment vehicle in Russia.

Methodological note: most of these companies have significantly reduced the granularity of their public reporting since 2022. P/E ratios are estimates based on available MOEX trading data. Where 2026 figures are shown, they reflect Q1 2026 results or management guidance. “n/a” denotes quarterly data not yet available at time of writing.

1. Sberbank: War’s Unlikely Winner

Sberbank’s trajectory is the most counterintuitive story of the war period. Immediately sanctioned, disconnected from SWIFT, and withdrawn from European markets, its net profit collapsed from 1.25 trillion roubles in 2021 to approximately 300 billion roubles in 2022, a 75% decline. Then came the recovery. By 2023, Sberbank posted a record 1.49 trillion roubles ($16.9 billion) in net profit, a fivefold increase over 2022. By 2024, a new record of $18.1 billion. And in 2025, the bank reported $21.9 billion, an 8.4% increase on the prior year.

The explanation is structural. With Western banks expelled and domestic competition subordinated to state priorities, Sberbank has operated in an environment of near-zero competitive pressure. The 21% key rate environment turned the bank into a cash machine: collect deposits, lend to the government at high yields, collect the spread. The banking sector’s total profit hit a record 4 trillion roubles in 2024. Sberbank’s CEO Herman Gref has repositioned the institution as a technology company, investing heavily in AI and acquiring stakes in domestic tech firms. The risks ahead are real. As rates fall toward 12% by year-end, Sberbank’s net interest margin will compress. The war has created the profits; the end of the war, or even the normalisation of monetary policy, will structurally reduce them.

2. Rosneft: The State’s Cash Machine

Rosneft is in many ways the most important company in the Russian war effort. As the country’s largest taxpayer, it contributed over 6 trillion roubles to the federal budget in 2024, approximately 17% of all federal revenues. Its CEO, Igor Sechin, is one of Putin’s longest-serving loyalists. The company produces 3.7 million barrels of oil per day, its extraction cost stands at $2.9 per barrel, and its proven reserves of roughly 40 billion barrels make it the third-largest hydrocarbon producer in the world.

Rosneft’s 2024 revenue hit a record 10.2 trillion roubles. Net profit reached approximately $12 billion, lower than the $16 billion of 2023 but exactly in line with pre-war 2021 levels in dollar terms. The nine-month 2025 net profit fell approximately 70% year-on-year, the most dramatic single data point in this entire report, as the Urals discount widened, US January 2025 sanctions targeted Rosneft directly, drone strikes disrupted refining capacity, and the oil price fell toward $50. Revenue in 2025 fell back toward 9.5 trillion roubles. The Middle East conflict in 2026 has partially reversed the oil price decline, offering some relief.

3. Gazprom: From Rent Distributor to Tax Collector

If you had to identify one company whose story captures the tragedy of Russian strategic miscalculation, it would be Gazprom. For thirty years, it was the crown jewel of the Russian state: a vertically integrated energy giant that distributed rents to politically connected elites, funded the Kremlin’s foreign policy agenda through energy dependency, and dominated European gas supply. By 2023, it had posted its first annual loss since 1999, approximately $7 billion, as European customers systematically replaced Russian supply and spot prices normalised.

In full-year 2025, Gazprom reported net profit of 1.307 trillion roubles, a 7% increase on 2024, with gas exports to China rising 24.8% year-on-year. EBITDA declined by just 6% to 2.917 trillion roubles, which management described as significantly better than the industry average. However, the Ukraine transit route ended permanently on January 1, 2025, and Russian gas now comprises only 18% of European imports, down from 45% in 2021. The EU has set a 2027 target for eliminating Russian energy imports entirely. Gazprom is structurally a smaller, more domestic company supplemented by Asian gas sales it cannot price at European equivalents.

4. Novatek: LNG Ambitions Frozen by Sanctions

Novatek is the most interesting long-term story in Russian energy. Before 2022, it represented Russia’s best attempt to transition away from pipeline gas dependency and build a genuinely competitive global LNG business. Its Yamal LNG project, launched in 2017, was a commercial success. Arctic LNG 2 was designed to bring another 19.8 million tonnes per year of LNG capacity online by the mid-2020s. The sanctions hit Novatek precisely at its most ambitious moment. Foreign shareholders froze participation in Arctic LNG 2. Novatek’s headline numbers have held up: 2024 net profit rose 6.5% to $5.2 billion, revenue grew to 1.55 trillion roubles, and production rose a further 0.9% in 2025. But debt jumped 15.4 times in 2024, to 141.6 billion roubles, a direct reflection of stranded Arctic LNG 2 investment. The Future Champion thesis that made Novatek the favourite Russian equity story of 2015 to 2021 is on hold, pending either a sanctions resolution or a fundamental project restructuring.

5. Lukoil: Private Capital Quietly Diversifying

Lukoil occupies a unique position in the Russian corporate landscape: it is the only major Russian oil company that is genuinely privately controlled, rather than state-directed. It was also, notably, the company whose board called for a ceasefire in 2022, a stance unique among major Russian corporates. Revenue reached 8.6 trillion roubles in 2024, an 8.7% increase from 2023. The company’s virtually debt-free balance sheet (D/E consistently around 0.1x) is its most distinctive financial characteristic. Where Lukoil is investing for the future tells you something: it is expanding production at Iraq’s West Qurna-2 field, aiming to double output to 800,000 barrels per day. That is not a Russia story; it is a bet on keeping international exposure outside Russian jurisdiction, precisely the kind of capital allocation you make when you are uncertain about the domestic environment’s long-term stability.

6. Magnit: A Perfect Storm

Magnit is one of Russia’s great retail success stories: 32,000 outlets across 72 regions, from proximity stores to cosmetics chains. Revenue grew consistently, from 1.17 trillion roubles in 2020 to 3.04 trillion in 2024. Then 2025 arrived, and with it the bill for operating a debt-funded expansion in a 21% interest rate environment. Magnit’s main operating entity, Tander, reported a net loss of 22.5 billion roubles for 2025, its first loss in the company’s entire history. Revenue formally increased 11% to 3.1 trillion roubles, but interest expenses soared 74%, eating through all operating profit. The debt/equity ratio has risen from approximately 0.6x in 2020 to an estimated 1.8x in 2025. From an investor’s perspective, the question is whether the operational business, strong brands, dense store network, genuine pricing power in a market with few Western competitors, can reassert itself once the rate cycle normalises toward 12% by end-2026.

7. X5 Group: Russia’s Most Formidable Retailer

X5 Group is Russia’s largest food retailer by revenue. It operates Pyaterochka (approximately 23,000 proximity stores), Perekrestok (supermarkets), and Chizhik (hard discounters). Revenue has compounded from 1.53 trillion roubles in 2020 to 4.6 trillion in 2025, a 3x increase in five years. Full-year 2025 net profit fell 20.1% to 83.1 billion roubles, as debt servicing costs rose 79% to 61 billion roubles. The company still grew revenue by 18.8% to 4.6 trillion roubles. Q1 2026 underscores the trend: net profit fell 43.1% year-on-year to 9.3 billion roubles, even as revenue grew 11.3% to 1.19 trillion roubles. The structural thesis for X5 in a post-war context is perhaps the strongest of any company in this analysis. With Western retailers absent, a genuinely data-driven approach to store placement and pricing, a hard-discount format that benefits from consumer austerity, and a digital business with over 33 million monthly active users, X5 has the operational characteristics of a long-term compounder.

8. Yandex: The Most Interesting Restructuring Story in Russia

Yandex is the company I would most want to own if I were betting on Russia’s long-term recovery, and the corporate transformation it has undergone since 2022 makes it structurally different from every other company in this report. What began as “Russia’s Google” has evolved, under duress and then by design, into something more interesting: a domestically rooted technology champion that has shed its Western exposure, completed a painful restructuring, and emerged with genuinely accelerating financial performance.

In July 2024, the Dutch parent company sold its Russia-based assets to a domestic consortium for $5.4 billion, the largest corporate exit from Russia since the invasion. The Dutch entity was renamed Nebius Group. The Russia-based entity, now trading on the Moscow Exchange as YDEX, retained the valuable domestic operations: search (holding approximately 62% of the Russian search market), ride-hailing (Yandex Go), food delivery (Yandex Eats), e-commerce (Yandex Market), cloud computing, advertising, and a rapidly growing fintech business.

The financial results since the restructuring are striking. Full-year 2024 revenue reached 1.09 trillion roubles, up 37% year-on-year, the first time the Russia-only entity had broken the 1 trillion rouble mark. Adjusted net profit was up 94% to 100.9 billion roubles. The company paid dividends for the first time since 2010, at 80 roubles per share. In 2025, estimated full-year revenue reached approximately 1.44 trillion roubles (plus 32%). Q1 2026 delivered 372.7 billion roubles in revenue (plus 22% year-on-year), with adjusted EBITDA up 50% to 73.3 billion roubles and adjusted net profit rising 2.7 times to 34.7 billion roubles. The company has guided for full-year 2026 revenue growth of approximately 20% and adjusted EBITDA of around 350 billion roubles. Its board is also considering a share buyback of up to 50 billion roubles.

What makes Yandex structurally compelling as an eventual reinvestment candidate is the combination of factors that are genuinely hard to replicate: a search monopoly in a market from which Google has been functionally excluded, the dominant ride-hailing platform in Russia, e-commerce and food delivery operations growing at rates that would attract premium valuations in any market, and heavy investment in AI using its proprietary YandexGPT and Alice assistant, with genuine data advantages from its search dominance. If I were building a watchlist of Russian assets to revisit when sanctions ease, YDEX would be at the top.

Looking for Signals: What All of This Actually Tells Us

I started this piece watching Russians fill the departure halls at Ataturk and Suvarnabhumi, and I want to end with what the totality of this research actually answers about my original questions.

On the question of why the travel surge: the answer is anxiety, not confidence. A population that is accelerating outbound travel in the face of new conscription rules and travel ban architecture is not exhibiting the psychology of a society at peace with its trajectory. The rush to Phuket and Bali and Dubai is the same impulse that drives people to accelerate retirement withdrawals when they fear rule changes: rational hedging against a system they do not fully trust. That is a domestic signal worth noting. It does not suggest imminent political change, but it is a real crack in the social contract between the state and its urban, mobile middle class.

On whether the war is approaching an end: the domestic signals are ambiguous but instructive. The economic beneficiaries of the war remain powerful and have no rational incentive to end it. But a growing number of civilian businesses, most visibly Magnit, but also steel companies, manufacturers, and the entire retail sector, are being systematically damaged by the monetary conditions required to finance the war effort. The profitability of occupied Ukrainian cities has turned negative: what was seized was rubble, not assets, and the reconstruction bill is one Russia is not positioned to pay. Elites who were vocal supporters of the war in 2022 are now, in the words of Rondeaux at Russia Matters, positioning for the commercial terms of whatever settlement emerges rather than the military outcome. These are not signals of a ceasefire in the next three months. They are signals of a system beginning to calculate exit options.

On whether Russia will be investable again: yes, eventually, and I think the opportunities will be extraordinary for those who are prepared. The grocery sector alone, X5 and Magnit together controlling a dominant share of Russian food retail in a country of 146 million people with no Western competition, is a business that would command entirely different multiples in a normalised environment. Yandex, a search and technology monopoly with genuinely accelerating fundamentals and a Q1 2026 that showed adjusted net profit rising 2.7 times year-on-year, represents perhaps the single most compelling watch-list candidate in the Russian market. Novatek owns arguably the best LNG assets in the Arctic, and Arctic LNG has a long-term role in Asian energy supply that sanctions are delaying, not preventing.

What I am not doing is treating any of this as an actionable call for today. The sanctions architecture, the MOEX’s inaccessibility to foreign capital flows, the ongoing war, and the structural uncertainties around what a post-war Russia looks like politically all remain insurmountable barriers for most investors. But the groundwork, understanding what exists, what has survived, and what has been damaged versus what has been destroyed, is exactly the kind of work that pays off when those barriers come down. That is what this piece is for.

Disclaimer: This publication is for informational and research purposes only. It does not constitute investment advice. Past performance is not indicative of future results.