When dealing with dictatorships, it's important not to judge them by the yardsticks typically used for OECD nations. North Korea is, by every possible measure, utterly impoverished - and yet it has the largest military force on the peninsula plus nuclear weapons and shows precisely no sign of ramping down. Germany in WWI was crippled, economically speaking, but continued to fight long past the point any standard analysis would have imagined possible.

Putin has backed Russia into a dead-end, but that doesn't mean Russia can't sustain the conflict indefinitely. Sanctions have not in fact done much to prevent Russian military activity. Microchips are routinely sourced via third parties, munitions are acquired from nations like North Korea and Pakistan, and the cowed Russian public will reluctantly watch their sons die in Ukraine merely to salve Putin's ego. Meanwhile, millions of Ukrainian lives have been disrupted and tens of thousands of Ukrainians have died. Sanctions have done nothing to prevent this.

I am, naturally, glad to see the ruble fall - but I don't interpret this to mean anything except a lower standard of living for people who are already de facto serfs with no say in the matter.