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Russian officials have lost their optimism and are now openly acknowledging that a recession is looming. While official statistics still paint a picture of economic growth, independent experts and business insiders point to a far bleaker reality. In fact, the economic slump that began with the start of the full-scale war never actually ended. As alternative inflation indicators like the so-called “Okroshka Index” prove unreliable, the only credible independent data from the Romir research holding has suddenly stopped being published — and even when this data was still available, it showed that real inflation in recent years was significantly higher than the official figures suggested. This means Russia wasn’t prospering — it was living on borrowed time. Now the reckoning is approaching, though the government prefers to call it a “soft landing.”
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For example, a provincial auto repair shop might have previously fixed three cars a week but officially reported only one; now it repairs just two cars, but payment for both is fully recorded in the statistics. The government can take pride in such signs of progress, but the wealth of the people under these conditions is not growing — it is declining.
When you're working with data like that, all you can really do is speculate. We'll know for sure only after a few decades I guess