In 2025, Collin Meisel and Mathew Burrows wrote, “Russia Can Afford to Take a Beating in Ukraine,” where they argued Russia was able to absorb the blows Ukraine was delivering and could continue fighting for a while. A year later, we asked Collin and Mathew to revisit their assessments.Image: The Kremlin via Wikimedia CommonsIn your 2025 article, you argued that due to its sheer size — in service-capable population, economy, and munitions production capacity — Russia can absorb more of a hit throughout this war than Ukraine can. After another year of combat, Ukrainian defense innovation, and even more Russian deaths, where does your assessment stand?Our assessment can be boiled down to “not great, but better than expected.” In the near term, the International Monetary Fund recently upgraded its 2026 gross domestic product growth forecast for Russia up from 0.8 percent to 1.1 percent — not outstanding but better than much of Europe. Ukraine’s growth forecast, meanwhile, was downgraded from 4.5 percent to 2 percent in 2026. Over the very long term, the recent crisis in Iran may speed up the green energy transition and ultimately undermine Russian fossil fuel revenues. But given how long it will take to electrify the world, or for new nuclear energy production (another potentially appealing alternative to diversify from fossil fuel dependence) to come online, that will be many years from now, a period in which Russia could plausibly undergo its own transition. In the meantime, Russia’s proposed Power of Siberia 2 natural gas pipeline may seem more appealing to China – a development which wouldn’t necessarily be a game changer for Russia, but which would certainly be a welcome development after that deal seemed like it was on life support.Militarily, an assessment of “not great but better than expected” is also fitting. Combat