Putin is a loser. Treat him like one.

Two weeks ago, Tucker Carlson made the claim to British broadcaster Jacob Rees-Mogg that Russia’s economy dwarfs Britain’s. It doesn’t. International Monetary Fund figures show Britain’s output is about $4.3 trillion and Russia’s about $2.8 trillion — 60 percent higher.

Carlson’s claim reflects a tendency by some to treat Russia and President Vladimir Putin as powerful. That feeds a faulty policy instinct: that Putin is a peer to be bargained back into the club. The record says otherwise.

He inherited a country smarting from the collapse of the Soviet empire and, after a brief hydrocarbon-fueled recovery , set it on a path of stagnation, isolation and self-inflicted decline. The invasion of Ukraine did not reverse that trajectory — it locked it in. Putin’s Russia is weaker, sicker, poorer relative to its rivals, and increasingly a vassal to Beijing.

There is little to be gained from cultivating Putin, as he has demonstrated by deploying disinformation to stoke divisions in the West, and with his support for Iran against U.S. forces and our allies’ energy infrastructure.

The right policy is to treat Putin like the loser he is.

Putin is running Russia’s resource-abundant economy into the ground. Real GDP growth since 2013 , prior to the invasion of Crimea, has been an anemic 19 percent, compared to 34 percent for America. Massive spending on the futile war against Ukraine saw GDP growth above 4 percent in 2023-2024, but that artificial boom has stalled; growth slumped to 1 percent in 2025, and forecasts for this year are worse.

Moscow plans to spend a record $200 billion on defense in 2027, about 35 percent of federal spending, while the government has doubled its 2026 deficit estimate to 3.2 percent of GDP.

The cushion is thinner, too. Oil and gas revenue fell 24 percent in 2025, to its lowest level since 2020, supplying about a quarter of federal income, against roughly half in 2014 . The liquid part of the sovereign wealth fund has plunged since before the 2022 invasion, from about $113 billion to $47 billion . With foreign markets closed, the Kremlin borrows at home with the key rate at 14 percent ; four in five regions spent more than they collected in 2025, and a record number cut healthcare spending in real terms.

Putin spent a decade building a fortress economy. Now he is strip-mining Russia’s future to fund the front.

Some of Russia’s demographic woes predate Putin , but the war has made them worse. Russia has suffered an estimated 1.4 million casualties since February 2022, including as many as 450,000 dead; the most losses for a major power since China’s during the Korean War . At least 650,000 people have fled Russia since the invasion, and Bloomberg estimates that the economy is short of at least 1.5 million workers .

Meanwhile, life expectancy in Putin’s Russia is more than eight years less than in Europe, and the Kremlin’s own spokesman has described the low birth rate as “catastrophic for the future of the nation.”

In February 2022, the general assumption was that Russia, with an economy roughly 10 times larger , population 3.5 times larger and land mass 28 times larger , would defeat Ukraine in short order. Yet Putin’s army was humiliated in 2022 and has barely advanced since. In 2023-2025, Russia gained less than 1.5 percent of Ukraine’s territory and has hardly advanced in 2026. Russia’s Black Sea fleet has lost ships and freedom of action , and Ukrainian strikes now reach refineries deep inside Russia .

Meanwhile, Finland and Sweden have joined NATO , and Europe is rearming. Unable to break Ukraine’s army, Putin is turning on its civilians and its economy. July was the deadliest month for Ukrainians since May 2022, with homes, schools and the electricity grid among the targets.

His recent provocations toward Europe, from drone incursions to sabotage and the harassment of NATO ships and aircraft that NATO attributes to Moscow, are not the mark of a statesman extending his influence, but the desperate jabs of a leader who cannot afford a real fight.

Putin’s mismanagement and costly war of attrition is making Russia a vassal of its former rival, China. Beijing now supplies roughly 35 percent of Russia’s imports and takes 30 percent of its exports while Russia accounts for under 4 percent of China’s trade. Cut off from Western suppliers, Russia buys roughly 90 percent of its sanctioned high-tech imports from China, and its liquid sovereign wealth reserves are held in yuan and gold rather than dollars or euros.

The leverage shows up in price. China reportedly pays about 39 percent less for Russian gas than Gazprom’s other customers in foreign markets. Beijing has also reportedly pressed for gas through the proposed Power of Siberia-2 pipeline to be priced near Russia’s domestic rate. This has deadlocked a project that the Kremlin needs far more than Xi does.

Treating Putin like a loser does not mean underestimating him. Putin may well outlast his country’s decline. That is the case for deterrence, not concessions. Russia is not a peer to be courted but a declining, dangerous power to be contained.

Every month the West keeps up the pressure, the bill for Putin’s war grows — a bill he cannot pay without Beijing and cannot escape by being invited back into the club.

Ludovic Hood, a former U.S. diplomat with experience in the Middle East and Europe, is a senior fellow with the Hudson Institute’s Center for Peace and Security in the Middle East.