May 5, 2025: Ukraine may not win its war with Russia, but the Russians are headed for defeat, even after a cease-fire, because of collapsing transportation, oil and chemical infrastructure due to lack of maintenance and capital reinvestment, plus war damage and western economic sanctions. Sanctions began in 2014, after Russia seized Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula and industrial Donbas region, and were dramatically increased in 2022 when Russia again invaded Ukraine to conquer the rest of it.
The nature of Russia’s gangster regime is also critical here. Putin assigns control of various portions of Russia’s economy to his gangster subordinates for them to loot provided they support him politically, and reassigns those portions as he deems fit. One example is how he broke up the old Soviet Communist railroad system into two different parts, one consisting of the rolling stock and the other of the rails and related ground equipment and fixtures, each going to a different oligarch. Putin later divided the first oligarch’s holdings into two and gave half to a third oligarch.
The ownership interests of these gangster oligarchs are completely different from those of western companies whose owners and managers try to preserve the value of their holdings first and maximize profits second. Russia’s gangster oligarchs know they can lose their holdings at any time due to Putin’s whims, and so concentrate solely on maximizing their income from both profits and looting the value of their holdings. This leads them to stint on maintenance, capital reinvestment to replace worn-out equipment and fixtures, and labor force training.
And everyone lower down the chain in their holdings and emulates their bosses. For example, rail workers rip out copper wire to sell for scrap from railway control systems on the trains, wagons & signals stations. Similar thefts take place in oil refineries and chemical plants, the Russian space agency Roscosmos, etc.
The two major threats to Russian survival in the next few years are collapse of its rail system and its oil exports. Rail collapse will bring down the rest of the Russian economy and conceivably result in mass starvation. Collapse of Russian oil exports would result in inability to pay for critical western imports to keep the rail system, and some of Russian industry in general, operational.
The immediate threat to Russia’s rail system is overuse due to its war with Ukraine. Russia increased the loads carried by rail cars from 80% of maximum to 100 percent of maximum in the summer of 2021 when Putin ordered mobilization of the Russian army for the invasion of Ukraine. This overloading approximately doubled the wear on rail car bearings and railroad beds. This required expedited maintenance of the rail bearings and beds, but that did not happen at all for various reasons, starting with their controlling oligarchs would have to reduce their income to pay for the increased maintenance.
Plus the rail system simply lacked the required additional maintenance personnel and rail bearings. Training of new maintenance personnel had gone down significantly after Putin gave control of the rail system to his gangster oligarch confederates. This was true of Russian industry in general, but was especially bad for rail car bearings. There were two types in Russia at the time, the old style bearings which required removal, inspection of each bearing individually with replacement of worn ones, then repacking and re-greasing of the bearing assemblies, and re-installation of the re-packed assemblies. Modern Western coil bearings, almost all produced in the European Union, consist of complete assemblies which are much easier to install and replace as whole units, and their working life is about 4-5 times longer than the old-style bearings – approximately two million kilometers of normal use. Russia, and even China, lack the ability to produce Western-quality coil bearings.
The two Russian oligarchs controlling rail cars began replacing the old-style bearings with imported Western coil bearings in 2013 because they could amortize the higher cost of coil bearings in only 8-10 years, a yearly return on investment of 10-12 percent.
Back then 85 percent of the two million total Russian rail cars and engines had coil bearings when the Ukraine war began in 2022. Western sanctions then cut off deliveries of new coil bearings. The 300,000 rail cars using the old-style bearings are almost all now out of service, due both to wear with the trained workers capable of repacking them either aged out of the system or, if they hadn’t, been drafted and become casualties in Ukraine.
About 100,000 Russian rail cars are now out of service, parked on rail lines near Ukraine and used as storage for supplies, munitions and small equipment for the war effort. How many of those are broken-down rail cars with old-style bearings, and how many are operational using coil bearings, is unknown. General Douglas MacArthur similarly kept smaller cargo ships carrying supplies to his Southwest Pacific Theater in World War Two for the same storage purposes, though he was supposed to return them. That was one of the reasons he was unpopular with Pentagon brass.
It is certain that 15 percent of Russia’s pre-war rail cars are now out of service, and the war is still going on. New ones haven’t been delivered because Western sanctions cut off supply of new coil bearings, and the workers capable of assembling and maintaining the old-style bearings are no longer available.
By this summer the useable lifetime of the first rail cars to have coil bearings will be close to running out, as all Russian rail cars will have incurred at least eight years of use in the past four. Ditto for the railroad beds themselves, but without adequate maintenance for four years. Initially it was because the trained workers weren’t available. That reason has gradually shifted to the trained workers being required to repair rail beds torn up by dramatically increased derailments of whole trains.
The Russian rail system is in a death spiral. It cannot stop while European sanctions block sale of new coil bearings to Russia.
At the same time Russian oil production is going down due to the sanctions blocking deliveries of oil drilling and maintenance equipment which Russia can’t produce. That affects production from existing wells plus drilling of new ones required to replace the emptying out of old ones. I.e., Russia’s declining oil production means it will need loans from the West to buy the rail coil bearings and oil drilling equipment simply to keep its rail system and economy from collapsing after the war with Ukraine ends.
Meanwhile, the railroad situation in sanctions free Ukraine is not ideal. One of the transportation difficulties between Ukraine and the NATO countries is the different gauge railroads used in Europe and Ukraine. Europe uses what is known as Standard Gauge. Gauge means the distance between the two rails. Standard gauge rails are 1,455mm apart. The Russian gauge is wider with the rails 1,524mm apart. In other words, Standard gauge tracks are four feet 8.5 inches wide while Russian Gauge tracks are five feet wide. Since Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union until 1991, all the Ukrainian railroads are Russian gauge. To deal with this problem, Ukraine built a transshipment point in the western Ukraine on the border with Slovakia and near the Hungarian border. Here there are cranes that quickly lift standard cargo containers from Russian gauge flatcars and load the containers onto European Standard Gauge flatcars. Passenger trains have a similar arrangement where passengers can disembark and walk a short distance to trains with a different gauge.
Until the Ukrainian military drove the Russian Black Sea Fleet away from the west coast of the Black Sea in 2023, the main Ukrainian port of Odessa was unsafe for commercial shipping. Now the Black Sea route from Odessa to the world is open, via the Turkish Bosporus strait. Before that the best way out was via rail, and that required a transshipment facility where cargo could be transferred between rail cars using different rail gauges.
Ukraine plans to build some European Gauge rail lines to major transportation centers in several Ukrainian cities. Eventually Ukraine wants to convert all its major rail lines to Standard gauge. This will make it easier to handle trade with Europe and, if there’s another war with Russia, the Russians will not have all those Russian gauge rail lines available to quickly move troops and supplies into Ukraine on Russian gauge railroads. Instead, the Russians will have to use roads or capture Ukrainian railroad engines along with passenger, cargo, and flatcars so they can use Ukrainian European Standard gauge railroads.
Converting Ukrainian rail lines from Russian to European gauge is not only necessary economically, but also militarily to deter the Russians from invading again, or cripple their logistics if they do.