The Physics of Defeat
Why Sanctions Against Russia Can’t Bite
In 1943, anthropologist Leslie White published his seminal paper Energy and the Evolution of Culture. His thesis was straightforward: civilizations rise or fall on how much energy they can harness per head.
He drove the point home with a simple example. A man cuts wood with an axe. If the wood is the same and the man’s skill doesn’t change, the amount of wood he cuts in an hour depends entirely on one thing: how much energy he puts in. The more energy expended, the more wood produced.
When human muscle hits its limits, society stalls. Progress comes only by plugging into bigger energy sources. From animals to coal, gas, and nuclear, every jump in available energy opened a new stage of development.
Money, in contrast, is a mere bookkeeping device in White’s framework. A way to track claims and exchanges. What actually matters is the flow of energy. Societies don’t advance because they balance their accounts, they advance because they can harness more power per person. As a consequence, a focus on a society’s cash pile is deceptive.
Europe has fallen for that deception, and nowhere more clearly than in its sanctions regime against Russia. They’re designed to “cut off revenue streams” and stop Russia from “refilling its war chest,” in Kaja Kallas’ words. According to the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office, sanctions “have deprived Russia of at least $450 billion in war funds.” An impressive number, almost one-fifth of Russia’s 2024 GPD. None of that has stopped the killing.
Yet by Europe’s logic, you just need to deprive Russia of even more revenue, and eventually Putin will be forced to the negotiation table. Shortly after Trump and Putin met in Alaska, Ursula von der Leyen announced:
We have adopted 18 packages so far, and we are advancing preparation for the 19th. This package will be forthcoming in early September. We know that sanctions are effective.
The term gaslighting is overused, but given Russia’s ability to keep waging war, calling these sanctions “effective” comes close. Europe’s fixation on Russia’s war chest—and its blindness to the role of energy—explains why Brussels can draft a 19th or a 190th sanctions package and it still won’t matter. Russia swims in energy. So what does that mean for its capacity to keep fighting? Let’s break it down.
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If you strip away the tragic loss of life, wars of attrition are contests of output: how many tanks can be rolled off the line, how many shells forged, how much propellant mixed. In short, it comes down to steel, aluminum, and explosives. And every transformation from raw material to finished product burns energy.
The most obvious input is steel. A modern main battle tank weighs about 50 tons, virtually all of it steel forged in a blast furnace. The same is true of every artillery barrel and shell casing.
Those furnaces reach temperatures of up to 2,000°C (3,632°F). In a blast furnace, coal provides that heat and Russia has plenty of it. In 2024, it consumed less than half of what it produced:
The chart above includes both metallurgical coal—used in furnaces—and thermal coal—the kind you burn in power plants. But if you look only at metallurgical coal, the story doesn’t change. Russia will use around 34 million tons this year while it produces more than 100 million annually.
For Moscow’s defense industry, that means a steady domestic supply, sanctions or not. After all, Russia also holds the world’s third largest iron ore deposits. Russia’s steel production—71 million tons in 2024—is enough to manufacture on the order of 1.4 million battle tanks per year. That’s obviously a theoretical calculation, but it underscores the scale of Russia’s metal resources.
If steel is the backbone of tanks, aluminum is the key component for fighter jets and missile casings. Aluminum is one of the most electricity-hungry materials on earth which is why smelters only survive where power is both cheap and abundant.
Russia has exactly that. And as the world’s seventh-largest producer of bauxite, it also controls the other critical input. In fact, the country is one of the world’s largest aluminum producer, thanks to Rusal’s Siberian smelters built next to giant hydroelectric dams.
The result is electricity so cheap it makes Western operators look insane by comparison. Back in 2015, Rusal’s electricity costs were estimated at $128 per ton of aluminum. Because Rusal, through its parent company, has indirect ownership of the hydro dams that power its smelters, those prices have likely remained stable. By contrast, French smelters in 2023 faced electricity costs of roughly $2,350 per ton. In other words, Russia can keep its aircraft and arms industries awash in aluminum at an 18th of Europe’s cost.
We’ve got tanks, guns, and planes covered. Next are the explosives. That’s where natural gas comes in. It’s the irreplaceable energy source and feedstock for ammonia through the Haber–Bosch process. From ammonia come nitrates, and from nitrates: propellants and explosives. And again, Russia’s natural gas production exceeds its domestic use. In 2024, Russia pumped 630 billion cubic metres of gas and burned only 477.
As a result, Russia produced around 17 million tons of ammonia in 2024, keeping it firmly among the world’s top three suppliers. And the surplus gas doesn’t just feed chemical plants. It fuels a big slice of Russia’s electricity grid, keeping both civilian industry and the military manufacturing humming. And at prices Europe can only dream of.
Logistics are the final piece of the puzzle. Tanks, trucks, jets, and the endless tail behind them all guzzle refined oil. No surprise, Russia has this covered as well. It pumps almost three times more oil than it consumes. And according to the Statistical Review of World Energy, its refining capacity is 6.8 million barrels a day, comfortably above its domestic use of 3.8 million.
You might think that this flood of war production comes at the expense of ordinary life. That if the Kremlin pours steel into tanks and gas into explosives, sanctions would pinch households hard enough to stir unrest. Maybe that’s how pressure builds on Putin.
The numbers tell a different story. Russian households still pay some of the cheapest energy bills in the world: about $6 cents per kilowatt-hour for electricity and under a dollar a liter for gasoline. In Germany, families pay six times as much for power and twice as much for fuel.
Behind those prices sits the real driver: per capita energy supply—the measure Leslie White said decides whether a society rises or falls. In 2024, the average Russian had more than twice the usable energy of a European:
That’s not a marginal difference. It’s the root of why sanctions don’t bite.
The Kremlin makes sure that abundance shows up in daily life. Gazprom sells gas at near cost at home, and the state effectively tops it up with subsidies. When global prices spiked in 2022, Russian households faced an 8.5% hike. In Europe, bills more than doubled. The result: no “heat or eat” crisis and no sense that sanctions are substantially squeezing daily life.
Back in 2022, Western headlines dwelled on sugar hoarding, pricey groceries, and the last iPhone in Moscow. But those were inconsequential frictions. What hasn’t changed is the foundation: The lights stay on, the homes stay heated, and the car tank still fills up. Sanctions designed to rattle the public fall flat. Ordinary Russians simply aren’t paying the price Europe thinks they are.
The inevitable conclusion was clear from the very first round of sanctions (though the Brawl Street Journal didn’t exist back then to say so): the EU can issue all the sanctions it wants. Russia’s war machine doesn’t need foreign cash to run. What Europe’s sanctions have achieved is one thing only: choking its own industry off cheap energy. It’s the logic of holding your breath to suffocate the other guy. Europe is weakening itself by choice, while Russia keeps breathing easy.
What the 19th round of sanctions will contain isn’t yet known. Most likely it’ll be more tinkering at the margin that Europe is famous for. It’s yet another example of Marvin Barth’s n+1 incrementalism: the obsession with the next tweak while ignoring the base layer.
None of it will make a measurable difference in a war of attrition. What matters is who can keep the furnaces hot and the shells rolling off the line. On that front, Russia hasn’t skipped a beat. Brussels could have saved itself 19 sanction packages by reading Leslie White. Instead, it chose to sanction itself into decline.
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Excellent
Thanks for sharing this very informative and insightful article.