Essay , | 01/19/2026 : Russia’s Climate Nihilism Is No Outlier

Let's declare that Russia will establish a global carbon offshore zone, where we will launch a new climate NEP for foreign companies and investments. Carbon-intensive goods will be produced in this zone for delivery worldwide.

—Ivan Zhidkikh, Executive Secretary of the Committee on Climate Policy and Carbon Regulation of the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs

This tongue-in-cheek suggestion from a representative of Russia’s most influential lobbying organization, responsible for mediating the relationship between the biggest Russian companies and the national government, offers a glimpse into the minds of the Russian ruling class and their ideas about climate policy in a world now firmly on its way exceeding the 2C warming target.

Despite Russia’s role in the global market as one of the key suppliers of so-called “energy carriers” — both fossil and nuclear fuels, but also fertilizer and grains — the climate crisis and the country’s role in it are almost invisible in Russian society. Apart from the indigenous people of the Arctic, whose subsistence is directly linked to local ecosystems, hardly anyone in Russia experiences climate change as something concrete affecting their lives right now, as opposed to somewhere in the distant future. Indeed, throughout the 2010s, when Russia experienced multiple waves of mass protests similar to those in other parts of the world, climate demonstrations were nowhere to be seen.

This is despite the fact that rising temperatures played a significant role in catastrophic events such as the weeks-long heat wave and forest fires in Central Russia in 2010, which affected over 17 million people and caused 55,000 excess deaths, or the 2012 flash flood in the Black Sea town of Krymsk that killed 170 people in one night. Climate change also factors in subsistence struggles, with longer and more extreme heat waves in the south of the country leading to frequent power outages as electricity demand rises, taking a toll on the decaying grid and driving people onto the streets with demands for accountability from local and regional authorities.

But while climate change and climate action might get a mention in media, it barely registers in political demands. Many Russians even perceive climate change as a net benefit for the country, citing such alleged consequences of rising temperatures as milder winters, more land to sustain agriculture, and the opening of the North Sea Route for year-round navigation.

Russia serves as a distorted mirror, amplifying the dystopian features of the so-called Western world.

Some political commentators would be all too eager to write this off as an immanent feature of Russian society — after all, if Russians proved incapable of resisting the invasion of Ukraine, is it any surprise that they would fail to stop their government and ruling classes from burning off the planet’s future for some windfall profits? Doing so, however, would severely misdiagnose the problem at hand: after all, Russian society’s much maligned ineptness and inertia in the face of injustice is so terrifying to the outside spectator precisely because it is so similar to the rest of the world and, more specifically, what is happening now in Europe and the US.

Russia serves as a distorted mirror, amplifying the dystopian features of the so-called Western world: militarized, barbarously violent, spreading destruction and death, authoritarian, hostile to immigrants and minorities, carceral, and spying on its citizens at every step. The very technologies and techniques of oppression and destruction the Russian state is now implementing in Ukraine and within its own borders were developed alongside and in cooperation with the global ruling classes and scientific military industrial complexes propped up by them and propping them up in turn.[1] Meanwhile, despite some early hopes that Russia’s adventurist aggression would provide a much-needed boost to the stalling phaseout of fossil fuels on the global level, both production and consumption of coal, oil, and gas continue to climb steeply.

Stating all of this is not to absolve Russia of accountability — whether on the level of individuals, organizations, or governments — or wash one’s hands in the spirit of “it’s all the same everywhere, no reason to single out Russia”, but rather to soberly assess the scale of the task at hand. The interlocking planetary crises of economy, society, and climate demand an interlocking planetary subject to mount a response, yet no such subject exists. In its place, a national race to the bottom seems to be all our respective ruling classes can imagine.

Russia: A Fossil Monster Like No Other?

Although perhaps well-meaning, the notion that there is a status quo to return to should bad actors like Putin, Netanyahu, or Trump be sidelined by a broad coalition is ultimately harmful, as it was the very (self-)destruction of the status quo that brought us to the current moment. The political centre is dissolving before our eyes, losing both legitimacy — be it through the mass bailouts of the Great Recession, the depravity of the Epstein affair, the wreckage of international law in Gaza, or the general inability to handle the climate crisis — and the electoral numbers to back it up. Do we thus find ourselves in the time of monsters, Antonio Gramsci’s famed interregnum? Perhaps, but I am more inclined to agree with what Mike Davis wrote shortly before his death three years ago:

that assumes that something new will be or could be born. I doubt it. I think what we must diagnose instead is a ruling class brain tumour: a growing inability to achieve any coherent understanding of global change as a basis for defining common interests and formulating large-scale strategies.

Rather, we are succumbing to what Samir Amin once called an “empire of chaos” — a world without a definite hegemonic transition, but rather a decay of hegemony, with no socialist alternative present and the global neoliberal economy increasingly fractured along geopolitical and geoeconomic lines. On the surface, this (lack of) a new arrangement is defined by the rise of military conflict in the zones that could be characterized as the core’s frontier, while underneath it, an intricate economic restructuring is underway, driven by the gradual decline of capital investment and profitability, the rise of economic nationalism, and uneven green transition(s).

This is the context in which the Russian government and its ruling class operates, seeking to solidify its role as a sub-imperial actor but also to be among those drawing up the rules of the hypothetical new arrangement. A crude metaphor is repeatedly invoked at the numerous forums and conferences of Russia’s leading businesspeople and economists: in these turbulent times, Russia wants to force its way onto the table and off the menu for good. If this means hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians (and Russians) killed and maimed, dozens of Ukrainian villages and cities destroyed, millions forced to flee their country, and whole ecosystems devastated — so be it.

Unfortunately for the rest of us, we are very much on the menu and have no nuclear arsenal to keep us off it. Even more unfortunate is that the Russian ruling class’s convictions about the nature of the current moment are shared by every other ruling class, extrapolating them to every area of economic and political activity. The only potential route out of the crisis thus becomes an individual lifeboat, with no common goals and solutions seen as worth pursuing. 

 Russia is no outlier — this national as well as global political paralysis runs deep.

As much was evident in the latest climate summit in Belém, riven by contradictory approaches and interests. While Russia, Saudi Arabia, and India led a group of petrostates to oppose the very mention of fossil fuels in the COP30 concluding statement, Europe and its allies received strong pushback for their attempts to implement the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM), recognized by the majority of representatives as an economic nationalist measure to finance the green transition at the expense of those lacking the technological and economic capacity to decarbonize. The talks resulted in a compromise that satisfied no one and served only to drag the catastrophic status quo of the global economy’s energy balance even further.

In other words, Russia is no outlier — this national as well as global political paralysis runs deep. With the growing regionalization of the global market, other sub-imperial forces grow in the shadow of the traditional “condominium of core states”. The likes of Turkey, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Brazil are adopting a more proactive and often acutely violent role in the sectors of trade they specialize in and regional “spheres of influence” they dominate, as well as in areas facing strategic withdrawal by the US and other core countries, like Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia, enforcing market discipline and expanding their respective resource portfolios and target markets.^[2] At the same time, this partial hegemonic withdrawal is coupled with more direct involvement in a few key regions and industries, as demonstrated by the Trump administration’s aggression in Venezuela and threats against Greenland, as well as US government buy-ins into the likes of Intel and some critical minerals firms.

The Ruling Class’s Cynical Calculus

At a certain point in its post-Soviet development, the Russian ruling class discovered three things. First, a geopolitical “seat at the table” was not automatically reserved for them following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Second, the rapid degradation of Russia’s productive capacity during the extreme neoliberal reforms of the 1990s rendered the national economy highly dependent on a few, relatively low-tech industries such as fossil fuels and petrochemicals, steel, and fertilizer production, leaving few incentives to automate or improve productive capacities. As a result, the country was destined to lag behind in technological development and become more and more dependent on imported technologies in such fields as equipment and machinery or semiconductors. Third, import substitution policies proved largely ineffective, as most Russian import-substituting products were uncompetitive internationally, while the local market was too small to absorb them at a rate that would make them profitable. The gradual loss of post-Soviet markets only aggravated the situation.

It is this conundrum of perceived inevitable decline that is perversely being “solved” in — and at the expense of — Ukraine through the means of Russia’s sole remaining relatively competitive high-tech industry: defence. Apart from posturing towards the European Union and the US, there is also a hope that the war will provide a boost to Russian productive capacities, catapulting the country’s business champions to the forefront of global development at least in a few key value chains organized around dual-use technologies like drones, self-driving vehicles and batteries. At the same time, these ventures — as well as the war itself — can only be financed through fossil fuel superprofits.

The goal of the Russian ruling class, thus, is not so different from energy multinationals and their shareholders the world over: to maintain their role in the global economy as “energy carrier” suppliers for as long as possible. To preserve its place in the planetary division of labour, Russia also works to keep energy prices inside the country down and secure supply route dominance, allowing for profitable export transit. Hence, the state’s focus on the Arctic in general and the Northern Sea Route in particular on the one hand, and on the development of domestic nuclear power on the other.

The effects of the political-economic logic applied by the Russian ruling classes reverberate through the entirety of the social fabric.

In this scheme of things, green value chains and decarbonization projects could only exist as supporting infrastructure for fossil fuel extraction and/or the military-industrial complex, a lubricant for the capital accumulation machine: freeing up more gas and oil for export, providing energy for extraction in the remote sites of the “planetary mine”, diversifying value chains through development of dual-use technologies, and greenwashing oil and gas corporations and the state itself via nature-based carbon offsets and megascientific climate monitoring projects. 

In other words, green economic clusters only get a chance to develop within the “security-sustainability nexus”, where the “security” component encompasses both economic and military security, while “sustainability” primarily underscores the durability and resilience of the existing fossil fuel-based economic model. This then dictates priorities for a “cost-effective” state climate policy: a heavy focus on monitoring and adaptation over mitigation and the creation of the financial infrastructure necessary to develop carbon markets so that extractive industries can “compensate” their emissions. In this “climate realist” approach, decarbonization is pure abstraction — adopting the “right” kind of measurement, and relying on ecosystems’ supposedly endless absorption capacity — and effectively means that fossil fuel extraction and combustion can continue unabated. The only real obstacles, then, are purely economic in nature (tariffs and market rules) and can be addressed through tactical compliance and reciprocal countermeasures at the domestic level. 

Russia is not an outlier in that regard, but rather a textbook case of the “climate realist” approach, which allows us to see its main features clearly and sharply defined. The effects of the political-economic logic applied by the Russian ruling classes reverberate through the entirety of the social fabric, shaping ideological and theoretical frameworks such as the much-strived-for “sovereignization”, i.e. a project of establishing the Russian state as both a regional and global power in the technological, economic, and military sense. These, in turn, solidify already existing tendencies in Russia’s political economy, presenting this logic and the interests behind it as “natural” and “rooted in tradition” while simultaneously extending far into the future through planning and policy documents and, in a broader sense, capturing the imagination of the ruling class.

Towards Planetary Solidarity

How, then, might a future eco-socialist politics look in Russia and beyond? There is an assertion that has become almost commonplace on the Left: capitalism consumes our future, rendering it unimaginable beyond the level of individual success, which in turn is confined to the national level — becoming the next “lead goose” in the endless pursuit of growth. The New Left, or what remained of it, devised two possible solutions to this impasse over the last 50 years: either adapt to that framework via a broad left-populist project aimed at restoring at least some elements of the welfare state, or escape to some form of communal living reminiscent of the utopian socialist experiments of the nineteenth century. These strategies were adopted well beyond the so-called Western world, influencing organizing strategies in Russia, where the Left had to search for blueprints to reinvent itself after the failure of the Soviet project.

Neither nation-states, nor empires, nor their alliances are set in stone — on the contrary, we should expect them to crumble, rearrange, or transform in our lifetimes.

Today, however, there is practically nowhere on the planet to which one can escape into some romantic idyll of self-sufficiency, while the political status quo that we might have tried to adapt to lies in ruins, with the mainstream succumbing to the genocidal depths of nationalist fervour. The shadows of Mariupol, Gaza, and El Fasher loom heavily over what remains of the twenty-first century, while mutually reenforcing climate, food, and water crises ensure further expansion of the empire of chaos. The promise of growth and development naturally transforms into the promise of being removed from the proverbial menu.

Any breakthrough from these nightmarish, fractured futures produced by the existing system of social organization can only happen on the planetary level through a radical restructuring of existing mutual dependencies. But so far, a planetary subject exists only in absentia. Largely in exile, Russian socialists now have a chance to participate actively in creating such a subject, sharing their experiences of organizing in a repressive society and contributing on a theoretical and strategic level, getting active in local struggles, and factoring in their analysis of the Russian state and society when it comes to international struggle.

Neither nation-states, nor empires, nor their alliances are set in stone — on the contrary, we should expect them to crumble, rearrange, or transform in our lifetimes. This means that the current moment demands a collective rethinking of global crises and a reframing of solidarity politics in a way that does not centre the state and its interests as the key actor and key arena of (political) change, but rather proceeds from the acknowledgement that we lack the subject necessary for the task at hand and thus need to construct it.

This alone will not be enough to unlock the realm of possibility. But it just might be the project that has a chance to dust off the banner of what Alain Badiou calls the “communist hypothesis”, reaffirming that the existing world is not necessary. That is also an abstraction, of course, just like any other guiding principle. It is up to us to develop it into something concrete.