Everything that has kept the Russian economy growing since 2020 has now been exhausted and long-term growth could drop to 1.6%, a Kremlin think tank told Vladimir Putin on August 19.

Without a change of model, growth settles at 1.6% a year over the coming decade - roughly half the 3% Putin has set as the target - according to a report prepared for the August 19 meeting of the Presidential Council for Strategic Development and National Projects, seen by Russian business magazine Expert.

The report is the work of the Centre for Cross-Industry Expertise "Third Rome", set up at the Presidential Academy (RANEPA) by presidential decision in December 2024, directed by Natalia Stapran and supervised academically by Maxim Oreshkin, deputy chief of the presidential executive office and a former economic development minister. Its job, in the academy's own description, is to advise the presidential administration on socioeconomic policy and to service the strategic development council.

The Third Rome reformations come from a long standing planning process that started with the so-called Plan K in 2016, a blueprint drawn up by former finance minister and the architect of Russia’s reforms Alexey Kudrin. That was transformed into the May decrees that set concrete goals for Russia’s’ socioeconomic devilment before morphing into the comprehensive National Projects 2.2, updated December 2025, that is the framework for much of Russia’s economic development strategy today.

But the National Projects have been exhausted, and the game has radically changed. Now it seems that Oreshkin is resetting the framework to take into account the extreme sanctions regime imposed by the West which has forced the Kremlin to already entirely remake its energy and trade sectors. Oreshkin and his colleagues are attempting to flesh those ideas out into a more comprehensive long-term framework for the new world Russia finds itself living in.

Russia's GDP grew 12% over the past six years despite the pandemic and sanctions, the report notes - then lists what did it: big export projects coming on stream, more people pulled into the labour market, fiscal stimulus, a construction boom on subsidised mortgages, the platformisation of the economy, the halt to capital flight, and import substitution. All of those initiatives, it says, are now spent.

The economy ministry cut its own 2026 growth forecast to 0.4% in May, down from 1.3%, after GDP contracted 0.3% in the first quarter. The Kyiv School of Economics reckons the war economy is grinding towards a halt even with an oil windfall behind it, small firms are buckling under taxes and weak demand, and business confidence has fallen to its lowest in two decades.

In place of the exhausted drivers the centre offers seven pillars:

regional development and domestic tourism, to bring territory outside the big metropolitan areas into economic circulation;

artificial intelligence, robotisation and autonomous systems to lift productivity;

further platformisation to cut transaction costs;

infrastructure for the "new economy", meaning more generation capacity, data centres, high-speed connectivity, data storage and transmission, and space;

an education system rebuilt around continuous retraining, so that wages rise on skills rather than on an overheated labour market; bringing the shadow economy into the open; and

a larger role for private capital in allocating resources.

Russia's platform economy is already worth RUB18.3 trillion ($215bn), about 8.5% of GDP. Data centres will need another 1-3 GW of capacity by 2030. Rolling out 61,000 5G base stations costs around RUB300bn ($3.5bn). Space infrastructure absorbs more than RUB4.4 trillion ($51.7bn) between now and 2036.

Paying for all of it rests on four things, and only one of them is under the government's own control. The state is to reach a zero structural budget deficit, cut the fiscal impulse and change the shape of its spending by 2029. Interest rates, and with them the cost of capital, are to fall as inflation eases. State support is to be recalibrated to crowd private money in rather than substitute for it. And the financial market is to be made to work: "There is money in the country. We need to build a mechanism that transforms savings into long-term investment capital," the report says. Corporate deposits alone stood at RUB64 trillion ($752bn) on July 1. Retail deposits make up another RUB70 trillion.

The rate assumption is the weakest link. The Central Bank of Russia has taken the key rate down to 14%, but inflation turned back up in the summer, which narrows the room for further cuts, and the budget was already running a 2.5% deficit at the half-year with oil revenues lagging. inflation has fallen a little since then, but the deficit has grown a little too.

Growth from 2027, the report argues, has to be "not so much a step forward, as a step upward: transitioning to a new development trajectory where economic growth directly transforms into improved well-being and quality of life".

The document reads in most places like the standard wish list the presidential administration and the economic bloc produce every few years. Zero structural deficit and a rebuilt spending structure by 2029 is the closest an official Russian paper has come to putting a year on when the militarisation of the budget is supposed to end.