Twenty months ago, after Vladimir Putin had launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine, many high-ranking Russians believed that the end was near. The economy faced disaster, as they saw it, and the Putin regime was on the brink of collapse.

Today, the mood has changed dramatically. Business leaders, officials and ordinary people tell me that the economy has stabilized, defying the Western sanctions that were once expected to have a devastating effect. Putin’s regime, they say, looks more stable than at any other time in the past two years.

-Real estate prices are rising, and construction is booming. At the beginning of 2022, most global brands left Russia, leaving empty storefronts in malls and streets. Now, the gaps have been filled by Russian counterparts, as the chief executive of one retail network told me. Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, recently admitted that the Russian economy had faced “a threat of collapse” in the months after the invasion but said the country is now over the worst.

Before the war, Russian business executives generally kept their savings in the West. They also bought real estate, properties that sometimes served as second homes for their families. Now, as one Russian oligarch told me, that door has been slammed shut, sparking an investment boom at home.

-After the invasion, the International Monetary Fund estimated that the Russian economy would fall by 2.3 percent in 2023. In January 2023, the IMF changed its forecast, predicting growth of 0.3 percent. It changed its forecasts at least two more times during the year; in October, it finally settled on a figure of 2.2 percent.

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