Among the enduring mysteries of Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine is why he wanted to. The financial burdens of empire were the principal reason for the Soviet Union’s dissolution back in December 1991. At the time, the Soviet bloc constituted 10.5 percent of the global economy, according to Nicolas Véron, an economist at Breughel, a respected think tank in Brussels. By April 2022, Russia’s share of the global economy (including its few remaining allies) had shrunk to 3.5 percent. Although Russia’s gross domestic product expanded on a per capita basis for the first dozen years of this century, it peaked in 2013 at $16,000, and today Russia’s per capita GDP is $12,200, ranking it seventy-eighth among the family of nations.

These are not propitious circumstances under which to rebuild an empire. Even wealthy countries, starting in the mid-twentieth century, realized that colonialism was a luxury they could no longer afford. For a country like Russia, whose per capita wealth situates it (humiliatingly) behind several of its former satellites, including Hungary, Poland, Croatia, and Romania, the cost of reabsorbing Ukraine would be especially prohibitive. Waging war against Ukraine has already cost Russia nearly $1 trillion. That’s a pittance compared to what Russia will have to shell out if it wins.

Think of it from Moscow’s point of view: There’s the cost of rebuilding Ukraine, the cost of military occupation sufficient to contain whatever underground resistance continues, and the cost of reabsorbing a population considerably poorer than its own. From an economic point of view, losing the war to Ukraine is by far the better option. Winning it would put Russia in the same unhappy position as Max Bialystock and Leo Bloom at the end of Mel Brooks’s The Producers, when their painstakingly self-sabotaged Broadway flop becomes an accidental hit and bankrupts them.