For the sake of a dictator’s ego, an entire nation is being fed to the flames. It may turn out to be the greatest act of national self-immolation in history.

It’s been more than two years since Russia launched its genocidal invasion of Ukraine. In that time, they’ve suffered half a million casualties, squandered almost their entire stockpile of Soviet arms, made themselves an international pariah, and achieved none of their original war aims.

As the war drags on and the costs mount up, the Russian state is becoming more paranoid, autocratic and violent at home. Putin’s thugs are no longer satisfied with shutting up anyone who tells the truth about the regime. They’ve resorted to murdering or imprisoning anyone who even has the ability to tell the truth. For example, they’ve started killing economists:

Valentina Bondarenko, a top Russian economist, has died at the age of 82 after falling out of her apartment window in Moscow, Russian state-run media reported on Tuesday.

“Falling out of a window” is a barely-disguised euphemism for extrajudicial killing by Russian state hitmen. Bondarenko is the latest of a list of Putin’s critics whose deaths were explained away with this obvious vranyo.

Unlike most of the other Russians who’ve died, Bondarenko didn’t speak out openly against Putin, as far as I’m aware. But we can guess that she told someone in power something he didn’t want to hear, and it’s obvious what that was: Western sanctions are slowly strangling Russia’s economy. Their only significant export, fossil fuels, is hobbled by the Western price cap; and over the long term, fossil fuel revenue is shrinking away as the world transitions to renewable energy. When it’s gone, they have nothing left to replace it.

The Russian state’s paranoia runs so deep that they’re even going after scientists, engineers and other intellectuals whose work was once considered shining jewels of national prestige. Like Alexey Soldatov, the “father of Russia’s internet“:

Alexey Soldatov, a Russian Internet pioneer and a founder of the first Internet provider in the country, has been sentenced by a court to two years in a labor colony on charges of “abuse of power.” Soldatov, 72, had been detained by a court in Moscow. He is terminally ill.

Prominent Russian scientists, like the physicist Dmitry Kolker, have been charged with treason for participating in the ordinary work of the scientific community:

Kolker, the son of the detained Novosibirsk physicist, said that when the FSB searched his father’s apartment, they looked for several presentations he had used in lectures given in China.

The elder Kolker, who had studied light waves, gave presentations that were cleared for use abroad and also were given inside Russia, and “any student could understand that he wasn’t revealing anything (secret) in them,” Maksim Kolker said.

Nevertheless, FSB officers yanked the 54-year-old physicist from his hospital bed in 2022 and flew him to Moscow, to the Lefortovo Prison, his son said.

…Other scientists working on hypersonics, a field with important applications for missile development, also were arrested on treason charges in recent years. One of them, Anatoly Maslov, 77, was convicted and sentenced to 14 years in prison in May.

The Institute of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics in Novosibirsk wrote a letter supporting Maslov and two other physicists implicated over “making presentations at international seminars and conferences, publishing articles in highly rated journals (and) participation in international scientific projects.” Such activities, the letter said, are “an obligatory component of conscientious and high-quality scientific activity,” both in Russia and elsewhere.

At the same time as it jails physicists and computer engineers, Russia is cannibalizing its other industries by redirecting all its resources into domestic war production. It keeps their guns firing a little longer, but it’s losing exports and knowledge it may never get back. Up to a million Russians have fled the country, mostly educated professionals who want nothing to do with the war, in the biggest brain drain since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

That was the right decision, as the Soldatov case and others like it show. Anyone who stays in Russia can come under suspicion at any time, for any innocuous act that offends the leadership, and be imprisoned after a show trial or summarily executed with no trial at all. Putin and his thugs have resorted to full-on Khmer Rouge-style anti-intellectualism, purging anyone who they merely suspect might be smart enough to harbor doubts about what the regime is doing.

All these other harms stack on top of the direct damage caused by sending an entire generation of men to die in the trenches. Russia’s population was already shrinking, and Putin’s war has been a demographic catastrophe. He’s ensured that hundreds of thousands of Russians are permanently erased from the population at the exact time of their lives when they should have been settling down, finding jobs and starting families. The long-term damage will be immense.

Any rational cost-benefit analysis would have told him to pull out long ago, but Putin is stuck in the trap of the sunk-cost fallacy. He’s convinced he’s in too deep to give up now, that he has to press on to make it all worthwhile. The consequence of his folly, in the long run, will be a downward spiral: a nation permanently weakened, impoverished, and drained of its best minds.

Take note, also, that Russia is what religious conservatives want to make America into. They dream of an authoritarian state run by an autocratic strongman, where media and opposition parties are crushed beneath the boot of the law and the church joins hands with the state to pump out nationalist propaganda.

But authoritarian states have a fatal flaw: no one can override the leader when he makes a disastrous decision. Unaccountable absolute rulers can and often do ruin the lives of their people and sacrifice their countries for the sake of their own egos. Russia’s violent convulsions and inevitable decline are a warning to America. The same fate lies in store for us, if we go down the religious right’s path.