Russia's main state development bank has sacked its chief economist over a speech he gave three months ago, in which he said the Russian economy would survive.

Andrei Klepach, chief economist at VEB.RF for 12 years, was dismissed on August 16. VEB.RF chairman Igor Shuvalov let him go on an instruction “from above”, The Bell reported, citing two people familiar with the decision. Klepach has confirmed he has left the corporation, but has not said why.

The remarks were neither new nor secret. Klepach made them at a session of the Nikitsky Club, the Moscow Exchange's discussion forum, on May 21, and the transcript has sat on the club's website ever since. They reached the press only on August 14, when the Russian language version of The Moscow Times published excerpts under a headline saying the Kremlin's main state bank had forecast Russia's “defeat” in an economic “war of attrition” with the West. Russian outlets picked it up from there. Two days later Klepach was out.

The word “defeat” is the headline's, but was not in Klepach's speech. He did not forecast collapse. He forecast survival, decline and, eventually, trouble in a much more nuanced message than the report made out.

“Whatever we do with our economy, it will survive. In that sense, from the economy's point of view, there is no critical point,” Klepach told the session. The losses, he said, lay elsewhere: investment had fallen, and there was no growth, still less growth in productivity.

“We are falling behind. We are losing both the technological and the economic competition in the world,” he continued. “And, as I have already said, we are losing it not only to China and the United States - in some respects we are losing it to Ukraine, however unpleasant that is for me too.”

Ukraine's economy is partly destroyed and its demography is a catastrophe, Klepach said, yet it is still standing on Western money: aid covering Kyiv's military and civilian spending runs at almost half of Russia's entire budget, and total assistance is several times larger than Russia's own capital outflow. “We finance the world, and the world finances Ukraine,” he said. Ukraine's own forecasters are gloomier than that suggests - Dragon Capital cut its 2026 growth forecast to 1% this month as the Black Sea ports shut.

“We will not win the competition in this war of attrition,” Klepach said. “We have an illusion that everything over there will collapse. It has not collapsed and it will not. Our costs are mounting.”

Those costs are the part of the speech that reads least like dissent and most like a briefing note. Sanctions expenses are rising and the damage from Ukrainian strikes on ports, infrastructure, chemical plants and refineries is increasing. Surveys show the quality of healthcare deteriorating. Inequality is widening again after falling in 2023-2024. Russia's war economy has been grinding towards a halt for months even with an oil windfall behind it, the KSE Institute found in June.

“I believe Russia will not fall apart, but I am almost certain that we will arrive at a social crisis,” Klepach concluded - and it would come, he added, when nobody particularly expects it. “Economically we will not collapse, but our lag will keep growing, with all the consequences that follow.”

He reached for two precedents his audience would have recognised: nobody expected the February revolution either, and Lenin wrote in December 1916 that his generation would not live to see it; the Soviet Union's 1991 collapse was long in coming, but was never fatally inevitable.

Fak News

This is not the first time an analyst has got into hot water for calling a spade a spade. Sberbank CIB sacked its oil analyst Alex Fak in May 2018, days after he published a report called “We need to talk about Igor”, that criticised its powerful chief executive Igor Sechin, a close Putin aide since the 1990s. That report was withdrawn and reissued without the entire “We need to talk about Igor” subsection. But Fak kept his job that time.

Six months later Fak wrote another controversial report and this time he got canned. The report found that chief executive Igor Sechin was building an empire with little regard for the company's profitability. Fak said Gazprom's three giant pipeline projects would cost the company $93.4bn to the benefit of its contractors - Arkady Rotenberg's Stroygazmontazh and Stroytransneftegaz, half owned by Gennady Timchenko and his family.

“Gazprom’s investment program,” which is seeing it spend $93.4bn on mega-projects like the Power of Siberia gas pipeline to China, Nord Stream-2 to Germany, and Turkish Stream, Fak and collegue Anna Kotelnikova wrote in the note, “can best be understood as a way to employ the company’s entrenched contractors at the expense of shareholders.”

If Gazprom were to be reformed after a recent government reshuffle and broken up into its components, Fak estimated, it would be worth $185bn - three times its then share price. This was not a controversial conclusion, and widely aknowledged by markert participants. Just in the Russian market that was the way things worked and you didn’t complain about it, in public at least.

“Dear all - I was dismissed today for writing the recent report on Gazprom. What took them so long, you ask? Bureaucracy, paperwork, a vague hope I could yet be reformed,” Fak wrote to clients. The bank called his work “unprofessional”.

The genre is older still. In the 1990s UralSib's head of research, Eric Kraus, was sacked for writing that “we need to remove the ‘former’ from the moniker former-bandits at Sibneft”, in a note on corporate conduct at the oil company then controlled by Roman Abramovich. The bank put out a press release explaining his departure - and forgot to strip the reply-to address, which showed the text had been written by Sibneft's own press office.

Klepach's offence, in the end, was not predicting a collapse. It was saying in public, on the record and at some length, that there would not be one.