May 5, 2025: Ukraine may not win its war with Russia, but the Russians are headed for defeat, even after a cease-fire or peace settlement. The causes are a collapsing transportation systems along with the oil and chemical infrastructure. Another cause will be lack of maintenance and capital reinvestment, plus war damage. Then there are the western economic sanctions. Sanctions began in 2014, after Russia seized Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula and industrial Donbas region, and were dramatically increased in 2022 when Russia again invaded Ukraine.

Russia’s corrupt government also matters. Putin assigns control of various portions to his corrupt subordinates for them to loot. In return Putin expects loyalty provided they support him politically. One example is how he divided the Soviet railroad system into separate components. One consisted of engines and rolling stock, while the other included the rails and related ground equipment and fixtures. Each component went to an individual oligarch. Putin later divided the first oligarch’s holdings into two and gave half to a third oligarch.

The management style of these corrupt oligarchs differs from those of western companies where owners and managers try to preserve the value of their holdings first and maximize profits second. Russia’s corrupt oligarchs know they can lose their holdings at any time due to Putin’s whims. The oligarchs concentrate on maximizing income from both profits as well as looting their holdings. This lead them to stint on maintenance, capital reinvestment and labor force training.

Worse, subordinates emulated management with similar damaging actions. For example, railroad personnel removed and sold copper wire from any equipment they had access to. Similar problems occurred at numerous organizations like the Russian space agency Roscosmos and numerous manufacturing facilities.

The two major threats to Russian survival in the next few years are collapse of its rail system and disruption of its oil exports. Rail collapse will bring down the rest of the Russian economy, possibly leading to local famines. Collapse of Russian oil exports would result in a bankrupt government unable to afford critical western imports needed to maintain the rail system, and Russian industry in general.

The immediate threat to Russia’s rail system is overuse due to its war in Ukraine. Russia increased the loads carried by rail cars from 80 percent of the maximum to 100 percent in the summer of 2021 when Putin ordered mobilization of the Russian army for the invasion of Ukraine. This overloading doubled the wear on rail car bearings and railroad beds. This required expedited maintenance of the rail bearings and beds. That did not happen because the oligarchs involved would have to reduce their income to pay for increased maintenance.

Worse, the rail system simply lacked the needed maintenance personnel and rail bearings. Training of new maintenance personnel had declined significantly after Putin gave control of the rail system to his corrupt oligarch associates. This was true of Russian industry in general and was a disaster when it came to the rail car bearings situation. There were two types of bearings in Russia at the time. There were the old style bearings that required removal, inspection of each bearing individually followed by replacement of worn ones. Then workers had to repack and re-grease each of the bearing assemblies. This was followed by re-installation of the assemblies. Modern Western coil bearings, almost all produced in the European Union, consist of complete assemblies which are much easier to install and replace as whole units, and their working life is about four to five times longer than the old-style bearings. Russia, and even China, lack the ability to produce Western-quality coil bearings.

The two Russian oligarchs controlling rail cars began replacing the old-style bearings with imported Western coil bearings in 2013 because they could amortize the higher cost of coil bearings in only 8-10 years. This produced a yearly return on investment of 10-12 percent. But 85 percent of the two million Russian rail cars and engines had coil bearings when the Ukraine war began in 2022. Western sanctions then cut off deliveries of new coil bearings. The 300,000 rail cars using the old-style bearings were soon out of service. This was due to both excess use and a lack of trained workers capable of repacking them. Older workers had retired and many younger ones were mobilized to fight in Ukraine and died there.

About 100,000 Russian rail cars are now parked on rail lines near Ukraine. These are used for storage of supplies, munitions and military equipment. It is unknown how many of these rail cars have old-style bearings or worn-out coil bearings, or are operational because they use coil bearings.

It is certain that 15 percent of Russia's pre-war rail cars are now out of service, and the war is still going on. New ones haven’t been delivered because Western sanctions cut off supply of new coil bearings, and the workers capable of assembling and maintaining the old-style bearings are no longer available.

Cars with the earliest coil bearings installed are increasingly out of service too. This became apparent in October 2024 when Ukraine invaded the Kursk area of Russia and the Russians were unable to move troops there by rail. Instead troops had to be moved by truck or tranced personnel carriers. The usable lifetime of Russian coil-bearing rail cars varies from three to five years on the Trans-Siberian route to about ten years for most other cars. The first coil bearings were installed in 2013 for Trans-Siberian rail cars that had already needed replacing twice, but only got it once. That put many of these rail cars out of service. Replacements were obtained from lesser priority rail lines.

At this point the number of serviceable rail cars will inevitably decrease, and on an accelerated schedule because of overuse. The last coil bearings were received during the late spring of 2022. By about August 2025 the overuse of Russia’s rail system will have reached four years of heavy use because of the war and preparations for the war. That is equivalent to eight years of peacetime use, and the usable lifetime of most coil bearings is ten years.

When railcar axle bearings wear out, the wheels stop rotating, heat up from friction and eventually explode. This means the rail cars drop onto the rails. This causes derailments that damage the rail beds as well as the rails. Unmaintained rail beds also cause derailments and all this is happening now. The number of derailments has soared to the point that repair trains carrying necessary personnel, equipment and to derailments are themselves derailing while on the way.

At the same time Russian oil production is going down due to the sanctions blocking deliveries of oil drilling and maintenance equipment which Russia can’t produce. That affects production from existing wells plus drilling of new ones required to replace the older depleted wells. Russia’s declining oil production, and declining oil prices, means it will need loans from the West to rehabilitate its collapsing rail system, oil production and economy after the war with Ukraine ends.

The Russian rail system is collapsing right now. Nothing can stop this from happening, particularly while the war goes on. The collapse will continue, even after the war ends, because Russia lacks the skilled manual labor to build or maintain the old-style axle bearings, and can’t obtain new coil bearings quickly enough even if the West offers them for free because of the lag time in building new production capacity. A massive Western relief effort costing at least a hundred billion dollars would be required to rehabilitate the entire worn-out Russian rail system, beds and rails too, not just new rail cars. Still more money would be needed for all the other critical infrastructure fatally run down by the war.

Meanwhile, the railroad situation in sanctions free Ukraine is not ideal. One of the transportation difficulties between Ukraine and the NATO countries is the different gauge railroads used in Europe and Ukraine. Europe uses what is known as Standard Gauge. Gauge means the distance between the two rails. Standard gauge rails are 1,455mm apart. The Russian gauge is wider with the rails 1,524mm apart. Since Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union until 1991, all the Ukrainian railroads are still Russian gauge. To deal with this problem, Ukraine built a transshipment point in the western Ukraine near the Hungarian border. Here there are cranes that quickly lift standard cargo containers from Russian gauge flatcars and load the containers onto European Standard Gauge flatcars. Passenger trains have a similar arrangement where passengers can disembark and walk a short distance to trains with a different gauge.

Until the Ukrainian military drove the Russian Black Sea Fleet away from the west coast of the Black Sea in 2023, the main Ukrainian port of Odessa was unsafe for commercial shipping. Now the Black Sea route from Odessa to the world is open, via the Turkish Bosphorus strait. Before that the best way out was via rail, and that required a transshipment facility where cargo could be transferred between rail cars using different rail gauges.

Ukraine plans to build some European Gauge rail lines to major transportation centers in several Ukrainian cities. Eventually Ukraine wants to convert all its major rail lines to Standard gauge. This will make it easier to handle trade with Europe. If there’s another war, the Russians will not have all those Russian gauge rail lines available to quickly move troops and supplies into Ukraine. Instead, the Russians will have to use roads or capture Ukrainian railroad engines along with passenger, cargo, and flatcars so they can use Ukrainian European Standard gauge railroads.

Converting Ukrainian rail lines from Russian to European gauge is not only necessary economically, but also militarily to deter the Russians from invading again, or cripple their logistics if they do.