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The russian government has effectively acknowledged a high likelihood of a banking crisis and a corporate payment crisis. The combination of risks is systemic and indicates not a cyclical slowdown, but an inevitable entry into a phase of debt collapse, the Foreign Intelligence Service of Ukraine (FISU) reported.
The key factor remains the hidden growth of non-performing loans. When restructured loans are taken into account, the real volume of problematic debt exceeds 11%, reaching approximately $131 billion. This is significantly higher than the 2–4% level considered safe for banking system stability and has long surpassed the 5% threshold signaling elevated risk. In international practice, a figure of 10% or more is viewed as pre-crisis or crisis-level. The accumulation of obligations is creating conditions for a full-scale bad debt crisis in Q3–Q4 2026.At the same time, the cost of servicing debt is rising rapidly. In 2024, russian companies paid banks $145 billion in interest—83% more than in 2023. In the first half of 2025, this figure increased by another 54% year-on-year, reaching $95 billion. As of the end of Q3 2025, one in four companies with loans had missed payments. The number of legal entities with overdue debt has risen to 165,000—41,000 more than at the start of 2025 and 100,000 more than in 2022.
Debt problems are concentrated in core sectors of the economy. In 2025, companies in the mining, metallurgical, and oil and gas sectors, as well as state-owned transport corporations, require restructuring. Notably, russian Railways (RZD) recorded a net loss for the first time in five years and requested the restructuring of approximately $50 billion in debt.
Defense lending remains a separate source of systemic risk. Between 2022 and 2024, defense enterprises received loans totaling about $202 billion. These obligations are concentrated in the banking system, have limited transparency, and can quickly turn into non-performing assets.
Together, these factors indicate a structural deterioration in russia’s economic model, where debt burdens and state-backed lending have displaced market-driven sources of growth. Without large-scale bank recapitalization or a mechanism to transfer corporate bad debt to the federal budget, a crisis scenario—with mass corporate defaults and a subsequent explosion of non-performing assets in banks—appears almost inevitable.
