Russia's ability to pay for its war — the «STRESS» zone. Indicators traded places; the total barely moved.

At the pace it has kept since the invasion, the index reaches zero around 2030. The middle 80% of simulated paths land between 2028 and 2033.

Zero does not mean Russia has stopped paying, and it does not mean every indicator has crossed its own line. Zero is what the eight scores average to. A score is not capped, so one indicator at +50 and another at −50 cancel out and the index reads zero while neither of them sits on its line. What zero says is that the eight together have spent all the distance they had from their trouble lines.

This is the weakest number on the site, and we would rather you knew why. The index has spent its whole life between 46 and 100, so reaching zero is an extrapolation outside everything we have observed. The sample is one war, with overlapping windows. Move the estimate onto only the last two or three years of data and its centre shifts by two years. Our own bands, checked against our own history, come out too wide rather than too narrow — this spread errs toward “we don't know”. how this is computed.