Wars are very good at pumping GDP, but from reports, someone linked an FT article in this thread, the increase or sustain in GDP is all down to war time spending by the Russian government.
Economically they're in very rough shape, but GDP is doing well because of that war time spending.
What does this even mean? I would have expected it to mean "can't wage war", "people are starving and storming the palace". Obviously not. So? Other than numbers, what does it really mean? If it's just "they have less luxuries", maybe it does not matter that much.
They are spending all of their cash on war production, which actually (combined with workforce shortages leading to higher wages) has resulted in unexpectedly high GDP growth.
However that's mostly fuelled by Russia spending all of their reserves (effectively they are literally burning money) to fund the war. There are actual reasons why they had to raise their interest rates to 21% despite inflation supposedly being below < 10%.
When that money runs out? Who knows.. Russia can hardly borrow in international markets. They'll have to either start printing money or the economy will crash. Well hopefully before they actually "win" the war. On the bright side their economy might crash anyway if the war is over (due to extremely high government spending propping it up, a bit like the situations immediately after WW1/2 in Britain or even the US).
It means that they have a very low debt-to-GDP ratio of 16.9%, a limited amount of natural resources (due to the small size of their country), plus they have been forced to switch to producing a lot domestically after the western sanctions in 2022.
Economically they're in very rough shape, but GDP is doing well because of that war time spending.