Vladimir Putin wants to have his dollars, spend them too, and invade Ukraine.

That's impossible, of course, but he's trying to make it a little less so with some financial legerdemain that covers up what's really going on. Putin, you see, is forcing Russia's companies to spend their dollars instead—but Russia's government will be on the hook if those firms get into trouble as Russia's economy implodes. So Putin, in other words, is playing a financial shell game to try to buy enough time for oil prices to rebound and bail him out.

Russia's problem, as I've said before, is that it doesn't so much have an economy as an oil exporting business that subsidizes everything else. And that business is in bad shape now that oil prices have halved the past few months. Cheaper oil means Russian corporations have fewer dollars to turn into rubles, which is just another way of saying that there's less demand for rubles—so its price is falling.

Free falling, actually. The ruble, which started the year at 33 per dollar, gradually dropped to 60 before suddenly dropping to 80 on Dec. 16. It was a run on the currency. People flocked to their banks to turn their rubles into dollars and, failing that, stampeded to stores to buy whatever foreign goods they could—luxury cars, Apple products and Ikea furniture—before their money lost any more value. Even jacking up interest rates from 10.5 to 17 percent, basically paying people to keep their money in rubles, wasn't enough to persuade them to do so.

And then the panic was over. Well, at least for now. The ruble stabilized, then it rallied, and now it's settled at around 54 per dollar. What changed? Simple: Russia's government started turning its dollars into rubles, and it started strong-arming Russia's companies into doing so as well. Specifically, the government spent $15.7 billion of what was its $414 billion war chest in the past week alone. That's a pretty high burn rate. And it's even worse than that because Russia is counting on that money to bail out not only its currency, but also its government and companies.

The math is pretty brutal. Russia's government, you see, will go from surplus to deficit now that its oil revenues have dried up. And it can't borrow the money it needs, because Western sanctions over its incursion into Ukraine have cut it, along with everyone else in Russia, off from international credit markets. So it will have to start dipping into its rainy day fund to cover its bills.

It's already using that money, though, to bail out its banks. Here's how the dominos line up. Russia's companies, as Paul Krugman explained, borrowed a lot of dollars the past few years when it looked like the ruble would keep going up and up. So those dollar debts—which can't be rolled over, again, because of the sanctions—are harder to pay off now that the ruble has collapsed. That's bad news not just for the Russian companies that might default, but for the Russian banks that lent them money.

So far, the government has seen its $530 million bailout of Trust Bank, a mid-tier lender known for its Bruce Willis ads, balloon to $1.9 billion in a matter of days—with plenty more to come for other banks. Indeed, the government announced that two other lenders will probably need $5.9 billion the next few months, and from there, who knows how much more. It's no wonder that Russia's banks mistrust each other so much that they won't lend to each other on anything but punitive terms for even short amounts of time. And that despite the fact that the government told them that they could pretend they hadn't taken losses by not marking their books to market.

Russia, in other words, is stuck in an economic catch-22. It can't afford to spend too many dollars bailing out its currency when it needs to use that money to bail out its companies. But those companies, which have a lot of dollar debts, will need even bigger bailouts—as will the banks that lent them money—if Russia doesn't bail out its currency. So either way, it's going to have to spend its dollars, but it can't really afford to do that, either. That's because $400 billion of reserves is more like $200 billion. Think about it this way. If you spend half your money bolstering your currency and your financial system, and that's still not enough, why should the other half be either? Markets will smell the blood in the water and attack until the ruble completely collapses and companies go broke.

So Putin needs to find more dollars, and he needs to find them now. Where, you ask? Well, the answer is as obvious as it is unlikely: Russia's companies. Now, the government has said it will never use capital controls—forbidding people and corporations from turning their rubles into foreign currency—even as it's started to introduce them. It's already ordered the big exporters to sell some of their dollars for rubles, and then keep their dollar reserves at that level from now on.

But think about it. There's a problem here: The government is basically taking dollars from companies that have a lot of dollar debts. So how will they pay back what they owe now? Well, if you guessed that in true circular fashion the government would lend companies back the dollars they need, you'd be right. The central bank, you see, will lend dollars and euros for up to a year to banks that have lent dollars and euros to corporations. Or, if you ignore the middleman, Russia's central bank is lending dollars directly to Russia's companies.

The point of all this is to hide how many dollars Russia is actually spending to prop up the ruble. And in that, at least, it's succeeding. It's not easy to keep track of how much money Russia is committing when it's spending its reserves, forcing companies to spend theirs, and then loaning those companies the dollars they now need. Because if companies default on these dollars loans, it will turn out that the government was spending these dollars all along. That shouldn't happen, but it still could if the combination of low oil prices and a deep credit crunch make its economy shrink somewhere between 5 and 10 percent next year, like people think it could. In that case, the central bank would probably print however many rubles these companies need, which it basically already did for the big oil producer Rosneft, and then watch the ruble fall further as markets catch on to the sleight of hand.

Putin could end at least some of this pain if he gave up his imperial ambitions in Ukraine and the sanctions were lifted. If he doesn't, though, and oil prices stay around $60 a barrel, then Russia is going to be hit by the double whammy of rising unemployment and rising inflation. To give you an idea how serious it's getting, Putin is already talking about putting price controls on vodka now that all prices are starting to climb.

Putin's going to find out if letting them drink vodka works any better than letting them eat cake.