The crisis of the late 2010s wasn’t like its predecessors. After 1998 and 2008, Russia’s economy bounced back quickly. Not so today.

After the August 1998 downturn that capped Russia’s long, transitional post-Soviet period, the country’s economy began growing rapidly despite the ruble’s depreciation by almost five times and the government’s default on all its ruble-based debts.

At first, that growth was a sign of recovery: Manufacturing capacity that had remained idle since the Soviet era once again went into demand. Then, when the reforms of the 1990s and early 2000s were fully implemented, entrepreneurs began investing in new production facilities. As the Russian economy more broadly showed new signs of life, so did its market for oil: Over the course of the aughts, oil prices almost doubled.

That period of growth ended in late 2008, when a new recession swept in from the United States as the subprime mortgage bubble burst. The resulting crisis was the world’s worst since the Great Depression, and Western investors rushed to withdraw their funds from developing markets, including the Russian economy. As production rates in the U.S. and Europe fell, so did oil prices.

For several months, Russia’s Central Bank tried to keep supporting the ruble despite pressure from investors eager to buy up dollars instead. The bank finally caved in 2009, leaving the ruble to spiral into depreciation once again. Then, despite the government’s efforts to support big businesses, manufacturing went down, too: It soon became clear that many companies had borrowed dollars and euros, which their depreciating rubles could no longer pay back.

Nonetheless, that crisis didn’t last long: By the end of 2009, the Russian economy began to grow. When oil prices once again exceeded $100 per barrel, it seemed as though Russia would return to the growth rates it had seen in the 2000s. That never happened: The growth rates of the country’s GDP and its population’s income in the early 2010s were half of what they had been before the recession. The fact that the federal government had rolled back practically all of its earlier reforms by 2011 had a significant effect on that lack of recovery.

In 2014, oil prices fell once again. At the same time, Western countries began introducing sanctions to push back against the Russian government’s actions in Ukraine, which further deterred investors. Unlike the other crises, this one was not followed by a rapid recovery. Oil prices remained low, sanctions only became more severe, and investors from Russia and the rest of the world alike directed their funds elsewhere. By the end of 2016, the budget had been hollowed out, too, and those funding cuts represented yet another hit to manufacturing levels and quality of life in Russia.

In 2019, the country’s economic growth has remained weak: It is lower than the average national growth rate worldwide and even comes in below the growth rate in most developed countries.