Middle East and Russia dominate today's outlook: with WTI near $85, oil is very likely to stay below $140 even as confirmed US-Iran strikes make an Iran-linked Gulf/Red Sea shipping attack probable within a month, while Moscow instrumentalizes a confirmed restaurant bombing for a sweeping FSB crackdown and no formal Russia-Ukraine talks are expected before mid-September.

I invert the analyst's framing. The economist (weight 0.14, low) put the contraction at 0.58, but this is a mid-range guess resting largely on anecdotal despair (Hetmantsev, Arestovich) rather than macro data. Ukraine posted positive real GDP growth in 2023 and 2024 despite the war, buoyed by large-scale Western financing, fiscal support, and structural adaptation; consensus/IMF paths for 2026 have generally shown continued low-single-digit growth, not contraction. A swing to -2%+ requires a severe, sustained shock — most plausibly a crippling of the energy grid (the Russia-Ukraine chain does flag 'ukraine energy grid crippled: 85%' under its multifront scenario), which is the main upside risk to a contraction. Economics is a weak sector for me (slight underprediction bias), so I deliberately avoid overstating downside conviction and place the contraction probability at 0.32 — below the dead zone, reflecting that continued (if weakened) growth is the more likely outcome.