Rostec director Vasily Brovko proposes Russia as an "ark" for the world. A review of his treatise

Vasily Brovko, director for special assignments at the Russian state corporation Rostec, has published a long essay in the philosophy journal Ottisk titled "Before the new apocalypse: Russia and the future of Christian unity". His central argument: the world is completing a five-hundred-year cycle dominated by finance capital, bankers are giving way to the owners of technology and their quasi-religion of techno-humanism, and Russia should become an "ark" for everyone who wants "to remain human". "We are used to thinking of crises as temporary, but what if the present era is a time when a historical structure built over almost five centuries is collapsing?" the text begins.

Ottisk is a peer-reviewed humanities journal launched in Moscow in May 2026. Its editor-in-chief is Alexei Kozyrev, head of the department of the history of Russian philosophy at Moscow State University. Brovko's article appeared in the third issue on November 2. It is written as a treatise that covers economics, war, demography, Silicon Valley, theology and the Arctic. Kurs Media checked its key claims against data from international organisations and against what the churches and Russian diplomacy themselves say.

The end of a cycle and debt

Drawing on Immanuel Wallerstein, Ray Dalio and Nikolai Kondratiev, Brovko concludes that "several cycles have reached their low point at once": demographic, investment and technological. The main symptom, he argues, is debt. The concern is widely shared: the International Monetary Fund warns that global public debt is rising faster than it should. But the treatise overstates the scale. Brovko writes of public debt that is "a hundred percent higher than what the economy itself produces", roughly 200% of world GDP. By the IMF's estimate, global public debt was about 94% of world GDP in 2025 and could approach 100% by 2029. The author describes the trend correctly; the figure is wrong.

His military spending number is more accurate. Brovko cites $2.8 trillion for 2025. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), world military spending last year reached $2.887 trillion, up 2.9% on the year before.

A map of future wars

The author then sketches a map of tension: Europe with its €800 billion rearmament programme, the Balkans, Central Asia, the wider Middle East, Africa, Taiwan and the Strait of Malacca. The strait, he writes, carries "more than 44% of world trade". The common estimate is more modest: according to Bloomberg, it handles about 25% of world maritime trade, although it is indeed vital for Asia's energy imports.

His boldest forecast concerns London. Brovko "would not be surprised" if England were to "betray the US and move into the camp of China's allies", because a London–Shanghai axis would suit the City better. For now the facts point the other way: Britain is in the AUKUS military pact and the Five Eyes intelligence alliance with the United States, and in recent years has restricted Chinese companies' access to its telecoms infrastructure.

One claim diverges from Russia's official position. The author calls Bosnia and Herzegovina a "pseudo-state created by NATO". In December 2025, marking the 30th anniversary of the Dayton Agreement, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov wrote that Russia "firmly and consistently supports the Dayton Agreement" and its "cornerstone principles of equality of the three constituent peoples and two entities". Moscow defends Dayton as the basis of Bosnia's constitutional order.

Demography and the "new barbarians"

Brovko explains the weakening of the Christian world through the medieval Arab thinker Ibn Khaldun's idea of asabiyyah, the inner cohesion of a people that the third, comfort-seeking generation loses. His evidence: low birth rates, the break-up of the family, hedonism and "cultural demobilisation". Falling fertility in Russia, Europe and the US is real. But it is not a specifically Christian story. According to Our World in Data, in 2023 the fertility rate was 0.7 children per woman in South Korea, 1.0 in China, 1.6 in Turkey and 1.7 in Iran, against a replacement level of 2.1. Demographers link the decline to urbanisation and education rather than religion: fertility is also falling in the places from which, by the treatise's logic, the "new barbarians" should come. The exception is sub-Saharan Africa: in Niger the rate is above 6.

On "cultural demobilisation", the author writes that 18% of adults in OECD countries "lack even a basic level of intellectual autonomy". The OECD's latest Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC, 2022–2023) paints an even bleaker picture: on average, 26% of adults scored at level 1 or below in literacy. But that is a test of reading comprehension, not a measure of "autonomy".

On migration, the figure is right: according to the UN, 304 million people lived outside their country of birth in 2024. The section's key line is "A strong civilisation assimilates newcomers. A weak one begins to adapt to them." In the treatise's finale it takes an unexpected turn: Russia, Brovko writes, is able "to take in hundreds of millions of people". He avoids a contradiction through selection: the "ark" should become a centre of attraction "for the world Christian community and all those who share its values". How like-minded people would be chosen on such a scale, the text does not say.

Techno-humanism and Silicon Valley

The core of the treatise concerns a new elite. The banker is replaced by "the owner of technology", who needs an ideology: "Techno-humanism becomes that ideology/religion." Brovko calls its extreme form techno-fascism and associates it with the circle of Peter Thiel, Palantir's chief executive Alex Karp, the philosopher Curtis Yarvin and Nick Land: corporations instead of the state, algorithms instead of law, and the human being as "a temporary interface for algorithms".

Here his concern matches the position of both of the largest churches. In January 2025 Patriarch Kirill urged that "we must not miss yet another possible danger capable of destroying human life and human civilisation" and called for strict control of artificial intelligence. Pope Leo XIV explained his choice of name by saying that his predecessor Leo XIII had responded to the first industrial revolution, and the Church now needs to respond to "a new industrial revolution and developments in the field of artificial intelligence". In May 2026 he issued the encyclical Magnifica Humanitas on protecting the human person in the age of AI: "The main choice is not between 'yes' or 'no' to technology, but between building Babel or rebuilding Jerusalem."

More debatable is the way the treatise folds into one "techno-humanism" authors who disagree with one another. The Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom is best known for warning about the risks of superintelligence, the American scholar Donna Haraway wrote her "Cyborg Manifesto" from a socialist-feminist standpoint, and the Frenchman Quentin Meillassoux is a metaphysician with no political programme. Silicon Valley is not monolithic either: according to The Wall Street Journal, the Vatican encyclical was presented together with Christopher Olah, a researcher at the AI company Anthropic, as the outcome of years of dialogue between the Holy See and technology companies.

A new council

From this follows the main theological claim: "Perhaps the present crisis demands from the Christian world a new conciliar action of a kind not seen for more than 1,200 years." The arithmetic is right: the last Ecumenical Council recognised by both the Orthodox and Catholics was held at Nicaea in 787. The author asks: "is techno-humanism not the heresy of the 21st century?"

The idea has a precedent. In February 2016 Patriarch Kirill and Pope Francis met in Havana and signed a joint declaration whose main theme was the protection of Christians in the Middle East and Africa; both churches agreed to "set aside existing differences" for that purpose. But a council is a long way off: doctrinal differences between Orthodox and Catholics remain, Protestants have no conciliar structure at all, and the Orthodox world itself has lacked unity since 2018, when the Russian Orthodox Church broke communion with the Patriarchate of Constantinople over its actions in Ukraine. The treatise offers no mechanism for overcoming these obstacles.

The "Russian ark"

The finale is about space. Brovko proposes to "look from the North" and see Russia as an Arctic-Pacific power: about 4,500 km³ of renewable water resources a year, oil, gas, coal, uranium and 118.8 million hectares of arable land. His conclusion: "The country's combined resource potential is capable of providing living conditions for a population of about 1 billion people." The article does not show the calculation behind this estimate.

Russia's Arctic activity is indeed growing. According to Rosatom, the Northern Sea Route carried a record "almost 38 million tonnes" of cargo in 2024, with international transit above 3 million tonnes. The author names a 120-kilometre tunnel under the Bering Strait as the ark's main practical project and writes: "Here one is struck by the foresight of Russian President V. V. Putin." The idea was voiced publicly in October 2025, after a telephone call between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump, by the president's special envoy Kirill Dmitriev. He put the cost at about $8 billion using The Boring Company's technology and the construction time at under eight years. Trump called the idea interesting. According to Dmitriev, the project must first overcome political difficulties.

The treatise's final sentence is a programme: "The Russian ark must gather people capable of passing through the crisis, preserving their core of values and together building the next world."

For business, the text matters as a signal rather than a plan. Ideas of the "civilisation state", the Arctic as a space for settlement and the ethics of artificial intelligence are being discussed at the level of the management of Russia's largest defence-industrial state corporation. The "ark" has no budget, timetable or implementing body yet. Closest to practice is the Bering Strait tunnel, but it depends on relations between Moscow and Washington. And some of the figures on which the forecast rests need correcting.

Sources

Most sources are in Russian.

• Ottisk: V. Yu. Brovko, "Before the new apocalypse: Russia and the future of Christian unity" (No. 3, 2026; in Russian)
• Kommersant: a new journal, Ottisk, launched in Russia (in Russian)
• Rambler / TASS: global public debt rose to 93.2% of GDP, IMF Fiscal Monitor (in Russian)
• Logos Press: IMF says global public debt is approaching 100% of GDP (in Russian)
• Finmarket: SIPRI on world military spending in 2025 (in Russian)
• Forbes Kazakhstan: Hormuz, Malacca and Singapore, the straits that control world trade (in Russian)
• OSN: Lavrov on Russia's support for the Dayton Agreement (in Russian)
• RIAMO: world fertility, UN and Our World in Data figures (in Russian)
• Skillbox Media: what the OECD Survey of Adult Skills found (in Russian)
• Destatis: 304 million international migrants worldwide (UN data)
• Expert: Russian Orthodox Church head calls for strict control of AI (in Russian)
• Expert: Pope Leo XIV compares the AI threat with the Tower of Babel (in Russian)
• Mentoday: Leo XIV explains his choice of name (in Russian)
• Interfax: Patriarch Kirill and Pope Francis agree a joint declaration, 2016 (in Russian)
• Expert: Rosatom reports record cargo on the Northern Sea Route (in Russian)
• Expert: Kirill Dmitriev on serious study of a tunnel to the US (in Russian)

Kurs Media editorial team. Corrections and statements from the parties: press@kursmedia.com. Read in Russian.