No, a sanctioned Russia is not a large North Korea
There have been lots of dumb memes going around that a sanctioned Russia would be the equivalent of a much more populous North Korea. Needless to say, this is not true. North Korea could easily be richer than Russia even under sanctions (it has, after all, a higher average IQ -possibly the highest in the world outside Singapore). The reason it is poor is not because of sanctions, but because the regime prefers a collection of relatively poor politically connected entrepreneurs to a thriving economy in order to retain its hold on power. Russia under sanctions would neither politically nor economically be anything like North Korea. It is completely nonsensical to suggest, as many seem to, that almost all world GDP comes from the West and is simply redistributed to the rest of the world via trade. Between 1930 and 1970, the U.S. consistently had imports below 5% of GDP, reaching an all-time low of 2.8% in 1942 (this is where the common anti-trade sentiment in America comes from, despite the U.S. remaining one of the least trade-reliant countries in the world). The countries destroyed in WWII largely rebuilt themselves, rather than relying on the U.S. for aid or even markets (this especially applies to Japan). The fact is, a sanctioned Russia would just be a sanctioned Russia -with living standards far closer to Argentina (another unusually isolated country) or China (a country barely more reliant on trade than the U.S. or Argentina) than North Korea. Indeed, given the Russian government’s recent policies, the most pressing danger to Russia is not North Koreanization, but Argentinization. Russia’s imports as a percentage of GDP were already a middling 20% -much lower than Hungary’s, Sweden’s, or Germany’s. This year, they will decline to 10% or so, reaching 5% by the mid-2020s.
When Iran was cut off from global trade by Trump (and that was with energy sanctions, which have not been applied to Russia), its real GDP per capita fell by 15% -about the difference between Russia and Chile. A cutoff of Russia from Western businesses would not mean a Russian cutoff from Indian and Chinese businesses -and, together, India and China have as much human capital as the U.S. and the European Union combined, and can produce essentially everything Russia needs.
This is not to suggest, of course, the transition away from reliance on the rich countries will be easy, only that it will happen. In the short term, the cutoff of imports will cause an economic shock on the order of 11% of GDP (most of that due to the government’s own policies, which have scarred the stock market) -though 0% if including the remnant 28 million Ukrainians, thus keeping Russia the sixth largest economy in the world by PPP, right between Germany and Indonesia. Russia will not be able to make modern style vehicles. Vacations overseas by Russians will become impossible. The country will have to rely exclusively on pirated intellectual property, making its goods and services even less marketable overseas than before. Imports of Chinese cars, Chinese fish, and Chinese phones will become far more necessary. But after making the necessary adjustments to its structure of production, Russian GDP (excluding the new territories) will in less than a decade bounce back from 11% or so below potential to about 5%, staying that way for the next twenty years or so, when sanctions will likely be lifted. Since Russia is currently far less rich than it could be, as suggested by the examples of southern Europe and Czechia, we should expect Russia to experience reasonably fast growth (faster than South Korea) from 2023 to 2030. Indeed, as Putin has suggested, Russia may well be able to use this shock as an opportunity to learn new skills -and expand its reach into economic sectors with a far brighter future than fossil fuels. The aviation and software (given the American tech sector pullout and the example of protectionist China) industries are obvious examples of such sectors. Russia’s economy will be forced to substitute quantity of production with quality of production.