MOSCOW — War jitters are rattling the Russian economy. The stock market is at risk of tumbling, dragging the ruble down with it. 

And that’s on top of spiking prices and wages that won’t budge. 

None of it has stopped Russian President Vladimir Putin, though. Moscow has been preparing for this.

If anything, the Kremlin’s rhetoric suggests it is willing to sacrifice the economy at the altar of Putin’s ambition to redraw the security infrastructure that has been in place since the end of the Cold War, massing troops on Ukraine’s border and risking war along the way.

There are reasons that calculus might be sound — at least for the moment. Despite years of sanctions and a pandemic, Russia’s economy is better equipped than many to survive a crisis — even if it is a self-manufactured one. Meanwhile, there is little Putin has to fear at home. Political opposition has been cowered and forced into near silence, even as average Russians bemoan their vanishing paychecks.

“Foreign policy is more important to Putin than economic consequences,” Sergei Guriev, a former chief […]