Disclaimer: I am not an economist.
“Was going to default anyway” doesn’t fit with the debt to GDP ratio or the reserves that Russia had piled up in foreign banks. My understanding is that a major root cause of the default is the sanctions preventing Russia from accessing its overseas reserves.
I believe Russia has serious structural issues with its economy. Most of the economy hangs on the price of oil, and Russian oil is expensive to extract. But that’s a decade-scale problem to fix, not a month-scale.
