"I can't live without alcohol"...Russian alcohol sales in the war are the highest ever.

Russia, famous for its vodka, has traditionally been a society with a strong image of a 'drink whale'.

Peter the Great, who gave birth to the Russian Empire, was a drinker enough to tell the story that he drank from a 1.5-liter custom glass, and former Russian President Boris Yeltsin was notorious for his drinking walls, as he was exposed to stumbling from heavy drinking during his visit to the United States while in office.

However, under President Vladimir Putin, who tends to abstain from alcohol compared to his predecessors, Russia has significantly reduced its alcohol consumption over the past decade with various taxes and marketing controls.

The per capita purchase of pure alcohol, which peaked at 20ℓ in 2003, was 7ℓ in 2017, a third of it.

The Times, a British daily, reported that Russia's decline in alcohol consumption has recently been reversed, and that the psychological shock of the three-year war against Ukraine has affected the revival of heavy drinking.

According to The Times, Russia's alcohol sales reached 1.84 billion liters in the January-October period, the highest since 2017 when related tallies began.

By type of liquor, vodka, Russia's "people's wine," sold 620 million liters during the period, accounting for the largest share, followed by wine with 470 million liters, up 22.5% from 2017.

With the overall increase in alcohol consumption, Russia's net alcohol consumption per capita is now 8 liters, up 1 liter from 2017.

At the same time, cases of alcohol dependence diagnosis also rose for the first time in a decade.

The number of first-time alcoholism diagnoses fell from 153,900 in 2010 to 53,000 in 2021, but this figure rose slightly to 54,200 in 2022.

2022 is the year when Russia invaded Ukraine under the so-called "special military operation" and the war broke out between the two countries.

The war, which began in February 2022, shows no signs of stopping until now, two years and eight months later, but rather intensifies with North Korea's participation in the war and Western measures to lift the ban on Ukraine's use of long-range missiles.

The Russian health ministry cited people being forced to stay inside during the COVID-19 pandemic as the reason for the reversal of Russia's more than decade-long downward trend in alcohol consumption, but the war on Ukraine and the resulting totalitarian atmosphere in Russian society cannot be overlooked, The Times noted.

Ruslan Isaev, head of the addiction treatment agency in Moscow, told Russian daily Kommersant that "performance in reducing excessive alcohol consumption has slowed somewhat due to social and economic upheaval and geopolitical disputes and sanctions."

The Times noted that growing antagonism with Ukraine's supporting West has weighed heavily on Russian society, as well as concerns about possible escalation of war, anxiety about losing loved ones to the war, and pressure to serve jail time when expressing anti-war opinions.