работать спустя рукава (rabotat' spustya rukava)

Literally: To work with sleeves let down

Example: “Он красил забор спустя рукава, и через месяц краска слезла.” — He just went through the motions painting the fence, and a month later the paint peeled.

English equivalent: To go through the motions

Origin: Rooted in the practical realities of old Russian dress: traditional outer garments, particularly among the nobility and better-off classes, were sometimes cut with sleeves reaching down past the knees, occasionally even trailing to the ground, largely as a mark of status rather than practicality. Genuine manual work under those conditions required physically rolling the sleeves up and bunching them out of the way first — засучив рукава (with sleeves rolled up) became the standard idiom for working with real energy and application. Left hanging loose and unrolled instead — спустя рукава (with sleeves let down) — those same long sleeves would have gotten in the way of almost any task, physically obstructing careful, attentive work and giving the phrase its lasting meaning: doing something carelessly, without any real effort behind it.