PODCAST DISCUSSION
WASHINGTON DC 15 JUNE 2026
(U) EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Civil War II | CW2-2026-008 | June 2026 UNCLASSIFIED // OSA // ANTINT
Russia’s economic collapse is no longer a projection. It is a documented event unfolding in real time across multiple sovereign datasets. The National Wealth Fund — the financial spine of the war effort — has been depleted from $113.5 billion in liquid assets at the invasion’s launch to $28 billion today. The consolidated budget deficit exploded 259% in 2025. Social Security reserves have been raided; there is nothing left to raid. Moscow physically shipped $961 million in gold bars to China in a single month to settle accounts it could no longer meet in any other way. Oil and gas revenues, which fund approximately half of state income, fell 26–34% year-on-year; the Iran war produced a reprieve, making the slope less steep — not less terminal. At current burn rates, liquid reserves reach zero by late 2026. The war in Ukraine has now lasted longer than Russia’s entire involvement in the Second World War. Ukrainian strikes reach strategic targets anywhere inside Russia. The Black Sea Fleet is largely on the bottom — sunk by a country with no navy — and what remains is hiding. The question this report addresses is not whether the system collapses. It is what Putin does when he gets the tap on the shoulder.
PRIOR REPORT
(U) I — THE ECONOMICS OF FINALITY
In November 2025, Moscow began shipping physical gold bars to China to settle its accounts. The mental image matters here. This is not an accounting entry — a flag moved between vault compartments at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, where most sovereign gold is held and “transferred” between countries without a bar leaving the building. Russia’s gold was cut off from the Western custodial system when sanctions hit. What happened in November 2025 was the physical loading of gold onto secure transport and its movement to Chinese counterparts, because China is one of the few places still willing to receive it. The Kremlin is literally selling the family silver, one shipment at a time, to stay liquid. In that single month the value of those bars was $961 million. Once sold, it is gone.
The trajectory of Russia’s National Wealth Fund is the single most important number in this analysis. Before the invasion in February 2022, its liquid assets stood at $113.5 billion — 7.3% of GDP and a genuine rainy-day reserve. By January 2024 the fund had burned to $55.9 billion at approximately $2.4 billion per month: the early war pace. By January 2025, $37.5 billion. By December 2025, emergency fiscal braking had slowed the monthly burn to roughly $800 million — but the remaining liquid reserve had fallen to $28 billion, now less than 2% of GDP.
At the attrition burn rate — the pace triggered when oil prices fall below $60/barrel or combat costs surge — the remaining $28 billion is exhausted within twelve months.
The deeper crisis is structural. Russia’s 2025 fiscal year was budgetary theater whose props have been exhausted. To hold the official federal deficit to 5.645 trillion rubles, Moscow raided its Social Security reserves — its citizens’ financial safety net — for the first time. That trick works once. The reserves are gone. Simultaneously: VAT raised by ten points to 22%, large payments deferred into 2026, war expenses including soldier sign-on bonuses shifted to regional budgets, money printed through the Bank of Russia’s REPO mechanism. The consolidated deficit still landed at 8.342 trillion rubles, up 259% from 2024. Regional budgets saw their deficits explode 646% as the civilian economy entered acknowledged crisis.
The human consequences are visible. Judges, teachers, and physicians are going without pay. Hospitals and schools are closing. Bus and tram routes are being cancelled. Food prices are rising at close to 2% per month — roughly 27% annualised. One in seven workers is “hidden unemployed”: employed on paper, absent in practice. Even the price of vodka is up 5%. In a country that has historically priced social discontent in vodka, that datum belongs in the economic analysis.
The size problem. The most persistent misconception about this conflict is that Russia is a large economy capable of sustaining a long war. It is not. Senator John McCain put it with characteristic precision: Russia is “a gas station masquerading as a country.” Russia’s nominal GDP stands at approximately $2.54 trillion — roughly the economic output of the state of Texas. The blob on the map and the economy are two different things, and confusing them is what has sustained four years of misplaced Western anxiety about Russian industrial capacity.
Against this, the European Union’s combined output runs to $19.5–20.2 trillion. The EU is not the loosely coherent, chronically divided bloc its critics describe. It is the world’s third great economic engine, on par with the United States and China. Against Russia’s $135.8 billion annual defense budget, the EU fields $446 billion — and that gap is widening as German rearmament accelerates under an open checkbook. Strip the United States out of the equation: the remaining NATO members field 6,634 tanks, 15,000+ artillery systems, 2,350 combat aircraft, and 3,250 helicopters on a peacetime footing. F-NATO — the free world’s alliance without a single American in the order of battle — could defeat Russia in a conventional conflict. The constraint is not military. It is complete disinterest in ownership. What would follow a Russian military defeat is eleven time zones of nuclear weapons, warring warlords, decaying infrastructure, and a governance void that no sane external actor wants to administer. Were it not for the nuclear weapons, the internal collapse and breakup of Russia would actually be a relatively clean outcome. The nukes are what make it catastrophic.
Russia is burning approximately $516 million per day on the war with no access to international credit. Every dollar spent is a direct loss to a future the Kremlin is rapidly spending down. The IMF has revised Russia’s 2025 real GDP growth forecast from 4.3% to 0.6%. The nominal headline growth figure captures inflation and military spending on hardware that does not circulate back into the productive economy. Russia is growing the way a man running a fever grows: the numbers go up, the patient deteriorates.
(U) II — THE SNAIL'S TRAIL: FOUR YEARS OF TERMINAL ATTRITION
Russia has now lost 11,676 tanks, 37,319 artillery systems, 435 fixed-wing aircraft, and 347 helicopters. In 2025 alone it suffered more than 320,000 casualties — filled increasingly by inexperienced conscripts replacing professionals who no longer exist. Since the frontlines stabilised in November 2022, Russia has gained precisely 1.1% additional Ukrainian territory. The cost of that 1.1%: more than one million total casualties.
What remains of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet is not a fighting force. Approximately one-third has been destroyed by a country with no navy — using sea drones and repurposed cruise missiles. The rest is hiding, running from port to port, hoping Ukrainian undersea drones do not find them at anchor. They are starting to. A submarine was sunk in port. The fleet that was meant to project Russian power across the Black Sea now functions primarily as a target. Russia’s air force is in similar condition: largely grounded, hiding from Ukrainian air defenses that have transformed the skies above Russian border regions into contested space. Strategic bomber bases deep inside Russia have been struck by Ukrainian drones. Ukrainian strikes now reach Moscow, the Urals, and targets the Kremlin spent years insisting were immune.
The theatre has inverted. Ukraine is attacking anywhere inside Russia. Russia cannot protect its own territory.
A further asymmetry that conventional analysis consistently underweights: the magazine-depth defeat running against Russia at scale. Air defense systems are being drained by Ukraine’s mass drone campaigns. In December 2025, a single Ukrainian operation forced Russian interceptors to engage 287 drones overnight, including 40 over the Moscow region. A Russian interceptor costs orders of magnitude more than a Ukrainian drone. The same cost-asymmetry that depleted NATO’s SM-6 stocks fighting Houthi drones in the Red Sea is now running in reverse against Russia, at industrial scale, month after month. Russia has no allied industrial base to replenish what it expends.
(U) III — THE CYCLE RUSSIA NEVER ESCAPES
Russia has run this cycle of imperial overstretch before, and each time the outcome has been systemic collapse.
Nicholas II had a warning. The Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05 exposed the same structural rot in spectacular fashion — a Baltic Fleet that sailed sixteen thousand miles around the world to be annihilated in an afternoon at Tsushima Bay, the most complete naval destruction since Trafalgar. The domestic consequence was the 1905 Revolution: general strikes, mutinies, the Tsar forced to concede a constitution he had no intention of honoring. The warning was unambiguous. He ignored it. When the same overreach was applied to a continental war nine years later, the bill came due in full. In 1917, the Tsarist autocracy finally broke under the weight of the First World War, and what followed was not a transition — it was catastrophic de-integration: civil war, breakaway republics, localized warlords, foreign intervention, and the end of three centuries of Romanov rule. In 1991, the Soviet Union — overextended through a global Cold War, an unsustainable military-industrial complex, and the draining adventure in Afghanistan — suffered the same fate when its centralized economic engine failed. The periphery shattered along institutional lines, producing fifteen independent states overnight. The pattern repeats not because Russian leaders are uniquely foolish, but because the system selects against the men who would stop it.
The apparent exception is the Great Patriotic War. Why didn’t the Soviet state collapse under the Nazi invasion — a pressure that dwarfs anything Putin now faces? The answer is external stabilization. The Soviet Union was approaching systemic failure when the Western Allies underwrote its survival. Through Lend-Lease, the United States and Britain injected billions of dollars of critical material — trucks, aviation fuel, trains, rations, aluminum — directly into the Soviet war machine. Without that logistical lifeline, the consensus among serious historians is that the centralized Soviet state likely would have fractured. There is no Lend-Lease for Putin.
There is a second variable the WWII exception illustrates that bears directly on the current moment: the role of the leader who comes after. Gorbachev was not a dictator. He was, by any serious account, an extraordinarily thoughtful and visionary leader — a man who understood that the system he inherited was rotten at its foundations and that the only way to preserve anything worth preserving was to let the periphery go, to accept the humiliation, and to refuse to use the violence available to him. When Poland moved, when East Germany opened its wall, when Czechoslovakia and Hungary and Romania followed, Soviet tanks were in position to repeat 1956 and 1968. Gorbachev chose not to use them. When his own republics began declaring independence and when the August 1991 coup plotters moved against him, he again chose restraint. The tanks stayed in their garrisons. What that choice preserved — the avoidance of rivers of blood across Eastern Europe — is incalculable. Putin is the opposite of this. He is not a strategic thinker. He is a thug who confused the means of power with its purposes, and who has now arrived at the destination every Russian leader who made the same confusion has reached before him.
George Kennan identified the mechanism in 1947. His “X Article” argued that Soviet power “bears within it the seeds of its own decay.” The NWF’s liquidation is the 2026 manifestation of that seed. The expansion of domestic repression spending beyond actual defense spending confirms that the system fears its own population more than its external enemies. The Cold War was won, in the end, without firing a shot — but Kennan did not win it. He wrote the doctrine. It was a succession of American strategic thinkers and presidents who executed on it, men who understood that containment required patience, institutional stamina, and the capacity to think across decades. Back when the United States produced people capable of that. NSD’s concurrent assessment of the American fiscal position — the Debt Bomb — notes that the same structural logic Kennan applied to Soviet decline is now visible in the American system; the convergence of those two trajectories may be the defining strategic fact of this decade.
The China reversal. For most of the post-Cold War era, Russia was the senior partner in its relationship with China — the nuclear power, the UNSC anchor, the country with the independent military doctrine and the strategic depth. That relationship has decisively reversed. Xi knows it and is exploiting it. As NSD’s companion assessment As Consequential as Yalta? documents, China now operates as the dominant power in the Indo-Pacific, and Russia has become functionally dependent on Chinese economic goodwill for fiscal survival — as the physical gold shipments to Beijing make plain. Those bars are not a transaction between equals. They are tribute.
(U) IV — THE TRUMP VARIABLE: SUPPLY, NOT STRATEGY
Every analysis of the Trump-Putin alignment has made the same foundational error. It searches for ideology, finds none, and reaches one of two conclusions: either the relationship is managed at the level of signals and propaganda, which both schools agree is consequential — or there is a covert strategic partnership running beneath the visible one. What the two schools actually disagree about are the motive, the drivers, and the trajectory underneath the visible pattern. The NSD framework — No Ideology: That’s Not Trump’s Weakness. That’s His Weapon (April 2026) — establishes why the conventional framing misses the mechanism, and why the correct reading is more dangerous than either standard alternative.
Trump is not executing a coordinated strategy developed in Moscow. What NSD identifies is a supply-driven pathological system operating without ideological constraint at presidential scale, whose outputs are structurally indistinguishable from a Russian information operation — not because they are coordinated with one, but because the same operating system has been running for forty years.
The mechanism is documented. When KGB-connected figures introduced Trump to anti-NATO arguments in the 1980s, they identified something Western intelligence consistently missed: a malignant narcissist without ideological commitment is not recruited as a traditional asset. He is supplied. The anti-NATO arguments generated narcissistic supply — the attention, adulation, and dominance the pathology requires. Trump has repeated those arguments for forty years not because he believes them but because they kept generating supply. No ongoing coordination was required after the initial installation.
The MICE framework and its modern update. The classic Cold War tradecraft mnemonic for why individuals commit espionage — MICE: Money, Ideology, Coercion, and Ego — was found too blunt to capture the complexity of modern human motivation. The intelligence community has since moved toward RASCLS, adapted from psychologist Dr. Robert Cialdini’s six principles of influence and formalized in IC tradecraft through a 2013 CIA Studies in Intelligence paper. Where MICE focused on exploiting an asset’s static vulnerabilities, RASCLS provides a dynamic toolkit for psychological persuasion and active cultivation.
(U) CALLOUT — RASCLS: THE MODERN RECRUITMENT FRAMEWORK, AND THE TRUMP EXPOSURE
Trump is exposed across every vector in the original MICE framework and across every vector of its RASCLS successor. A MICE-RASCLS profile of this subject would be the most complete in the history of the discipline.
(U) CALLOUT — THE INSTALLED PATTERN: REPRESENTATIVE PARALLELS
The Iran war is the installed system’s most revealing recent output. The rhetorical template Russia deployed to justify Ukraine — operation not war, haven’t started yet, lay down your weapons, we had no choice — has been reproduced almost verbatim by the Trump administration to frame the Iran campaign. This is not coordination. It is the same operating system running in a new theatre.
Trump undermined NATO for his own supply-driven reasons — reasons that happened to align perfectly with Russian strategic interests — without thinking through the consequences. He never believed the Europeans would step up, spend more, and begin building the capacity to defend themselves without American participation. The calculation, to whatever extent one existed, was that his threats would produce submission. He was wrong. The more Trump aligned with Russia and signalled American withdrawal, the more European leaders concluded they were genuinely alone — and the more alone they were, the more seriously they took rearmament. Germany is rearming with an open checkbook for the first time since 1945. Japan, facing the same dynamic in the Pacific, is doing the same. France is leading a European defence architecture that no longer routes through Washington. Trump did not intend this. He set out to weaken European defence; what he produced was a Europe and a Japan calculating that they must be capable of defending themselves.
That outcome is not good for Russia. A self-sufficient European defence posture is precisely what the Kremlin has spent thirty years trying to prevent. Trump inadvertently delivered it.
That outcome is not good for America either. What allies are concluding — not loudly, but irreversibly — is that the United States has become a variable to be managed rather than an anchor to rely on. Alliance capital of the kind America accumulated across eighty years of post-war leadership is not renewed by goodwill gestures or recommitments. It is built across decades and destroyed in a single electoral cycle. The calculation European and Japanese planners are now running is not about this administration. It is about the constitutional machinery that produced it, returned it to office, and remains fully intact. No future American president — however multilateralist, however institutionally orthodox — can offer allies the one assurance that would actually move the needle: confidence that what happened cannot happen again. They cannot offer it because it would not be true. The mechanism is still there. The precedent is set. The strategic recalibration underway in Berlin, Paris, Tokyo, and Warsaw is not a reaction to a personality. It is a response to a structural fact, and structural facts do not yield to charm offensives.
What Trump provides Russia is the one resource Moscow cannot manufacture: hope. Every signal of American disengagement extends Putin’s survival timeline. What Trump cannot provide is any of the structural variables — the oil market, the NWF balance, the casualty rate, the EU’s fiscal capacity to rearm. The Trump variable extends the timeline at the margin. It does not change the trajectory.
(U) V — WHEN THE GOLDEN BRIDGE IS GONE
The economic collapse and the nuclear risk are not separate problems at different analytical addresses. They are the same problem at different stages of the same process.
NSD’s recently published assessment — “We know you are contemplating the use of tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine” (UNW-2026, nukes.substack.com) — establishes the complete analytical architecture of this risk, including the 2022 near-miss and the specific conditions under which it was managed. Readers requiring the full treatment are directed there. This section addresses only the mechanism by which economic collapse changes the nuclear calculation.
In October 2022, thirty thousand Russian troops were trapped on the west bank of the Dnipro River at Kherson, cut off by Ukrainian strikes on their supply bridges, with the Ukrainian army closing in on land that Putin had formally declared part of Russia three weeks earlier. American intelligence was listening to Russian military officers discussing not whether to use a nuclear weapon on that battlefield, but when and how. The CIA director put the probability of actual use at approximately fifty percent. President Biden told his national security adviser: “Putin is not going to let himself be routed out of Ukraine without breaking the seal on tactical nuclear weapons.” The United States spent the following weeks making nuclear use as costly as possible — calling Moscow directly, enlisting China and India to warn Putin, signalling consequences through every available channel — while simultaneously making sure the Russians had what Sun Tzu calls a golden bridge to retreat across. That bridge was the Kherson withdrawal. Russia pulled thirty thousand men across the river over three nights, claimed it as a military decision, and the nuclear question disappeared. The crisis ended not because a moral firewall held, and not because the deterrence architecture functioned on its own, but because Washington built that bridge and Moscow walked across it.
The question for 2026 is whether a golden bridge exists. The threat Putin now faces is not the encirclement of an army at a river crossing — it is the survival of the regime itself. The conditions that produced the 2022 “no” — the Chinese economic lifeline visibly at risk, the Indian diplomatic relationship intact, the golden bridge of military withdrawal still available — are present but weakened. New START has expired. The intelligence channels that carried Austin’s warning are thinner than at any point since the Cold War. The dual-use missile systems Russia has fired thousands of times conventionally will look identical on launch when the first nuclear warhead rides one. If anyone still deters Russian nuclear use in 2026, it is not the United States. It is China. The day Russia has less to lose in Beijing is the day the brakes weaken — and that is not a decision Russia controls.
(U) VI — WHAT COMES AFTER THE TSAR
The chess position has a name: Zugzwang. The question for the West is not which of three tidy scenarios it prefers. It is which of three ugly ones the data makes most likely.
The succession problem: Why kleptocracy is worse than what came before. The Tsarist system fell, but it had the Bolsheviks waiting — a revolutionary movement with doctrine, organisation, and cadres capable of seizing and running a state. The Soviet system fell, but it had the nomenklatura and technocratic class — an institutional state apparatus that, however corrupt and sclerotic, knew how to administer territory. Putin’s kleptocracy has neither. He has not built a political system. He has built a personality structure, and personality structures do not hand themselves over. He has simultaneously destroyed the ideological alternatives, eliminated the institutional state’s independence, and — through the 380+ high-level arrests and estimated 75+ mysterious deaths since 2022 — removed the men most likely to manage a transition. The czarist system had a fallback. The communist system had a fallback. The kleptocracy has the warlords waiting.
Putin exits. There is no managed succession scenario in this analysis, because the available evidence does not support one. Putin will die in office or be removed by something more abrupt. A palace removal — if it comes — will not be managed in any meaningful sense. It will be a violent rupture, and what it reveals beneath it will determine everything that follows.
Scenario A — Fragmented Warlordism (Most Likely Near-Term Successor State). The centre loses fiscal and coercive control. Regional security forces, successors to Wagner’s operational model, and oligarchs who have been positioning for this moment break from Moscow. This is not 1991: there are no clean Soviet Republic borders to dictate a peaceful divorce. A collapse today means the Russian Federation itself fracturing — more chaotic than either 1917 or 1991, because neither of those collapses involved a post-Soviet state with this density of armed factions, this distribution of nuclear weapons, and this absence of functioning institutions. The Caucasus and Siberia are structurally the most vulnerable fracture points. NSD’s probability assessment: HIGH as the primary successor state to Putin’s exit.
Scenario B — Chinese Absorption of the Far East. With Moscow unable to project power across eleven time zones, the resource-rich Russian Far East becomes an easy target for Chinese economic absorption. Beijing will not need to fire a shot. It will step in as the default administrator and customer of a neglected periphery that China has been quietly positioning to absorb for years. The already-reversed China-Russia senior partnership makes this a straight-line continuation of existing trends, not a new strategic departure. NSD assessment: HIGH probability on a 10-year horizon if Scenario A develops.
Scenario C — Terminal Escalation. Putin reaches the Nero Decree threshold before the system produces any coherent alternative. The cost side of the deterrence calculation empties. NSD assessment: MODERATE probability, rising as the fiscal position worsens and elite isolation deepens. This is the scenario for which no one in Washington is adequately preparing, and which the data makes increasingly plausible.
The three scenarios are not mutually exclusive in sequence. The most dangerous trajectory runs through A into C: warlordism producing the fracture of coherent command and control over the world’s largest nuclear arsenal — distributed across a territory larger than any other on earth, in the hands of factions whose survival calculations are entirely their own.
The Kennan problem in 2026. Kennan did not manage the patient decline of Soviet power. He wrote the doctrine for doing it. A succession of American strategic thinkers and presidents — men capable of thinking across decades, of holding a consistent position against short-term pressure, of treating alliance management as a strategic asset rather than a cost — executed on that doctrine over forty years. Back when the United States produced people capable of that.
The question is whether the Kennan play is even available in 2026. NSD’s assessment: it is not, and for a reason that has nothing to do with ideology or political will. The Kennan model of patient management required that the coming collapse be manageable from the outside — that Western institutions would be positioned to help absorb the shock when it came, as they were in the 1990s: IMF programs, NATO expansion, EU accession offers, bilateral assistance. The coming Russian collapse may not be manageable from the outside in any meaningful sense. No external actor — not the EU, not NATO, not China, not the United States under any conceivable administration — is going to send forces into Russia to manage what follows. The disinterest in ownership established in Section I of this analysis was a military and strategic judgment. Here it becomes an existential one. The Kennan play in 2026 is not patient management. It is watching from a safe distance while hoping the nuclear weapons stay under coherent control as the empire falls. That is a strategy of last resort, not of choice — and it underscores what the West’s most urgent task actually is: not managing a Russian collapse that cannot be managed, but building, right now, the external conditions — in Beijing above all, in the security architecture of Eastern Europe, and in the intelligence channels that still function — that make the worst outcomes less likely when the collapse comes.
Update 25 JUNE 2026
UK NEWS catches up to NSD analysis
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From inside the Kremlin - this Economist oped is reproduced in full below because it is a unique insight that has an unusual depth and resonance. NSD wanted to make sure readers did not miss this important traffic.
The Economist | By Invitation | A bleak view from Moscow
Vladimir Putin is losing his grip on Russia
His every move to preserve power accelerates decay, writes a former senior official in the Russian government
May 9th 2026 | LONDON
I ARRIVED NOT as an event but as an attrition, felt everywhere at once. Vladimir Putin has led Russia into a dead-end and nobody has a map for what comes next. The first manifestation is a shift in the language used by senior officials, regional governors and businessmen: they have stopped using the first-person plural when talking about the actions of authorities in the country.
As recently as last spring, everything was “we” and “ours”. Mr Putin’s war on Ukraine may be reckless and failing, but it was shared. “We” were inside it, and it would be better for all of “us” if it ended sooner. Now they describe what is happening as “his” story, not “ours”. Not our project, not our agenda, not our war.
His decisions are described as “strange”. Even stranger is the fact that he decides anything at all. It is not about failing approval ratings, though they may exist. It is more as if what Mr Putin will decide, but as something that will unfold independently of him—and possibly already without him.
This shift in language does not signal a rebellion. The authoritarian system can survive for a long time on fear, inertia and repression. It still has a monopoly on violence, but has lost its monopoly on shaping the future. In the past, the regime, for all its lies, had some project it sold to its consuming public: from “sovereign democracy” to an “energy superpower”. There was even, before the Ukraine invasion, the turn to what it termed itself as a national vocation. The irony is that Mr Putin started the war to preserve power and the system he had created. Now, for the first time since the conflict began, Russia’s elites are starting to imagine a future without him. This is down to a confluence of four factors.
First is the growing cost of fighting. The war in Ukraine was meant to be a special military operation conducted by selected groups who received financial incentives for their trouble, while the rest of society carried on as normal. This model crumbled as the war grew in length and scale. It has led to signs of distress and stress, degraded oil infrastructure, increased criminality, endless justifications for lower living standards. A system built for mythological normality is not being allowed any purpose to return.
Second is a growing demand for rules among elites who have been forced back into Russia, along with their capital. Previously, their property rights were outsourced to the West. They used London courts, offshore structures and international arbitration to resolve conflicts or seek protection. Now conflicts must be resolved domestically, without these tools. Institutions that guarantee property and limit the powerful need rules and procedure.
In the past three years a new world evolved. An outflow of federal funds transferred from private businessmen and either nationalised or handed to loyalists and cronies. This was the largest redistribution of property since the mass privatisation of the 1990s. It is no wonder the elites have suddenly discovered a taste for the rule of law and democracy. For even if one’s loyalty to the regime stays solid and lies in deep silence, confiscation remains likely.
Third is the change in geopolitical climate that Mr Putin himself helped bring about. Russia once had a certain place in the global order. In reality it is a macro analysis. Thanks to the war in Ukraine has accelerated the crisis of Western democracy, the rise of populism and global fatigue. Russia now finds itself in a world whose rules are weak and whose international order is not driven by strong institutions but by the interests of the strong. In the past, Russia would wield asymmetrical power through its permanent veto on the UN Security Council, the Soviet nuclear legacy and energy leverage. But Europe now buys its gas elsewhere. Russia’s Security Council seat has been devalued with the UN itself, and its nuclear blackmail has undermined the non-proliferation regime, depriving it of a reflex status as a great power. When the world order and Western hegemony is broken, the benefits of a declining status quickly disappear.
At the same time, Russia is suffering an identity crisis. For the first time in generations it lacks an outward model to define itself against. Historically it defined itself in relation to Europe and the wider West. They were there to catch up with, to fall behind, to conquer or to serve as a mirror. That old race is gone. The West as a single cultural, military and political entity is in crisis. There is no “them” against which one can define “us”. This is not an ideological issue. It is a vital one. Any development requires a model and an outward point of reference—and the government is unable to provide it.
Fourth is growing ideological control within many remaining divisions. The previous social contract, whereby the state stayed out of people’s private lives while citizens stayed out of politics, has collapsed. In the past the system bought people’s loyalty with consumerism and material progress, which this year’s summer restrictions are the most striking manifestation.
The issue is not so much repression itself as repression without purpose. An ideology by definition presupposes an image of the future. This one demands a return without offering one. People are required to be loyal without seeing and what for, or what loyalty serves. The political loyalty does not seem desirable to authorities, as the authorities are involved in the conversation. Optimism has been burned out from within.
Running out of moves
All four factors create a situation which in chess is known as a Zugzwang: when every move worsens the position. The system can persist for as long as Mr Putin remains in power. But his every move to preserve power and status accelerates decay. His instinctual response may be to intensify repression. He may even start a new war. But these actions would only make things worse. He cannot remain the connection between power and the future. He can only make the regime bloodier and more dangerous. ■
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Very thorough and basically irrefutable by a civilian onlookers such as I. The Nero Decree threshold didn't work out for Nero, or Hitler, so I am unsure Putin has the power to enforce one. Still, the peeling away of the elites is mirrored by Lukashenko currently positioning himself as a neutral party. He is as you know a former Collective Farm boss who finds himself basically unassailable within Belarus after he crushed the opposition. His peasant cunning tells him to trim sails and tack away from danger as shown by his reaction to Zelenskyy's threat to destroy the Russian-operated radars on their border. Clearly Putin leant on him to accept the radars but his self preservation instincts have made him back down in the face of Ukrainian threats to invade, which could lead to unintended consequences for Lukashenko. It's funny to read the official explanation from Belarus: the radars were causing problems for the grouse breeding areas with their emissions so the local agricultural authorities decided to disable the radars. Note, the local authorities dealing with a local grouse-based problem, no sign of Lukashenko's name on the decision. As I say, a wily old peasant, a fox, who knows his limits. Also, of course, a brutal lawless autocrat who has illegitimately claimed the last presidential election as his victory.
In conversation with this — the ecological emergency running on the same timeline, from the same root.
https://substack.com/profile/11296806-john-fridinger/note/c-277530997