Summary and Key Points: As Russia’s economy buckles under sanctions and drone strikes on its oil infrastructure, the elite consensus around Vladimir Putin is showing visible cracks — with a well-connected business leader telling The Guardian there is now “profound disappointment in Putin” and a growing sense that “some kind of catastrophe is looming.” Former US Special Envoy for Ukraine Kurt Volker told PBS Frontline that “things are crumbling around Putin” and now openly discusses scenarios where Ukraine could retake Crimea — an eventuality that was almost impossible to foresee just two months ago.
Putin Can’ Escape His Ukraine Mistake
Tu-160 Bomber from Russia. Image Credit: Creative Commons.
No end of bad news keeps piling up for Russian President Vladimir Putin. The worst of it is that the more time goes by, the more there is a sense that his invasion of Ukraine was the most fatal of a long string of bad decisions. The end of his rule, which may be closer than anyone thinks, may also be the beginning of the end of Russia as we know it.
The increasing trend is that the worse conditions become inside of Russia, the more of the nation’s oil and gas industry is destroyed, and the higher the casualty figures for Moscow’s military climb, the less anyone sees of Putin or hears him make comments to address what he intends to do about it. What seems to be the former KGB Lt. Col.’s isolation from the outside world has even forced the Kremlin to deny that he is being told the true state of affairs in the nation.
“No. It is not so,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov said publicly back in April. “Putin is the head of state, and his powers mean he deals with the widest range of issues on the agenda.”
However, the level of confidence behind that statement appears not to be shared by the upper elites in Russia.
The overall sense, said the UK Guardian newspaper this past weekend, is that the increasingly negative consequences of the February 2022 invasion have “broken Putin’s unwritten contract with the Russian public.” This contract is the public’s pledge that “we do not get involved in politics and trying to gain power for ourselves – but only as long as the state acts in our best interests.”
It Is Too Late to Save The Situation Now in the Ukraine War
“There’s definitely been a shift in mood among the elites this year … there is profound disappointment in Putin,” a man described as a well-connected business leader told the Guardian for a long assessment published last weekend. There is now in Russia “a growing sense that some kind of catastrophe is looming,” he continued.
T-84 Tank from Ukraine War. Image Credit: Creative Commons.
T-84 Tank Ukraine. Image Credit: Creative Commons.
“No one believes everything will suddenly collapse tomorrow,” the source told the UK daily. “But there is a growing realisation that utterly senseless, self-destructive decisions keep being made. People who once defended Putin no longer do. Any sense of a future has disappeared.”
The two authors also know the political landscape and the country’s situation well. One is Shawn Walker, who reported for the Guardian from Moscow for more than a decade, and Pjotr Sauer, who reports from there now and is the son of the late Derek Sauer. The elder Sauer was the 1990s champion of trying to build a free press in what was then Boris Yeltsin’s Russia and is famous for founding the English-language Moscow Times.
They are also not alone in their pessimistic view of how, as former US Special Envoy for Ukraine Kurt Volker told Frontline this week, “things are crumbling around Putin.” The level to which Putin’s empire is flailing about to no good effect in its battlefield operations in Ukraine makes him and others now even talk about scenarios where Ukraine could retake Crimea, said the former Washington envoy. This is an eventuality that was almost impossible to foresee even two months ago.
Rising Instability
The combination of drone attacks, internet blackouts, and the continuing downturn in the Russian economy is combining into a perfect storm of discontent that contributes to a growing sense of instability in Moscow, concluded another long essay in The New Yorker from three weeks ago.
But, as the New Yorker profile points out, “Just about everyone would like to stop the war tomorrow—that’s obvious,” a well-known member of Russia’s political élite told the magazine. “There’s not a single person, other than Putin and the military brass, who wants to keep on fighting. But no one would ever dare to express their displeasure.”
In a separate interview with Farida Rustamova, founder of the newsletter, Vlast, a Russian word meaning “political power”, the New Yorker writer Joshua Yaffa concludes that the recent series of events “has created a sense that the political system is at once tightly controlled and utterly rudderless.”
“On the one hand, the regime is more airless than ever,” said Rustamova. “All the screws have been tightened to the max, but it’s also never been as chaotic and unpredictable. The old rules are breaking down, and no one knows what the new ones are, or whether they exist at all.”
The Ukraine war has created a fundamental sense of despair, and that probably has eroded the support of the population to as little as “less than 20 percent” said Volker in the same broadcast.
The war has tested but not yet broken the loyalty of the Russian public to their “Tsar” Putin, according to the conclusions of almost all current analyses, including those of two Russian-based analysts who spoke to National Security Journal.
But the only hope – and it is a faint one – is that someone with influence over Putin, such as the Chinese Communist Party leader Xi Jinping, would convince him that a ceasefire is the only way to prevent Russia from eventually collapsing. Otherwise, this war will go on until some catastrophe tears the country apart.
About the Author: Reuben F. Johnson
Reuben F. Johnson has thirty-six years of experience analyzing and reporting on foreign weapons systems, defense technologies, and international arms export policy. Johnson is the Director of Research at the Casimir Pulaski Foundation. He is also a survivor of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. He worked for years in the American defense industry as a foreign technology analyst and later as a consultant for the U.S. Department of Defense, the Departments of the Navy and Air Force, and the governments of the United Kingdom and Australia. In 2022-2023, he won two awards in a row for his defense reporting. He holds a bachelor’s degree from DePauw University and a master’s degree from Miami University in Ohio, with a specialization in Soviet and Russian studies. He lives in Warsaw.
