The Fall of Vladimir Putin

In the wake of the June 2023 Wagner revolt, former United States Ambassador to Moscow Michael McFaul wrote a lengthy essay on what it said about Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The former KGB Lt. Col. had always wanted to go down in history as having been one of Russia’s greatest and most powerful leaders.

Instead, says the US diplomat, “he is increasingly looking like one of its weakest.”

In the same essay, McFaul points out why it was not just the Wagner Group’s aborted march on Moscow that demonstrated Putin’s weak position.

Nor was it the senior Russian government officials who fled Moscow in fear that the private military company and its leader, Yengeniy Prigozhin, might actually succeed and reach the Russian capital.

Nor was it the local police and RosGvardia officers at checkpoints along the road to Moscow who either ran away from their posts as the Wagner convoys approached, checked into hospitals to avoid having to take orders, or conveniently “misplaced” their mobile phones so the orders would never be received in the first place. The most prevalent example of Putin’s failures to build a strong Russia was the very existence of Wagner itself.

Putin the Weak: How Wagner Shows the Regime’s Failures

As McFaul wrote:

“The fact that the Wagner Group—a private paramilitary company led by Prigozhin—existed at all was already a sign of Putin’s weakness. Strong leaders do not create and pay mercenaries to do their fighting. They rely on conventional armies.

“Of course, for years the Kremlin denied any links to Wagner and, in fact, did so as the group raged through Syria starting in 2015 and committed massacres in the Central African Republic in 2021 and 2022 and in Mali in 2022. For much of the time since the group’s founding in 2014, Prigozhin outright denied its existence too.

“This secrecy is also a sign of Putin’s weakness. Weak, criminal leaders need to hide their associations with their military forces. Strong, legitimate leaders do not. It was only in September 2022 that Wagner’s association with the Russian state was publicly acknowledged.”

Sending Wagner’s forces to fight in Ukraine was an additional sign of Putin’s weakness. The war, continuing for months and years longer than expected, prompted Wagner to begin recruiting within Russian prisons. Putin was running out of soldiers, wrote McFaul, and he “felt compelled—out of weakness, not strength—to ask Prigozhin and newly hired criminals to fight in Ukraine, specifically in the horrific Battle of Bakhmut.”

The System Depends on War

A more recent essay in the Kyiv Post points out just how the Russian state’s weakness created by Putin also precludes any possibility of shutting down hostilities.

“Putin didn’t just start this war—he built a system that depends on it. Psychologically, economically, and politically,” writes the author, a former Ukraine television producer.

Putin will “prolong the war as long as possible. Because without it, his political regime collapses. Without it, his carefully staged image as a ‘great leader’ disintegrates. His historical legacy doesn’t survive peace—it only survives in chaos.”

Internal pressures could cause Putin’s dictatorship to implode from within, which may have more of a chance of ending the conflict than Russia’s defeat on the battlefield. One of these is that a high percentage of troops returning home from the war are former criminals recruited out of prisons.

The UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in Russia confirmed recently that approximately 170,000 violent offenders were recruited to fight in Ukraine.

“Many of them—and this is a new trend—are committing fresh violent crimes upon their return, targeting women, girls, and children, including sexual violence and murder,” she said during a UN Human Rights Council session in Geneva.

Putin: Using War as a Cover for Failure

If this were not enough to cause social unrest and undo an increasingly brittle political order, then there is the fact that war is being used as a convenient cover for the government’s growing list of failures—but the cover is wearing thin.

When terrorists attacked Crocus City Hall near Moscow in March 2024 and killed over 140 people, Putin’s regime was quick to blame Ukraine despite ISIS later claiming responsibility. Despite the very public declaration by the terrorist group, most Russians did not question the former KGB Lt. Col.’s official lie.

But, as the same former TV producer, Andrew Novitskyi, the lies cannot cover up the overall disastrous situation inside of Russia: “Basic services are collapsing. Health care is underfunded. Infrastructure is crumbling.

“Putin promised to relocate people from Soviet-era barracks over twenty years ago—but instead, he’s now building new apartment blocks in occupied and destroyed Mariupol [in Ukraine]. The message is clear: war matters, people don’t.”

The Ukraine war, as so many commentators and anti-Putin figures have told me, stands no chance of ending under the current regime in Moscow. As they explain, the war is necessary to keep this one man in power and continue the lie about him being a strong leader.

Until Putin is unmasked by the truth or until his regime collapses from the inside—the war will continue.

About the Author:

Reuben F. Johnson is a survivor of the February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine and is an Expert on Foreign Military Affairs with the Fundacja im. Kazimierza Pułaskiego in Warsaw. He has been a consultant to the Pentagon, several NATO governments and the Australian government in the fields of defense technology and weapon systems design.  Over the past 30 years he has resided in and reported from Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Brazil, the People’s Republic of China and Australia.

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