Trying to understand Russia

The war in Ukraine, now in its fifth year, has killed hundreds of thousands of Russian citizens, hollowed out what was left of Russian civil society, accelerated demographic decline, and reoriented Moscow's foreign policy toward a structurally subordinate partnership with Beijing. Yet the regime in Moscow has grown stronger in its grip, not weaker, out-enduring every Western speculation about its collapse. Support for Putin continues to poll in the high eighties even as support for continuing the war has fallen to a record-low.

In my opinion, this is the paradox that defines contemporary Russia: a society that wants peace but will not demand it, animated by an identity project that fuses Soviet nostalgia, Orthodox messianism, and imperial grievance, ruled by a leader who has staked everything on a war he cannot end without losing everything.

To understand why that is the case, how Russia ended up being the country (and society) that it currently is, requires tracing several intertwined arcs. Each of these might reasonably be contested, none of them reduces the situation to a single "villain" or a single cause.

Yet together they describe a country that has chosen confrontation not because it misunderstood the alternative but because, for the regime that rules it (that is, Vladimir Putin and his clique of cronies), no alternative was tolerable.

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From "collapse of" to "vertical of" power

Everyone with a vague understanding of recent history is likely to be aware of the fact that the Russian Federation of December '91 was a state in name only. The 1993 constitutional crisis produced the "super-presidential" constitution that Putin later inherited.

The economic "shock therapy", implemented under Yegor Gaidar and Anatoly Chubais, collapsed the Russian GDP, wiped out household savings, and reduced male life expectancy by almost ten years in less than a decade. The loans-for-shares auctions converted state firms into oligarchic empires, and the country defaulted on its loans in August 1998.

All of this, as well as the military adventures in Chechnya, led to Yeltsin (who, at this point, was ailing and surrounded by a "family" of oligarchs and relatives) handing power to a little-known FSB director on the last day of the century.

Putin's first decade in power can be understood as the methodical construction of what he called the "vertical of power". Regional governors were stripped of autonomy, as were the oligarchs. Independent television networks (such as NTV and ORT) were reclaimed from their respective owners, and the arrest of Yukos CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky signaled that the oligarchs who survived - both metaphorically and literally - that they would serve the state and its interests, not the other way around.

Experts widely treat the Yukos-affair as the moment the so-called siloviki - former members of the security services, such as the (today) well-known Igor Sechin, Nikolai Patrushev, and Alexander Bortnikov - displaced the leftovers of the Yeltsin-era "liberal" reformers. However, treating the regime Putin built as a simple autocracy is, .. well, too simple.

The formal institutions of Russian policymaking are nothing more than executive agencies where policies are announced and applied, not discussed and decided. The real decisions are made by informal networks of confidants. I'm saying networks because treating the siloviki as a monolithic entity misunderstands the actual structure of Russian governance.

In his book "The Code of Putinism", author Brian Taylor describes the siloviki as a "solar system" of interlocking clans bound by what he calls the "code of Putinism"; shared ideas (such as conservatism, statism, anti-Western-ism), and emotions (resentment, inherent sense of vulnerability, almost pathological need for "respect").

What the correct label for the Putinist system is has been, and continues to be, endlessly debated. Some, like Timothy Frye in his book "Weak Strongman", call Russia a "personalist autocracy", Timothy Snyder called it "fascism" (an attribution that was intensely resisted by several prominent political scientists and historians), others call it a kleptocracy. But no matter what we call it, it's clear that the system Putin built is more complex than "simple" authoritarianism.

There is, however, one clear-cut, simple part of the system that is of utmost importance: Putin. Russia no longer has politics, it has Putin. (I wish I would have come up with this myself. Unfortunately that's not the case, I stole that somewhere, yet forget where from. My apologies for not providing a source.). The 2020 constitutional amendments completed the transition from managed-succession to a regime explicitly built around a single man.

Identity for a constitution

Putin might have inherited the constitution, a rather favorable one, from Yeltsin, but he also inherited an ideological vacuum. One that he had to fill in order for his regime to stay viable. And fill it he did, although the new Russian identity is one assembled from fragments more so than fashioned from a coherent doctrine.

The substrate is trauma. The Russian experience of 1991 could be describe as a "triple loss". Loss of empire, loss of ideology, and of the very essence of identity. The phrase "the wild nineties" is more than a cynical invention by the Kremlin to justify its rule. It's a mental model shared by large parts of the Russian population, since ordinary Russians did indeed experience humiliation, poverty, and a perceived loss of dignity.

What the Kremlin did was take this mental model, these memories, and learned to articulate and amplify them into a durable political resource. Yeltsin's reforms became, in the proscribed retrospect narrative, an American-imposed catastrophe. Things like the eastwards expansion of NATO or the Budapest Memorandum became symbols of national degradation. Putin and the state he created became the antithesis, positioned explicitly as such. A strong state, restored sovereignty, recovered dignity.

Into this void, or on top of the substrate, flowed three ideological streams that still largely structure Russian public discourse. The first is the concept of the "Russian World", Russkiy Mir. Institutionalized through a state-funded foundation and theologically elaborated by Patriarch Kirill as a civilizational space founded on (eastern) orthodoxy, Russian language and culture, and especially the common historical memory, it became a core tenant of Russian state ideology.

At the same time it is deliberately elastic. Sometimes it's soft-power outreach to the diaspora, sometimes a claim over all Russian-speakers, sometimes even some sort of civilizational messianism (comparable to Islamist cries of "Islam is the solution!"). It is also, from the outside, hilariously over-the-top at some points.

In March 2024 the World Russian People's Council declared that the war against Ukraine was a "holy war against a West immersed in Satanism". Sure, the consequences of this are very real, as is the suffering of Ukraine from them. But .. come on.

The second stream is a reinvention of Russia as a civilization-state rather than a nation-state, a framing progressively enshrined in foreign policy concepts - which goes hand in hand with the memory cult around the Second World War, "The Great Patriotic War" in Russian parlance. It's a part of history that allowed Communists and anti-Communists (as well as pretty much every other political part) to be united around an unambiguous narrative of sacrifice and redemption.

One of the biggest institutional carriers of these ideological streams is the Russian Orthodox church, which has undergone a dramatic revival since 1991 - in a process that can be called ideological subordination, with the church subjecting itself completely to the will of the state.

Examples for this subordination can be found in Patriarch Kirill's "Forgiveness Sunday" sermon on March 6th, 2022, in which he framed the invasion of Ukraine as defense against Western "gay parades" and moral decay. He has also, repeatedly, declared that soldiers who die in Ukraine have their sins forgiven, which is a near-formal equivalent to "Deus Vult!", of crusade indulgence.

The cost of this subordination has been schism. Large parts of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church have broken with Moscow, and the Ecumenical Patriarch has condemned Kirill's stance as "damaging to the prestige of all Orthodoxy" - an excellent example for events and actions inside of Russia having a direct impact on the "near abroad"

The near abroad that really wasn't. At least not anymore.

The concept of the "near abroad" emerged in late 1991 as roughly 25 million ethnic Russians woke up outside of the Russian Federation. In his paper "The End of the Near Abroad", Thomas de Waal describes that the phrase "simultaneously named a new arrangement of sovereignty and an old familiarity, a longstanding spatial entitlement and a range of geopolitical emotions".

But what started out as an ambitious project, attempting soft integration at first, ended up a failed project after Putin resorted to violence, which has in turn destroyed residual goodwill, drained Russian capabilities, and created security vacuums that China, Turkey, Iran, and other actors have rushed to fill.

The institutional architecture of Russian primacy - institutions such as the Commonwealth of Independent States, the Collective Security Treaty Organization, the Eurasian Economic Union, the Russia-Belarus Union State, .. - has hollowed out.

The CSTO's only "genuine" deployment was the January 2022 operation to rescue Kazakhstan's President Tokayev from domestic unrest. Other than that it refused to assist Armenia when Azerbaijan seized its territory in September 2022 and stood aside during the Kyrgyz-Tajik border war in the same month, shattering its credibility in the process. The EAEU, which Russia represents with 87 percent of bloc GDP, was always more a veto on members' Western integration than a genuine economic community.

This has not been without consequences for Russia. Kazakhstan's President Tokayev, rescued by CSTO troops just months before, refused to recognize the DNR and LNR at the St. Petersburg forum in 2022, calling them "quasi-states". China now dominates regional infrastructure, Turkey is gaining more influence in the South Caucasus through its alliance with Azerbaijan. And the refusal to support Armenia in its lasting conflict with Azerbaijani has led Armenia's Prime Minister Pashinyan to freeze CSTO participation in 2024, signing an EU Integration Act in 2025, and the likely formal withdrawal from the CSTO in the coming months.

Ironically enough the paradox of Russia's neighborhood is that it has never been more economically intertwined with Russia through sanction-evasion flows, nor more politically suspicious of it. Russia's quest for a privileged sphere has produced the opposite of what it sought: a region that does business with Moscow while trusting it less than at any time since the fall of the Soviet Union. Something that the "near abroad" shares with "the West".

Failed integration: a tragedy of mutual reinforcement

Similar to the debate around the exact nature of the Russian political system, the question of why Russia and the West failed to integrate after 1991 is both unanswered and subject to intense discussion. Depending on who you ask you are going to get wildly different answers, but they can be roughly summed up into three camps.

The first camp locates the primary cause in Western strategic choices. Famous names like John Mearsheimer and George Kennan argue that the expansion of the NATO alliance violated an implicit 1990 bargain, predictably generated nationalist backlash, and crossed Russian red lines most clearly drawn at the April 2008 Bucharest summit declaration that Ukraine and Georgia "will become members of NATO".

The historical record on the 1990 assurances partially vindicates both sides. In her book "Not One Inch" Mary Sarotte confirms that James Baker did indeed tell Gorbachev that there would be "no extension of NATO's jurisdiction one inch to the east" and that NATO Secretary-General Manfred Wörner said that the alliance "would not deploy NATO troops outside of the territory of the FRG".

However, the author also shows that the Bush administration walked these statements back within weeks, that the eventual Two-Plus-Four Treaty contained no formal non-expansion pledge, and that U.S. officials exploited Gorbachev's weakness rather than correcting his misreading. In conclusion, no written promise was broken, but reasonable Soviet interlocutors could have understood informal words as commitments - ultimately leading to a semantic-moral dispute that will never be fully resolved.

The second camp locates the failure inside Russia, treating Russian revanchism as the independent variable. Experts such as the author Timothy Snyder, in his book "The Road to Unfreedom" argue that Russia's trajectory reflects a centuries-long pattern of imperial self-conception, weak institutions, and the absence of rule of law which produced autocracy and confrontation with the West under Tsarism, Bolshevism, and Putinism alike - regardless of what the West was doing.

The third camp describes a structural tragedy: a collapsing nuclear-armed (former) empire whose elites retained imperial self-conception which collided with a triumphant liberal order expanding through institutional enlargement, with no obvious meeting point between them. Genuine integration would have required the West to slow enlargement and grant Russia co-equal status, and Russia to become a post-imperial liberal democracy. Neither side proved willing or even able.

Sequencing mistakes compounded the problem. As an example example, some Western experts argue that the early Russian economic shock-therapy failed because the West never provided the Marshall Plan-style financing Russia had proposed. While one can reasonably argue that reforms worked where implemented and that Russia's problems stemmed from political resistance, the shared truth is that the West indeed never made a serious economic offer comparable to post-WWII Western Europe.

Speaking of "shared truth", I would argue that the fairest reading is that integration failed through mutual reinforcement, rather than any single cause. Russian official narratives of encirclement, hypocrisy, and double standards have genuine empirical foundations - Kosovo, Iraq, Libya, missile defense, selective sanctions, .. - even when they exaggerate. Similarly, Western narratives of Russia as a revisionist autocracy also have genuine foundations - Chechnya, Georgia, Crimea, Skripal, Navalny, MH17, obviously Ukraine, and an endless list of others - even when they ignore Western contributions.

After the Cold War ended it wasn't really the case of the triumph of one side's worldview, but the consolidation of each side's worst suspicions about the other, amplified by domestic politics in both, and cemented by flashpoints neither side managed to defuse. Flashpoints that, in hindsight borderline inevitably, would lead to war.

Why Russia Putin chose war

As with the failed integration of the Russian Federation after the fall of the Soviet Union, there's no single explanation for why the full-scale invasion of Ukraine eventually happened. As tempting as it would be to ascribe it to Putin going insane during the pandemic, or to elite interests, or to systemic failures in the different Russian intelligence agencies, .. unfortunately the world isn't that simple, doesn't work like that. But all of these things do indeed have an impact.

Putin's July 2021 essay "On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians" makes explicit claims that Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians constitute a single triune nation, that Ukrainian nationhood is an artificial Western project, that modern Ukraine's borders are illegitimate Soviet constructs, and that an anti-Russian Ukraine would be "comparable to weapons of mass destruction aimed at Russia".

Look, I'm not an expert on authoring political essays, but I'd be willing to argue that it might be better if politicians, especially in such an influential position, would stick to their actual job, rather than writing essays like that. There's a reason for why they are politicians, not essayists or historians, political scientists. But who am I to judge.

The authors Serhii Plokhy and Mikhail Zygar both read the full-scale invasion as the last war of Russian imperial decolonization, analogous to the post-1945 wars that accompanied the unwinding of the British and French empires. The war plan's maximalism support this reading, with captured orders showing that Moscow's plan was for a 10-day active phase followed by occupation and formal annexation by August 2022. So does Putin remarking to George W. Bush that "Ukraine is not a country" and comparing himself to Peter the Great in June of 2022.

The aforementioned paper has likely not been created in a vacuum, or out of boredom, but might well be the product of Putin's personal ideological radicalization, enabled by institutional closure. Catherine Belton, in "Putin's People" and Mikhail Zygar argue that it's likely that Putin has, over the years, drifted from pragmatic authoritarianism toward messianic imperial nostalgia, after the 2011 Moscow protests, the 2014 Maidan, and COVID isolation.

With a mindset like this, the miscalculation and failures by Russian intelligence services had a particularly negative impact on the situation. In the weeks and months leading to the full-scale invasion, the FSB's Fifth Service (responsible for the near abroad) did not deliver a realistic assessment of the situation, it delivered what the Tsar wanted to hear - that Ukrainian resistance would collapse immediately and that Russian forces would be welcomed as heroes and liberators.

Additionally there might have been a range of supporting factors, supplementary drivers. Domestic political factors - such as the economic stagnation since 2014, pre-election legitimacy needs ahead of the March 2024 vote, memory of the 2014 "Crimea Effect" might have influenced Putin's decision making process, as might have the increasingly clear failure of Putin's hybrid-influence strategy in Ukrainian politics.

His closest ally Viktor Medvedchuk was under treason charges, pro-Russian-TV channels had been shut down, and the Zelensky government was pursuing NATO membership more aggressively than its predecessors. In front of the background of the frozen conflict that the annexation of Crimea and the Donbas war provided, 2022 looked like a way to finish what 2014 had begun, before Ukraine consolidated as a Western-aligned democracy whose existence Putin had come to regard as an existential threat to his regime. Ideally, that "finish" would take three days, nothing more than a quick "special military operation".

The "three days" that remade Russia

By now, five years later, we are all well aware that the invasion that was meant to take three days has lasted much longer than that, and the Russia that emerges from this situation is barely recognizable as the country that began it.

The front line, from a strategic point of view, is largely stuck. Not that it has ever moved significantly to begin with, with Russia capturing roughly 160 square miles per month in the last few years (which, given the size of Ukraine, is .. not a lot, especially given the horrendous losses the Russian Armed Forces have suffered in the process).

The same thing happened on a political level. A Trump administration peace plan, leaked in November 2025 and heavily tilted toward Russian demands, collapsed after European and Ukrainian counter proposals. All other efforts at reaching a comprehensive, or even reasonably-sized local, ceasefire have failed as well.

The human cost is staggering. Verifiable numbers are, for obvious reasons, hard to come by. But it's reasonable to assume that Russia is well on the way to have suffered 250.000 confirmed military deaths, with casualties including wounded now widely estimated to be around one million - making this Russia's second-deadliest conflict in a century. Russia has compensated through contract recruitment at extraordinary costs, roughly $4 billion in enlistment bonuses in the first half of 2025 alone, with average regional sign-on bonuses rising from 1.23 million rubles in October 2024 to 2.17 million rubles a year later.

While the Russian economy has shown remarkable resilience, it is now visibly stagnating. After apocalyptic 2022 predictions, Russia grew 3.6 percent in 2023 and 4.1 percent in 2024 on a wave of defense spending. That boom has reversed, with annual GDP growth recessing since the first quarter of 2025. Current data is not widely available, but more and more assessments of Russia being straddled by a technical recession can be found online.

Oil and gas revenue collapsed from $146 billion in 2024 to $111 billion in 2025, just 23 percent of federal budget revenue, the lowest share in two decades. The Rosneft and Lukoil sanctions of October 2025 have proven unusually effective as well: Indian state refiners cut Russian imports 29 percent month-on-month in December, and secondary-sanctions fear has constrained global Russian oil operations.

Domestic repression has expanded into a durable architecture. Human Rights Watch documented 72 criminal cases in the first half of 2025 alone for violations of the foreign-agent law; 355 journalists and outlets are foreign-agent designated. The 2023 Supreme Court designation of the "International LGBT Movement" as extremist has produced criminal sentences including the prosecution of three publishers for selling fiction with LGBTQIA+ themes. On the other hand, even pro-war bloggers have been disciplined, signaling that the Kremlin's tolerance for "ultra-patriots" has hardened since Prigozhin and the Wagner mutiny of June 2023.

Russia's foreign-policy pivot has been real but asymmetric. The February 2022 "no limits"-partnership with China delivered record trade of $244 billion in 2024, but this number continues to fall ever since. With Russia accounting for just three percent of the market for Chinese goods while Russia itself imports half of its supplies from there, China is Russia's indispensable lifeline, while Russia is replaceable for China. Aware of this fact, Russia has tried to build an "alternative architecture", by deepening relationships with India and Turkey, as well as the BRICS expansion to Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia, the UAE, and Indonesia - with limited success.

The long-term implications are coming into focus more and more. Russia's wartime deaths, emigration of the young and educated, collapsed immigration, a, for lack of a better word, "fertility decline" compound earlier trends. Structural isolation from Western technology and capital is, for the foreseeable future, permanent. Import substitution in aviation, semiconductors, advanced manufacturing, and medical equipment continues to struggle.

On top of that, the succession question remains unresolved. Putin, who turned 73 in 2026, has no designated heir, and the fragmented fractions in power - only held together by Putin as arbiter - are unlikely to be able to provide one they can all agree on in case of Putin's death. Not exactly a great outlook.

A country that cannot go back (aka "Conclusion")

One of the biggest challenges in taking an analytic look at geopolitics is refusing to accept tempting simplifications - in this case, three at once. It is tempting to reduce Russia to Putin, at though a single man's psychology and KGB formation explain everything, but this misses the elite networks, ideological substrate, and societal structures that made his choices possible and that will likely outlast him.

It is tempting to reduce Russia to NATO, as though Western policy alone produced the confrontation. This misses the imperial self-conception, institutional pathology, and deliberate authoritarian consolidation that predates and transcends any specific Western grievance.

And it is tempting to reduce Russia to ideology, as though Eurasianism (mainly including this at this late stage of this post just so nobody can yell at me for completely ignoring Dugin, although he would deserve it in my humble opinion), Russkiy Mir, orthodoxy, or fascism named a coherent doctrine driving state behavior - while the available evidence instead shows an eclectic emotional pastiche, sustained more by repression and media saturation than by mass enthusiasm, serving the regime rather than directing it.

The Russia of 2026 is a country trapped between irreversible choices and unsustainable commitments. It cannot withdraw from Ukraine without undermining the regime whose survival depends on the war's continuation. It cannot win the war on any timeline that its economy, demography, or military can sustain. It cannot reintegrate with Western capital and technology without the political transformation its rulers have spent 25 years preventing. It cannot escape dependence on China without a reorientation toward the West that the same rulers have declared impossible.

The result is a state that has learned to exist in permanent emergency, with a wartime mobilization economy, an almost fully repressed civil society, a foreign policy of managed hostility, and a society that has learned to accept this as the new normal.

What this means for the West is neither that Russia is inevitably hostile nor that integration was ever possible on the terms either side actually offered. It means that the Russia the West confronts today is the product of thirty years of choices made in (primarily Moscow), compounded by a regime that discovered it survive only by externalizing the contradictions of its own rule.

The post-Cold War settlement that never quite was ended not with a treaty but with a tank column crossing the Belarusian border in February 2022. What replaces it will depend on developments inside Russia that the West can only influence at the margins. Developments that, for the foreseeable future, will continue to be shaped by the lived memory of humiliation, the institutional habits of empire, and the choices of one man running out of time to make them.