I have been asked why Trump, who is supposedly Putin’s friend, did not block the new American sanctions package. And just how “hellish” these sanctions will be for Russia.

Look, I would be careful about saying that Trump is Putin’s friend. Trump is nobody’s friend.

But it appears that Putin does appeal to him. Perhaps he would like to have the same powers Putin has. But American society is not built for that. Trump has to fight much harder political battles to resolve the questions he wants to resolve. And, as we can see, he does not always succeed.

Nevertheless, the sanctions package approved by Congress looks very tough. It provides for tariffs of up to 500% on Russian goods, and up to 100% on goods from certain major buyers of Russian oil and gas or countries facilitating Russian oil sanctions evasion. It also creates additional possibilities for action against the shadow fleet.

But we have to understand what powers Trump has under this legislation.

There are mandatory measures in the law. At the same time, Trump has broad powers to waive them in America’s national interest. That gives him an increase in his own powers, with considerable freedom over how he applies these measures against Putin.

Trade between Russia and the United States is already very small. Imports of Russian oil have long since been stopped. What remains could easily be presented as an exception, if that is what Trump wants to do.

The same question arises with third countries.

We know Russia’s two largest trading partners: China and India. How likely is Trump to impose the full 100% tariffs on either of them? I think that is extremely unlikely.

The legislation allows tariffs of up to 100%. That leaves him room to choose.

And there is another point here. The Supreme Court struck down tariffs Trump had imposed because he did not have the authority to impose them. This legislation gives him a way to replace some of those tariffs with similar ones introduced under a new law.

For Trump and his administration, that is an opportunity. It would be strange if he did not take advantage of it.

I would not say that all this has nothing to do with his relationship with Putin. But Trump has so much freedom over how to use these powers that I would not make that relationship the central explanation.

Yes, he now has another instrument in his hands.

And I expect him to use it just as he has used the instruments available to him before.

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I was recently asked how Putin could end this war without admitting his failure, given that he cannot achieve his military goals and has no exit strategy. The question contains an assumption: that he is looking for an exit. Very likely he is not looking for one at all. That is the fundamental error of thought in the West.

Putin’s position is this:

You Europeans will stop supporting Ukraine in six months. You Americans will not use force against me. I will talk to you politely. I don’t want a fight. But I will continue to do what I want. And who are you anyway?

To understand why he thinks he can afford this, you have to look at what he sees inside Russia, and at what he sees in the West.

The war of all Russians

After the full-scale invasion I said it was of the utmost importance for Putin to turn his war into the war of all Russians. He has not managed it. For a long time he tried to wage it as a “special military operation.” The mobilization of 2022 showed that Russian society is not willing to understand this war as something personal.

From history we know that Russians tolerate an unsuccessful war for no more than two years. Putin has done everything he can to avoid setting that stopwatch in motion. But since the Ukrainian attacks on Russian oil refineries and depots this year, the countdown has been running.

The numbers show it. Approval of the war has risen because of the Ukrainian attacks, by seven percentage points since February. Putin’s personal approval ratings have collapsed. In the past both values rose together. Now they move in opposite directions. If military activity continues beyond 2027, his ratings will fall even more significantly.

For the moment he seems willing to pay a high political price. But declining ratings shift the center of power to the security forces that keep society under control. A rule can be backed by the security forces, but that is uncomfortable for Putin. How long he is still willing to pay that price is a question for the psychologists.

Almost the entire Russian elite is against the war. But as long as there is no dramatic defeat on the battlefield, the president does not have to fear this elite too much.

The mood before the election

The mood in the country could be read even before the vote. Take the anti-war party Yabloko. It was initially allowed to run because it was expected to get one or two percent. Then, within two weeks, its support shot up so high that the Kremlin got really scared. By our calculations Yabloko was suddenly at ten percent and could have risen further, to 20 or 25 percent. These were mainly protest voters.

For a democratic society, 25 percent of protest voters is not a critical mass. For a dictatorship it is a very strong signal, and the Kremlin was afraid it would become public. That is why Yabloko is now not allowed to run.

We estimate the anti-war opposition at about 15 percent of the population. On the other side are the “Z” turbo-patriots, the opposition from the other direction, and they also make up about 15 percent. The remaining 70 percent are politically inactive and make their decision in the moment.

We can see how far the opposition reaches through our channels on social media. If you take all the opposition media together, we reach about ten million people a day. In an extreme situation, such as the Wagner mutiny, that rises to as many as 30 million. It happens every time people realize that change is possible and that it depends on them.

Putin needs a mobilization

International observers expect a mobilization after the election. I am absolutely sure Putin needs one. It does not have to be announced. It will simply take place.

To allow a rotation of his troops alone, Putin needs 300,000 additional men. And because of the higher demands of this kind of warfare, he does not need just anyone. He needs educated people. By my estimate, half of them would have to be students and engineers.

If he were pragmatic, he would have to stop the war as soon as possible. But when I look at his psychological state, I have the impression that many of his decisions lately have not been based on pragmatism at all.

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What Putin sees in the West

When you get inside Putin’s head, he thinks that Ukraine is tired. The West too. In Germany there will be a change of government, if not today then tomorrow, and the new government will stop supporting Ukraine. The same will happen in France next year. So I just have to hold on a little longer, Putin thinks, and then everything will be fine.

Every time the EU discusses a new aid package for Ukraine, it struggles just to make a decision. Maybe tomorrow it will not make one. So I, Putin, have to remain steadfast. That is his reasoning, and Europe has given him no reason to abandon it.

I have said nothing about the Americans so far. That is exactly how it looks in Putin’s head: there are no Americans out there. He thinks, “I will always find a common language with Trump.” If Trump were to change his position, the entire picture I have described would change immediately.

As long as China supplies Russia

Many people expect the economic crisis to force Putin’s hand. I do not expect an economic collapse. Current revenues from trade, including oil and gas, are enough to buy the necessary goods in China.

The second component is redistribution within the economy. Production capacity and human resources are geared to military needs, which means the infrastructure is not maintained or modernized. Barges sink, pipelines explode, the heating fails in winter, and in some regions five-storey buildings collapse. That is increasing, but it will not become critical in the next two years.

The only economic factor that could put an end to the war is the absence of supplies from China. As long as China continues to supply Russia, the situation can deteriorate endlessly and Putin can still continue the war.

Russia’s other partners have started to speak differently. India’s Prime Minister Modi recently said it was time to end the war. Kazakhstan’s President Tokayev was surprisingly critical. Those words do not mean much. Perhaps they said them in public and afterwards went to Putin: “Well, we had to say something to Washington.” And Putin replied: “All right, you keep buying my oil and supplying us with goods.”

It is a painful loss of reputation for Putin in the circle he moves in. But my impression is that strategic perspectives do not really interest him at the moment. He is totally fixated on winning this war. He is learning the names of small Ukrainian villages, and he does not bother to know the Kazakh president’s patronymic. That would be far more important than remembering the name “Mala Tokmachka.”

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Europe has to find the strength

Germany has responded to the sabotage in Leipzig by closing the Russian consulate in Bonn and the Russian House in Berlin, announcing sharper border controls for Russians and sharply reducing the number of tourist visas. Experience shows that sabotage is not really related to the number of visas issued to Russians. Many of the people involved in sabotage have Western passports; some were even born in the West. Such measures do have symbolic significance, and reducing the number of Russian staff in diplomatic missions reduces the possibilities of the Russian intelligence services. But I am not sure this is the best way.

What Europe would have to do is find the strength to actually show Putin what it always says. We will support Ukraine for as long as necessary. We have decided on the rearmament plans and we will implement them. And according to these plans, in two years we will produce more weapons than Russia.

In that case Putin’s psychological state would look completely different. He would think: my God, I have to end this war as soon as possible, otherwise it is my end.

Unfortunately, Europe has not yet shown him this inner firmness. Instead, the impression emerges that it could stop the aid tomorrow. As long as that impression holds, Putin will keep waiting, and he will not be looking for a way out.

Anyone can make a mistake a couple of times. But the number of such factual errors is growing. At times, you get the impression that the man lives in a world of fantasies he does not think to check. And we are talking about a man who holds all power in the country.

Here is what we see:

• Orcas hunting polar bears. Putin tells a story about orcas attacking polar bears in packs and tearing them apart. I am not against vivid metaphors, but they still have to be based on facts.

• The Oreshnik missile and the Tunguska meteorite. He compares the missile’s kinetic impact to a falling meteorite, invokes Tunguska and talks about impacts that formed entire lakes. Someone brought him this nonsense, and he repeated it.

• Naryshkin at the Security Council. At the meeting immediately before the war, he presses Naryshkin to speak plainly and challenges his hesitant “I will support” with the demand to say whether he supports the proposal. We remember how afraid Naryshkin was.

• The name of Kazakhstan’s president. Putin repeatedly gets Tokayev’s name and patronymic wrong. They are not simple, but not so difficult that he could not have learnt them after so many attempts.

• Not using the internet. He does not use the internet and gets his information about the world from those familiar briefing folders. Being proud of that is like being proud of not using electricity or running water—especially when the internet is a principal means of checking facts.

• Military successes in “Komsomolsk”. He describes fighting and Russian military advances in a non-existent Ukrainian city called Komsomolsk. Buildings have supposedly been taken, and the advance continues.

• Confusing the Oskil River with Stary Oskol. He describes Ukrainian troops almost surrounded on the left bank of a river he calls “Stary Oskol”—the name of a Russian city. Of course, anyone can confuse a name or misread it. But his strength used to be precisely his sharp memory and attention to detail.

• A prepared interview cut after publication. He gives an interview to his chief propagandist, visibly reading his answers from a teleprompter. The interview is published, then the Kremlin’s version is shortened by around six minutes—almost a quarter. The reporting establishes the reading and the cuts, but does not establish that difficulty reading caused the edits.

• Coughing during a recorded greeting. An unedited recording appears online showing him coughing and complaining of an irritated throat. He says he has spoken a great deal that day. There is nothing abnormal about this. But selling himself as untouched by time is becoming harder.

• A public “hurrah” removed from the official footage. His garbled cheer was omitted from the versions published by the Kremlin and state television.

• The disappearing ice-swimming footage. The Kremlin claims that he continues taking his Epiphany plunge, but stops providing photographs or video. It first showed him taking part in 2018. There would be no question if it had never shown these swims. But it did.

• Long absences covered by prerecorded appearances. He disappears from public view for extended periods while previously recorded footage creates the appearance of work. Nearly identical offices in different residences make it look as though he is at the same desk every day.

• Kursk, fuel shortages and burning refineries. These are problems the whole country discusses. Yet, to my eye, he often seems not to notice them. That is my assessment of his public response; the events themselves are documented.

• Elephants from Laos during an attack on a Moscow refinery. On the day of a major drone attack on the Moscow oil refinery, he publicly discusses elephants from Laos.

• Periods of almost no travel around Russia. He goes through long periods without regional visits. When he resumes travelling, he largely avoids regions of European Russia within range of Ukrainian drones. His concern for his own safety increasingly shapes his movements.

• His old displays of courage. Submarines, flights with Siberian cranes, dives for amphorae: everyone understood that these were staged, but the image was there. To my eye, today’s Putin is unwilling to accept even the minimal risk needed for such performances.

• Secret bunkers and years of quarantine requirements. He spends long periods in bunkers. For years, people had to quarantine before meeting him. The requirement was shortened over time and was finally lifted in early 2026.

I do not want to indulge in ageism. I am no young man myself. Taken separately, there is nothing criminal or frightening in these things. Putin has not lost his mind or become senile and, for his age, is in reasonably good shape. Were he an ordinary man, I would say he had long years of retirement and fishing ahead of him.

The problem is that Putin is not a pensioner. Nor is he simply the president of a nuclear power. He has concentrated all power, all authority, every lever of government in his own hands. He personally makes the key decisions and personally maintains the balance of interests between all the elite groups.

Such a system is harmful and inefficient. It also demands enormous work and nervous strain from its sole leader. Brezhnev had the Politburo to back him up—a real, not decorative, collective governing body. The institutions that could provide Putin with a safeguard or share responsibility no longer exist.

The cost of a mistake here is much higher than for a pensioner out fishing. That makes us look differently at his mistakes, slips of the tongue, fantastic stories and declining attention and capacity for work.

The health and cognitive abilities of a man on whom questions of war and peace depend, and who periodically threatens everyone with a nuclear strike, are not a matter of idle curiosity. They are a matter of legitimate public interest.

I think Putin has long needed to retire. But there seems to be nobody who can tell him. He himself does not realise it—and is unlikely ever to do so.

I am deeply skeptical that Putin will agree to stop the war without achieving the goals he has declared. He is convinced that the political changes which may take place in Europe will lead to a reduction in support for Ukraine. And if that support decreases, he believes he will be able to achieve his objectives and, in effect, force Ukraine to capitulate.

He is counting on these changes over the next six to nine months. While he has that expectation, I find it very difficult to believe that he will agree to stop.

His objectives are quite clear.

- First, the complete seizure of Donbas.
- Second, restrictions on Ukraine’s foreign policy and defense policy.

These are conditions that, by and large, no sovereign country can accept. After accepting such restrictions, it would be left completely defenseless against the Kremlin’s next military aggression. When Putin might take it into his head to attack again, nobody knows. It is impossible to predict.

There may be progress on particular questions, especially limiting attacks on the infrastructure used to supply food to world markets. But an actual end to the fighting this year is something I remain very doubtful about.

This post draws on NEST Centre’s analysis. Subscribe to their weekly briefings and receive it in your inbox every Monday.

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Germany

The AfD’s victory in Saxony-Anhalt has, of course, caused a very serious discussion in Europe, and certainly in Germany itself. The party received 43.8% of the vote while advocating an end to sanctions against Russia, military assistance to Ukraine, and a return to purchases of Russian oil and gas. All of this encourages Putin’s expectations.

Nevertheless, we have to understand what kind of election this was. It was an election in one relatively small German ‘state’. Moreover, in eastern Germany, which has been a base of support for the radical right for decades. I think it highly unlikely that the AfD will achieve the same result in a federal election. And it is the federal government that determines German foreign policy.

This is a very important signal. But let me say again: it is a signal, and the German government and German political parties still have time to make changes to their policies.

The conduct of some of these parties in the European Parliament is certainly disturbing. We recently held an event there—we, meaning the Anti-War Committee of Russia—to discuss why Russia’s elections cannot be considered legitimate. A few days beforehand, Russia’s foreign intelligence service issued a statement about enemies preparing to discredit the elections. Then representatives of right-wing European parties turned up and kicked up an enormous row, trying to prevent even an ordinary expert hearing. In effect, they were supporting the position of Russian foreign intelligence. This was a fairly routine discussion, and they were trying to stop even that.

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But we also need to understand why people vote for these parties.

Of course, there are people in Germany who think it would be good to receive cheap Russian gas again, and perhaps to help Ukraine less. In Saxony-Anhalt, that position has particular importance because chemical enterprises there depended heavily on cheap Russian gas.

Nevertheless, if we look at the German economy as a whole, the practical significance of restoring those supplies is much smaller. Russia offers discounts to its customers, and it is these discounts that some AfD voters are counting on. But the savings are not decisive for an economy of Germany’s size.

In my view, even assistance to Ukraine is a secondary question for German voters. The central question is migration. This is a serious concern for German voters, and they direct that concern at their government.

If the government hears its population, the AfD can go back below the five-per-cent threshold. If it does not, the German political system, and the European political system more generally, face serious upheaval. These problems will remain with European politicians for years.

France

From this point of view, Marine Le Pen coming to power in France could create considerably greater problems. We would be talking about the presidency, and the French president has exceptionally broad powers in foreign policy.

But there is another question here. We cannot simply equate the radical right with supporters of Putin. Or, incidentally, with supporters of Trump. In many cases these are isolationists, opponents of the Atlantic alliance.

We have seen this kind of expectation before. Stalin tried to be friends with Hitler. There were raw-material supplies, industrial supplies, all these apparently mutually beneficial relations. We know how that ended. I very much hope the lessons have been learned, and even today’s most extreme European parties do not display Hitler’s level of radicalism. But the assumption that such parties will necessarily be Russia’s friends deserves some skepticism.

For now, Putin expects their success to reduce support for Ukraine. That expectation is one reason I doubt he will agree to stop fighting without getting what he wants.

As for whether these politicians will turn out to be friends of Russia, or friends of Putin personally, that is something Mr Putin still has to find out.

For a closer look at Putin’s expectations of Europe’s rightward shift, read NEST’s weekly briefing and subscribe to receive a new one next Monday.

Under new management

Within a week of Prigozhin’s death in August 2023, Russia’s deputy defence minister and a military intelligence general were in Burkina Faso. They were offering its military ruler troops and political support. The Defence Ministry’s Africa Corps gradually absorbed fighters and contracts across the Sahel. Russia’s foreign intelligence service, the SVR, took charge of a revived version of Prigozhin’s African political operation.

In the Central African Republic, the government preferred to keep Wagner: its men already had relationships with local officers, and the authorities preferred paying through access to resources rather than cash. Wagner retained more autonomy there, while coordinating with Moscow’s military. It also guarded a very profitable asset: the Ndassima gold mine, whose development rights had gone to a Prigozhin-linked company. A 2025 report estimated the mine’s illicit annual revenue at more than $100 million.

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Campaigns of intimidation and PR

In May 2024, three Wagner men detained Joseph Figueira Martin, a Portuguese consultant for the American aid organisation FHI 360, in a bar in the Central African town of Zemio, with a local gendarme present. He was accused of spying for the United States. Why he was originally singled out remains unclear, but leaked Russian reports explain how political operatives used his imprisonment to attack American influence in the country.

Martin says his captors beat him and chained his wrists to his ankles. Later, in a police detention centre in Bangui, the capital, a Russian visitor arrived carrying cigars and a book with Prigozhin’s face on the cover. “I will kill you. You will die in Bangui,” Martin recalls him saying. Dossier identified the visitor as Denis Suprunov, a Wagner veteran and instructor. According to Martin, Suprunov almost cried when he spoke about his dead employer.

Outside the prison, Prigozhin’s former political staff were arranging a campaign against the prisoner. Radio Lengo Songo, founded by Prigozhin’s employees, published his photograph and called him an American spy. The organisers paid for dozens of articles and other press coverage, and arranged demonstrations against him. At one, mannequins were hung from makeshift gallows. Their reports claimed the campaign had weakened international pressure for Martin’s release and encouraged the Central African authorities to hold firm. He remained in custody until April 2026, when Portuguese diplomats negotiated his release.

From Africa to the Balkans

Other former Prigozhin employees were helping prepare unrest and sabotage in Europe. One operation involved Moldova, where Moscow has tried for years to prevent a decisive turn towards the West. In summer 2024, around 15 young Moldovans arrived at a camp near Banja Luka, in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Russian instructors taught them to operate drones and confront police. According to Moldova’s intelligence service, they were being prepared to organise unrest.

Dossier recognised several instructors from its investigations into Prigozhin. Georgy Bubnov had worked in security for his company Concord before going to the Central African Republic. Alexander Volkhonsky had taught surveillance and recruitment in Prigozhin’s African operation. Witnesses said Volkhonsky taught the Moldovan recruits how to break through police cordons and prepare incendiary mixtures. One trainee described being sent into Banja Luka to map government and diplomatic buildings, along with places from which to launch drones.

When Bosnian authorities discovered the camp, the instructors moved it to Serbia and finished the course there. Some recruits then headed home with drone equipment. Someone was supposed to collect it in Romania so they could enter Moldova without it, but nobody appeared. On 11 October 2024, they reached the Moldovan border with the equipment still in their bags and were arrested.

Recruiters also sought people already living in Europe. In March 2024, the Wagner-linked Telegram channel Grey Zone advertised a contact called “Privet-bot”. OCCRP journalists investigating sabotage recruitment reached a real person through it, offering paid assignments. Later advertisements in French asked for information about soldiers, police and intelligence officers.

Putin had every reason to distrust Prigozhin’s men after the mutiny. Yet his government kept employing them, and his officials took over much of the work they had been doing. The people now directing those operations bear responsibility for them, however long Prigozhin’s name remains attached.

Dossier’s documentary has more of the evidence. Also available as an article in Russian.

The siege lasted 3 days. All this time, students and teachers were held in cramped, unsanitary conditions, denied water or food, with no access to toilets. State TV deliberately lied to the public and claimed there were only 350 hostages—knowing damn well over 1,100 hostages were forced to drink urine instead of water.

It was also a pivotal moment for the now-head of RT, Margarita Simonyan, who rose to prominence for her broadcasts during the attack and whose “talents” were noticed.

At some point during the crisis, it became clear that successful negotiations to save the children were highly possible through the mediation of Chechen independence leader Aslan Maskhadov.

But to Putin, who positioned himself as a young and energetic new leader, engaging in dialogue with someone like Maskhadov would mean instant “loss of face”.

To stop Maskhadov from mediating and gaining legitimacy, the Kremlin ordered a sudden, bloody storming. It was not a rescue operation but a heavy military assault.

On Putin’s orders, Russian forces fired thermobaric weapons directly at the mined school building, detonating explosives and igniting a massive, fatal fire. They had one main priority: destroying the terrorists. Saving children came in second, if further down on the list.

Abandonment and Cynicism
The moment the cameras were turned off, the survivors were cut off from aid. The state that vaporized their school didn’t spend a single ruble to fix their shattered bones and burn scars.

I had to personally step in from my prison cell to coordinate and fund their medical rehabilitation because the federal authorities completely abandoned them. Adding insult to injury, when the parents received this financial help, the state sent them tax bills for it.

The political cynicism of the moment was simply astonishing. Putin used the heinous attack on children as the reason for abolishing the direct elections of regional governors.

Of course, in reality, this proposal had nothing to do with security. The sole reason for undoing the gubernatorial elections was to destroy federalism and secure lifelong rule and immunity for himself.

For two decades, Putin boycotted Beslan on the anniversaries of the tragedy. On major milestones like the 10th and 15th anniversaries, he flew to Mongolia to celebrate a century-old battle instead. In 2023, he designated September 3rd as “Victory over Japan”—a new holiday invented entirely to erase Ossetia’s pain from public memory.

The regime has consistently treated grieving families with immense cruelty. In 2016, Golos Beslana (Voice of Beslan)—an organization of mothers who lost their children—staged a public protest.

They wore T-shirts with a simple, devastating message: “Putin is the executioner of Beslan.”

They demanded answers about why the storming was conducted the way it was. Instead of answers, they were met with arrests, fines, and sentences of community service.

Eight years later, for the 20th anniversary in 2024, Putin staged a hasty, televised visit to the grieving town.

He was so unprepared and lacking in empathy that he got the number of dead children wrong on camera, saying 136 died instead of 186. The rest of the time he spent lecturing mothers about imaginary foreign conspiracies.

When the mothers asked why the official investigation remains unfinished after 20 years, Putin responded by saying that he was “hearing about this for the first time” and told them to talk to the chairman of the Investigative Committee, Bastrykin.

His sudden visit after 20 years of silence was nothing but a PR stunt and it had a clear purpose — to distract the country from his massive military failures in the Kursk during the Ukrainian incursion.

Beslan was the definitive, horrific proof that Putin is a sociopath who treats his own citizens as disposable for his power and ratings. If he will do this to his own citizens, he will do it to anyone. This is why I am so convinced that the real threat to global stability is not his departure, but his continued rule.

In the West, this keeps raising the same question: can Ukraine inflict damage on the Russian oil industry so critical that routine, background-mode repair no longer replaces the losses? Or will Russia simply patch things up, as it has so far and as Moscow insists it always will?

The short answer: yes, it can.

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Repairing — seriously repairing — a plant that has been hit with tens or hundreds of kilograms of explosives, a plant that has burned and been doused with water, is impossible without shutting it down. Work like that requires major capital repair, with the replacement of the units themselves.

That is not being done. What is being done is the opposite. Scheduled maintenance is being stopped, and by that means the plants squeeze out somewhat more fuel. The quality fuel they can no longer produce is being replaced with low-quality fuel, which duly ruins car engines. This relieves some of the tension on the gasoline market, and on the fuel market generally. But it’s not equal to repairing the plants, even if they’re kept operational and there’s no immediate shortage, they are dramatically degraded compared to baseline.

If that's the case, at what point do patches on top of patches on top of patches become critical, and everything breaks down completely?

No one will tell you that, and neither can I.

But this is the thing I know for certain: if fire burns around a refinery unit for long enough, and the unit heats up, then its structural strength decreases — its ability to hold weight, withstand pressure, and withstand temperature. By how much does it decrease? That can be calculated, but only by conducting very serious studies, and for those studies the units have to be stopped. And yet, nobody is stopping them. So in reality, the calculation can only be done approximately.

And no one will tell you that this particular strike will be the last one, the one after which the unit simply collapses. But the Ukrainians are continuing to strike the refineries and at some point this will lead to very heavy technological consequences that cannot be made good while the plants keep running. That is what irreparable means here: not that the damage looks dramatic today, but that it accumulates in the steel itself, faster than anything the current mode of operation can restore.

I very much hope these consequences stop at technology and do not claim more human lives. But that, too, is possible: if a hole has simply been punched in a unit, that is a disaster — but it is one kind of disaster. If at some moment a unit or a storage tank collapses and the fuel splashes out in all directions, and there are people standing nearby, that is a disaster of a completely different kind.

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I remember from my Yukos years that a significant number of units, and a significant number of storage tanks, stand on rises — they are placed so that fuel can drain from them downhill, by gravity; not all of them, but a significant share. Around them, there are containment berms.

But if such a tank, an enormous vessel, loses its structural strength in a single minute, and that can happen if it has been hit several times, then the fuel inside will spill out all at once. And it will flow downhill. Where will it flow? Who and what will be on its way? In some cases, people have managed to build settlements in these areas: somewhere dacha plots, somewhere outright residential neighborhoods. And, of course, no Russian official is going to tell those people any of this. If a catastrophe like that comes, the responsibility will lie with the man who started this war and works and lies every day to hide its consequences from his citizens.

No one can name the day when the patches give out — not in Kyiv, not in Washington, and not in Moscow. But the question is no longer whether Ukraine’s campaign is working, it’s what happens as the breaking point approaches.

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I am returning to you today in our regular format (in Russian) —answering your questions and reflecting on what happened over the past week, and, more importantly, what it really means for all of us.

Before we dive in, please take a moment to like this post on Substack and share your thoughts in the comments after reading it. I don’t ask for this out of vanity, though it is always appreciated, but because it is the only way to signal to the algorithms that our conversation matters and needs to reach more people.

Now, let’s get down to it.

What happened

Less than a week ago I was asked what it meant that Yabloko had been registered for the upcoming September Duma elections while Boris Nadezhdin was being forced out of the country.

I gave the answer that has been true for most of the last twenty years: the Kremlin likes to keep a single, tightly managed “opposition” option on the ballot. The technology for drawing whatever result the authorities want on the final protocol is more than sufficient for them to retain power. So, the numbers would come out slightly higher in Moscow, and somewhere around one percent nationally. Then Putin would wave that one percent around the world—and especially to his partners among other authoritarian regimes—as “proof” that Russian society is monolithically united behind him and his war.

At the same time, I said that anyone or anything capable of actually bringing anti-war voters together and showing that our real numbers are much higher than one percent would be removed.

I was talking about Lev Shlosberg and Boris Nadezhdin. When Russia’s Supreme Court stripped Yabloko of its election registration, it applied that rule to an entire party instead of an individual.

The formal reasons

The lawsuit was brought by Rodina—a party created by the Kremlin itself. The judge was Vyacheslav Kirillov, who previously declared Memorial an extremist organization. The Central Election Commission was represented by Sergey Sakharov, the same official who helped keep Alexei Navalny off the ballot in 2017.

The formal grounds cited for banning the country’s only registered anti-war party are laughable and include:

• Publishing images generated by ChatGPT (allegedly infringing on OpenAI’s rights).

• Using a photograph of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima (allegedly infringing the rights of the U.S. Army).

• Quoting classic Soviet pacifist songs like “Let There Always Be Sunshine” and “As Long As There Is No War.”

• A party logo allegedly copied from a 100-year-old poster by El Lissitzky.

Alongside these copyright claims came the usual boilerplate charges: that an anti-war platform constitutes “extremism” and that objecting to the persecution of LGBTQ people violates territorial integrity.

Nobody in that courtroom believed for a single second that this case was about El Lissitzky or Soviet songs (least of all the people arguing it.)

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Why?

So why did the Kremlin change its mind? Why discard a plan that Putin himself personally approved?

It comes down to simple numbers and authoritarian psychology.

Yabloko was initially let onto the ballot to draw protest votes away from the Communists. But then something unexpected happened: the party began to grow rapidly. State pollsters at VTsIOM recorded Yabloko at 3% nationally, 7–8% in Moscow and St. Petersburg, and 18% of voters saying they would consider voting for them—the highest potential figure in fifteen years. Russian Field showed 5.3% in Moscow, and the momentum over the ten days following registration was strictly upward, with six full weeks of legal campaigning still ahead.

The threshold to enter the State Duma is 5%. A political strategist working with the presidential administration summarized the Kremlin’s dilemma perfectly: nobody inside the system is looking to manage a sixth, unpredictable faction in the Duma.

A managed election does not require a weak opposition but requires a predictable one. The entire architecture of ballot qualification—from signature rules to political grounds for candidate disqualification, down to the tame opposition parties sitting in the Duma for two decades—exists for a single purpose: to guarantee a predictable result before a single vote is cast.

A party moving between 5% and 18%, running on television debates with an immediate ceasefire as its core platform, is an unknown quantity. Dictatorships cannot tolerate unknown quantities.

Five Hundred Apples Outside the Courtroom

While the judge was reading the verdict, around five hundred people gathered outside the courthouse. Mostly Muscovites under thirty, many attending their first street action, some too young to vote at all. They handed each other apples, sang Tsoi and Soviet cartoon songs, and drew the party logo on the pavement in chalk.

The crowd was not violent or threatening in any way. Just five hundred young people who were born entirely under Putin’s rule were volunteering their time and standing in the street for a party that was going to be given a made-up result anyway. The authorities looked at those young people, looked at the polling numbers, and drew the obvious conclusion that it was too risky

Grigory Yavlinsky said afterwards that this ruling was an admission of fear. I think he is right here.

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Vladimir Putin’s strategy rests on a simple assumption: time is on his side.

He expects Ukraine to run out of people, Western governments to lose interest and Russian society to absorb almost any cost without resisting. He does not need a convincing path to victory if he believes that everyone else will break first.

But that assumption is becoming less secure.

Russia’s economic reserves are being consumed. The military is struggling to find the technically capable personnel required by modern warfare, oil infrastructure is increasingly vulnerable. Meanwhile, after almost four years of hesitation, Europe has finally begun expanding its defence industry.

None of this means that Putin’s regime is about to collapse but it does mean that he does not have unlimited time.

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Sanctions are not an off switch

The new American sanctions are important because they would allow Washington to penalize major buyers of Russian energy, potentially including China and India.

But sanctions capable of stopping Putin’s war immediately do not exist.

China and India are large states with their own strategic interests. Neither will reorganize its foreign policy simply because Washington demands it. The current bill also gives the American president considerable discretion over whether and how its measures are applied.

Relations with China concern the future balance of power across the Asia-Pacific region. For any American administration, that is a larger strategic question than the war in Ukraine. It is therefore doubtful that Washington will risk a fundamental economic confrontation with Beijing solely to change Putin’s calculations.

Sanctions weaken the Russian regime but they take years to properly kick in.

The more immediate variable is Ukraine’s military capacity: weapons, ammunition, intelligence and the ability of Ukrainian society to sustain the war. That requires continuing Western support and a much larger European defence-industrial base.

Why Putin’s next mobilization will target skilled recruits

Modern warfare does not reward the Kremlin merely for putting more untrained men into uniform. It needs drone operators, engineers, technicians and people capable of learning complex systems quickly.

That is why the most important targets of any future mobilization would probably be students, recent graduates and educated young specialists.

Russia is already offering university students substantial financial incentives to join drone units as operators and engineers. This reveals where the military’s personnel shortage is most serious.

These people are also among those least willing to volunteer.

Their most likely response to forced mobilization is organized rebellion — the cost is too high under a de-facto totalitarian rule. It would be avoidance: hiding, evading the authorities or leaving Russia.

The Russian opposition abroad must prepare for that possibility. That’s why we work with Western governments to create realistic routes for endangered specialists to leave, receive visas, open bank accounts and adapt to life outside Russia. The Kremlin should not be allowed to convert an entire generation of educated Russians into military personnel.

The fuel crisis may ease, the underlying issues will not

Ukraine’s attacks have demonstrated the vulnerability of Russia’s oil-refining system.

In July, Russian gasoline production reportedly covered only around 65% of seasonal demand after several major refineries stopped operating. The government responded through imports, export restrictions and the use of existing reserves.

If the intensity of attacks on refineries remains lower, the immediate shortage could ease by the end of August. But that should not be confused with a recovery.

Maintenance has been postponed. Damaged facilities must operate under extraordinary pressure. Lower-quality fuel reduces economic efficiency and creates additional strain on machinery. The likelihood of industrial accidents will increase if refineries continue operating without the repairs normally conducted during the summer.

The Kremlin can move fuel around and conceal shortages but it cannot abolish the physical deterioration of its infrastructure.

Strikes on Wildberries expose a political dilemma

The attacks on Wildberries warehouses are different: it is not primarily a military-supply system. It is an essential part of Russia’s consumer economy and an interface connecting thousands of small businesses with their customers.

Destroying its warehouses disrupts logistics, employment and everyday life. It also destroys the goods and livelihoods of small entrepreneurs who have little influence over the war.

There is an uncomfortable political effect. Under dictatorship, blaming the dictator is dangerous. People therefore search for an enemy they can denounce safely. Ukraine becomes the available target for anger that might otherwise be directed at the Kremlin.

Attacks on consumer infrastructure can consequently strengthen the regime’s narrative, even while weakening the economy supporting it.

Ukraine determines how to fight the aggression against it. But the political consequences of each category of target should be examined honestly. The Kremlin’s own actions are instructive: it has strengthened protection around refineries while apparently treating consumer warehouses as less strategically important.

Russia is consuming the reserves accumulated before the war

For years, the Kremlin presented the Russian economy’s continued functioning as proof that sanctions had failed.

In reality, the war economy has been consuming reserves accumulated during earlier decades.

Russia’s Economy Ministry has cut its 2026 growth forecast to 0.4%. Analysts at the state-controlled VTB bank estimate that the government could withdraw 2.5 trillion rubles from its reserves this year, leaving only 1.6 trillion rubles as a fiscal cushion.

The state has also pushed an increasing share of wartime risk into the banking system.

This does not produce a spectacular collapse. It gradually removes the economy’s margin of safety: fewer workers, less private investment, deteriorating infrastructure and growing dependence on state spending.

That is why the government increasingly restricts access to meaningful economic statistics. The Kremlin wants Russians to believe that the present situation can continue indefinitely.

It cannot.

Europe is finally starting to catch up

Europe spent almost four years moving too slowly, the delay gave Putin an enormous advantage. But the direction is now changing.

EU ammunition-production capacity reportedly increased from roughly 300,000 rounds annually in 2022 to approximately 2 million by the end of 2025. New European programs are intended to expand production capacity further and create a steadier supply of military equipment

These figures should not be exaggerated: production capacity is not the same as ammunition delivered to Ukraine. Europe still faces fragmented procurement, staffing problems and long lead times.

But the underlying economic balance matters. Europe’s economy is several times larger than Russia’s, once its defense industry is placed on a sustained footing, Putin cannot assume that Russia will retain a permanent material advantage.

This does not mean that Ukraine can simply wait another year and then march to victory. Ukraine’s own shortage of people is severe. Nor can the West remove Putin and reconstruct Russia on our behalf.

That responsibility remains ours.

But Putin’s belief that he can continue this war for another five or ten years without fundamentally changing Russia is false. If the war continues, Russia will not merely lose another decade of development — it will move steadily away from a modern economy and towards permanent technological, institutional and social degradation.

Time is not yet decisively against Putin.

But it is no longer unquestionably on his side.

This post is based on my latest Russian-language video Q&A: Putin and Durov: A Thug’s Bargain | Wildberries: The End? | What Happens to Gas Prices?

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First, it stages political legitimacy. The election is engineered as a ritual referendum of trust to project an official mandate for ongoing war and economic hardship.

Second, it feeds two competing bureaucratic machines inside the state at once. The Russian bureaucracy is not a single monolith but a collection of factions driven by self-interest. The security apparatus profits by fabricating plots, prosecuting opposition candidates, and expanding repression to secure budgets and promotions. Meanwhile, political managers and propagandists profit by orchestrating electoral mechanics and selling political stability solutions to the Kremlin.

Third, it preserves Putin’s balance of power. Putin maintains control by balancing his two main pillars: repression and propaganda. Relying entirely on the security services would make him their hostage, while relying only on propaganda is impossible after years of full-scale war. Funding and empowering both sides through the election cycle keeps Putin in place as the indispensable arbiter.

Post-Election Mobilization

Once the election ends, the regime will shift toward escalating the war effort. The 2022 mobilization in Russia never stopped legally because Putin’s decree declaring it was never revoked; it was simply managed quietly to avoid public panic. However, current recruitment of roughly 30,000 men per month falls short of the military’s demand for 50,000.

After the vote, an intensified dragnet to pull men to the front line is inevitable. These recruits will be sent to the front with little to no training, serving primarily as a meat shield for professional units.

In an environment where Ukraine receives and produces massive numbers of drones, often more than one or two drones per incoming soldier, throwing untrained men into combat will not alter strategic outcomes. It will simply raise the monthly death and injury toll from 30,000 to 50,000.

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Targeting Diaspora and the Limits of Repression

To sustain the war, the regime must manage its population on two fronts.

First, it must keep skilled workers and specialists inside the country. High-skilled personnel are the most capable of adapting abroad, making their departure a threat to the regime’s survival. Following the new wave of mobilization, tighter exit controls are almost certain, whether through formal laws, border checks, or administrative passport delays.

Second, the regime is moving to neutralize opposition abroad. Because effective collective resistance inside Russia is quickly crushed by the security services, organized opposition naturally operates from overseas. Recent laws restricting consular services, property sales, and document access for exiles tried in absentia amount to a de facto revocation of citizenship, accompanied by physical and psychological threats.

The post-election phase will force Russian citizens to choose between passive compliance, flight, or refusal. While resisting carries the risk of severe repression, the regime faces a hard mathematical limit: Russian prisons do not have the physical capacity to hold even two months of mass draft refusers.

If society collectively refuses to go to the front, the state cannot incarcerate everyone. Whether Russian society recognizes this bottleneck remains the central question following Putin’s electoral operation.

The Soviet Machine Was Stoppable

Start with the machine that truly looked unstoppable and turned out not to be. The Soviet Union built the war economy the West now imagines Russia has built. By the 1980s, 84 percent of Soviet industrial enterprises were tied, to one degree or another, to military production. Eighty-four percent. It was enormous, it was rigid, it was clunky, and in the end the civilian economy simply could not carry it. That machine could be stopped, and it was. It ground the country down until the whole system stopped with it.

That is the cautionary tale sitting behind every serious discussion of Russia today, and Putin, whether by design or by accident, has not repeated it. His war machine is far lighter than the Soviet one, and that lightness is the reason his economy is still standing.

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Putin’s Machine is Lighter

Two things explain it. The first is unglamorous: size matters. Any honest economist will tell you that large economies absorb shocks that would flatten a small, isolated one, because they have somewhere to redistribute from. A small country under strict isolation collapses at the first serious blow, while a big one bends and reallocates.

The second, and decisive, factor is China. When Europe imposed its technological sanctions, it turned out that perhaps 90 percent of the goods in question had never really been made in Europe at all. They were designed and serviced there, and manufactured in China. The supply chains simply rerouted eastward. The brand names changed, and little else did.

That rerouting let Putin keep the military share of the economy low. I would be surprised if military production accounts for more than 30 percent of the Russian economy today, and it may be nearer 15. A war economy at 30 percent is a wholly different story from a militarised society at 84. It leaves the civilian half room to breathe, and that room is why Russia has been able to fight for four years without the collapse.

The catch is that this lightness is borrowed. Strip out China and the countries that in turn depend on China, and the war could not go on. Russia does not produce the cellulose that gunpowder requires. It can be made from wood pulp, but the resulting powder is wretched, so you want cotton, and Russia does not grow cotton. If Beijing chose to close that tap, it could. Russia mines very little copper of its own and buys much of what it needs through China-linked suppliers. Take those imports away and Russia’s military industry could sustain the war for perhaps six months, a year at the very outside. Our report of the relationship at NEST, Marriage without love, describes this asymmetry: a partnership in which Russia is the junior partner and China holds all the leverage.

(Flawed) Market Economy

Russia’s economy is more closed than open. When Putin orders resources redirected to weapons, something has to give, and what gives is civilian production. In Soviet times this was done by decree, through Gosplan, today it is done through interest rates. The Central Bank has held its key rate at punishing levels, 21 percent at the peak, and the effect is to throttle civilian manufacturing so that the steel, the metals, the cement and the workers can be reassigned to defence. Businessmen complain there is no money for civilian investment. There is money — what there isn’t is spare resources; they have already been pledged to the war. This is a squeeze happening before our eyes, but it is a managed squeeze rather than the Soviet-style seizure. I happen to think Elvira Nabiullina is running the least bad version of it.

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What Actually Threatens It

Ukraine’s drones have dominated the coverage, and the fires at Russia’s refineries are causing real pain on the ground. But the strikes will not be decisive by any means— the lost volume is manageable, and the crisis they have set off is one of logistics and decision-making rather than supply. I have set out why separately, in Why the Fuel Crisis Is Spreading Across Russia. The point that matters for the bigger picture is the one that piece ends on: the gravest danger to Russia’s war economy is not the enemy but the way the country is now governed. An economy this large and this well insulated is hard to break from the outside, it is being worn down from within.

The Man of the Last Visit

I used to advice Russia’s first prime minister, Ivan Silayev, an outstanding Soviet-era minister who had run first the aviation and then the machine-tool industries. As he passed seventy, I watched the changes set in that I have since seen in other ageing leaders. After seventy, the range of questions a person can hold in his head at one time begins to narrow.

If a man accepts that narrowing, he can stay brilliant within a single field for years. I knew Kissinger and Brzezinski, both sharp on international affairs to the end of their lives. But a head of state has to hold everything at once, and that is where it breaks down. He remembers the distant past clearly, and he remembers the last half hour clearly, and the ground in between falls away. We had a name for what Silayev became: the man of the last visit. Whoever had walked in most recently owned his mind. If the next visitor arrived even half an hour later with a different case, he recalled that the previous person had told him something, but the argument itself was gone, and he took the new one fresh. I think this now may be happening to Putin. It is why Valery Gerasimov finds it so easy to report that we are taking some small town near the front for the hundred-and-tenth time. Putin is not putting on an act—he genuinely does not remember.

There is a theory in the West that the end of the war would be the real stress test for Russia’s economy. I do not understand it. Ending the war would be an unambiguous good for Russia. Military plants would eventually make less, but not at once, and if their workers kept drawing wages, the economy would gain, because the steel and metal now going into shells would flow to civilian use instead. The men now at the front would not all be demobilised in a day, and the ones who were would be absorbed easily: an economy with 2 percent unemployment is an economy short of hands, not one with hands to spare. The danger to Putin from peace is not economic. It is that a year or so after the guns stop, people begin to ask what the million dead and maimed, the ruined towns and factories, were paid for. Those questions are the threat, and they are first and foremost political and not fiscal.

For me this is also personal. I ran Yukos, once Russia’s largest oil company. Among the plants now burning are the Samara refineries I was once directly responsible for. Watching them burn is painful. But I understand that this is war, and that war is not fought any other way. And unlike some of the affected by the current fuel crisis, I remember perfectly well who started this war and who is actively choosing to continue it.

What the strikes have done

Ukrainian drones are hitting practically every major refinery in the European part of Russia. The only plants spared are the small “teapot” refineries, most of them in or near the North Caucasus. I thought the Moscow refinery would be covered by air defense. It turned out that even it was not.

By volume, this is not yet a catastrophe: refining output is down by roughly a quarter, which in monthly terms means hundreds of thousands of tons of gasoline. Russia could buy those volumes abroad and bring them in. The breakdown is happening elsewhere: in logistics and in decision-making.

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Two ways out, and the one they chose

Moving fuel across a country this size means product pipelines, rail tankers, trucks, state reserves, and company stocks held at plants and depots. Someone has to decide what type of fuel moves where, in what quantity, and quickly. This is the origin of the current crisis.

The Kremlin has two ways out of it.

The market way is to free the prices. In a dozen or so regions fuel would jump to something like five dollars a liter, demand would collapse, and supply would begin to flow in from other regions simply because shipping it pays. In three to five months the situation would settle. Politically, the regime cannot afford that picture.

The administrative way is for the oil companies to move fuel between regions themselves. That means booking rail capacity and coordinating with each other, and the state would have to help organize it. It no longer knows how. There are far fewer qualified people left in the system than there used to be. Some left the country, some scattered, and some simply refuse to touch this problem.

What the government actually chose is a third way: cutting fuel quality standards to Euro-2, a grade so low it was banned from sale in Russia back in 2013. There is room below even that. You can pour chemistry into straight-run gasoline and sell the result. That fuel destroys the catalytic converters of modern cars. Not great. But in the Kremlin’s calculation, a small price.

After every strike, repair crews do the impossible to bring capacity back. I honestly cannot imagine what those brigades are pulling off right now. But this will not go on forever, because patches accumulate, and at some point a plant fails outright. The Moscow refinery has already been stopped completely.

While at least some refining continues, there is room to maneuver with the product. If the strikes continue and half of the refining capacity in European Russia stops completely, no games with quality standards will cover the gap. That would be real trouble. And the harvest season is approaching — today the crisis is about gasoline, harvest runs on diesel, and trouble with diesel would be a different order of problem.

Putin’s loop of repression

No Ukrainian drones have done as much damage to the Russian economy as Russia’s own government. The war handed more power to the FSB and the people around it. Their answer to every problem is the same: tighten the screws, accelerate the crackdown; the screws get tightened and the economy gets worse. Nobody within the regime is willing to openly admit that it got worse because of the tightening. The men in epaulettes point to the worsening, call it enemy action, and tighten again and the spiral keeps going.

A modern economy rests on perception as much as on production. It matters less what the refineries can still produce than how consumers experience the shortage and how the people responsible for logistics respond to it. So far, consumers see empty pumps and the people responsible… are responding badly.

Signal to NATO countries

In mid-May 2026, the Estonian Border Guard photographed the Marshal Vasilevskiy. The images revealed two heavy machine guns mounted on the wheelhouse—one on each side. Sandbags were placed alongside them to protect the firing positions. The border service shared these photos with the publication Delfi, which subsequently shared them with the Dossier Center and a consortium of investigative journalists.

The weapons identified are 12.7mm Russian “Kord” heavy machine guns. They are capable of firing 10 rounds per second and can hit targets up to two kilometers away. This marks the only known instance of a Russian civilian vessel being outfitted with such weaponry. Moscow’s intent here is not merely to protect the ship from Ukrainian drone attacks, but to send a deliberate signal to NATO countries.

While the machine guns were only recently installed, the ship itself has been under enhanced protection since at least August 2025.

• On every voyage, the vessel has carried between 8 to 12 passengers—totaling roughly 50 individuals in recent records.

• At least 24 of these passengers have served or are currently serving in Russian security forces, including the FSB, Rosgvardia, and the army.

• Five men aboard the tanker in late May and early June 2026 used their military IDs as travel documents.

One frequent passenger, Dmitry Artemenko, has been on board for five voyages. Artemenko is registered at an address in Balashikha, near Moscow, which houses the FSB Special Purpose Center. This is the same unit associated with Russian hitman Vadim Krasikov, who was convicted of a high-profile murder in Berlin and subsequently exchanged in August 2024. Employment records for most other passengers remain untraceable, likely because military service data is often scrubbed from or omitted in personal data leaks.

Gazprom, the owner of the Marshal Vasilevskiy, did not respond to Dossier’s inquiries regarding the necessity of the machine guns.

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Why now?

Over the past year, Ukraine has repeatedly attacked Russian ships, though targets have primarily been “shadow fleet” tankers in the Black and Mediterranean Seas. The only gas carrier to suffer an attack to date is the Arctic Metagaz, which was blown up near the waters of Malta in March 2026. After the crew was evacuated, the ship was left drifting with its LNG cargo, threatening to detonate at any moment, before eventually being towed to Libya.

However, relying on standalone machine guns to defend against aerial drones is highly ineffective, according to Jens Wenzel Christoffersen, a Danish commander and independent military analyst for Danwatch. A Baltic intelligence officer speaking to Delfi agreed, noting that defending against aerial threats typically requires multiple automatic weapons linked into a unified system.

While machine guns could theoretically be used against maritime surface drones, the geography complicates this theory. “The Baltic Sea is not the Mediterranean,” the Baltic source noted. “There are no countries here from whose territory maritime drones could be launched. Ukraine could not do it and remain unnoticed. I am more than certain that no Baltic Sea country would take on such a political risk.”

Furthermore, the machine guns are mounted high on the vessel, restricting their field of vision. If a maritime drone were to approach the stern closely enough, it would enter a blind spot where the ship’s hull completely obstructs the gunners’ line of sight.

Kaliningrad’s Lifeline

The most probable explanation for the militarization lies in the vessel’s strategic function. The Marshal Vasilevskiy is Russia’s only Floating Storage Regasification Unit (FSRU). The Gazprom vessel not only transports LNG but also converts it back from a liquid to a gaseous state, making it ready for domestic consumption.

Stationed off the coast of Kaliningrad, the ship and its associated marine terminal are capable of fulfilling the energy needs of the entire Russian exclave. When the ship and terminal were commissioned in 2019, Gazprom CEO Alexei Miller emphasized its importance: “The gas supply system via the Minsk-Vilnius-Kaunas-Kaliningrad main pipeline has been completely disconnected, and Kaliningrad’s gas supply is currently being carried out entirely through the marine receiving terminal.”

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Vladimir Putin highly praised the maritime supply route, stating, “The importance of the terminal for energy security and strengthening the region’s energy base is hard to overstate, primarily given the geographical location of the Kaliningrad region.”

Currently, the maritime route serves as a backup, while the pipeline remains the primary supply method. The Kaliningrad region consumes 2 to 2.5 billion cubic meters of gas, which matches the pipeline’s delivery volume. In late 2025, Russia and Lithuania agreed to extend the gas transit treaty. Today, the Marshal Vasilevskiy runs between Kaliningrad and the Portovaya compressor station in the Gulf of Finland. Customs data shows that in 2025, it transported 376,000 tons of LNG (roughly 560 million cubic meters of gas). Despite these relatively modest volumes, Moscow cannot afford to abandon the vessel amid the ongoing war in Ukraine and fractured relations with Europe.

The machine guns on the Marshal Vasilevskiy appear to be a physical manifestation of Moscow’s defensive posture in the region.

“Our assessment is that from the Russian perspective, the transportation of LNG to Kaliningrad is very important. Gas reserves for the winter are currently being built up,” a European intelligence officer explained. “Installing weaponry on board aligns with Russia’s attempts to ensure the protection of its energy supplies in the Baltic Sea.”

Beyond practical defense, the optics are crucial. A Baltic intelligence source summarized the calculus:

“This is an LNG tanker flying the Russian flag. The ship is new, owned by a single entity, and built in 2018. It is not some 20-year-old piece of junk from the shadow fleet that might snap in half at any moment. My assessment: these weapons are placed on board 50% to repel attacks by Ukrainian sea drones and 50% as a signal to the West.”

The source added that while Western nations have no plans to board the ship, the presence of heavy weaponry drastically alters the risk assessment for any potential intervention. “If rumors spread that the shadow fleet has heavy machine guns on board, the risk assessment associated with boarding for Western countries will be completely different. In that case, the probability of seizing ships will drop to zero.”

“Even the most basic forms of economic activity are being militarized,” noted Marco Giannangeli from the private intelligence firm Sibylline in a conversation with Follow the Money. “Moscow wants to demonstrate its readiness to defend its vessels. So it is better to think twice before trying to seize them. This is the very essence of deterrence.”

This article is based on an investigation by the Dossier Center, Delfi, Danwatch and Follow the Money, which can be read in full here.

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Yet today, that same territory is being systematically isolated. While Ukrainian officials have openly stated their goal is to turn Crimea into a logistical island, the reality on the ground is already reflecting it. Getting onto the peninsula is still somewhat possible, but leaving it, or getting basic supplies delivered to it, has become a monumental task.

Part I: The “Sacred” Promise

When Russia annexed Crimea, the Kremlin presented it as a site of supreme, civilizational value.

“After a heavy, long, and exhausting voyage, Crimea and Sevastopol are returning to their home harbor, to their native shores, to their port of permanent registry, to Russia!”

— Vladimir Putin, 2014 (kremlin.ru)

The logic presented to the public was simple: if taking the peninsula proved Russian power, keeping it safe and prosperous would prove Russian greatness. Putin explicitly pledged that security in Crimea was the state’s absolute priority, promising to “stop any threats.”

He later doubled down on this mythology, comparing the territory to Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, stating it held “immense civilizational and sacred meaning” that Russia would hold “from now on and forever.”

Part II: The Reality in the Skies

Ten years later and 4 years into the full-blown war, Putin’s assurances of safety and stability have been shattered.

Perhaps the clearest illustration of the situation is a policy enacted by local Crimean authorities: they do not turn on air raid sirens. The official justification given to the public is that sounding the alarms would destroy the residents’ mental health, because the sirens would be forced to ring for 20 to 22 hours every single day.

It’s a steep, one-way trajectory:

• August 2022: The first major Ukrainian attack hits the Novofedorivka military airfield, followed soon after by the bombing of the Crimean Bridge.

• Total 2022 attacks: 7

• Total 2023 attacks: 75 (The threat becomes so severe that Russia is forced to pull the bulk of its prized Black Sea Fleet out of Crimea and relocate it to Novorossiysk).

• Total 2024 attacks: 69

• Total 2025 attacks: 123

• 2026 (First half alone): 150 attacks.

In the spring of 2026, Ukrainian forces executed a targeted campaign against Crimean air defense radars. This created massive blind spots in the defensive umbrella. The radar deficit is currently so severe that authorities issued a surreal decree: riding motorcycles at night is strictly banned. The noise of civilian engines prevents the military from hearing the acoustic buzz of incoming drones—which is now one of their primary ways of detecting them.

Part III: The Gas Shortage

Leaving the peninsula today is an ordeal driven by a crippling gasoline deficit.

On June 4, authorities put fuel on a strict rationing system, capping purchases at 20 liters per person. City transit, ambulances, and fire trucks get absolute priority. For a regular citizen to buy gas at a station, they have to generate a digital QR code through a local messenger app called Max. The codes are claimed within seconds of dropping, the app crashes routinely, and residents report constant system failures.

Basic supply-and-demand has taken over:

• Speculators are reselling 20-liter gas coupons for up to 8,000 rubles (roughly four times the normal, pre-crisis price).

• Drivers are crossing the Crimean Bridge with gas canisters filled in the neighboring Krasnodar region, though a strict 100-liter-per-car limit prevents this from solving the shortage.

• The fuel panic immediately triggered a food panic. Supermarkets have placed purchasing caps on basic staples like sugar and buckwheat.

Local authorities promised to resolve the deficit within a month by placing an artificial price ceiling of 86 rubles per liter on 95-octane fuel (which currently trades near 100). By the standard laws of economics, a price cap will simply guarantee the black market grows.

The reason the fuel isn’t arriving lies on the R-280 highway—the famous “land corridor” captured during the 2022 invasion. Ukrainian forces are now deploying drones equipped with machine vision that specifically hunt fuel tankers along the route, turning it into a “road of death.”

With heavy cargo trucks strictly banned from the Crimean Bridge since 2022, and the railway ferries across the Kerch Strait disabled by Ukrainian strikes, the peninsula is running out of ways to receive goods. Russian soldiers discussing a June 7 strike on the Chongar bridge openly concluded that logistics in that direction will soon rely on donkeys.

Part IV: Where Is Mr. President?

Transport into the territory is shrinking to match. On the night of June 8, a Moscow-to-Simferopol passenger train was struck by a drone; night-time passenger trains have since been banned, forcing travelers to be unloaded and bused across the peninsula for the final leg of the trip.

Despite this, the Kremlin treats the danger with a bizarre institutional blind spot. When cluster munitions fell on a beach in Sevastopol in 2024—killing a nine-year-old girl—the beaches were kept open. The head of Sevastopol, Mikhail Razvozhaev, merely suggested that people avoid beaches that lacked concrete shelters.

The Russian government routinely issues travel warnings for its citizens abroad—advising caution in Thailand due to the risk of U.S. extradition, or warning against the Middle East due to regional wars. Yet no official safety warning exists for Crimea.

The public, however, can do the math. In the first days of the fuel crisis, hotel bookings dropped by a third, tracking ten cancellations for every single new reservation.

Throughout this entire logistical squeeze, Vladimir Putin’s reaction has been defined by total silence. He has not mentioned the Crimean fuel crisis once. In a June 12 address, he acknowledged that front-line progress was moving slower than desired and noted the enemy’s expanding drone operations, but spoke as though the peninsula did not exist. In fact, he has not set foot in Crimea since 2023.

The clearest view of the Kremlin’s actual priorities sits hundreds of miles north, in Valdai—the site of one of Putin’s private presidential estates.

While Crimean supply highways sit exposed, authorities have begun erecting massive anti-drone nets over the roads in Valdai. These aren’t designed to catch drones flying in from Ukraine; they were put up to ensure that drones smuggled inside parked civilian semi-trucks cannot launch from a rest stop and fly toward the President’s residence. While Crimea gets rationed fuel, his personal estates remain ringed by heavy Pantsir and Buk missile systems.

The contrast leaves three possible deductions: either the “sacred” status of Crimea was strictly for television; or the President’s promise of “forever” carried an expiration date; or, when forced to choose between defending a civilizational monument and protecting one of his twenty personal palaces, the choice was never in doubt.

As one stranded citizen recently asked: “Why do we need Crimea at all, if you can’t go anywhere?”

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This produces the classic praetorian danger: the autocrat risks ending up a puppet of the very service he built. Authoritarians try to avoid it, because a single service can accumulate enough power that the autocrat is no longer of any use to it. Putin keeps doing it anyway. And it may become one of the causes of his end, though not the only one.

The FSB is the main heir to the KGB. In December 1999, days before he became acting president, Putin told a roomful of security veterans, smiling, that “a group of FSB officers sent undercover into the government” had completed the first stage of its mission. People treated it as a joke. More than two decades later, it is difficult to treat like one.

What exactly does the FSB control?

Communications. A law Putin signed in February 2025 lets the FSB order any operator to cut any kind of connection, mobile or fixed or internet, at its own discretion, with no explanation and no liability to the customer. This is where the blackouts come from.

Its own prisons. In July 2025 Putin signed a law restoring the FSB’s right to run its own pretrial jails, a power stripped from it in 2006 as a condition of Russia’s membership in the Council of Europe. From January, the rules inside those jails are set by the FSB director alone, outside the Criminal Procedure Code. By spring, Lefortovo and six other facilities had been signed over to the agency. A prisoner inside one is at the full mercy of the service that is investigating him.

Everyone’s data. From April 2026, the FSB can demand free copies of the databases of any organization in the country without a court order. Banking secrecy, medical confidentiality, commercial secrets: surrendered on request. According to Ukraine’s foreign intelligence service, the agency’s powers were widened five times in the first quarter of 2026 alone.

All of science. State and private institutions must now log every research project involving foreign partners in a single database the FSB can read. That gives the FSB a standing window into Russian science as a whole, far past classified military work, at a moment when serious research is impossible without international collaboration. What the constant threat of prosecution for foreign contact does to a country’s science is easy enough to picture.

Citizenship. The FSB can issue the findings used to strip Russians of “acquired” citizenship on national-security grounds. It does not have to name the grounds. “There is reason to believe the person poses a threat” is enough.

Detention without trial. A Putin decree of March 8, 2022, recorded in Investigative Committee files but never published, lets the FSB and other agencies send anyone deemed to “oppose” the war to a detention facility with no criminal case, no court order, and no appeal. The order has no public text and its contents are unknown. The constitution says liberty may be taken only by a court.

Conscripts. The agency can now route draftees into its own Border Service, away from the front but wherever the FSB wants them.

Even officials’ phones. Out of fear of being spied on, the FSB barred state employees from Apple devices and told them to switch to Android, the Russian Aurora system, or Chinese phones. Chinese phones, the reasoning goes, spy on no one.

What is not visible

These are only the powers openly made public. The agency also runs a shadow portfolio, and there too it has grown.

It orchestrates the killings. Britain’s public inquiry found that the FSB probably murdered Alexander Litvinenko with polonium in London in 2006, with Putin’s probable approval. In 2020, Bellingcat and its partners traced the poisoning of Alexei Navalny to an FSB unit operating out of the agency’s own Criminalistics Institute. Vladimir Kara-Murza survived two poisonings that U.S. authorities classified as deliberate. The poisons program and the state’s doping operation now appear to be run under one roof.

It takes the hostages. When the FSB needs a captured operative back, it arranges for someone to be captured. The largest prisoner swap since the Cold War, in August 2024, freed the journalist Evan Gershkovich, the former Marine Paul Whelan, and Kara-Murza, among others. The man Moscow wanted in return was Vadim Krasikov, an FSB colonel serving life in Germany for shooting a Chechen exile in a Berlin park in daylight, a killing a German court called state terrorism. Russia jails the innocent in order to free its assassins.

It runs the sabotage campaigns abroad. Across Europe, the past two years brought arson, derailment attempts, parcel bombs, and assassination plots that NATO now rates a record-high threat. Western agencies pin most of the kinetic sabotage on military intelligence, the GRU, rather than the FSB; the larger truth holds anyway, which is that strategy in Moscow is increasingly written by the security services and not by diplomats or generals.

The invasion of Ukraine itself rested on the FSB. Its Fifth Service told Putin that Kyiv would fall in days and that Russian troops would be greeted as liberators, an assessment that came from the FSB rather than the GRU or the General Staff, and that proved catastrophically wrong.

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The praetorian problem

Rome’s emperors knew this danger. The Praetorian Guard they leaned on made and unmade them. The signs that the same imbalance is starting to cost the Kremlin are visible. The internet crackdown is detested by everyone outside the FSB. Russians now name internet restrictions as their single largest source of anxiety, ahead of the pandemic and the 2022 mobilization. Putin’s numbers have slipped: the independent Levada Center recorded his rating falling from 87 to 79 percent between September 2025 and April 2026, and even state pollsters put his approval at its lowest since the war began. Analysts who watch the Kremlin describe a widening rift between its civilian and its security wings over the blackouts.

Putin’s answer has been to look past the problem. At a government meeting on Arctic development, he brushed the outages aside as the cost of operational work to prevent terrorist acts, and left the FSB’s decisions standing. He has gone back to appearing in public and kissing other people’s children for the cameras. European intelligence reports describe his growing fear of a coup or an assassination. A system built around one man is only ever as strong as that man, and a service that can switch off the country, jail without trial, and read every database does not, in the end, need his signature.

Whether the FSB ever grows political ambitions of its own, whether it ever decides it no longer needs the president, is something none of us can know yet. But facts speak for themselves: Putin spent two decades making sure that no institution in Russia could turn against him. He then handed the FSB the authority to jail without trial, cut communications across the country, and read every database without a court order. He gave it its own prisons and its own conscripts. It is only logical to infer that at some point the agency with such vast powers will no longer need the man who gave them. What it lacks is not the means to challenge Putin but the motive. Motives change.

In September 2025, a cargo ship left a Turkish port carrying marine engines made by the German manufacturer MAN. The cargo was bound for St. Petersburg, for the Almaz shipyard, which builds patrol boats for the border service of the FSB. The EU banned this trade within weeks of the full-scale invasion: the first large-scale export restrictions came on 25 February 2022, and by that spring they covered shipbuilding equipment, marine technology and engines that could serve Russian shipyards, the navy or the FSB’s border guards.

The scheme that defeats those restrictions is simple. The Turkish yacht builder Vicem Yachts orders engines from MAN’s Turkish office. MAN received signed and stamped assurances that the engines would remain in Turkey, including an explicit ban on re-export to Russia. “Five yachts are being built, and MAN engines are ordered for them,” a source familiar with the logistics told Dossier Center. “The engines arrive in Turkey, but they travel on, and some Volvos are installed instead.”

Over the past year, ten MAN engines were shipped to Vicem for five vessels under construction. Six of them did not stay in Turkey. On paper, they went to two Hong Kong companies, Hongkong Pokwing and Scorpion’s Holding Group; the latter has been on British and Ukrainian sanctions lists since last September for “support and facilitation of armed aggression against Ukraine.” The engines never reached Hong Kong either. According to Dossier Center’s sources, the containers went to St. Petersburg, to Almaz, where the engines are installed on Project 12200 Sobol patrol boats for FSB border guards.

As one source put it: “Formally, the container is on its way to Hong Kong. What is actually inside it, nobody knows.”

The financial documents tell the same story: Almaz paid almost 760,000 euros for the engines to TPO Kronstadt, a supplier with an office in the business centre called “Senator” in St. Petersburg. Hongkong Pokwing, the documented recipient of the engines, received 37 million rubles from Kronstadt, with the payment routed through a Turkish intermediary called Malpina Yazilim. In 2025, Malpina was one of the main payment agents through which money moved, including payments for sanctioned European and American equipment; over the past year it received 334 million rubles from Kronstadt, including 11.5 million as fees for its services.

Kronstadt itself was founded in St. Petersburg in 1999. It supplies engines, pumps, cranes and deck equipment, and its website lists more than 70 international partners, including America’s Caterpillar, the Italian crane maker Melcal and Denmark’s Desmi. Its owners run a corporate group that has included Kron CIS in Germany, three companies registered in Texas and at least six in Cyprus: Sergei Sukhachev handles Russian suppliers, Andrei Nikitin works with the Chinese direction, and Andrei Spirin, who also holds Cypriot citizenship, the European companies. Kronstadt’s last published accounts, for 2021, showed revenue of 826 million rubles. In 2024 and 2025, billions of rubles passed through the company, and its ten largest clients alone paid more than 3.7 billion.

Almaz paid more than 620 million rubles of that over two years under contracts for FSB border service vessels, buying Danish pumps from Desmi and Grundfos, diesel generators and winches along with engines. Surgutneftegaz bought 473 million rubles’ worth of parts for Caterpillar engines. Baltic Shipyard takes Italian Melcal cranes and Spanish Fluidmecánica equipment. Velesstroy, one of the main contractors on the Yamal LNG project, bought heat exchangers for 461 million. Many of these buyers are themselves under Western sanctions. A source familiar with the company’s work summed it up: “Practically all the equipment that was supplied before 2022 continues to be supplied now.”

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The intermediaries stretch from Turkey and China to the UAE, Uzbekistan and Thailand, and every link adds a layer of separation between the manufacturer and the final Russian buyer. Kronstadt’s largest foreign recipient of funds in 2024, the Turkish company Marind Endustriyel Denizcilik, received around 214 million rubles over two years; its manager of record is Margarita Bildirici, a St. Petersburg native who teaches dance in Bodrum. “Kronstadt pays the Turkish company, and the Turkish company pays the manufacturer,” a source explained. “Formally, it is considered the end buyer.” The same architecture moved Caterpillar engines worth 51 million rubles to the Russian extraction company Berezkagaz: a Chinese intermediary, Tianjin DSWT Aviation Leasing Corporation, brokered the purchase, and the engines arrived at the port of Vladivostok in early January 2025 before travelling on to a field in the Khanty-Mansi region. The Chinese middleman takes 5 to 10 percent of turnover.

There is also a problem that begins after delivery. Modern marine engines cannot simply be bolted in and switched on. Three shipbuilding sources say commissioning them is practically impossible without the manufacturer’s representative or a specialist it has certified, because only they have access to the proprietary software. “To start the engine, a MAN engineer arrives with the software, checks all the connections and the installation, connects to the engine’s electronics and installs the software,” one source said. “Without this, the engine is just a piece of metal.” Alex Prezanti, a British lawyer and co-founder of State Capture: Research and Action, points out that if MAN exported engines or provided related technical assistance and intellectual property without authorization from Germany, that would be a violation of EU sanctions.

There is no evidence that MAN knowingly broke the rules. After journalists’ questions, the company began an internal investigation in mid-April, and its employee who visited Vicem’s office in Istanbul was met with silence: he was told only that the engines were no longer in Turkey, that they had been resold. MAN told Süddeutsche Zeitung that partners from countries known as sites of sanctions evasion undergo additional vetting. It says it has terminated its relationship with Vicem, denies that any of its employees commissioned engines that ended up in Russia, and suggests that a Vicem specialist familiar with these engines could have carried out the work.

Russia’s shipbuilders cannot substitute their way out of this dependence quickly. Many vessel designs were drawn around specific foreign engines. “It is not only the engine,” one industry expert explained. “Behind it come the gearbox, the shaft and the compatibility of all the equipment. If the hull has already been designed for a specific engine, replacing it means redoing the foundations and the entire mechanical part.” That means recalculating the design, rebuilding the foundations and years of delay. The Kremlin doesn’t have that kind of time, so it goes around the sanctions instead.

It doesn’t mean the sanctions have failed — the fact that buying a German engine now requires a yacht builder in Istanbul, a paper recipient in Hong Kong and an intermediary managed by a dance teacher in Bodrum is a dempnstations that sanctions have imposed real costs. But they are not magic and do not automatically sever the connections that bind the global economy together, and enforcement cannot end with a prohibition written on paper.

As long as a European manufacturer can collect a signed and stamped promise that its engines will stay in Turkey, and those engines end up on FSB patrol boats anyway, the system is not working. The West cannot stop at imposing restrictions and needs mechanisms capable of enforcing them: ways of establishing what is actually inside the container, rather than what the documents say.

This article is based on Dossier Center and Süddeutsche Zeitung’s investigation, which can be read in full here.

In June 2025, a fabricated story spread online claiming that Volodymyr Zelensky had bought his mother a $3.2 million apartment in Dubai’s Burj Khalifa. It was built around an AI-manipulated video made to look like a report by the Saudi broadcaster Al Arabiya, and it was quickly debunked: no such Al Arabiya report ever aired, and Dubai’s land registry shows no such purchase.

This document is the after-action “media case” that the Social Design Agency (SDA — Агентство социального проектирования), a Western-sanctioned Kremlin contractor, produced to claim credit for the campaign. It surfaced in the leak obtained by Delfi Estonia and reported by the Dossier Center together with OCCRP and others.

Read it as the perpetrators’ own scorecard — the apartment story is false, and every figure it cites, including its claim of more than 86 million views, is the agency’s own internal estimate. It is reproduced here exactly as written and translated slide by slide, with no edits or commentary.

Slide 1

BRIEFING NOTE

Media Case

“BURJ KHALIFA”

Date executed: 9 June 2025

Slide 2

I. Description of the media case

According to the case materials, Zelensky bought his mother a luxury apartment in Dubai’s Burj Khalifa skyscraper for $3.2 million. As reported by the Arabic outlet Al Arabiya, citing data from the Dubai Land Department, the deal was concluded on 16 September 2024 — the birthday of Rymma Zelenska, who is officially listed as a pensioner and lives in Kryvyi Rih. The purchased apartment measures 186 square meters. It is located on the 11th floor of the skyscraper and forms part of the Armani Residences complex, whose interior was designed by Giorgio Armani.

Slide 3

After the case materials began to be published, the story of Zelensky’s luxury purchase was published by major foreign bloggers with multimillion-strong audiences [their posts, screenshots]

Slide 4

The story of Zelensky’s multimillion-dollar purchase reached Russia’s largest media outlets. Vitaly Borodin, head of the Federal Security and Anti-Corruption Project, issued an appeal to the UN, in which he demanded that an investigation be carried out into the corrupt activities of Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky.

Silovoy Blok — News Agency

Menu: Home · Politics · Army · Society · Service · Weapons · Abroad · Economy

POLITICS Borodin calls on the UN to investigate Zelensky for corruption after his property purchase in the UAE

Author: Elena Evstratova

Slide 5

As the case materials spread, Ukraine’s «Center for Countering Disinformation» refuted the claim that Zelensky had bought his mother an apartment in the tallest building in the world. The body, which operates under Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, noted that Al Arabiya’s website contains no information about the Ukrainian leader purchasing luxury real estate, and that the narrative of Zelensky’s corruption is one of the most popular among «Russian propagandists».

Center for Countering Disinformation (@CforCD) ❗ Fake information is being spread on X claiming that President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky allegedly purchased an apartment in the Burj Khalifa “for his mother” for $3.2 million. [accompanying image overlaid with the text “as a birthday gift for his mother Rimma Zelenska” and stamped “FAKE”]

Slide 6

Some comments from social-media users outraged by Zelensky’s multimillion-dollar spending:

Slide 7

II. Publication of the media-case materials

A) Publications in the foreign segment of the internet

• 19 of the Project’s contractors shared the media-case materials on social media. Views of the case materials via contractors — 10,178,900.

• Organic distribution of the content across foreign media and social networks gathered 35,971,000 views.

In the foreign segment of the internet, the case materials gathered a combined total of 46,149,900 views as of 09.06.2025.

B) Publications in the Russian segment of the internet

As of 09.06.2025, Russian mass media and social-media blogs had published 415 items about the case, with a combined reach of 39,664,400 views.

C) Refutation of the case materials

As of 09.06.2025, 22 refutations had been published on social media and on foreign news resources, with a combined reach of 410,800 views.

D) Total reach of the materials about the case

In the Russian and foreign segments of the internet, the materials about the case and the refutations gathered a combined total of

86,225,100 views

(in English — 21,405,200 views; in French — 5,950,400 views; in German — 148,300 views; in Ukrainian, Spanish, Italian, and other languages — 19,056,800 views; in Russian — 39,664,400 views) as of 9 June 2025.

This is a leaked internal after-action report from the Social Design Agency (SDA — Агентство социального проектирования), the Moscow political-technology firm run by Ilya Gambashidze and operating under the supervision of Russia’s Presidential Administration. It documents “Operation ‘Pig Head,’” an Islamophobic provocation carried out on the night of 8–9 September 2025, in which a six-person team placed severed pig heads marked “MACRON” at ten mosques and Muslim cultural centers around Paris, timed to coincide with France’s “September 10” protest mobilization.

The report surfaced in the leak obtained by the Dossier Center with Shomrim, Le Monde, and the OCCRP consortium. Read it as the perpetrators’ own self-congratulatory account. The operatives behind this and related stunts were Serbian nationals, several later arrested and convicted in Europe. Russian-language original pdf-file can be viewed here.

Report on Operation: “Pig Head”

Location: Paris, France

Date: 8–9 September 2025

Carried out simultaneously with the “#10September” operation.

Operation summary

In Paris, severed pig heads — 10 (ten) in total — are delivered to the city’s mosques and Muslim cultural centers. On each pig’s forehead, the surname of the country’s president — “MACRON” — is written in blue marker or other permanent ink.

Photographs of the heads before the operation began (08.09.2025):

Method of execution

A team of 6 (six) people was engaged to carry it out.

IMPORTANT (!): The operatives had no contact with the team responsible for the “#10September” operation and are unaware that it took place.

The team arrived in Paris on 07.09.2025. On 08.09, reconnaissance of the area was conducted, the pig heads — purchased in advance through a network of intermediaries — were delivered, and other supplies were procured. The operation was carried out at night, between 00:00 and 05:00, on the night of 8–9 September 2025. After carrying out the operation, the team successfully left the country.

Results of the operation

Target No. 1: Mosquée (Institut des Cultures d’Islam – ICI). Address: 56 Rue Stephenson, 75018.

Result:

Target No. 2: Mosquée Islah Montreuil. Address: 70 Rue des Sorins, 93100 Montreuil.

Result:

Target No. 3: Association Islamique Al-Ghadir. Address: 15 Pl. du Général de Gaulle, 93100 Montreuil.

Result:

Target No. 4: Mosquée Anwar El-Madina. Address: 27 Rue Etienne Marey, 75020.

Result:

Target No. 5: Mosquée (Union des Musulmans de Malakoff). Address: 1 Rue Avaulée, 92240 Malakoff.

Result:

Target No. 6: Mosquée Khalid Ibn Al-walid. Address: 28 Rue Myrha, 75018.

Result:

Target No. 7: Mosquée de Javel. Address: 47 Rue de Javel, 75015.

Result:

Target No. 8: Mosquée de Montrouge. Address: 51 Rue Racine, 92120 Montrouge.

Result:

Target No. 9: Association Musulmane De Gentilly. Address: 140 Rue Gabriel Péri, 94250 Gentilly.

Result:

Target No. 10: Mosquée de Saint-Ouen. Address: 3 Rue des Docks, 93400 Saint-Ouen-sur-Seine.

Result:

While attempting to access this location, the operatives encountered the mosque’s round-the-clock armed security, which prevented them from entering the restricted premises. As a result, the pig head was placed at the entrance. When they attempted (at the operation coordinator’s insistence) to return and move the head to a backup location, police were already on the scene. It was therefore decided to leave the head where it was.

Additional notes

1. A USB flash drive containing 28 (twenty-eight) photographs of the completed operation is attached to this report.

2. The operation received wide coverage in world media:

French-language sources (access via VPN):

• Libération

• Le Monde

• Le Parisien

• TF1

• Le Figaro

• The Local France

• France 24

• La Provence

• Paris Match

• …and many others

English-language sources (access via VPN):

• CNN (USA)

• CBS News (USA)

• Reuters (USA)

• Barron’s (USA)

• AOL (USA)

• TRT Global (Turkey)

• Ynet News (Israel)

• Morocco World News (Morocco)

• Middle East Eye

• The Straits Times (Singapore)

• Free Malaysia Today (Malaysia)

• Maeil Business Newspaper (S. Korea)

• Bilyonaryo News (Philippines)

• Al Arabiya (UAE)

• Mathrubhumi (India)

• Fakti BG (Bulgaria)

• …and many others

Russian-language sources:

• RIA Novosti — “Pig heads dumped at mosques in Paris” (09.09.2025)

• Gazeta.ru — “Pig heads marked ‘Macron’ found near mosques in France”

• Argumenty i Fakty — “Pig heads marked ‘Macron’ found near mosques in France”

• RIA Novy Den — “Someone scattered pig heads at mosque entrances in Paris” (09.09.2025)

• Moskovsky Komsomolets (MK) — “Pig heads marked ‘Macron’ dumped at Paris mosques”

• Regnum — “Pig heads dumped at Paris mosques”

• EurAsia Daily (EADaily) — “Pig heads marked ‘Macron’ dumped at mosques in Paris” (9 September 2025)

• RuTube — “Pig heads marked ‘Macron’ found in front of mosques in Paris” (video, posted 9 September 2025, runtime 00:04:24)
  

  Putin is convinced that in Ukraine he is fighting the “collective West” — and across the continent, a full-fledged hybrid war is already underway. In this section I track it and collect the original-source documents behind it. Subscribe to stay updated, it is and will forever be free.

  
  

This is an internal planning file from the Social Design Agency (SDA — Агентство социального проектирования), a Moscow political-technology firm run by Ilya Gambashidze that operates under the direct supervision of Russia’s Presidential Administration, with reporting lines to first deputy chief of staff Sergei Kiriyenko and some reports said to reach the country’s “top official” — possibly Putin himself. It surfaced in a leak obtained by Delfi Estonia and reported by the Dossier Center together with Shomrim, Le Monde, and the OCCRP consortium.

Titled “Projects 2026,” the file catalogues the firm’s ongoing and planned influence operations against France, Germany, other Central European states, and Armenia — among them a fake “think tank” built to pass as an independent research institute, systems for monitoring and manipulating social-media “opinion leaders,” and “self-populating knowledge bases” (essentially Wikipedia clones designed to outrank the originals in search and quietly seed Kremlin-friendly narratives), all framed internally as “cognitive strikes” meant to hide the Russian hand.

Read it as the agency’s own self-reporting: the figures below are its stated targets and claimed progress, they have not been independently verified.

The original Russian-language PDF is available here

PROJECTS 2026

1. Think Tank

A website has been created. The English version has been launched. Design improvements and technical work on concealment and infosec are underway. Once this work is finished, analogous sites will be launched in German, French, and Spanish. Social media accounts will also be set up: FB and X.

Project targets for each site (4 sites total):

• 50 publications per month — reworking and summaries of reports from respected think tanks on topics favorable to us.

• 6 original publications (one per topic).

• 2 original reports.

Monthly total:

• 230 texts.

• 500 images.

• 300 social media posts.

2. Opinion-Leader Circles

A trusted contractor has been selected; the technical specifications for the infrastructure and software suite have been worked out.

Project targets:

Daily replenishment of the post database from 10,000 accounts (scraping). Posting messages on social media (narrative injection) — 2,000 per month. Monthly analytics on narrative propagation, mutual influence among opinion leaders, and discussion trends.

3. Opinion Tracker

Monitoring the accounts of the 100 most prominent French opposition opinion leaders and publishing 30–40 of their posts daily on the site, with screenshots and links to the original posts.

Project targets per month:

• 1,000 publications (text, link, screenshot).

• 5 original overview pieces.

4. Self-Populating Knowledge Base — Germany

Servers have been launched and web shells created, and the content corpus is being assembled (the database already holds over 200,000 pages).

Project targets:

• Editing 100 articles per month.

• Creating graphic content for the articles — 100 per month.

• Search-engine promotion of the edited articles via “behavioral factors” — 200 per month.

• “Training” 6 AI platforms on the edited articles — 500 per month.

5. AI News (France)

Creating and running accounts for 3 projects across 6 social networks, with daily content.

Project targets per month:

90 video clips commenting on the current news agenda, adapted to the formats of the 6 distribution platforms and social networks — 540 videos in total.

6. Russian Wave

Creating and populating three websites: Russian, German, and French.

Project targets per month:

• 200 longreads.

• 200 news items.

• 500 illustrations.

Translation and adaptation for two countries: France and Germany.

• 400 longreads.

• 400 news items.

Social media management: VK, Dzen, Telegram, Facebook, X — 100 posts per country on each platform.

7. Yerevan First!

A licensed media-outlet website has been launched.

Project targets per month:

• 200 longreads.

• 200 news items.

• 500 illustrations.

• 10 video products: interviews, overview videos.

Social media management: VK, Dzen, Telegram, Facebook, X.

8. Self-Populating Knowledge Base — Armenia

Servers have been launched and web shells created, and the content corpus is being assembled (the database already holds over 50,000 pages).

Project targets per month:

• Editing 100 articles per month.

• Creating graphic content for the articles — 100 per month.

• Search-engine promotion of the edited articles via “behavioral factors” — 200 per month.

• “Training” 6 AI platforms on the edited articles — 500 per month.

For four years the obituaries have been written on a schedule of their own: the sanctions would break the economy, the elite would fracture, the streets would fill, and none of it happened. A new report from the NEST Centre sets out why, and it does so without the consolation that most such forecasts smuggle in. Its central finding is the one that neither the Kremlin’s triumphalists nor its undertakers want to hear: the only event that would by itself bring down the system Putin has built is Putin’s own death.

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The vulnerabilities

The report describes three ways the regime could end, but not all of them are equal.

1. Putin's death, serious illness, or incapacitation would be enough on its own, as an isolated occurrence, to bring about the end of the regime, because a system that has no embedded mechanism of succession simply ceases to exist once its designer can no longer perform the role of supreme arbiter. Many of the functionaries Putin trusts are simply old, and their sudden deaths could sharply alter the distribution of power: just look at the chairpersons of Russia's Supreme Court.
   Eighty-year-old Vyacheslav Lebedev died in office on 23 February 2024 after a prolonged illness. He was succeeded by Irina Podnosova, a 71-year-old university classmate of Putin's — but she too died slightly more than a year after her appointment.
   The same logic applies, in its gravest form, to Putin himself: when his rule ends, there is no process for replacing him in a way that would satisfy the different interest groups.
   

2. Palace coup — a situation in which an influential group with significant coercive, administrative, and financial resources comes to believe that the continuation of Putin’s rule seriously damages its long-term interests and decides to remove him. Right now, the elite remains consolidated around Putin because confrontation with the West leaves no alternative, yet it is simultaneously fragmented, atomised, and intimidated. That combination makes a coup unlikely rather than impossible.

   
   The security forces are a collection of competing bureaucracies, who are kept that way on purpose: Putin weakens their leaderships, appoints outsiders to head them, keeps aged and ill figures in place, and maintains managed conflicts between agencies so that no single actor accumulates the autonomy to move against him. The military, the classic source of coup risk, has grounds for discontent but no informal leader to articulate it — anyone who stood out has been imprisoned, exiled, removed, or killed, from Popov and Surovikin to Prigozhin and Shoigu.

   
   The binding constraint underneath all of this is Putin's arbitration: as long as he can distribute resources, balance the interest groups, and set the limits of the permissible, competition between them stays competition and does not become rebellion. A palace coup therefore becomes likely only if Putin first weakens and loses the ability to play supreme arbiter — which is precisely why this scenario is not really separate from the first, but flows out of it.
   

3. A popular uprising is the least likely of the three. Russian society is more passive than protest-prone: it is atomised, demoralised, and largely conformist, with most people focused on adapting to the war rather than resisting it. The anti-war minority has been crushed — firm opponents of the war are only 7–9 per cent of the population, the opposition's leaders have emigrated or been imprisoned, and its mobilising platforms have been blocked or criminalised — so it poses no independent threat to the regime.
   If an uprising ever did come, it would most likely originate not from this liberal anti-war flank but from the radicalised pro-war one: the militarist Z-community, angry that the war is being fought too slowly and too incompetently rather than that it is being fought at all. Their grievances are accumulating, and the eventual return of veterans — with combat experience, horizontal networks, and the means of organised violence — could give such a movement a coercive weight the old democratic opposition never had. But even this would require a trigger: society's frustration only becomes dangerous when it crystallises and coincides with elite conflict or a crisis of governance.
   

What makes Russian economy resilient

The modern Russian economy is not efficient, but it is resilient in a way the Soviet economy never was, because it has two features that make it adaptable:

1. Market prices. The liberalisation of prices in January 1992 proved irreversible: since then, the Russian authorities have not resorted to price freezes even during the most acute moments of crisis.
   

2. Floating rouble. In spring 2015, the Central Bank of Russia abandoned currency interventions aimed at supporting the rouble exchange rate. Before then, it could spend hundreds of billions of dollars attempting to counter changes in the currency market, but each time it was eventually forced to abandon the policy of intervention and accept a devaluation of the rouble.
   
   These two stabilisers absorb the shocks that in the Soviet system turned into shortages and eventually collapse: price levels can swing sharply, but the economy adjusts rather than seizing up.
   
   The classic sanctions lever, a falling oil price, has also lost much of its bite, and the report keeps two separate measures distinct. As a share of export earnings, the four key energy commodities — crude oil, petroleum products, pipeline gas, and LNG — fell to 45 percent in 2024 and 41–42 percent in 2025.

   

   As a share of federal budget revenue, hydrocarbon-related income fell even faster, dropping to 17.3 percent in the first quarter of 2026. The price cap and the other measures, meanwhile, barely dented the physical volume of Russian exports.
   
   Together these mean a drop in global oil prices can no longer, on its own, trigger a currency crisis the way it once did, while the budget is now far better insulated. Because oil taxes are reckoned in roubles, when the dollar price falls the government can simply let the rouble weaken, so that each devalued dollar of export earnings converts into a larger number of roubles in the tax base and a chunk of the lost revenue is recovered.
   
   The reverse side of that devaluation is inflation, which Russians consistently rank as their top concern and the Kremlin fears, but it as a short-term vulnerability and a constant background irritant rather than a force capable of bringing the regime down.
   
   Putin talked about this openly in 2014:

   The real economic danger is the slow degradation of institutions, driven by the security bloc, the siloviki, at the expense of the pragmatic managers who have kept the wartime economy upright. Between 2022 and 2026 the state seized assets worth two to three percent of GDP and then passed them, at a discount, to men close to the Kremlin, while the courts approved these nationalizations in one or two short hearings and in some cases stripped shares from small investors who had been accused of nothing.
   

Political catalyst

The front has become a cash economy: contract soldiers earn many times the average wage and spend much of it close to the line, while the commanders run informal common funds that have curdled into extortion, so that fighters pay tribute to avoid being sent to die and officers cash out the bank cards of the dead. The men who survive come home with money they cannot hope to earn again in civilian life, with networks built outside any chain of command, and with a practised facility for organized violence, and some of them will form paramilitary groups while others drift into organized crime or into the private armies of local strongmen.

Putin has already ordered the police agency, which is short more than 212,000 officers, over a fifth of its strength, to take in veterans, a measure that will carry the habits of a lawless front directly into the police. The Kremlin sees the danger, since it is building networks of rehabilitation and prosthetics and has funded the Defenders of the Fatherland Foundation at 50 billion roubles over three years, but its plans assume a steady return of 50,000 to 100,000 veterans a year rather than a sudden mass demobilization. The end of the war, in other words, may prove more dangerous to the regime than the war itself.

Read the report in full

Where it leaves us

A closed system carries the cause of its own collapse inside itself, and Putin’s is no exception to that rule. The mistake is to think we have much say over the timing — we do not. The regime will go when it goes. What lies within our power is not the fall itself, but everything that follows it.

The most dangerous moment for Russia is not the collapse but the void that comes after. Confusion and anarchy can produce a regime worse than the one they buried. If no plan is ready when that day arrives, then the country will fall back into the trap it has fallen into so many times before, and it will sit in it for another generation.

Preventing that is the part of the work I have taken on myself.