The Russian army has a term for this: flag planting. A group gets into a village, takes a photo with a flag and leaves, and the village is declared captured. Promotions, bonuses, a nice report. No real results. Capture on credit is even more brazen: a report declares a place captured, in the hope that someday it really will be.

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Commanders at the front lie to their superiors, the superiors lie to the General Staff, and the General Staff lies to Putin. Everyone knows it is a lie and pretends it is true, because it lets Putin simulate a successful war. And some contract soldier pays with his life storming yet another ruined village.

In autumn 2025 the generals reported more than once that they had taken Kupiansk, in eastern Ukraine, and Putin boasted of it. In December Zelensky came to the town. Putin called it staged: having taken Kupiansk on credit himself, he accused Zelensky of flag planting.

On September 1 Putin announced the capture of the Ukrainian town of Sviatohirsk. It fell short even of flag planting: the video was generated by AI. A week later a Ukrainian corps commander was strolling around the town. That did not make Putin even blush.

By some counts, 80% of Russia’s military successes in 2026 are fakes of this kind. If nobody checks, the commander in chief is glad to repeat any nonsense, as long as it confirms success at the front.

So keep this in mind” when Putin announces his victories to the world, many of them are preemptive flag planting. His army is not winning the way he says it is. If Putin understands that his troops cannot advance any further, it will be possible to negotiate a ceasefire with him. Until then, all we can seriously talk about is a ceasefire.

In October, Maria Vorontsova, Putin’s elder daughter and a medical researcher, presented a new longevity laboratory at the Skolkovo business school near Moscow. Last year, Putin and China’s leader Xi Jinping were overheard in Beijing discussing whether people could live to 150.

First, let’s note that the laboratory whose work Putin’s daughter presented deals not so much with extending life as with the changes in the economy, in demography and in other social areas that come from people living longer. It is more about that.

That Maria Vorontsova works separately on extending life, and that money has been allocated for it — well, we have heard about that.

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But the first fiddle here is more likely played by a far more tragicomic character: Mikhail Kovalchuk, who heads the Kurchatov Institute, Russia’s national nuclear research center. Kovalchuk really is a kind of cross between Ostap Bender, the con man of Soviet satirical novels, and Academician Petrik, a self-styled scientist known for pseudo-scientific inventions.

As head of the federal nuclear center, which is frightening in itself, he utters very strange words and makes very strange speeches about a world government that sits who knows where. In this sense he is an extremely benighted man, or he plays an extremely benighted man. We should not rule that out either: understanding what the country’s current leadership, and Vladimir Putin personally, wants, he acts out exactly what Putin needs.

Maria Vorontsova, by contrast, has always been fairly measured in her assessments, and she was in this speech too. She says that a human life has a set length, 85 to 90 years in favorable circumstances, and that this is the length we would like to reach. All steps beyond that are attempts, as they say, to cheat God. And so far progress in that direction is not very noticeable.

As I understand it, and from what I heard some time ago, she would not much like her dad to experiment on himself with radical life extension. These experiments don’t work very well on rats. On a human being, even one who in character resembles these wonderful animals, it could all end very quickly and very sadly. And apparently sadly for his daughter, since she speaks about it so very cautiously.

Russia’s state program does indeed provide for life expectancy to rise, to 78, and to 74 for men. I would say that so far the government and Vladimir Putin are working in exactly the opposite direction. But it is written down.

I don’t think Putin fully believes these stories about 150 years that Kovalchuk may be pushing. What we heard in his conversation with President Xi was more what is called small talk: the everyday, social part of a conversation, when people trade half jokes. It was certainly not a serious conversation.

But the situation itself is, of course, very unpleasant. The life of the world, and certainly the life of Russia, depends on what goes on in the head of one man who is no longer young, and whose age has just reached the line he wrote into the program for all of Russian society: 74 years. And today many billions, tens and even hundreds of billions of dollars are being spent on shortening the lives of all other Russians, not lengthening them. That is what he does. What can you do about it?

Will he want to take us all with him? Let’s hope he won’t be allowed to. Although, as of today, nothing constrains him.

Trump has said he is open to a three-way meeting with Xi Jinping and Putin, and Putin appears open to it too. People say they want to discuss everything, including the fate of Ukraine. Many now ask whether the world could come to a point where three countries decide all of world politics, or whether this is only for two more years, until Trump leaves.

All week, the Kremlin propaganda celebrated a possible “new Yalta”.

A troika that decides the fate of the world, as it did after World War II, is the model in Putin’s head. In reality, apart from nuclear arsenals, Russia today cannot be compared with China and the United States. Not in population, not in production volumes, and not in the level of its scientific and technological base. Over 25 years, Putin drove all of that deep down. He cannot compete with the United States, and now he cannot compete even with China.

Britain was once part of such a troika, and very quickly it was not, because its empire fell apart. Russia’s economy, I will not say it has collapsed, but it is at least in a deep depression. Over the last 15 of Putin’s 25 years in power, average economic growth in Russia has been roughly half of China’s. That tells you the balance of power, and how much Putin could afford to say inside this troika.

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The other two sides want very different things from such talks. For Trump, the key issue is reducing nuclear weapons. For China, a country with a very powerful economy that lags well behind the United States in nuclear weapons, the interest is exactly the opposite. China has no interest in dividing the world. It has quite clear interests connected with Taiwan, and as its capabilities grow, it will keep pushing those interests. I really do not know whether America will be able to resist or not.

China vs United States

In industrial production America is no competitor to China. The real question between them is whether America is ready to accept Chinese goods on its own market, or will pay much more money to other producers. America and China will probably settle that question without Vladimir Putin.

Then there are artificial intelligence and modern technology. This issue is very pressing between the United States and China. Russia’s place in this discussion, sadly, after a quarter century of Vladimir Putin’s rule, is basically nil. We are nobody in the artificial intelligence race. Well, thank you, Uncle Volodya, you got what you wanted. In this sense the country is in very deep trouble, and sadly in many other areas too.

So when we talk about a troika dividing the world, it is Putin who wants to divide the world. China and the United States have modern disputes over trade, supply chains and high technology. One would of course like to talk about Greenland and Taiwan, but grabbing each other’s territory is not their first or even second priority.

Such a meeting is certainly possible. But Putin’s place at it would be a folding chair at the side of the table. Even a folding chair matters a lot to him, because it would give him legitimacy. To some extent it would remove from him the stamp of a pariah, a man wanted by the International Criminal Court. That is his personal wish, and it comes from his personal problems and fears.

As for the country, it cannot count on more than a folding chair. Alas, that is the result of 25 years of Putin’s rule.

Greetings, dear friends!

Another week has passed, and we are meeting again to talk about the most important events, or at least the events that interested you most this week.

This is the English-language version of my weekly Q&A with followers, presented by the NEST Centre.

How to ask me a question:

1. Subscribe to NEST Pulse, the NEST Centre’s weekly newsletter (a must read if you follow Russia.)

2. After you sign up, wait for your first NEST Pulse newsletter to reach your inbox, then reply to that email with your question.

3. Make sure to start your reply with “Question for Khodorkovsky:”

Each week I pick a few of these questions to answer in the next video.

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1. Is the war ending?

On October 21, Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy, met Putin in St Petersburg, bringing an updated plan to end the war. Vladimir Medinsky, whom I mention below, is the Putin aide who headed Russia’s delegation at earlier talks with Ukraine. The US midterm elections are on November 3.

Q: Is the war ending? Why have the negotiations suddenly intensified? Nobody seems to have changed their position: Putin wants Donbas, and Ukraine wants a halt to the fighting and guarantees. These positions could never be reconciled before. Has something changed?

A: Nothing has changed. To my deep regret, after a three-hour meeting with Witkoff, Putin apparently decided to take some ritual steps. We can tell they are ritual because Medinsky has again been appointed as negotiator. They are meant to make sure Donald Trump keeps his position, which is to step away from Ukraine and push it toward the terms that would suit Vladimir Putin.

Ukraine is not ready to agree to this for now. Putin thinks he can force it through with another winter of problems caused by the strikes on Ukraine’s energy system. He also counts on the risks Ukraine faces from changes of political elites in European countries, and on the fact thaft Europe’s money for Ukraine in 2027 is not guaranteed. Add Donald Trump joining this wonderful position, and Ukraine’s situation really is not the simplest. But Ukraine is not ready to capitulate either. So these so-called negotiations will most likely end in nothing again, in another round of stalling.

I think Putin is also making a significant mistake here, because Trump’s position may change. After these midterms, Trump will have many other problems at home, connected with the very likely loss of at least one chamber of Congress. Even if he does not rely on Congress now, Congress holds all the tools of investigation, and the new Congress will very likely harass and press his administration. All of this will make it harder for Trump to support Putin’s position.

Still, Putin seems to have decided to take the risk and keep up the pressure on Ukraine. So for now there is no reason to expect anything serious from this stage of the talks. But the situation changes quickly, and in a week we may see something different.

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2. Why did Putin reshuffle his government?

On October 19, Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin proposed a government reshuffle, and two days later the State Duma approved it. Finance Minister Anton Siluanov also became a deputy prime minister. Dmitry Grigorenko, a deputy prime minister who headed the government’s staff office, left the government and was replaced by First Deputy Finance Minister Irina Okladnikova. Yuri Trutnev, the presidential envoy to the Far East, was replaced by Oleg Kozhemyako, governor of the Primorye region, and Transport Minister Andrei Nikitin became a deputy prime minister. Under Russia’s constitution, the prime minister becomes acting president if the president can no longer perform his duties.

Q: Why did Putin replace several key players in the government? Is he unhappy with their work? But Mishustin stayed, and the government seems to do everything Putin orders. What is behind these changes?

A: On October 19, Mishustin, so to speak, proposed the changes and the Duma, so to speak, approved them, and on October 22 the decrees were signed. Several significant figures in the government, or their positions, have changed. Siluanov keeps his post as finance minister and also becomes deputy prime minister, and a deputy finance minister now heads the government staff office, which is a very important position.

One of Mishustin’s closest people, Mr. Grigorenko, was also removed from the government. This is Putin’s same old personnel policy: he tries to stop people who are, to one degree or another, strong figures from building their own teams. Mishustin is strong not only personally but because of his position under the constitution. If something happens to Putin, it is Mishustin who becomes acting president until early elections. So Putin, as always, is trying to leave him without a team. That is his traditional line.

More telling is that people from the Ministry of Finance are getting more levers. It shows that Putin is worried about the country’s finances and reserves, and about the war gradually sucking the life out of the country. Something has to be done, so the Ministry of Finance gains importance, and people able to carry out a tough financial policy get more posts and more opportunities. We can say with confidence that, at least at this stage, Putin is thinking about financing the continuation of the war, not about what might happen if the war stopped.

The other changes, such as Mr. Trutnev’s, are most likely retirement after all. Kozhemyako as presidential envoy to the Far East, the transport minister: these positions matter less for us.

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3. Why does China pay less for Russian gas than for gas from Turkmenistan?

Russia’s budget dosuments show that Gazprom expects to sell gas to China in 2026 at about $248 per 1,000 cubic meters, against about $562 for its other foreign customers. Power of Siberia 2 is a second gas pipeline from Russia to China (planning stage), Turkmenistan is China’s other big supplier of pipeline gas. Serdar Berdimuhamedov is president of Turkmenistan.

Q: The Ministry of Economic Development accidentally revealed the prices of pipeline gas deliveries to China. It turns out that on the Chinese route Gazprom gets $40 to $60 per 1,000 cubic meters less than Turkmenistan does. Does China value and respect Berdimuhamedov more than Putin? Surely Russia is a bigger and more important ally for Xi.

A: These wonderful documents were indeed posted. Part of the material was hidden, but not well enough, and we could finally see the prices at which gas is sold to China. The discount for 2026 is 56%. If the general gas price is around $560 per 1,000 cubic meters, China plans to take it at $248. And for Power of Siberia 2, China is pushing for a price $50, or even $130, below what it pays Turkmenistan.

A country under the leadership of a great leader, and you will laugh, but I mean Russia, not China, has driven itself into a situation where, by and large, China is the only buyer for its pipeline gas. There are not many options for liquefied gas either. The plants and the ships still have to be built, and it is unclear whether sanctions will squeeze all of this in the end. So China sees itself as the absolute monopoly buyer.

In other words: you want to produce gas and sell it to us? Here is how much it will cost: enough to pay for the extraction and put a little money in your pocket. That’s it. You don’t want it? Fine, we will buy from someone else. You are the ones who cannot sell, whose gas-producing regions will grind to a halt.

And why not? In China’s place, probably any sensible statesman of any country would do the same. Guys, if you have driven yourselves into this situation, why shouldn’t I take advantage of it? If I had no gas and only you had it, you would increase prices for me — the way Russia once pushed prices up for Europe. Now I am your only buyer, so I will leverage my position to get a better price. Of course, making sure that producing this gas stays at least minimally profitable for you. Why should I pay you more? Because we’re friends? Haha! Go and look for other friends on the market.

All of this was predictable and absolutely clear. Putin blundered into this, just as he blundered into a growing dependence on China in other areas too: in purchases, in oil supplies, everywhere. It all costs the country enormous money.

We also know Putin’s real attitude toward China. It is far from good, I would even say far from decent. Putin and his circle are, after all, deep latent racists. But right now they have no other options. They have to deal with China, and China takes advantage of it. So yes, the prices are lousy. And yes, it will stay this way as long as power is in Vladimir Putin’s hands.

Unfortunately, nothing this week tells us that the war is ending, or that this winter will be less dramatic for Ukraine than the last one.

I very much hope next week brings better news. All the best, and until next week.

Send me your questions! To do that:

1. Subscribe to NEST Pulse

2. Wait for your first NEST Pulse newsletter to reach your inbox

3. Reply to that email with your question, making sure to state “Question for Khodorkovsky:”
   
   

This is the English-language version of my weekly Q&A with followers, presented by the NEST Centre.

How to ask me a question:

1. Subscribe to NEST Pulse, the NEST Centre’s weekly newsletter.

2. After you sign up, wait for your first NEST Pulse newsletter to reach your inbox, then reply to that email with your question.

3. Make sure to start your reply with “Question for Khodorkovsky:”

Each week I pick a few of these questions to answer the following week.

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1. Can Ukraine’s strikes on data centers wipe out Russians’ bank accounts?

In October, Ukrainian drones hit data centers belonging to Yandex, Russia’s largest tech company. Sberbank, which the viewer mentions, is Russia’s largest bank.

Q: Ukraine is striking Russian data centers. How much could this affect the country? Could it set Russia back a hundred years, and what could fall apart? Could Sberbank lose the record of your account or reset it to zero? Could it lose the record that you repaid a loan? Could your e-tickets vanish just before a flight?

A: Well, e-tickets can vanish, and regularly do, without any Ukrainian strikes. So let’s set that aside.

As for accounts at Sberbank, of course they cannot disappear altogether. Or rather, the information about them cannot disappear. The money itself certainly can.

But this information cannot disappear as a result of strikes on data centers, because it is duplicated many times over and is stored in far more places than these data centers. Some records of transactions might be lost, but again, they are most likely duplicated, and after some sorting out they will be restored. This is not a critical part of the consequences of the Ukrainian strikes. And in this respect it is certainly impossible to say that the country will be set back a hundred years.

It is another matter that if these strikes continue, the infrastructure of the Russian internet, and of the businesses and services that depend on the internet and modern communications, will naturally start to crumble. And in many ways this is linked not only to the Ukrainian strikes but also to what the Russian authorities have done to the internet, to these systems of communication and data processing. I want to remind you that when the internet was created in America, the brief was precisely maximum resilience in wartime. The internet was built from the start so that strikes on individual parts of it would not knock it out.

Ha! But what can you do with people who can’t keep their hands off things? Roskomnadzor, Russia’s internet censor, very much wanted to be able to cut the Russian internet off from the global one, and so the law sharply reduced the possibilities for duplicating data and for storing it outside Russia. That, of course, reduced resilience. Then they installed filters. Then they installed additional equipment under SORM, the well-known system of state surveillance of communications, to monitor incoming and outgoing traffic. Then it turned out that installing it everywhere was somehow unprofitable, expensive and unappealing, so they decided to route the traffic through a limited number of points where it would all converge. And of course all this sharply reduced the resilience of the Russian network.

Then there are the supercomputers. Without big machines, this kind of full-scale work is not yet possible, especially now that Russia is cut off from the global network and from other countries. And there are few machines. They are mostly built from imported components, and with the technology sanctions imposed on Russia because of Putin’s war, those components are not easy to obtain today. So, clearly, the network has become less effective.

Clearly, further strikes could seriously complicate the work of businesses that depend on the internet. At the same time, things like bank accounts and records of repaid loans will most likely not be affected. But the ordinary businesses, services and conveniences we are used to will keep crumbling, and in many ways, I want to say again, not only because of the strikes, but because the Russian authorities, through their own efforts, have sharply reduced the resilience of the network and of communications inside Russia.

2. Why has Trump turned back to Putin?

On October 9, after a call with Putin, Trump announced a deal under which Russia would supply diesel to world markets, and the US Treasury temporarily waived sanctions on Russian diesel. Sparring with Zelensky over the deal, Trump said Ukraine should get a new leader. Since the war with Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz, US diesel prices have hit record highs. The US midterm elections are on November 3.

Q: Why has Trump suddenly moved closer to Putin again? What is this strange energy deal, or diesel deal, that nobody but the American president knows about or confirms? Why is Trump now openly demanding that Zelensky resign? Has Putin somehow managed to corrupt Trump?

A: Trump faces elections, and very soon: on November 3. Not his own, of course; his term continues. But the elections to Congress are just around the corner.

And there is a huge chance that the Republicans, and so Trump, will lose at least one house of Congress, and perhaps both.

That would not exactly tie Donald Trump’s hands completely, because even now he does not turn to Congress very often and mostly prefers to act through executive orders. Even so, Congress has the power, for example, to open investigations.

And these investigations, into Trump himself and into the people around him, will cost time, nerves and very, very bad PR. So for Donald Trump even the slightest chance of keeping both houses of Congress is fundamentally important, and he will try to do everything that serves it. Right now he thinks of practically nothing else.

And why is Congress slipping away from Trump’s team? Largely because of diesel prices, which jumped because of the war Trump is waging with Iran in the Middle East: the Strait of Hormuz is blocked, and many oil refineries in the countries of the region have been put out of action. All in all, this is no joke at all.

Blaming the fall in world diesel output on Ukrainian strikes on Russian refineries is, shall we say, a stretch. We are talking about roughly one percent of world diesel trade. Still, first, even one percent can move the price of diesel by a few cents or tens of cents, and that matters to Trump’s voters.

Second, he would like to show his voters that he is doing everything in his power to bring the price of diesel down, and that the obstacle is the very Ukrainians whom those voters support. We really must understand that Trump’s voters, by and large, support the Ukrainians. So pitting these two narratives against each other, “you are paying more for diesel because of the Ukrainians” and “you support the Ukrainians,” is what Trump’s team is doing now, because they need it to win, or at least to soften their defeat, in the coming midterms.

And I think there is no need to bring in extra explanations here, such as Trump being corrupted. I don’t know whether Putin is corrupting the president of the United States or whether that is not happening yet, but even without any corruption, this is simply in the interests of Donald Trump and his team. And he is acting precisely in his own interests. That Ukraine’s interests suffer as a result has, well, always left Trump fairly indifferent.

I would also note that emotions, of course, break through. Donald Trump has not forgotten that his first impeachment was tied to Zelensky. Trump asked Zelensky to do certain things that Zelensky could not do.

But Trump decided that Zelensky did not want to. He decided that Zelensky was backing the Democratic Party. I don’t actually know whom Zelensky backed, but Trump decided that Zelensky was backing the Democrats, and for Trump that was absolutely unacceptable. He holds it against Zelensky to this day. Whenever an opportunity like this comes up, when he can set the interests of Ukraine and Zelensky against the interests of his own voters, he immediately remembers it and says: let’s get rid of Zelensky, he has to go, and so on.

That this coincides with Putin’s narratives is perhaps a pleasant bonus for Trump’s team, but a bonus all the same, because they would of course like to reach an agreement with Putin specifically. They reason that Zelensky and Ukraine depend on them more and Putin depends on them less, so an agreement with Putin naturally matters more.

That, in fact, is what is happening now. Trump is playing along with Putin out of his own interests and his own emotions, and Putin, since nothing is working out for him on the battlefield, is trying to improve his position by persuading the Americans to undermine Ukraine’s ability to defend itself.

3. Can Ukraine hold out without American help?

Ukraine relies on American Patriot air defense systems, which can shoot down ballistic missiles, on SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet, and on US intelligence for targeting and for warning of Russian missile launches. Palantir is an American company whose software combines large volumes of intelligence data.

Q: What will happen to Ukraine if America goes all the way and cuts off aid entirely? Can Ukraine hold out without Patriots, Starlink, and intelligence for targeting and for warning of launches?

A: Of course, all these elements are extremely important for Ukraine: the launch warnings, the missiles that can shoot down the ballistic missiles striking Ukrainian cities, the supply of other weapons, intelligence with targeting data, and intelligence showing where Russian air defenses are positioned. All of this, of course, helps Ukraine, which is the weaker side in this war, with far fewer resources than Putin. All of this helps Ukrainians hold out.

If America does refuse all this help, will it be hard for Ukraine? Undoubtedly, it will be hard. Will it be critical? Hmm, I wouldn’t say so, because Ukraine has enough allies. These allies, the European allies, have their own intelligence capabilities, their own targeting capabilities and their own early warning of launches. Unfortunately, all of this is very fragmented.

That is, it has not been brought together. There are systems like these, but they belong to different countries and have not yet been combined into one. But the technology already exists, including the technology of Palantir, which makes it possible to combine all this data quickly and effectively. And I am absolutely convinced that if the United States stops supplying intelligence of this kind, it will largely be replaced by European data.

I don’t really believe, or don’t believe at all, that Donald Trump and his administration are prepared to ban the sale of weapons to European countries, and through them to Ukraine, for money.

You see, right now, with diesel prices rising in America, the simplest way for Trump to bring them down would be to restrict exports. America produces more diesel than it consumes and exports a substantial share of it. If exports were restricted, the price of diesel in America would fall. For Trump this is extremely important. And yet he cannot bring himself to do it, because he understands perfectly well that a large part of his support rests on the companies, the people and the towns that depend on that price. And they will not let anyone hit them in the pocket. It is the same with weapons.

Trying to forbid American corporations to make money by producing this hardware and supplying it to Europe? For Trump, that would be fatal.

And we must also bear in mind that, as I have said before, around seventy percent of Americans, and certainly more than half of the Americans who count themselves among Trump’s supporters, favor continued support for Ukraine. And if it becomes clear that the Trump administration is leaving Ukraine in the lurch, banning it, denying it the ability to defend itself, well, that will not exactly win him votes. So it seems to me that the American administration can, naturally, create certain difficulties for Zelensky, and is creating them. Ukrainians will have to pay for these difficulties with a great many lives. And it seems there is no escaping that.

But a total switch-off of the kind that could dramatically affect Ukraine’s ability to defend itself will not follow.

4. Has Russia lost the AI race after the strikes on Yandex?

The Yandex data centers that Ukrainian drones struck house Russia’s most powerful supercomputers. Even before the strikes, the most powerful of them ranked 101st in the world. The independent Russian outlet Meduza has reported that the damage could set Russia’s AI development back by years.

Q: All three Yandex supercomputers, which are also the country’s main supercomputers, have been destroyed or badly damaged. Experts say that in the AI race even Kazakhstan is now ahead of Russia. How much of a problem is this for the country? Or is it just a temporary inconvenience?

A: First, I should say that as of today there is no confirmation that these three supercomputers have been destroyed. Some strikes have been carried out, but we cannot say to what extent they did final and irreversible damage to these computers.

Second, it is important to understand that in the AI race these supercomputers, which rank below 100th in the world, certainly play some role, but that role is completely insignificant. Today the race to build advanced AI is between China and the United States. Even Europe is effectively not taking part in it.

Moreover, to my deep astonishment and, in a sense, regret, Europe, with its highly qualified workforce and quite considerable means, has in effect excluded itself from this race. It is busy regulating the problems connected with AI. That is its contribution. In other words, it is reducing its competitiveness in this race even further. And Russia simply isn’t there. It just isn’t. You cannot make worse something that practically doesn’t exist.

Where is Russia present? In the use of AI. Besides the problem of creating AI, there is problem number two: how to put it to work, how to realize its potential to raise productivity. That task is important, a whole range of countries are working on it, and in this area Russia actually looks quite good.

But, as always, the dictatorship never sleeps; it cannot let anything develop freely. To develop AI, even in the sense I have described, to develop its use, you need access to the best models.

You need to work with Western cloud services, you need to reopen all those gates that have been half-closed. And the authorities do not want to do that, because for dictatorships openness is always a huge, huge problem. So I very much fear that even after achieving quite good results at the start, Russia’s AI industry will lose this competition, lose even to those who are in fact weaker in productive and intellectual potential. It will lose simply because the handicap, the weight on its legs that the Kremlin has piled on its own developers, its own young people working in modern technology, and keeps piling on, will at some point become absolutely unbearable.

And blaming this on the Ukrainian strikes would be rather laughable, though, clearly, the strikes are real too. But I want to say again: if everything worked normally, if the dictatorship were not a dictatorship, well, first, there would be no war at all. And second, modern digital systems would have been built from the start to withstand damage to individual parts.

It is only because Roskomnadzor could not keep its hands off these systems that even minimal strikes on them in Russia now knock them out.

We have to live with that.

5. Will limiting Schengen visas for Russians stop Putin’s saboteurs?

EU governments are discussing whether to issue Russian tourists Schengen visas valid only in certain countries rather than across the whole Schengen area. Germany reportedly proposed the idea. In September, Germany blamed Russia for an attempted drone attack on a Ukrainian cargo plane at Leipzig airport and tightened entry rules for Russians. The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) has set up a platform for dialogue with Russian democratic forces, and I am one of its members.

Q: Several European countries are preparing proposals to restrict Schengen visas for Russians, to the point of effectively giving Russians only national visas rather than Schengen ones. How much will this whole idea help in the fight against Putin’s saboteurs, and will the Russian members of the PACE platform do anything about it?

A: Let’s be precise: this is not about national visas, which have their own advantages and drawbacks, but about limiting the territory where Russians’ visas are valid. Frankly, I don’t really believe this will help in any way in the fight against Putin’s saboteurs, because, as we now see, they have learned the ropes and use citizens of other countries for their criminal activity, including even citizens of Ukraine, who are not covered by any of these restrictions.

From this point of view, in my opinion, it is rather strange to restrict Russians by citing the need to counter Putin’s sabotage and saboteurs. And the existing restrictions already work today; they have sharply reduced the flow of Russians.

I have also heard another approach to this question, when representatives of Western governments say: well, Russia is at war with Ukraine, so why should Russians be holidaying here meanwhile, soaking up the sun? If they are at war, let them suffer. This has its reasons, but it also has obvious problems of its own. Tourist visas are the remaining means of communication between Russian civil society, anti-war Russians and the West, including the Russians who are in the West.

And when this is shut down and we are told that there will be special individual permits instead, it is clear that the Russian authorities could very easily block such individual permits, or at least make life enormously difficult inside Russia for the people who receive them.

I think this is a mistaken approach. I have explained why it is mistaken to our colleagues in Western governments, and we will keep explaining it. I think some changes are inevitable, but we will most likely manage to do something so that these changes are not so dramatic.

We will, of course, discuss this in December at the next meeting with the platform’s participants from European countries other than Russia.

What will come of it? We’ll see. There are plenty of arguments on both sides. And of course the sabotage carried out by Putin’s subversion and intelligence machine makes this kind of conversation very difficult: about Russian citizens, about visas for Russian citizens, including their humanitarian purpose, since many Russians have relatives abroad. All in all, it’s the usual story. Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin has landed all of us in serious trouble. Will we manage to get out from under it somehow? We’ll try. Though one more Leipzig, and the situation will be harder still.

6. Why did Montenegro send Rybar’s founder back to Russia?

On October 9, police in Montenegro detained Mikhail Zvinchuk, founder of Rybar, one of Russia’s most popular pro-war Telegram channels, together with four other Russians. Zvinchuk is under EU sanctions that bar him from entering the EU. Montenegro expelled him on national security grounds, and he is back in Russia. In 2024, the US State Department offered up to $10 million for information on Rybar’s interference in American elections.

Q: “Montenegro detained the founder of Rybar, the biggest pro-war Telegram channel. The Americans had offered ten million dollars for his capture. Montenegro simply deported him to Russia. What is the logic? Is Montenegro more afraid of Putin than of the US? Then why detain him at all? Did nobody in Montenegro want ten million?”

A: I would point out that the Americans offered ten million for convincing evidence that Rybar and similar outfits interfered in the elections and political systems of Western countries, mainly the political system of America. Not for detaining the man, but for evidence of his guilt and the guilt of the organization.

The more serious question is how a man under sanctions ended up in Europe: through whom he got there, how he obtained a visa, how he ended up on a plane. These are all big and serious questions which, as far as I know, will now be investigated in great detail.

We can assume this is about corruption, another act of corruption connected with sanctions. And there are a great many such cases of sanctions-related corruption, including in Europe. I very much hope this particular case will be properly looked into.

That Montenegro, lacking proof of the man’s guilt, decided to send him to Russia specifically, and not anywhere else, only shows that all the talk about the justice system not really working in Europe is deeply mistaken. The legal system in Europe does work. If a person finds himself in a tough legal situation, he can be sure that even if he is in the wrong, even if he really is a criminal, the legal system will protect his interests. And if the evidence of his crime is insufficient, he will manage to get out of that situation. It is another matter that the whole machine of European justice catches up with everyone in the end. Everyone it considers important to catch, it catches, after ten years, twenty years, thirty years. This adversarial system is often hard for us Russians to understand, but it exists.

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7. Did Russia cause Brexit?

On October 11, Prime Minister Andy Burnham said it was “clear” that Russia had interfered in the 2016 referendum on leaving the EU, which Leave won with 51.9% of the vote. Afterwards, his spokesman said the government did not believe Russia had succeeded and considered the result legitimate.

Q: “The British prime minister has said that Russia interfered in the referendum on leaving the EU. Given that Leave won with less than 52% of the vote, do you believe Russian interference led to Brexit and changed the makeup of the EU?”

A: We know that the British prime minister has since made clear that journalists misunderstood him: he did not say that Brexit happened under Russian influence or because of it. There was some influence, as I understand it, and it will most likely be proven. But it is absolutely certain that the polls showed exactly what happened: that the Brexiteers were winning by a small margin. People here know how to count votes; in that sense everything here is very precise. And it is also absolutely certain that a significant part of Britain’s political elite campaigned hard for Brexit. In my view that was a mistaken position. I said so at the time.

And the funniest thing, you know, is that a great many people in Britain, now that they have understood what Brexit led to, are absolutely certain that they voted against it. You ask people: “Why did you vote for Brexit? Do you see what you’ve got out of it now?”

“Me, for Brexit? What are you talking about? Never!” And you see that more than half the country actually voted for Brexit, but now fewer than a third say they voted for it. How does that happen? Well, it just does.

It happens in Russia, and it happens here in Britain too. People don’t want to remember that they made a serious mistake that hit them in their own pocket. I think these mistakes must be corrected, and they most likely will be.

8. MEPs who visit Moscow, and visa limits for ordinary Russians

The Insider, an independent Russian investigative outlet, has found that one in ten current members of the European Parliament has visited Russia since it annexed Crimea in 2014, and that some still travel there to meet politicians, officials and even spies - like Sergei Naryshkin - who heads Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR). In September he accused the EU of interfering in Russia’s parliamentary elections, and on October 8 the European Parliament voted not to recognize the newly elected State Duma as legitimate.

Q: “The Insider writes that many members of the European Parliament have kept traveling to Russia since the war began, and some even meet Naryshkin. How does this square with the constant tightening of restrictions on Russians? Why doesn’t anyone stand up at a session and say: ‘This MEP met the head of Russian intelligence yesterday’? That is far more dangerous for democracy than giving a Finnish tourist Schengen visa to a teacher from St Petersburg.”

A: Well, it is absolutely true that corruption inside the Western political system is far more dangerous than some visas for ordinary Russians.

Absolutely true. And everyone understands this perfectly well. The difficulty is that it is very hard to prove a situation like this, a direct link of this kind. Though sometimes it is very funny. When we held hearings in the European Parliament on the Russian elections, Mr. Naryshkin, the head of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, put out a statement that went roughly like this: various renegades are doing everything they can to smear our most honest elections, and we will counter them in every way. And the next day, during these hearings, eight members of the European Parliament from various parties, mostly extremely radical ones but members of the European Parliament nonetheless, came and started disrupting the event. So we can plainly see a direct instruction going from Russia’s foreign intelligence service to members of the European Parliament, and some of these members carrying it out.

What is even funnier is that Russia’s foreign intelligence service is burning its agents on an utterly stupid and pointless fight over how the vote that took place should be judged. That it has nothing to do with honest elections is so obvious. And it was so obvious that Europe would take an unequivocal view on this, that burning your agents for the sake of it, well, you know, that is something that often happens in dictatorships.

The master gave the order, and the servants don’t stop to think. What choice do they have?

So such agents exist, and Putin works effectively with his agents; we have seen this in many examples, and it must be fought. And of course, the way this goes on at the same time as the restrictions on Russians looks extremely unpleasant. Just as unpleasant as when sanctions were imposed on ordinary Russians while super-rich Russians were taken off the sanctions lists, having managed to create, let’s say, conditions in which these same Western politicians voted to take them off. All of this looks terrible. And don’t think we don’t talk about it. I spoke about it quite directly several years ago in the European Parliament. I told the MEPs sitting there to their faces: we know about you, you are in effect carrying out unlawful instructions, we know this about you. There was a big scandal, but I don’t know how much it helps. I hope it does.

That’s probably all for today. I look forward to new questions, and let’s pick up the conversation in a week — subscribe to NEST Pulse here and follow instructions on top of this article to submit your question.

There will surely be plenty that’s new. I hope that over this week the situation between Donald Trump’s administration and Ukraine will settle down somehow, because American society, the voters, stand on Ukraine’s side.

Thank you, and until next time.

This is the English-language version of my weekly Q&A with followers, presented by the NEST Centre.

How to ask me a question:

1. Subscribe to NEST Pulse, the NEST Centre’s weekly newsletter.

2. Once the NEST Pulse newsletter reaches your inbox, reply to that email with your question.

3. Make sure to start your reply with “Question for Khodorkovsky:”

Each week I pick a few of these questions to answer in the next video.

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1. Putin's winter war on Ukraine's cities

At the Valdai Discussion Club on October 1, Putin spoke of his readiness to continue the war and rejected a mutual halt to strikes on energy facilities. In the days that followed, Russia began striking the bridges across the Dnipro in Kyiv for the first time since the full-scale invasion, and Ukraine hit a data center belonging to Yandex, Russia's largest tech company. And Neither side has broken through on the front.

It is very hard for me to say what Putin is prepared to do in pursuit of his goal, which I find rather strange: to seize a piece of land from a neighboring country, from a people that was friendly to Russia before all this began. It will bring Russia nothing good. The devastated territories will have to be rebuilt. The money for that obviously cannot come from the West, and it seems it will not come from the East either, because no one will recognize these annexed, seized territories. So Russia will have to spend money it is short of even for itself.

Why all this is happening, and where it will eventually lead, is unclear. But for Putin it has become an idée fixe. If he is trying to restore the Soviet Union, the idea is a bad one. As a result of this whole story, the countries that were once part of the Soviet Union are running from Russia rather than drawing closer. Who wants to deal with a country led by a man who can, at any moment and for reasons no one understands, start a mad war, now in its fifth year, with hundreds of thousands of victims and enormous destruction?

What else Putin is prepared to do on this path is impossible to know; I think he does not know it himself. But at Valdai he spoke of his readiness to continue the war, and it is fairly obvious that he intends to continue it by destroying civilian infrastructure.

On everything he can actually influence, the war against Ukraine and the situation in Russia, his message was nothing new: I have been cruel, I will be crueler still, and through that cruelty I will win.

He will not.

His idea is that if Ukraine survived last winter's nightmare in the cold, it will certainly not survive this one, and Zelensky will be forced to capitulate. But no country has ever capitulated because its infrastructure was being destroyed. We know of no such example. I do not know where Putin got this idea.

2. The bridges are not the real danger

Destroying the bridges has clearly not worked out for him. Destroying major bridges is a difficult technical task. The Americans managed it in their attack on Serbia, but no one else has done it effectively. Over these four and a half years there have been many attempts, by Russia and by Ukraine, to destroy major bridges, and all of them, except perhaps one, by some accounts, ended in complete failure.

Now, too, the most that happens is that traffic over the bridges stops for a while. I think the military officers given this task understand that. So this fire is mostly harassment: it puts the people of Kyiv under strain, along with the drivers who have to cross the river. Destroying the bridges is unlikely.

What is a big and serious problem is that Ukraine's energy infrastructure is being knocked out, and Kyiv may again be left without heat for the winter. Ukrainians cannot counter ballistic missiles and, for now, have only a limited ability to counter jet-powered drones, so they naturally try to inflict the same pain on Russian infrastructure and Russian society. All of this hardens people further on both sides of a front line that Putin drew and that nobody needs.

It is very sad, but this winter will end as the last one did: with great hardship for civilians in both Russia and Ukraine, and with everything still where it was.

3. Putin's bet on Europe's far right

Putin is counting on something else as well. Next summer, the far right may come to power in European countries, at least in France and perhaps in Germany. These forces have apparently shown interest in restoring relations with the Kremlin and in no longer helping Ukraine. If the West stops helping Ukraine, Ukraine will find it extremely hard to hold out. That is what Putin is counting on.

But the winter strikes on Ukrainian cities, this humanitarian catastrophe, will more likely mean that Western societies simply do not allow any Western politician to strike such a backroom deal with Putin.

Whoever comes to power in France or Germany, none of them will be able to reach agreements with Putin amid what is called urbicide, the deliberate destruction of cities. It would be political suicide.

If Putin does not understand this, I think he will come to understand it in the coming months. It is a pity that tens, if not hundreds, of thousands more people will pay with their lives for his learning it.

4. Schröder, Putin's useful idiot, and the arrest of his intelligence chief

Two German stories broke at almost the same moment. Former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder joined the supervisory board of the Russian arm of Globus, a German hypermarket chain that stayed in Russia after the full-scale invasion. A few days later, German prosecutors arrested August Hanning, who ran the BND, Germany's foreign intelligence service, from 1998 to 2005, while Schröder was chancellor. Prosecutors suspect him of treasonous espionage. They have not explicitly said which country's intelligence service he was in contact with.

Some have asked whether the two stories are connected: whether, once one of Putin's agents was arrested, the other was evacuated. No. The timing does not fit, and I am absolutely sure that Schröder was not Putin's agent in the direct sense of the word, an agent meaning a spy.

For Putin, Schröder was a useful idiot. Putin did him a great personal favor involving his family, one that mattered enormously to Schröder personally, and because of it Schröder came to consider himself obliged to Putin. Being obliged to a man like Putin is a big problem.

So as not to feel like a thoroughly indecent man, Schröder gradually adjusted both his politics and his view of the world to the idea that Putin is in fact a good man whom nobody understands. I very much hope that something shifted in Mr. Schröder's mind after the large-scale slaughter in Ukraine began. Even so, he has continued to deal with Putin.

It is clear why the supermarket chain wants him on its board: he gives it a direct channel to Putin. Schröder surely understands that too, and since he agreed, it means he has decided to keep up his relationship with Putin even now.

So I do not consider him a good man. He came to owe Putin for understandable private family reasons, but he goes on repaying that debt while understanding who Putin really is. I am not sure that speaks well of him.

The case of Schröder's intelligence chief is somewhat worse. This is a man who had access to top-secret documents and who, it appears, and I repeat, it appears, at least until a court rules, deliberately passed them to the intelligence services of countries that were at the time, if not hostile, then rivals.

That naturally calls the work of his own service into serious question. Partner services that work with the BND will naturally be wary of sharing information with it.

It is also worth noting that after leaving the service, he obtained this confidential information through one of his former staff who was still working there, and perhaps more than one; that is not yet known. So at least one person, and most likely several, have been put in very serious trouble. All in all, a very unpleasant and very ugly situation.

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5. Putin at 74: why he cannot leave, and why he cannot last

Putin turned 74 on October 7. His current term ends in 2030, and the Kremlin periodically lets rumors circulate that he is looking for a successor.

I suppose Putin has entered the decade of his life in which Russia's dictators have usually died in office. The work is nerve-racking, and it seems not to let them live very long.

But it need not happen only the way it did with Stalin, who simply died in a pool of his own vomit. It is enough for Putin to end up helpless on an operating table, and a palace coup becomes possible. That is especially true if things stand as they do now, when Putin's elites, broadly speaking, think they may be better off without him than with him.

There is a second reason. The system of power Putin has built is not only a system of corruption. It is also a balance between elite factions, which he sets against one another, as often happens in criminal gangs, so that he can act as the arbiter of their endless fight. Such a system can be managed effectively as long as the man at the top has the brains and the stamina for it. As he ages, his effectiveness as arbiter naturally declines, and at some point the situation simply spins out of control. I consider the probability of that happening in the next five to seven years to be quite high: more than 50%, I would say 60%, perhaps even 70%.

At the same time, the probability that Putin will try to stay on after 2030 is still quite high, simply because he cannot afford to leave now. For him, leaving carries a mortal risk. After you have killed hundreds of thousands of people on both sides of the border, and more than a million people, it seems, have been killed or crippled, an attempt simply to walk away will hardly be greeted with delight. More than one person will want revenge, and once you are no longer head of state, that is an enormous risk. I think Putin understands this perfectly well, so he will try to hold on to power for as long as he can.

There are four years until 2030, and there is a good chance he will try to hold his post. But the probability that he completes the next term is, in my view, close to zero.

He is covering all this with talk of a search for possible successors, or at least with rumors of such a search. I think that is an outright deception. Dmitry Medvedev, whom Putin installed as president from 2008 to 2012, showed him that even the most loyal man, entirely under his control, can have his own opinion on foreign policy. Especially after the havoc he has already wreaked, Putin will hardly risk that again.

So I do not believe in any successor. I believe Putin will try to extend his rule, and I believe that attempt will end within this decade of his life, that is, within the next five to seven years.

War is the condition of this regime’s existence. No war, no Putin. That is the situation today.

This is precisely why I believe attempts to reach an agreement with Putin to end the war altogether are unrealistic. If Putin understands that his troops cannot advance any further, it will be possible to negotiate a ceasefire with him. But signing strategic treaties with him would be deceiving ourselves.

If he manages to break Ukraine’s resistance this winter, or later, in the spring, once the situation in Europe has changed in his favor, he will expect political control over Kyiv in addition to the territory he gains.

There is no cheap way to stop him

People very often ask me how Europe can stop Putin, hoping for some idea that would let it do so while doing nothing, or as little as possible.

Let me say it at once: sanctions alone will not stop the war.

Putin is spending the equivalent of roughly $250 billion a year on the war, and the figure may grow. Europe cannot count on spending three or four times less and still winning.

But of course he does have vulnerabilities.

Putin’s vulnerabilities: where are they?

Shrinking civil economy

First, he is forced to divert resources from the civilian sector to the war. This has been going on for almost five years, and it is badly weakening Russia’s infrastructure. If an industrial accident or some other disaster happens, these weaknesses will seriously undermine the regime’s stability.

And if no disaster happens?

Oil money

Second, the regime depends on foreign revenue and foreign supplies, and that makes it vulnerable.

Today Russia’s foreign trade is in surplus: Russia sells more than it buys. Who do we thank for that? The American president and the war in Iran.

The United States and Israel began striking Iran on February 28. Iran’s effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz then sent oil prices sharply higher, and Russia’s oil export earnings rose with them.

If the oil price were where it was before the war in Iran, Russia’s trade balance would be negative today.

Can anything be done about this? Ask the Americans.

Technology sanctions

Then there is the regime’s dependence on supplies. Technology sanctions constrain it, but not as much as they could. Who do we thank for that? First, of course, China. Second, the European Commission.

Why? With China, I think, the answer is obvious. But why the European Commission?

The Commission, the EU’s executive arm, proposes economic sanctions jointly with the EU’s foreign policy chief and oversees how member states enforce them. The EU has adopted 21 packages of sanctions against Russia so far.

How long is the sanctions list today? How many lines does it have? Ten thousand. How many of them are critical to Putin’s war machine? No more than 500.

Now imagine you are responsible for administering these sanctions. Which is easier to manage: a list of 10,000 or a list of 500?

Back in Soviet times, when similar sanctions were in place, there was a body called COCOM, which handled technology sanctions professionally. COCOM, the Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls, was set up by the United States and its allies in 1949 to control exports of strategic technology to the Soviet bloc, and it worked until 1994.

The war is in its fifth year, and there is no such body.

Skilled people

There is one more vulnerability of Putin’s regime, and I know very well that I am not supposed to talk about it: skilled people.

If these skilled people are drawn out of Putin’s system, the effect is immediately visible on the battlefield.

Suppose you say: “Our security services do not want to do this work, and we would rather keep these people out, because there may be agents of the FSB, Russia’s security service, among them.” Fine. Then carry on helping Putin’s regime.

After Putin: not democracy, but a Russia that does not threaten its neighbors

Do not count on Russia becoming a democracy after Putin. That is ruled out for roughly 20 years.

The goal must be a Russia after Putin that is not aggressive toward its neighbors.

Can Europe do anything to make that happen? The answer is yes. We will discuss this in more detail at the Munich Security Conference, which meets every February.

But one thing is certainly necessary: decentralizing power in Russia. More parliamentarism, more federalism.

At the end of September, The Atlantic reported that Donald Trump had backed a plan to ease some sanctions on Russia in exchange for the release of Russian political prisoners. The idea apparently belongs to John Coale, Trump’s special envoy, who has already secured the release of hundreds of political prisoners in Belarus in exchange for sanctions relief, and the plan is still at an early stage.

In December 2025, for example, the United States lifted sanctions on Belarusian potash exports, and Lukashenko freed 123 prisoners, among them the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Ales Bialiatski. In March 2026, Coale announced that sanctions on Belarusian banks and on the potash producer Belaruskali would be lifted as well.

The human rights group Memorial currently lists 1,368 political prisoners in Russia, and rights advocates acknowledge the list is incomplete.

Whether such a deal with Russia is a good idea is a very difficult question.

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The case for a deal

My colleagues and I were recently at the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. The Council of Europe is the continent’s leading human rights organisation itself. At the Assembly, we discussed this question with human rights defenders. At first, they were enthusiastic about the proposal from Trump and his adviser.

Look at Belarus, they said. A huge number of political prisoners have been freed there, and perhaps there will be none left at all. Why should the same be impossible with Russia?

And indeed, if it were possible to free every political prisoner in Russia by lifting sanctions on certain people in Putin’s outer circle, on the houses, yachts and planes they want for a life of luxury, I would personally say: to hell with them, let them enjoy their yachts. What matters is that people stop being held in prison and dying there. Since the start of this year, I believe, five political prisoners have died.

But what’s in it for Putin?

But I very much fear that Putin has no desire to help his entourage live a more pleasant life, especially outside Russia. I think his only thought today is where to find more resources to keep crushing Ukraine.

And this is where a completely different question arises. Can we allow Russian political prisoners to be exchanged for lifting sanctions in a way that would let Putin produce more weapons or kill more Ukrainians?

Russia vs Belarus and my position

With Lukashenko, this problem does not arise. Belarus is not at war. If sanctions on his potash fertilizer exports are lifted, so what? He will steal an extra $3 billion and put it in his pocket. Perhaps one day he, his children or his grandchildren will use it for a life of luxury. That is not good, but in the end, to hell with him.

With Putin, the situation is different. If he gets an extra $10, 20 or 30 billion, that money will be turned into more missiles, and those missiles will kill more people in Ukraine. So we are talking about whether we can trade the lives of Russian political prisoners for the lives of Ukrainians. That is a completely different question.

My personal answer is that of someone who was a political prisoner. I was offered the chance of release in a situation where someone else would have had to pay for that release with their life. I refused. And I think any decent political prisoner would refuse such an offer. It is impossible.

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Imagine this: a nuclear war has begun. The first strike has destroyed Russia’s leadership and its primary command posts. There is nobody left to order retaliation. But the missiles must launch nonetheless.

It was for precisely this scenario that the Soviet Union created one of its most secret nuclear systems: Perimeter, known in the West as “Dead Hand”.

Even then, a human being was supposed to make the final decision. That person was the last safeguard against a mistaken nuclear strike. Now one of Perimeter’s own developers says its modernisation has made it possible to proceed without that final human decision, once the system has been activated in the relevant mode.

Documents discovered by the Dossier Center, Danwatch and The Sunday Times show a vast underground complex in the northern Urals, constructed over decades.

The background

Work on Perimeter began in the 1970s. Soviet military planners feared a “decapitation strike”: an attack that would destroy the leadership, the General Staff, the main command posts and the communications linking them to nuclear forces. A retaliatory order might never reach the missile units.

Perimeter was designed to provide a backup means of transmitting that order. Its most unusual elements were special command missiles, though they were only one of several backup channels. Instead of a nuclear warhead, each carried communications equipment. Once airborne, they would broadcast a coded launch order to surviving missile systems, which would then carry it out.

The first command missile was based on a silo-launched intercontinental missile. Mobile systems followed: Gorn, based on the Pioneer, and Sirena, based on the Topol. A successor, Sirena-M, based on the Yars, was planned for delivery by 2025.

The original arrangement required the political leadership to put Perimeter into combat mode once a missile attack had been detected. Officers in a protected command post would then monitor the situation. If nuclear explosions occurred and contact with the leadership and General Staff disappeared, they would acquire the authority to make the final decision.

Only after their order would the command missiles launch.

The human-in-the-loop debate

According to the Stanford nonproliferation expert Jeffrey Lewis, the Soviet Union was a deeply hierarchical state. Russia remains one. The leadership has always feared that if it were destroyed, the whole structure beneath it would collapse. Perimeter was intended to guarantee retaliation even in that situation.

The American nuclear expert Bruce Blair first revealed the system’s existence publicly. His source was Colonel Valery Yarynich, who had worked directly on Soviet nuclear command and control. Part of the system could indeed work without people: command missiles transmitted an order that other missiles would then execute automatically. Yarynich later made an important clarification: the final decision still belonged to people in a protected command post.

Perimeter entered combat service in January 1985. The idea of dispensing with the human decision was already being discussed. An archival memorandum by Oleg Belyakov, who headed the Communist Party Central Committee’s defence industry department, complained that a proposal for a fully automatic retaliatory operation had not received sufficient attention.

Under that proposal, the leadership would switch the system to automatic mode when nuclear war seemed imminent and officially notify the adversary. The memorandum shows the idea was not implemented. According to nuclear expert Pavel Podvig, there is no documentary evidence that the Soviet Perimeter ever worked in fully automatic mode.

The “doomsday machine” was an idea the American analyst Herman Kahn had explored in 1960: an automatic device that would guarantee retaliation against an attacker. Stanley Kubrick subsequently brought a Soviet doomsday machine to the screen in Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.

Now consider what one of Perimeter’s own developers has written.

Retired Major General Viktor Khalin writes quite openly about Perimeter on pages of a military newspaper Veteran Missileman. He took part in its development and, in the mid-2000s, returned to lead work on a new control component for the system.

In one of his articles, Khalin wrote that Russia’s military and political leadership now possessed virtually reliable technical means to carry out retaliation in both “automated” and “automatic” modes.

The words sound similar but difference is enormous.

In the automated mode, a human retains the final decision. That person can hesitate, question the information and check it again. In the automatic mode, once the system has been activated and the programmed conditions are met, the retaliatory sequence can proceed without a fresh human decision.

The leadership would first have to put the system into that mode. But after that, according to Khalin’s account, a further decision by an officer in a protected command post would no longer be required.

Nuclear expert Podvig also recalls an incident from the 1970s. The central command post mistakenly sent out a preliminary instruction to prepare missiles for launch. According to Podvig, only one command post followed the procedure as prescribed. Most commanders suspected something was wrong. There were no signs of nuclear war around them, and they did not mechanically follow the order.

The directive was actually a readiness order rather than a launch command.

The Putin era

The command missiles themselves were also due to be modernised. In December 2019, Deputy Defence Minister Alexei Krivoruchko told Krasnaya Zvezda that the ministry planned to order the new mobile Sirena-M system and deliver it to the armed forces by 2025.

Its location has not been disclosed. But 2025 satellite images of the missile regiment at Yurya, where the previous Sirena systems were based, show large objects concealed under camouflage netting beside the missile hangars. Earlier images do not show them.

Khalin’s articles repeatedly mention another element of Perimeter: Object 1335. This is the underground complex inside Kosvinsky Kamen, a mountain near the village of Kytlym in the northern Urals.

The mountain rises to around 1,500 metres. Its mass of dense rock offered a suitable location for a deeply protected facility, and studies in 1981 confirmed what the military called its “unique radio transparency”.

Tourists climb the mountain and publish accounts. In 1997, one of them lost his way and came out at the military site: barbed wire, half-abandoned hangars and a concrete tunnel entrance. We learned part of the military unit’s history from a photograph apparently taken by a conscript’s relative, showing an information display inside the unit.

Construction of Object 1335, codenamed Grot, began in 1982. Its principal facilities were connected by underground tunnels. Long-wave and short-wave radio centres were installed tens and hundreds of metres beneath the surface. The mountain became a testing ground for protected military communications. According to the unit’s display, the launch command for a Topol-M missile in February 2000 was sent through Object 1335.

The initial construction phase ended around 1990. After that, work slowed sharply: the Soviet Union was falling apart, and money for such an expensive project was scarce. In 2004, the Russian defence minister and chief of the General Staff approved Grot as the basis for a reserve General Staff command post. According to Khalin, a secret presidential decree followed in 2005, providing for a new Perimeter control component at Object 1335. By 2010, the equipment had completed preliminary testing and been shipped to the site.

The contrast on the surface is striking. Kytlym has old wooden houses, and residents must travel about 60 kilometres each way to see a doctor.

The military settlement has modern housing, its own boiler house, a kindergarten, a club, a clinic and helicopter landing pads. It was built from the mid-2000s under a contract worth about 1.5 billion roubles and completed only in 2020.

There is another neighbour: a platinum mine. In 2014, the British company Eurasia Mining took control of the West Kytlym operation. Some mining areas lay only a few hundred metres from the military compound and entrances to the underground complex.

After the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Eurasia decided to leave Russia. At the end of 2025, it agreed to sell its 68% stake to a Russian company. Despite a valuation of approximately $251 million for that stake, it expected to receive only about $9 million because of the compulsory discount and other requirements Russia imposes on companies from “unfriendly” countries. Eurasia cited the threat of nationalisation without compensation. As of summer 2026, the transfer had not been completed.

In response to the investigation, Eurasia denied having commercial, contractual or informal relationships with Russia’s Defence Ministry, military contractors, state bodies or private companies in connection with defence procurement.

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The Mountain Unlike Any Other

Inside the mountain, the documents point to an enormous infrastructure of radio centres, communications and life-support systems, and command equipment for the strategic nuclear forces. Separate sections are linked by tunnels. Former US Assistant Secretary of Defense Andy Weber believes such a bunker would logically be built to withstand nuclear explosions and to support the soldiers inside for a long time afterwards. The investigators identified at least four equipped entrances.

Procurement records give some idea of the scale. They list about 22,000 tonnes of steel—roughly the amount in three Eiffel Towers—about 56,000 tonnes of cement, at least 13,000 tonnes of sand and nearly a hundred pieces of construction machinery and equipment. Rock blasted out of the mountain was crushed on site into gravel and sand, and a concrete plant was built beside one of the entrances.

The investigation identified at least 24 internal rooms or spaces. In 2019, refrigeration equipment with a capacity of about five megawatts was purchased. That would be enough to regulate the temperature in tens of thousands of square metres of ordinary rooms, or several thousand square metres densely packed with computing and communications equipment.

According to Per Goltermann, a professor at the Technical University of Denmark, the cement alone would make about 150,000 cubic metres of concrete. That is comparable to the concrete needed for two large modern Moscow metro stations with their tunnels. A former conscript who had been inside compared the halls to the metro, though he admitted he had never been on one. Another, whose fellow soldiers laid cables there, said the distances inside were long enough to travel by bus.

And, of course, the procurement documents list products from Western manufacturers. Danish Rockwool insulation and Danfoss valves. Italian K-Flex insulation. French Haulotte construction machinery. Swiss Belimo valves. Some of these purchases date from after 2014, when the EU began restricting supplies of military and dual-use goods to Russia. Imported products continued to appear in documentation associated with the project after February 2022.

Sanctions lawyer Alex Prezanti explains that export controls on goods used in connection with nuclear, chemical or biological weapons existed in Europe long before the current war. Depending on the applicable rules, exporters who knew—or had been notified—of such an end use had to obtain authorisation. After 2022, many of these goods became prohibited for export to Russia.

The Fastest Ride to Heaven

In 2018, Putin said of nuclear war: “Why do we need such a world if Russia is not in it?” In November 2024, Russia changed its nuclear doctrine.

Nuclear weapons can now be used in response to conventional aggression that creates a “critical threat” to the sovereignty or territorial integrity of Russia or Belarus.

Before, that required a threat to the very existence of the state. An attack by a non-nuclear state with the participation or support of a nuclear power now counts as a joint attack.

All this lowers the threshold for a nuclear strike. The Soviet Perimeter was built to guarantee a response. According to Khalin, the modern version no longer needs a final human decision to do that. And under the new doctrine, the attack on Russia does not have to be nuclear.

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.