So are my colleagues at the Russian Anti-War Committee, the opposition organization I co-founded after Putin invaded Ukraine. So is the Committee itself. The labels were assigned by Russian courts — courts that long ago stopped pretending to operate independently of the Kremlin. No European government takes any of these designations seriously as security matters because they know what they are: punishment for opposing the war.

And yet, on every trip I take through Europe, in every interaction with a bank or a migration office, the “terrorism” marker is in my file. Compliance officers see it, border processing takes longer than it should. The Russian designation carries real weight inside European institutions — not because European officials believe it, but because European systems were not designed to distinguish between an actual terrorist and a Putin critic the Kremlin has decided to call one.

This is the part of Russia’s hybrid war on Europe that does not get the attention it deserves. Drone incursions and cyberattacks make news, while the slow, systemic transfer of Kremlin enforcement power into European banking and migration bureaucracies does not. But it is happening, and it is the case I made earlier this month to the European Parliament’s Special Committee on the European Democracy Shield, a new body charged with defending the EU from foreign interference.

What follows is the argument I made there, adapted for a wider audience.

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What a Kremlin blacklist actually is

A short word about myself, so you know where I am writing from. I have spent the last decade working on Russian authoritarianism, political repression, and hybrid threats — that is, the use of nonmilitary tools (propaganda, cyberattacks, sabotage, financial pressure, legal harassment) to achieve geopolitical goals. Before that I spent ten years in Putin’s prison on a politically motivated sentence. The work I do now is run through several organizations: the Dossier Center, an investigative project that documents Kremlin-linked corruption and influence operations; the NEST Centre, a policy think tank advising European and transatlantic governments on Russia’s future; the Anti-War Committee mentioned above; and counter-propaganda projects whose combined audience exceeds one billion views a year.

The practice of blacklisting itself is older than any of us. In the Soviet Union, informal registers of “unreliable” citizens determined who was allowed to work, study, publish, or travel — and who would be sent into internal exile, to a labor camp, or pushed into the kind of internal silence Russians call “inner emigration.” Alongside those registers, the Soviet state kept lists of political enemies used for provocations, blackmail, and at times physical elimination. The whole apparatus was a system of social control built on fear and uncertainty.

The Putin regime has modernized this system to fit the interconnected world.

Russia is still governed, at the top, by people who came up through the security and intelligence services of the late Soviet Union, and their operating logic — if you are not with us, you are against us, and therefore everything is permitted against you — has not changed.

What has changed is the way they bring this mindset to life. With Russian opposition figures, journalists, and ordinary war refusers now scattered across Europe, blacklists have become an instrument of hybrid warfare directed outward. The Dossier Center’s investigations show that contemporary Russian hybrid campaigns are not only about propaganda and sabotage. They include a carefully engineered system of pressure on individuals through ostensibly “legal” instruments: criminal cases, directories of “extremists” and “terrorists,” restrictions on visas and passports. Their goal is not to imprison everyone the Kremlin dislikes but to force people to live in a permanent state of fear. Today you can travel, open a bank account, speak at a conference. Tomorrow you may find yourself on a wanted list, at risk of arrest in any country with a Russian extradition treaty, or of having your assets frozen. Psychologically, this uncertainty and unpredictability does the same work the prison otherwise would.

How the Kremlin uses blacklists against European politicians

The Kremlin places European politicians on its blacklists for doing what democratic politicians are supposed to do: supporting Ukraine, supporting sanctions, condemning war crimes, exposing corruption.

These lists bear no resemblance to the EU’s own sanctions. EU sanctions are grounded in Union law, set out in public regulations, adopted by accountable institutions, subject to judicial review, and accompanied by individual reasoning for each listed person. Putin’s blacklists have no transparent legal basis, no verifiable evidentiary record, and no independent judicial oversight. To treat the two as morally equivalent — as the Kremlin’s preferred narrative of a “mirror response” invites Europeans to do — is to mistake authoritarian theater for law.

Inclusion on a Russian list is only the first step. Once a politician’s name is on it, the wider hybrid machinery activates. Smear campaigns appear in Kremlin-aligned media. Coordinated attacks roll out on social networks. Supposedly “grass-roots” initiatives — produced in the languages of EU member states and posted in the names of their citizens — call for the politician’s resignation, often within hours of the listing. In parallel, money and informational support flow to the politician’s domestic opponents, all wrapped in a peace-loving message: let us restore normal relations with Russia, this is in the interests of our peoples.

The objective is not so much retaliation against a few troublesome figures, as it is to demonstrate to every European politician that supporting Ukraine and resisting Russian aggression carries a personal cost — defamation, economic penalty, occasionally physical risk. It is an attack on European democratic resilience conducted one elected official at a time.

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How the Kremlin uses blacklists against Russians like me

Here I speak from direct experience. The Russian authorities have designated me a “terrorist,” along with my Anti-War Committee colleagues, and labeled the Committee itself a “terrorist organization.” European governments understand that none of these designations have any basis in real security concerns. But the designations exist in international databases, in compliance software, in migration files. European institutions touch those databases every day.

For thousands of Russian pro-democracy activists, journalists, and humanitarian volunteers living in Europe, the labels mean more than the (real) risk of being detained on a Russian extradition request in a country with weaker rule of law. They mean daily, systemic friction: banks close personal and organizational accounts because compliance departments would rather lose a customer than risk a “reputational” connection to anyone tagged as a “terrorist,” however obviously absurd the tag. Migration authorities delay residency renewals because they do not know how to interpret the Russian accusations in the file.

A more aggressive instrument is the refusal to renew Russian passports for exiles. Many of these people have been turned into de facto stateless persons, unable to travel legally — unless they return to Russia, where prison awaits. Without identity documents recognized by another country, they live a half-life in Europe.

From the perspective of EU sovereignty, this is a direct challenge. The Kremlin is exporting its repressive practices by using European legal and financial infrastructure as an extension of its own punitive apparatus. The technical term for this is “transnational repression” — when an authoritarian state reaches across borders to silence its critics — and it is no longer only a question of human rights. It is a question of the security and independence of European institutions.

What Europe should do

The EUDS Committee is finalizing its report this year. It is essential that the question of blacklists not be folded into the general catalog of hybrid threats but appear as a distinct section with concrete recommendations. Seven of them, in particular:

1. Name the practice. Recognize the Kremlin’s blacklists explicitly as an element of hybrid warfare and a form of transnational repression — affecting both EU citizens and Russian pro-democracy actors in exile. State this without euphemism, and without portraying it as an “ordinary diplomatic exchange of restrictive measures.”

2. Reform legal cooperation. EU and candidate countries should adopt a common approach to Russian requests for legal assistance and extradition involving Russian opposition figures, journalists, and activists. These requests should be assessed through the lens of transnational repression, not handled as routine criminal-law cooperation.

3. Create “grey passports.” Establish a harmonized EU mechanism for issuing travel documents or special residence statuses to victims of transnational repression whose passports Russia refuses to renew for political reasons. Without this, thousands of people are trapped: they can neither return home nor live a normal life in Europe. A common EU standard would allow them to prove their identity and move freely — including to the kinds of policy meetings where their evidence is most needed.

4. Stop banking “de-risking.” The European Commission’s department for financial services — known as DG FISMA — together with national regulators should require banks to distinguish between genuine security threats and politically motivated designations by authoritarian regimes. Retail banking is not only the privilege of managing large accounts; it carries a public responsibility — including the responsibility to absorb the additional compliance work needed to keep the accounts of activists and NGOs open. Otherwise, the European financial system becomes an unwitting instrument of the very repression the EU is trying to counter.

5. Fund Russian civil society systematically. The Dossier Center, the NEST Centre, the Anti-War Committee, and many other independent organizations in this field hold unique data on hybrid operations, agent networks, and specific cases of transnational repression. Russian independent media reach multi-million audiences inside Russia and across Europe. EU funding in this area is currently fragmented and reactive. The Multiannual Financial Framework for 2028–2035 — the EU's next seven-year budget cycle — needs a dedicated, long-term mechanism to support Russian pro-democracy actors, investigative projects, and independent media. It is not a charity, but an investment in European security. I am doing what I can, but the scale of the problem goes far beyond my personal resources and those of my small group of fellow donors.

6. Speak to Russians directly. The Kremlin exploits an information vacuum, persuading ordinary Russians that Europe is “punishing” them for their nationality rather than for participation in aggression and repression. The EU needs not only 200-page policy documents but clear public communication in Russian, the involvement of Russian experts in European debate, and regular consultations with the diaspora. This reduces vulnerability to Russian propaganda and makes EU policy easier to implement on the ground.

7. Pull out the talent. The EUDS report should include a dedicated section on talent visas and the targeted attraction of specialists from Russia — engineers, scientists, IT professionals, cultural figures. The fastest way to weaken the regime is to draw out the people who create real value. This simultaneously reduces the Kremlin’s resource base and strengthens Europe’s own human capital.

What happens if Europe doesn’t act

The European Commission’s working premise for democratic defense is straightforward: NATO protects territory; the EUDS and the new European Centre for Democratic Resilience (the Commission’s institutional home for this work) protect democracy itself. To that I would add: if blacklists and transnational repression are not on the priority threat list, the EU is leaving the Kremlin a vast “grey zone” — the space below the threshold of open conflict, where pressure on individuals and institutions accumulates without triggering a coordinated European response.

The current situation is already worrying. The trajectory is more so. Our investigations show the Kremlin is systematically increasing its expenditure on propaganda, agent networks, criminal connections, and grey-zone operations. Blacklists are a cheap and effective tool inside that strategy. If Europe does not respond now, in a few years the conversation will not be about repression of opposition figures — it will shift to sabotage of critical infrastructure, political campaigns directly financed through criminal channels, and entire diaspora communities held hostage by Russian intelligence services.

I am ready to provide the EUDS Committee — and any other European institution that finds it useful — with the underlying material: Dossier Center investigations, analytical briefs from NEST experts, and documented cases of transnational repression collected by Project Ark, the humanitarian initiative that supports Russians who have fled the war. The work is being done. What is needed now is a European policy framework that takes it seriously.

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This year, the day arrives in a form Russia has not seen in nearly two decades. For the first time since the early 2000s, the parade on Red Square will pass without military hardware. The soldiers will march past Lenin’s mausoleum, but the equipment that is supposed to embody Russian military strength will stay out of frame.

Across Moscow, the authorities have promised sweeping restrictions on cell phone connection and mobile internet, officially because of the threat of Ukrainian drone strikes. The Kremlin, which still describes its war as a “special military operation” requiring no general mobilization, has decided that protecting the capital from Ukrainian retaliation requires shutting down the city’s communications on the most important day in its political calendar.

The cracking base

The war with Ukraine has now lasted more than 1,520 days. The war the Soviet Union actually won against Nazi Germany lasted 1,418. Russia is staging Victory Day during a campaign that is already longer than the one it commemorates, against an adversary smaller and poorer than itself, on terrain that was meant to fall in three days.

The military picture explains the missing hardware better than any drone threat alone. The Russian advance has been minimal since 2023. The front is positional. Ukrainian strikes have intensified in recent months and now reach further into Russian territory than at any previous point. A parade of armored columns down Tverskaya Street in 2026 would advertise the gap between Russia’s claimed strength and the reality on the front.

Putin’s approval rating has dropped to 71 percent, the lowest level since the start of the full-scale invasion. In December, the same trackers were reporting figures above 80 percent. Russia’s pro-war Telegram channels, the right-flank audience the Kremlin needs and fears in roughly equal measure, are increasingly dissatisfied with results that are not arriving.

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Underneath the political readings, the economic ones are deteriorating. Daily-life grievances are accumulating in the social-media spaces that the regime cannot fully police, and in the front-line reports that the “military bloggers” will not stop publishing. Last year’s 80th anniversary passed quietly for Putin. Mobile internet was switched off in Moscow for the first time as a precaution, but the front-line dynamics were still favorable for the Kremlin and several foreign leaders flew in. The 81st arrives in a different mood. Right-flank complaint posts are already going up in advance of the date.

In that context, the internet shutdowns serve two purposes. They are presented as a counter-drone measure. They also turn down the volume on the regime’s right-flank critics for the few days the holiday lasts.

The role for Trump

The most telling Kremlin move this year is on the diplomatic side. Putin proposed a Victory Day ceasefire to Donald Trump, or, in Trump’s telling, accepted Trump’s proposal, and the American president agreed to act as mediator between Moscow and Kyiv. This is the second straight year Putin has tried to wrap May 9 in a temporary halt. The first attempt, in 2025, did not produce an agreement. The 2026 version differs in one important way. A Western intermediary is now publicly carrying Putin’s preferred outcome on his behalf.

The terms of the proposed ceasefire favor Moscow. A truce timed to the parade gives the Russian state a few days of staged calm, suspends Ukrainian strike activity at the moment Russia is most exposed to it, and allows the celebration to proceed without the embarrassment that has been building. If Kyiv accepts, Russia gets a reprieve. If Kyiv refuses, Russia gets a propaganda dividend, a chance to argue that the obstacle to peace is in Ukraine.

A ceasefire proposed by Putin can be rejected by Zelensky on the merits. A ceasefire publicly attached to an American president is a harder thing for the Ukrainian government to refuse without political cost. By routing the initiative through Washington, Putin has shifted the burden of saying no.

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What gets classified tells you what he fears

The “cannibal battalions”: secret decrees likely mask the mass pardoning of murderers and rapists sent to the front. The state calls them heroes but keeps the paperwork hidden because the public would revolt.

Economic decay: statistics on oil, gas, and trade — the lifeblood of Putin’s war machine — have been scrubbed. Data on military deaths and casualties is classified to keep the human cost of the invasion out of the public record.

By last year, over 300 datasets had been concealed from the public eye. More than 30% of the national budget is now “closed” spending. We no longer know where the money is going, or how many people are actually dying at the front.

Not all of the secrecy hides the war’s impact. Much of it protects the elites. Real estate records have been classified, officials’ income declarations abolished, and photos of MPs in the State Duma banned outright.

It is now happening each time something inconvenient surfaces or threatens to surface.

A timeline of the blackout:

• April 2022 — Customs and foreign trade data (Barents Observer)

• May 2022 — Detailed federal budget expenditure (Carnegie)

• December 2022 — Officials’ income declarations (publication suspended) (Moscow Times)

• March 2023 — Real estate ownership records (Rosreestr) (Moscow Times)

• April 2023 — Oil and gas extraction statistics (Meduza)

• July 2024 — Mortality data on deaths from external causes (Worldcrunch)

• August 2024 — Diesel, fuel oil and petroleum production statistics (Hydrocarbon Processing)

• December 2025 — Annual income and asset declarations fully abolished (Bloomberg)

• January 2026 — Photographers banned from State Duma plenary sessions (Moscow Times)

• February 2026 — FSB given power to shut down communications under classified rules (Meduza)

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The echo chamber Putin built for himself

Putin has created an echo chamber so secure that he is losing touch with reality. Generals report “victories” in places like Kupiansk to keep the boss happy, but the situation on the ground is the opposite. He is a leader making decisions based on obsolete or false information.

The peak of the absurdity: secret laws. There are now laws people are bound by but cannot know. Under Secret Decree 605, the FSB can shut down any communications that violate classified rules. You can be arrested for breaking a law you aren’t allowed to read.

Most governments classify information to protect it from foreign rivals. Putin’s classifications protect the regime from its own citizens. Their function is to cover for incompetence and systemic failure at home.

When a dictator feels the need to hide half of his decisions, it’s obvious that even he knows nothing he is doing is going to improve people’s lives. This curtain of secrecy is designed to conceal the fragility of the regime’s position.

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Russia is formally continuing its offensive in several directions at a slowing pace and with not a lot to show for it: in March 2026, Russian forces took just 23 square kilometers (8.9 sq miles) of new territory, while Ukraine regained the initiative and recaptured about 50 square kilometers in the south.

The energy contest produces costs without breakthroughs

Both sides have responded to battlefield stagnation by escalating long-range strikes. Russia has intensified drone and missile attacks on Ukrainian cities and energy infrastructure. Ukraine, in turn, has concentrated on Russian oil and targeted refineries and export ports hoping to drain the revenue that finances Putin’s war.

The campaign was tactically successful: between March 25 and April 11, Ukrainian attacks cut average daily shipments from Russian ports by roughly a third. In just over two weeks, 30 million barrels did not reach export markets, and the strikes exacerbated Putin’s PR problem by producing vivid imagery of infrastructure on fire and leaving residents of refinery cities without electricity. But it has not broken the war economy. The rise in global oil prices, driven by tensions in the Strait of Hormuz, allowed Moscow to absorb the lost volumes through higher unit revenue.

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The Druzhba pipeline, which runs through Belarus into Poland and Germany, has become its own theater. For three months, Ukraine has used the southern segment of the pipeline it controls to pressure Hungary and Slovakia, the two EU governments most consistently obstructing aid to Kyiv. Moscow has responded by weaponizing the northern branch: starting May 1, Russia will halt the transit of Kazakh oil to Germany — one of Ukraine’s largest arms suppliers. Russia has pledged to compensate Kazakhstan for the reduction in its export capacity elsewhere; Germany is projected to lose 2.5 million tons of imports annually. As with every other front of this war, the energy contest yields costs without any meaningful breakthroughs.

Sanctions follow the same logic. The European Union has just adopted its 20th sanctions package. Its principal innovation is an attempt to penalize third countries that help Moscow circumvent existing measures. The first such country is Kyrgyzstan, which can no longer receive computer numerical control (CNC) machines or telecommunications equipment from EU members. Last year’s relevant dual-use exports totaled less than $770 million — marginal as pressure. And whatever pressure it does apply can be offset by loosened U.S. restrictions: just a week earlier, Washington had extended through mid-May a waiver covering transactions in Russian oil already loaded onto tankers before April 17.

What the war still produces is mostly content for state media

The Putin regime can still sustain the war economically and politically for some time longer. What it cannot do is win it on terms that justify the cost. After more than four years of full-intensity warfare, Russia has reached the ceiling of what its army can extract from this front.

Inside Russia, Putin’s approval rating has just registered its largest drop in four years. At the same time, public discontent is growing — internet shutdowns, bans on messaging apps, and worsening economic conditions more broadly. For now, that discontent is mostly visible online. More telling is the shift among pro-war bloggers: their audiences run into the millions, and they increasingly question in public whether continuing the war makes sense given the absence of any visible gains.

Ukraine is also tiring. In early 2026, 65 percent of Ukrainians said they were prepared to fight as long as necessary. By March, that figure had fallen to 54 percent. Daily missile strikes on civilian and energy infrastructure are wearing down a society four years into a war it did not start and cannot afford to lose. The window for negotiations, when it opens, will not stay open indefinitely.

What to make of it

Under these circumstances, the diplomatic process will likely resume in weeks, perhaps months. As cynical as it may sound, negotiations with Putin should not be treated as an alternative to war, because he will use the pause to regroup and rearm. Without locked-in Ukrainian territorial integrity, security guarantees with enforcement mechanisms, and the ability to reimpose pressure quickly if Putin breaks them, a ceasefire is simply the runway for the next phase.

It would be wise for the Europeans to accelerate arms deliveries before talks begin and to recognize that what happens inside Russia during this window matters more than anything Russia agrees to at the table. This deadlock is exposing the regime’s limits; the work now is to make that exposure compound rather than fade.

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Putin does not normally draw attention to economic underperformance. His system is designed to avoid precisely that kind of scrutiny. When he does, usually there is a bigger purpose. In this case, the most likely target is his own government — something similar was done ahead of previous elections to manage declining approval ratings and reset the political narrative.

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In the past, as Russia moved toward State Duma elections, groups within the elite would begin to compete more openly for influence and resources. Public attention would be directed toward certain ministers or factions, and responsibility would be reassigned in some areas.

Putin’s ratings now appear to be under strain. Even state-controlled polling has pointed to a noticeable decline since the start of the war. That matters less as a measure of public sentiment than as an internal signal. When official pollsters acknowledge falling support, it suggests those numbers are being used within the system itself.

At the same time, the economic narrative is intersecting with a broader power struggle. The division between the civilian administration and the security services has become more visible, particularly in areas such as control over the internet.

Until recently, digital policy was largely managed by the domestic political bloc within the Presidential Administration. That approach prioritized stability and avoided overt restrictions during politically sensitive periods. This has begun to change. Responsibility for key decisions, such as blocking platforms and restricting communications, has shifted toward the security services, particularly the FSB.

As a result, Russians have been dealing with regular disruptions to crucial services, even in Moscow, where mobile internet was recently cut off for weeks. As the restrictions have expanded, so has criticism of them, including from officially sanctioned opposition parties. But just as these parties are not genuine opposition, neither is their dissent. It is part of a managed dynamic — the administration has given certain factions permission to criticize the blocks, and they have received special dispensation from the electoral commission to campaign on banned platforms.

The real message is not the criticism, but what it represents — and that message is being directed inward.

What appears to be public debate is, in fact, a controlled contest over responsibility and authority. Economic criticism, government pressure, and disputes over internet control are not separate developments. They are different aspects of the same process.

The question, then, is not whether the system is under pressure; it undoubtedly is. It’s how far the balance is going to tip, and in which direction.

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For years, Budapest served a specific function. It did not need to openly oppose Europe. It only needed to slow it down. Orban repeatedly used Hungary’s veto to block or delay financial aid to Ukraine, sanctions packages, and collective decisions that required unanimity. The result was not paralysis, but enough friction to complicate and weaken a coordinated response.

This alignment was not accidental. Orban maintained regular contact with Putin, including visits to Moscow after the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. His government justified its position through energy dependence, but the relationship went further. Hungary became one of the largest buyers of Russian gas in Europe, relied on Russian nuclear fuel, and continued importing oil through established pipelines. Orban used energy dependency as a political shield. Under his watch, Hungary remained tethered to Moscow through:

• Gas via TurkStream.

• Oil through the Druzhba pipeline.

• Nuclear fuel and expansion via Rosatom.

Whenever the EU needed consensus, Hungary’s pattern was surgical: delay, dilute, complicate. Orban’s track record of blocking aid to Ukraine is staggering:
2022: Blocked an €18bn aid package.
2023: Stalled crucial payments through the European Peace Facility.
2024: Obstructed a €90bn long-term support plan for Kyiv.

Energy was both the explanation and the leverage.

At the same time, Russia exercised its influence through less visible channels. Investigations point to coordinated information campaigns during Hungary’s election cycles, involving networks that mimicked media outlets, spread disinformation, and amplified pro-government narratives. These efforts did not need to be decisive to be effective. Their purpose was to shape the environment, not control it outright.

The relationship also extended into diplomacy and sanctions policy. Hungarian officials were involved in discussions on removing individuals and entities from EU sanctions lists, sometimes relaying internal deliberations to Moscow. This created a channel through which Russia could test, influence, and occasionally weaken European measures from within.

A GRU Spy Hub in Budapest

Russian intelligence activity in Hungary has been a primary Western concern for years. Networks were built through political contacts, media figures, and nationalist groups, creating deep channels of influence.

Budapest served as a “safe harbor” for Russian interests. The International Investment Bank, based there until 2023, operated with diplomatic protections and was widely viewed as a potential intelligence foothold.

There were other layers.

Contacts with the Russian Orthodox Church, cooperation with aligned media figures all formed part of a broader ecosystem of influence. None of these elements alone determined policy. But together, they reinforced it.

Orban was not simply pro-Russian. He was structurally useful.

His departure does not erase these networks overnight. Nor does it guarantee a unified European position. There are still some avenues left for Putin to exert a level of control over European affairs. But Orban’s absence removes a predictable point of resistance at the center of the EU; one that Moscow had put a lot of effort into, and learned to rely on.

This is a tangible loss for the Kremlin. Influence inside the European Union has always depended on fractures. Under Orban, Hungary was able to provide a fracture-on-demand, consistently and at the highest level.

Without that, Russia’s ability to shape outcomes from within becomes more limited. Not impossible. But harder. And in times like these, that matters a great deal.

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When Pashinyan met Putin in Moscow earlier this month, the agenda included bilateral relations, Armenia’s European ambitions, and upcoming elections. But the underlying reality is simpler. Armenia is trying to move closer to the West without breaking from Russia. The Kremlin, in turn, is content to tolerate this, as long as Yerevan understands the limits of what it can do.

Armenia has become an uncomfortable partner for Moscow. Not hostile, but no longer fully aligned. Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Yerevan has taken steps that would have been unthinkable a few years earlier: distancing itself from the CSTO, expanding cooperation with the United States, and exploring closer ties with the European Union. These moves reflect a loss of confidence in Russia, particularly after Moscow failed to support Armenia in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.

Russia’s position in the South Caucasus has weakened. It no longer dominates the region as it once did. Turkey, the EU, the US, and even China are now active players. Armenia’s gradual westward pivot is part of that broader regional shift. But it has clear and visible limits.

The pivot hits the balance sheet

Armenia remains deeply dependent on Russia economically. Trade flows have increased significantly since 2022, driven in part by Armenia’s role in re-exporting goods into Russia. Russian capital, migrants, and businesses have boosted sectors ranging from construction to banking. More importantly, Armenia remains heavily reliant on Russian energy, receiving gas at preferential prices with few viable alternatives.

This dependence constrains Armenia’s foreign policy and gives the Kremlin a quiet but effective tool of influence. Putin does not need to threaten. He only needs to remind.

The same logic applies to security. Russia maintains a military base in Gyumri and a presence along parts of Armenia’s borders. Even though this presence has been reduced in some areas, it remains a factor in Armenia’s strategic calculations, particularly given its proximity to Turkey.

Moscow’s preference for the "known quantity"

The Kremlin’s approach is pragmatic. It is not seeking to destabilize Armenia outright or replace its leadership at any cost. Pashinyan is not viewed as an ally, but he is predictable. And predictability has value.

That does not mean Russia is passive. It continues to cultivate influence through media, business networks, and political actors. Pro-Russian figures are encouraged, even if their chances of electoral success remain limited. The goal is not necessarily to win elections, but to ensure that any outcome remains within acceptable boundaries.

Armenia, for its part, is attempting a balancing act. It is moving westward, but cautiously, aware of the risks. The European Union has shown interest, but not urgency. Financial support remains limited, and full integration is a distant prospect.

This leaves Armenia in a familiar position: formally independent, but structurally constrained. Its choices are real, but not unlimited.

For Moscow, that is enough.

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Many commentators interpreted this as a sign of desperation, proof that the war economy is running out of money. They are wrong.

The Russian budget has more effective instruments for extracting revenue than passing a hat among billionaires. VAT was raised to 22 percent in January. Corporate profit tax went up by five percentage points. A windfall tax brought in 320 billion rubles. The state does not lack mechanisms for collection.

What Putin sought from that room was not money. Even Kerimov’s 100 billion rubles would fund less than three days of war at the current rate of 259.4 billion rubles per week. Putin is now seeking loyalty and complicity: each businessman in that room publicly confirming that he stands with the war, finances the war, and bears responsibility for it.

Conditional ownership

The arrangement between the Kremlin and Russian big business was established in the early 2000s. The West calls these men oligarchs, but in the 1990s that word meant something specific — businessmen with genuine political influence, people who controlled media outlets and financed campaigns. The men who sat across from Putin in March have no such power. They are asset holders who manage wealth at the Kremlin’s discretion, permitted to generate profits in exchange for political loyalty and the absence of political ambition. My company, Yukos, was driven to bankruptcy. Its assets were transferred to state-controlled entities, and I ended up spending ten years in prison. My arrest came shortly after one of these same RSPP meetings, where I raised the issue of state corruption on camera and directly in front of Putin. The lesson was not subtle, and it was not lost on the rest of the business community.

Vladimir Gusinsky and Boris Berezovsky, who controlled major media outlets and wielded them with a degree of independence, were forced out of the country. Their assets were absorbed by structures aligned with the Kremlin. Loyalty shifted from a strategic advantage to a condition of survival. By the time Putin returned to the presidency in 2012 after the Medvedev interregnum, the unspoken contract had hardened further. The Magomedov brothers, co-owners of the Summa Group close to Medvedev, received nearly twenty years in a maximum-security colony and lost most of their holdings. Others, like Alisher Usmanov, read the situation and switched camps.

The full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 transformed this system of conditional ownership into something more aggressive. More than 150 companies have been nationalized through quasi-legal mechanisms. Prosecutors revisit privatization deals from the 1990s or declare enterprises “strategic.” They cite procedural violations committed by regional authorities decades ago. Recent targets include the Dalpolymetal mining complex and Domodedovo airport. Prosecutors now routinely demand the return of assets privatized twenty-five to thirty years ago, arguing (often correctly) that the original transactions were flawed. The practical effect is that no business in Russia can be confident its property is secure.

Business participation in financing the war did not begin with this meeting. As Proekt and iStories have documented, companies connected to Oleg Deripaska, Leonid Mikhelson, Sergei Gordeev, and Mikhail Gutseriev have been involved in recruiting contract soldiers and providing supplementary payments since 2022. Informal channels have also been documented: contributions to state-affiliated funds and structures that operate outside the formal budget.

Ceremonies of allegiance

Putin has staged these rituals before. On February 21, 2022, he convened the Security Council on camera and forced each member to publicly endorse the coming invasion. The footage of officials stumbling through their approval, some visibly uncertain, all visibly afraid, became one of the defining images of the war’s first week. Three days later, on the day the invasion began, Putin met with the RSPP. All thirty-seven business representatives who attended were subsequently sanctioned by Western governments.

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The March meeting follows the same logic. The economic contribution is marginal; it is the political symbolism that is truly important. By publicly agreeing to fund the war, each participant becomes personally invested in its continuation. They cannot later claim they were uninvolved or that the war was none of their doing — their names are on the ledger. Putin has ensured that the cost of defection now includes personal complicity in the financing of a war that the International Criminal Court has deemed criminal.

Western sanctions, paradoxically, have reinforced this dynamic. With assets frozen in Europe and the United States, Russian billionaires have fewer options for diversifying their risk. The war in the Middle East and the physical dangers of residing in the UAE, once a preferred refuge, have closed off one of the last remaining escape routes. Russia’s wealthiest citizens are locked in a room with Putin, and he has been methodical about removing the exits. The “voluntary” contribution is the price of remaining in the room.

What has changed

The system I knew in the early 2000s operated through ambiguity. Ownership was conditional, but the conditions were unspoken, and a businessman who stayed out of politics could operate with reasonable predictability. That system no longer exists. The conditions are now explicit and the penalties are public, while the scope of required loyalty has expanded from political silence to active participation in a war of aggression.

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He also had no interest in angering Washington while negotiations on the Ukraine war still seemed possible. That restraint has been quickly dropped. By mid-March, Russian officials started declaring the American “blitzkrieg” a failure, accusing the United States and Israel of unprovoked aggression, questioning the evidence for Iran’s nuclear programme, and warning of nuclear catastrophe from strikes near the Bushehr power plant. Behind this rhetorical shift, Russia appears to have begun providing Iran with intelligence and drones — though only to an extent that maintained plausible deniability.

And, of course, none of this was spontaneous: the Kremlin has no allegiances and treats every international crisis as a transactional opportunity. It is certainly willing to scale back its support for Iran if the United States substantially cuts military assistance to Ukraine or freezes it at current levels. The intelligence sharing, the drones — all of it is on the table and is priced in Ukrainian terms.

So far, the bargaining has produced nothing. Moscow continues to invoke understandings supposedly reached at the Anchorage summit, but Russian commentary increasingly suggests frustration that the “spirit of Anchorage” — the collegial atmosphere between the Russian and American sides — is evaporating. The Americans, occupied with Iran, are not offering the Kremlin what it expected.

One of the consequences of this is the increased pressure on Europe. From Moscow’s point of view, Europe is where Russia faces the most resistance but also where it has the most leverage, especially while Washington is consumed by the Gulf. Trump’s open irritation with NATO allies who refuse to back his Middle East campaign gives the Kremlin additional grounds for optimism. A crack is forming between Washington and European capitals and Moscow is working to widen it.

There are several places where this pressure is becoming apparent.

• First, European navies have been stopping and inspecting tankers they suspect of being part of Russia’s shadow fleet (the uninsured ships that move Russian oil through the Mediterranean, the Baltic, and the North Sea). The EU and Britain are discussing expanded legal authority to confiscate these vessels. Moscow has responded by signalling its readiness to deploy naval forces against European shipping. This trajectory, if continued, may lead to a direct confrontation at sea between Russia and NATO member states.
  

• Second, in Karelia, roughly 160 kilometres from the Finnish border, Russia is rebuilding and expanding military infrastructure linked to the possible deployment of a new 44th Army Corps: up to 15,000 personnel, along with air defence and signals intelligence units. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine drove Finland into NATO, and the Kremlin, rather than recalibrate, has responded with predictable belligerence.
  
  And it doesn’t stop with Finland: an anonymous social media campaign across Telegram, TikTok, and VK threatens the sovereignty of another Baltic NATO state — Estonia — with dozens of posts suddenly emerging to promote the “self-determination” of Narva, the Estonian border city where approximately 87 percent of residents are ethnic Russians. The rhetoric (a “Narva People’s Republic,” appeals to “historical justice,” calls to “protect the Russian-speaking population”) reproduces the Donetsk and Luhansk playbook almost verbatim. The campaign is anonymous, it aligns with Moscow’s interest in destabilising NATO’s eastern flank, and it circulates through pro-Russian media networks.
  

• Third, there is Kaliningrad, the Russian exclave between Poland and Lithuania. The narrative of a Western “blockade” threatening the region has circulated since 2022, but Moscow has turned up the volume on this considerably. Official statements now warn that any steps against Kaliningrad will be treated as a direct provocation and could lead to military conflict.

Can Putin invade Estonia and Finland? No, not really. The Russian army is grinding through Ukraine and cannot spare forces for a second front. The navy has been losing ships in the Black Sea for two years, and the corps being assembled in Karelia will not reach combat readiness for several more years.

But it’s not what matters here: all the Kremlin needs is European officials sitting in a meeting room for a week, trying to understand whether it could. Demonstrative escalation is becoming one of Moscow’s key levers of pressure on Ukraine’s European allies. The Kremlin seeks to project a readiness for harsher action, including the creation of new flashpoints, even though its actual capacity for such escalation remains limited.

European governments should not wait for Washington to sort out its priorities. The shadow fleet sanctions need visible, consistent enforcement; every tanker that passes unchallenged confirms Moscow’s assumption that Europe lacks the will to act. NATO’s eastern flank needs reinforcement on European timelines, not American ones. And the Narva information campaign needs to be treated as what it is: a test run of the same model that worked in Donbas in 2014.

The war in Iran does not need to end well or badly for any of this to continue. It only needs to keep Washington looking the other way. At the moment, that is exactly what it is doing.

Over the past year, the Kremlin has been systematically dismantling Russians’ access to the open internet — throttling YouTube to near-unusability, preparing a full ban on Telegram, blocking WhatsApp and VPN services, and tightening control over every remaining channel through which Russians might encounter unfiltered information. From the outside, this looks like garden-variety authoritarianism, or perhaps just technological incompetence. It is neither. All of these restrictions serve a single purpose: to protect the uninterrupted operation of the Kremlin’s most important weapon in this war.

That weapon is not the Oreshnik. The Oreshnik is an expensive scarecrow with no serious military utility — a conventional warhead that misses targets, or a nuclear one that guarantees mutual annihilation. It is not the Sarmat, the Kinzhal, the guided bombs, the Iskander, or even the human-wave assaults and the inflated contract payments and the Iranian-made Shahed drones.

The Kremlin’s main weapon is lying.

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Lies That Capture Cities

Lying captures cities — literally. Take Kupyansk. If you believed Putin, Kupyansk fell in November 2025. General Sergei Kuzovlev, commander of Russia’s Western grouping, personally reported to Putin that assault units of the 68th Motorized Rifle Division had “completed the liberation” of the city. Putin clarified: the entire city? Kuzovlev confirmed. He received the Hero of Russia award on December 9 for this achievement.

Three days later, Zelensky drove to Kupyansk and filmed himself standing in front of the city’s recognizable entrance monument. “Putin publicly lied, claiming Russian forces had taken the city,” Zelensky said. “So I went to Kupyansk myself to show the world that Putin is lying.”

On January 27, the Chief of the General Staff, Valery Gerasimov, claimed that Russian forces had also captured Kupyansk-Uzlovoy, the rail junction five kilometers south of the city. Days later, a Ukrainian officer was filmed walking through its center. Ukraine’s Center for Counteracting Disinformation called the claim “a ridiculous lie” and said Gerasimov was constructing a “parallel reality” for Putin.

Russian pro-war military bloggers, who follow the frontline closely, were openly baffled. Some joked that at this rate, the generals might as well claim Kyiv on paper. A term has even emerged among them for the practice: “capturing a settlement on credit” — reporting a victory now that you plan to achieve sometime later. The advantage of credit captures is that you can take the same town more than once: Kupyansk, for instance, was reportedly claimed at least twice in two months.

And when a credit capture needs visual confirmation, the troops have a maneuver for that too. They call it the flagvtyk — the flag-plant. A squad photographs itself with a flag amid the rubble of a destroyed village, evidence enough for a report that the settlement has been “liberated”.

The Hierarchy of Lying

Military lying, like everything else in the Russian army, has a hierarchy. Unit commanders lie about capturing villages. The Chief of the General Staff lies on a grander scale, befitting his rank. In the first two weeks of January 2026, Gerasimov announced that Russian forces had seized over 300 square kilometers of territory. Independent estimates put the actual figure at a fraction of that claim. Throughout 2025, Putin, Gerasimov, and field commanders systematically inflated their territorial gains, a pattern that independent monitors documented repeatedly.

The Supreme Commander stands above the Chief of the General Staff, so naturally he is permitted to lie on a larger scale still. He can even invent cities that do not exist. Not long ago, Putin boasted of capturing not only Kupyansk but also “Komsomolsk”, offering geography to back it up: “If you look at the map, further south is Komsomolsk, and north of Komsomolsk is Kupyansk, Slavyansk.” He even described street fighting there. The problem: there is no such city. He likely meant Konstantinovka, which nobody has ever called Komsomolsk. The nearest actual Komsomolsk is 300 kilometers away in Poltava Oblast. You might assume he misspoke — except he was reading from prepared notes.

Phantom Encirclements

In this war, lies do not just capture nonexistent cities. They encircle nonexistent enemies. At the Valdai Forum in late 2024, Putin claimed that 15,000 Ukrainian soldiers had been encircled near Kupyansk — 10,000 in one pocket, 5,000 in another.

Later, in the spring of 2025, he announced the encirclement of several thousand Ukrainian troops in Russia’s Kursk Oblast and invited them to surrender under threat of annihilation. Trump repeated the claim publicly, posting on Truth Social that “THOUSANDS OF UKRAINIAN TROOPS ARE COMPLETELY SURROUNDED” and urging Putin to spare their lives. His own intelligence agencies told the White House this was not true. The CIA and European intelligence services assessed that Ukrainian forces were under pressure in Kursk but not encircled. The Institute for the Study of War said it had found no geolocated evidence of any significant encirclement.

Fifteen thousand soldiers is an enormous force by the standards of this war. If they had been captured, Russian television would have paraded them endlessly as proof of Zelensky’s failure to protect his own troops. If they had been destroyed in battle, the wreckage would be unmistakable. They vanished nowhere — because the encirclement never happened. Ukrainian forces withdrew from Kursk Oblast in relatively good order, without any encirclement.

Everyone Lies

The result is a war in which everyone in the chain of command lies. Putin lies — either inventing claims himself or pretending to believe his generals. The defense minister, Andrei Belousov, lies — the same man who arrived at his post declaring: “Making mistakes is acceptable. Lying is not.” Gerasimov lies. The generals lie to Gerasimov. Their subordinates lie to them. The fabricated Kupyansks do not appear from nowhere.

And the whole system lies to the soldiers on the frontline and the civilians behind it. From the very beginning: Putin swore he had no intention of invading Ukraine and mocked anyone who accused him of preparing for war. “Do not believe those who frighten you with Russia,” he said. “We do not want to partition Ukraine. We do not need this.” Just one week before announcing mobilization in September 2022, his spokesman Peskov promised that no mobilization was planned. Putin lied to soldiers’ faces, telling them the army was fully equipped. Soldiers posted videos saying they had to buy motorcycles, internet access, water, and body armor with their own money.

The Kremlin now claims the army does not depend on Telegram and can therefore block it without consequence. It is doing this at precisely the moment when Telegram remains the primary means of frontline communication. “Telegram is our only communication channel,” soldiers have pleaded. “Don’t take it from us.”

Conscripts and students are lured into service with promises of one-year contracts far from the front, or short stints as drone operators. In practice: service until the end of the war, in whatever unit they are sent to.

And the residents of the territories Putin claims to be “liberating” — the people of Mariupol have been promised new apartments to replace the homes the Russian army destroyed. Three years later, they are still living in borrowed apartments, waiting. The new buildings that were constructed have been sold to Russian veterans and security personnel under preferential mortgages. The displaced residents of Mariupol say they were deceived — they expected Russia and got the DNR. In truth, there was no deception in that particular part: what was promised is exactly what was delivered. Putin’s world is precisely this.

Guns Instead of Butter

Finally, the state lies to the entire country. “Guns instead of butter” — you likely heard this expression. “National defense is the most important priority,” Putin told Russians in 2023, “but in pursuing strategic goals in this area, we must not repeat the mistakes of the past, we must not destroy our own economy.”

By 2025, military and security spending consumed over 40 percent of all federal tax revenue — and that is not the ceiling. The longer the war continues, the worse it gets. Spending on the army is hard to cut while battles are ongoing. Spending on citizens is easy to cut. Which is exactly what is happening now. There is an old Russian joke: “Dad, will you drink less?” — in our case, fight less? “No, son, you will eat less.”

The Spin Dictator and His Limits

Sergei Guriev and Daniel Treisman, in their book Spin Dictators, describe leaders like Putin as autocrats who prefer to hold power through lies and propaganda rather than through force. As we have seen, that is not entirely accurate. In 2022, Putin launched a real and bloody war against Ukraine precisely to consolidate his power. On both sides of the front, people are dying in earnest. But lying is indeed the Kremlin’s principal weapon in this war: lies about the war’s purposes, its progress, its consequences, its victories, and its losses.

What Putin fears most is the moment when people collectively realize they are being lied to. The blacklists of websites, the YouTube slowdown, the bans on WhatsApp and Telegram — all of it serves this single purpose. Putin’s power rests on lies. His war and its claimed successes rest on lies. And the further the war drags on, the more lying is required — and the wider the gap between what the state tells people and what they can see with their own eyes. The danger of exposure grows with every month.

That is why the Kremlin now bans what it tolerated just a few years ago. A few years ago, reality only needed to be embellished. Today it must be replaced entirely.

You can fool some of the people all the time. You can fool all the people some of the time. But you cannot fool all the people all the time. The quote is often misattributed to Abraham Lincoln. But the phrase is a good one.

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A Russian soldier’s chances of surviving the war in Ukraine may be far lower than official narratives suggest. An investigation by the Dossier Center offers a rare, data-driven look at how one frontline formation — the 27th Guards Motor Rifle Division — has been used since early 2024. The picture that emerges is of a system that sustains itself through constant replenishment, absorbing heavy losses as a matter of routine.

The documents were obtained from Captain Oleg Miller, who deserted the Russian army and took with him detailed personnel lists covering the division from early 2024 through January 2025. The records include every serviceman assigned to the unit, from senior command down to support staff. They provide a clear view into both the division’s structure and its losses.

A division that replaced itself

Over the course of 2024, 28,234 individuals were added to the division’s rolls. On paper, a motor rifle division of this type should not exceed 12,000 to 14,000 personnel. The discrepancy is too large to explain through bureaucratic turnover. Within a single year, the division consumed and replaced its entire fighting strength.

The 27th Division has not been rotated out of combat and rebuilt. It has remained continuously engaged since early 2024, fighting on the Avdiivka–Pokrovsk axis. Under normal military practice, a unit sustaining this level of attrition would be withdrawn, reconstituted, and retrained. That has not happened. Instead, the division has been kept in place, its losses absorbed by a steady inflow of new recruits.

These recruits are not distributed evenly across the formation. Headquarters, logistics, communications, engineering, and artillery units operate at some distance from the front line and sustain comparatively low losses. Vacancies in those areas are limited. New arrivals are overwhelmingly directed to frontline rifle companies, where the demand for replacements is constant.

The system resembles an assembly line. Contract soldiers are sent into assault companies. They are killed, wounded, captured, or simply disappear. Their places are filled by the next intake. The process continues with little interruption.

The 433rd Regiment

The 433rd Motor Rifle Regiment, one of four within the division, appears to have borne the heaviest losses. When it first appeared at the front in April 2024, it had 1,720 personnel. Over the course of the year, 6,857 soldiers passed through its rolls. Approximately 5,000 are gone — including 1,816 listed as “missing for more than one day.”

This last category is significant. According to the division’s own documentation, only 12 deaths were recorded across the entire formation in 2024. That figure is not credible. Open-source verification already identifies far more confirmed fatalities. The Dossier Center spot-checked 100 individuals from the “missing” category. Of those, 51 percent were confirmed dead through publicly available information. Another 13 percent were listed under circumstances strongly suggesting death. No evidence was found that any of those sampled were still alive. The remainder left no trace in public records — a gap explained by delayed death confirmations, absent relatives, or the lack of formal reporting.

Calculating the true toll

Extrapolating from this sample, the number of dead and missing in the division likely approaches 5,000 for 2024 alone. Estimates by Mediazona and BBC Russian suggest that severe wounds resulting in permanent removal from service occur at roughly twice the rate of fatalities. If that ratio holds, the division may have suffered around 10,000 such injuries in the same period. Total irreversible losses: roughly 15,000 in a single year.

The arithmetic is consistent. A division of no more than 14,000 is cycling through more than 28,000 in a year. The difference is casualties.

At the division level, these figures translate into an annual probability of death of 15 to 17 percent, and a 30 to 35 percent probability of being severely wounded and permanently removed from service. But these averages are misleading. Safer roles are largely stable and generate few vacancies. New recruits are funneled disproportionately into the most dangerous positions — frontline rifle companies tasked with assault operations.

In the 433rd Regiment, the data suggests roughly one in four soldiers may have been killed within a year. When severe injuries are included, the probability of being killed or permanently incapacitated rises sharply. New arrivals, who are disproportionately assigned to these roles, face the highest risk of all.

The Wagner model, updated

The structure bears a clear resemblance to the model the Wagner Group employed under Yevgeny Prigozhin: a protected core of command and support units combined with expendable assault detachments, composed largely of convicts promised release after six months if they survived.

The current system relies on contract soldiers who have, in formal terms, volunteered. In practice, many appear to have had limited understanding of the conditions they would face. Unlike Wagner recruits, they are not serving fixed terms with a defined endpoint. Their options have been reduced to four: death, severe injury, capture, or desertion.

Desertion is difficult to quantify. The records include 2,691 cases of unauthorized absence across the division, 893 of them in the 433rd Regiment alone. The data does not clearly distinguish between permanent desertion and temporary absence due to leave, injury, or administrative issues. The scale, however, is telling.

Who is fighting

The composition of the division reflects the strain on Russia’s military manpower. A significant proportion of officers appear to be reservists or individuals who received minimal training before being assigned to command roles. Large numbers of junior lieutenants — a rank rarely used in peacetime — suggest accelerated and improvised commissioning. Many officers are significantly older than would be typical for their rank in a professional force.

Age does not appear to confer any advantage in survival. The data indicates that older soldiers are more likely to be killed. One documented fatality involved a 64-year-old private.

All of this… to what end?

Over nearly two years of active combat, the division has advanced across a sector approximately 50 kilometers wide along the front line. The cost, measured in casualties, runs into the tens of thousands.

For the command structure, the system functions as intended. Units that sustain heavy losses continue to operate, and their commanders are rewarded. The 433rd Regiment, despite its casualty record, was awarded Guards status in early 2025. Its commander was promoted. So was the division commander.

The personnel are replaceable. The structure endures.

The Dossier Center’s findings, grounded in internal records rather than external estimation, provide one of the clearest pictures to date of how Russia sustains its war effort. For many of those sent to the front — particularly the contract soldiers funneled into assault companies — survival is not the expected outcome. Their lives are treated as a consumable input in a system whose true purpose has nothing to do with their survival, and everything to do with keeping Putin in power.

The oil dividend

The war has turned high energy prices into a significant resource for Moscow. Iran’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz removed a substantial share of global oil supply from the market, and demand for Russian crude rose sharply. A $10 per barrel increase in export prices generates roughly $1.1–1.2 billion in additional monthly revenue for the Russian budget. Given that the average price of Russian export oil in January and February stood at around $42 per barrel, it is reasonable to expect that April alone will bring no less than $4.5 billion in additional income.

At the same time, higher energy prices complicate the task for Western governments. The more expensive oil and gas become, the harder it is to maintain strict sanctions and an aggressive policy of rejecting Russian energy without provoking domestic discontent. These expanded opportunities for selling Russian oil give the Kremlin greater confidence that it can continue the war through 2026 without resorting to the non-military budget cuts that the Finance Ministry had begun planning.

The distraction dividend

The conflict is also diverting Western attention from Ukraine. The escalation around Iran has already stalled the negotiating process, reduced the intensity of debates over new aid packages for Kyiv, slowed decision-making, and strengthened the position of those within the EU who argue for a “pause” in supporting Ukraine. Moreover, the war has intensified competition for the same limited production capacity — air defence systems, ammunition, spare parts — turning Ukraine into one of several recipients of finite resources. This does not mean that aid to Kyiv will stop, but the risk of delays has increased, and delays directly affect Ukraine’s ability to compensate for Russia’s numerical advantage on the battlefield and to protect its energy and industrial infrastructure.

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Why none of these guarantee Moscow a turning point in the war

However, this window for increased pressure on Ukraine does not guarantee Moscow a turning point in the war. Given its internal constraints, the Kremlin is unlikely to attempt a rapid breakthrough of the front line. It will prefer to continue a slow war of attrition.

Russia continues to run up against the quality and structure of its military force. The bulk of its experienced officer and NCO corps has been lost, which reduces the army’s capacity to plan and execute complex offensive operations. Although the Kremlin always retains the option of launching a large-scale mobilisation at relatively short notice, there are no signs that one is approaching. To maintain the necessary pace of its creeping mobilisation, the regime is encouraging regions to make active use of new recruitment practices — pressuring students with academic debts, tightening the rules around alternative civilian service, and aggressively recruiting contract soldiers, reservists, and foreign nationals. The result is an influx of less trained and less motivated personnel.

At the same time, a rapid expansion of the army’s numbers would more likely reduce its combat effectiveness than enhance it, since there are neither sufficient training centres nor the necessary equipment to prepare hundreds of thousands of new recruits. Furthermore, the Ukrainian military’s active and skilled use of drones has made it substantially harder to assemble the large troop concentrations required for major breakthroughs anywhere within 50 kilometres of the front line. This effectively rules out the possibility of a surprise strike, making large-scale operations far less effective and scenarios of a rapid collapse of Ukrainian defences unrealistic.

From the Kremlin’s perspective, this configuration does not look like failure. In the absence of any realistic chance of a quick military breakthrough on the one hand, and with well-founded doubts about Donald Trump’s ability to compel Volodymyr Zelensky to accept peace on Russian terms on the other, the Russian army is slowly pushing Ukrainian forces out of Donbas, advancing toward Zaporizhzhia, and occupying small territories in Sumy and Kharkiv oblasts. These territories may serve as bargaining chips at the moment when the two sides approach the fixing of a line of separation.

For the time being, Vladimir Putin is able to demonstrate to his inner circle and to President Trump that his uncomplicated military tactics allow him to convert minimal tactical gains into a gradual shift of the front line in Russia’s favour. In such a situation, he has no incentive to resort to risky decisions or to make serious concessions in negotiations, whenever they resume.

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In essence, Trump did for Putin what Putin couldn’t achieve by starting a war in Ukraine: he took his regime beyond the status of a regional power. But all of this depends on the war ending within five to six weeks. If it drags on — especially into ground operations — it could not only neutralise Russia’s short-term gains but undermine the entire geopolitical effect the Kremlin expects.

I lay out the full argument in The Telegraph: read here.