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

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

What exactly does the FSB control?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is not visible

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

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

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

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

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

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The praetorian problem

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Slide 1

BRIEFING NOTE

Media Case

“BURJ KHALIFA”

Date executed: 9 June 2025

Slide 2

I. Description of the media case

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

Slide 3

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

Slide 4

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

Silovoy Blok — News Agency

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

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

Author: Elena Evstratova

Slide 5

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

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

Slide 6

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

Slide 7

II. Publication of the media-case materials

A) Publications in the foreign segment of the internet

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

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

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

B) Publications in the Russian segment of the internet

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

C) Refutation of the case materials

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

D) Total reach of the materials about the case

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

86,225,100 views

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

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

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

Report on Operation: “Pig Head”

Location: Paris, France

Date: 8–9 September 2025

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

Operation summary

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

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

Method of execution

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

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

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

Results of the operation

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

Result:

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

Result:

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

Result:

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

Result:

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

Result:

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

Result:

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

Result:

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

Result:

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

Result:

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

Result:

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

Additional notes

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

2. The operation received wide coverage in world media:

French-language sources (access via VPN):

• Libération

• Le Monde

• Le Parisien

• TF1

• Le Figaro

• The Local France

• France 24

• La Provence

• Paris Match

• …and many others

English-language sources (access via VPN):

• CNN (USA)

• CBS News (USA)

• Reuters (USA)

• Barron’s (USA)

• AOL (USA)

• TRT Global (Turkey)

• Ynet News (Israel)

• Morocco World News (Morocco)

• Middle East Eye

• The Straits Times (Singapore)

• Free Malaysia Today (Malaysia)

• Maeil Business Newspaper (S. Korea)

• Bilyonaryo News (Philippines)

• Al Arabiya (UAE)

• Mathrubhumi (India)

• Fakti BG (Bulgaria)

• …and many others

Russian-language sources:

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

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

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

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

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

• Regnum — “Pig heads dumped at Paris mosques”

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

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

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

  
  

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

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

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

The original Russian-language PDF is available here

PROJECTS 2026

1. Think Tank

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

Project targets for each site (4 sites total):

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

• 6 original publications (one per topic).

• 2 original reports.

Monthly total:

• 230 texts.

• 500 images.

• 300 social media posts.

2. Opinion-Leader Circles

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

Project targets:

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

3. Opinion Tracker

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

Project targets per month:

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

• 5 original overview pieces.

4. Self-Populating Knowledge Base — Germany

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

Project targets:

• Editing 100 articles per month.

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

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

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

5. AI News (France)

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

Project targets per month:

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

6. Russian Wave

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

Project targets per month:

• 200 longreads.

• 200 news items.

• 500 illustrations.

Translation and adaptation for two countries: France and Germany.

• 400 longreads.

• 400 news items.

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

7. Yerevan First!

A licensed media-outlet website has been launched.

Project targets per month:

• 200 longreads.

• 200 news items.

• 500 illustrations.

• 10 video products: interviews, overview videos.

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

8. Self-Populating Knowledge Base — Armenia

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

Project targets per month:

• Editing 100 articles per month.

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

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

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

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

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The vulnerabilities

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

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

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

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

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

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

What makes Russian economy resilient

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

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

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

   

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

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

Political catalyst

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

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

Read the report in full

Where it leaves us

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

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

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

On June 7, 2026, Armenia holds parliamentary elections.

By the time Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan visited Moscow in early April 2026, Yerevan had already frozen its participation in the Russian-led military alliance and indicated a desire for closer ties with the EU and the US. During that meeting, Vladimir Putin chided Pashinyan, complaining that pro-Russian politicians in Armenia were being kept in prison despite holding Russian passports. Pashinyan responded with a lecture on Armenian democracy, assuring Putin that there are no political prisoners in the country.

While Putin claimed the Kremlin does not interfere in neighboring elections, leaked documents obtained by Dossier Center show otherwise. The investigation reveals an operation built around multiple opposition candidates, a contingency plan for fusing them into a coalition after the vote, and a broader strategy to influence civil society—including a plan to take over Armenian NGOs left without funding following the dissolution of USAID.

The “Savior” Candidate with Ties to the FSB

The Kremlin’s primary candidate to serve as the nation’s “savior” was Samvel Karapetyan, founder of the Moscow-based Tashir Group, a Russian holding company of over 200 companies and roughly 45,000 employees. Karapetyan met a list of specific requirements: he was not connected to the discredited “old opposition,” the “Karabakh clan,” or Pashinyan’s group.

However, his ties to the Russian state were deep. He held Russian state awards and strong ties to Russian state and church circles. Crucially, in Russian databases from 2006, his workplace was listed as “IC FSB” (Information Center of the FSB), a designation typically used for informants or foreigners operating under FSB control.

The operation around him was detailed: plans included a television channel, a media holding company, a legal defense committee for his anticipated arrest, and the launch of a new political force on his birthday on August 18, followed by a “National Wellbeing” program on Armenian Independence Day, September 21.

Of these milestones, only the movement launch was hit close to schedule. Karapetyan announced Mer Dzevov (”Our Way”) on August 13, 2025, from a pretrial detention cell, after his arrest in June on charges of publicly calling for the violent seizure of power. His nephew Narek became the movement’s nominal head. The movement was later registered as a party and renamed Strong Armenia in December 2025.

The “Strong Russian Armenia” Problem

By the autumn, the Kremlin’s own consultant on the project, Gleb Kuznetsov—head of the expert council at the Expert Institute for Social Studies (EISI), an institute closely tied to the Russian Presidential Administration—concluded that Karapetyan’s profound ties to Russia were a liability.

Karapetyan legally could not be a deputy or prime minister due to holding Russian and Cypriot passports alongside his Armenian one. (In April 2026, Karapetyan announced he would renounce his foreign citizenships, though achieving this before the election was unlikely). Furthermore, he had entered the “pre-sanctions zone” as a major Gazprom contractor; his villa in France, attributed by French prosecutors to a Gazprom subsidiary, had been seized by the authorities.

In a February 2026 project analysis, Kuznetsov noted that Karapetyan was automatically perceived as a Kremlin project. Kremlin propagandists Vladimir Solovyov and Margarita Simonyan had publicly endorsed him, prompting a protest from the Armenian foreign ministry.

Analysts, Kuznetsov reported, were already joking that Karapetyan’s registered party should be renamed “Strong Russian Armenia.”

When Karapetyan’s numbers began to fall, accelerated by a January 2026 podcast appearance in which his son proposed a “ministry of sex” to address Armenia’s demographic crisis, and later by a visit from U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance, who publicly endorsed Pashinyan, the Russian team activated a second track.

The Backup: Arman Tatoyan and “Wings of Unity”

The second track centered on Arman Tatoyan, a 44-year-old lawyer and former Armenian ombudsman. His biographical file for the Presidential Administration emphasized his fluency in Russian, his Russian-language doctoral dissertation, and his close collaboration with Russian ombudsmen and structures within the Eurasian Economic Commission.

In October 2025, Tatoyan announced his political participation through the initiative “Wings of Unity” («Крылья Единства»), which was registered as a political party by mid-April 2026. The plan was to position him as a clean, institutional, progressive candidate.

The campaign was designed inside the same Russian institute with the Kuznetsov’s wife, Karine Sarkisyan, preparing the launch document. Kuznetsov also suggested a reading list for Tatoyan in December 2025, a document riddled with hallmarks of AI writing.

Financial spreadsheets authored by Davit Ananyan (former head of Armenia’s State Revenue Committee) outlined the costs. One document projected a five-month campaign budget of 926.7 million drams (about 185.6 million rubles), covering regional headquarters, salaries, and advertising. A separate document detailed a Moscow staff salary fund and a permanent research program consisting of two quantitative studies and ten focus groups per month. An edit on one of these estimates was traced to Yekaterina Sokolova, deputy director of EISI.

The instructions to Tatoyan included a script for handling questions about Russia. He was instructed to say he was “pro-Armenian,” that Russia is simply “a reality” (citing gas dependence and large Armenian diaspora), and to question why Pashinyan only worked with one side. He was explicitly told not to call for a return to the CSTO, refrain from expre, and not to attack Russia.

The campaign struggled to launch. By February 2026, Sarkisyan complained that Tatoyan’s operation lacked a media plan, travel schedule, or approved slogans. By March, his polling stood at 7.8 percent, short of the 10 percent target set by the Russian team.

Unmoving Polls

A third Russian document proposed a post-election coalition: Karapetyan and Tatoyan would merge. Tatoyan would carry the institutional, moderate message, while Karapetyan would handle the “geopolitical, resource, and conservative” side. Together, they would form an anti-Pashinyan majority cleansed of any toxic association with former president Robert Kocharyan.

To aid the final stretch, the Russian team designed two parallel information campaigns: “Anyone But Pashinyan” (to prevent the splintering of the protest vote) and “Come Out” (to drive turnout based on regime fatigue).

Despite a sustained, well-resourced political-technology operation, the polls tell the final story. A summer 2025 poll commissioned by the Russians showed only 16 percent of Armenians wanted closer ties with Russia, while 57 percent preferred neutrality and 22 percent favored the EU. The Kremlin spent the next year trying to move that number.

As of May 2026, the Armenian Election Study reports Pashinyan’s approval has risen to 49 percent, and his Civil Contract party retains a substantial lead. Of the opposition forces Moscow backed, only Karapetyan’s Strong Armenia is currently projected to clear the four-percent threshold. The “Anyone But Pashinyan” and “Come Out” information campaigns were never implemented, and the Russian political consultants’ recommendations seem to have failed to secure a victory for any of their candidates.

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What follows is the opening speech I delivered on May 20 in Strasbourg at the biannual conference of the Russian Anti-War Committee.

The audience was several hundred members of the Russian democratic emigration: activists, journalists, human rights defenders, lawyers, and organizers now working from exile across Europe and beyond.

We have gathered because the Russian political emigration today is a part of Russian politics. Possibly the only part that can still speak freely, act openly, and build connections with the democratic world. But the freedom to speak does not by itself make us a political force. What makes us a political force is goals, responsibility, the ability to negotiate, and the readiness to work not only for ourselves but also for those who remain inside Russia. For Ukraine, for Europe, and for the future Russia.

1. Name what is happening

The first task of the democratic emigration is to honestly name what is happening. The war against Ukraine is criminal. Russian troops must be withdrawn from all occupied territories. Internationally recognized borders must be restored. War criminals must be held accountable, and the victims of aggression must receive compensation. Even if it takes years and years, this is our goal.

2. Do not let Putin monopolize the image of Russia

The second goal is to prevent Putin from monopolizing the image of Russia. The Putin regime wants the world to see only two Russias: an aggressive state and a silent population. Our duty is to show a third Russia: people who oppose the war, oppose dictatorship, and support a lawful, free, federal state. This is not only a question of our reputation; it is a question of Russia’s political future.

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3. Support those who remain inside

The third goal is to support those who remain inside the country. People there live under pressure, fear, criminal prosecutions, denunciations, censorship, and the threat of prison. We have no right to demand heroism from these people from a safe distance, but we are obligated to do what we can afford to do — support prisoners and their families, help independent media, defend lawyers, journalists, volunteers, and civic activists, and carry their voices to international institutions.

4. Help Ukraine — practically

The fourth goal is to help Ukraine. Not symbolically, but practically. Support for Ukraine is not a foreign policy position of the diaspora, but the moral and political foundation of our existence. The anti-war movement has already made assistance to Ukrainian prisoners of war, demands for access for humanitarian organizations, “all-for-all” prisoner exchanges, and international monitoring of the treatment of prisoners among its priorities. This must not be episodic work, but permanent work.

5. Build political representation

The Russian democratic emigration cannot live indefinitely in the mode of separate leaders, separate funds, separate YouTube channels, and separate conflicts. We need institutions. The PACE platform for dialogue with Russia’s democratic forces is an important step — and important precisely because it creates a regular channel of consultation, political input, and coordination with European institutions. But any platform will be strong only when an organized community stands behind it.

6. Develop an image of the future Russia

It is not enough to say: “Putin must go.” That is correct, but it is not enough. After Putin, the country will not become free automatically. If we do not have answers to questions about federalism, about property, about the courts, about lustrations, about the army, about the regions, about compensation to Ukraine, about relations with Europe, about the role of the security services, and so on — if none of that is in place, the vacuum will be filled again by people of the old system. Our task is to prepare not only the protest, but the project.

7. Defend the emigration itself

The Kremlin tries to reach people abroad as well — through criminal cases, through lists of extremists and terrorists on which nearly half of this hall appears, and through pressure on passports, bank accounts, statuses, documents. The questions of visas, residence permits, documents, the rights of Russian-speaking residents of Europe, academic and cultural exchanges — none of this is a domestic-life agenda. It is part of the political resilience of the democratic emigration. Without a protected emigration there will be no sustainable political work.

8. Speak with Russian society

The Kremlin wants to cut people inside Russia off from the world and convince them that Europe hates them by their passport. We have to explain: the sanctions are directed against the regime, the war is being waged in the name of the state, but responsibility for the future lies with society. A clear Russian political language is needed not only for Brussels, Strasbourg, and Washington, but for Moscow, Yekaterinburg, Kazan, Novosibirsk, and Vladivostok.

9. Respect differences inside the democratic movement

We are not obliged to be one party; we are not obliged to have one ideology. In a free Russia we will have different political programs, different voters, different disputes. But today we share a common minimum: to stop the war, to dismantle the Putin regime — a regime that is the source of the aggression and the source of the repression — to release political prisoners, to recognize human rights and freedoms, to reject discrimination and public destructive conflicts inside the anti-war movement.

In conclusion

I understand that many people are tired. Tired of emigration, of poverty, of disputes, of mutual accusations, of the feeling that history is moving without us. But politics begins where exhaustion does not turn into capitulation. The Russian democratic diaspora possesses resources that people inside Russia do not: freedom of speech, the ability to gather, access to international institutions, security, knowledge, and professional networks. That is a great deal. Which means we also have an obligation to use those resources.

Our aim is not to become a government in exile, especially not on paper. Our aim is to become a functioning political infrastructure for assistance, representation, pressure on the regime, connection with society, and preparation for a democratic transition.

We do not know when the window of opportunity will open. But we know one thing for certain: if it opens and we do not have institutions, a program, personnel, and trust, then that window will close again. And it will close again for decades.

Therefore, the main question now is not who speaks the loudest on behalf of Russia. The main question is who is capable of building the force that Russia will need after Putin.

Thank you.

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Vladimir Putin returned from Beijing having signed roughly 40 bilateral documents and having failed, again, to land a deal on the Power of Siberia 2 gas pipeline. The rest of the visit was what this kind of meetings always are. There was an extension of the friendship treaty from 2001, and Xi used some more warm words to describe his relationship with Putin.

There was little of substance to signal a meaningful change in the structure of their deeply unequal cooperation. For anyone who wants to understand that structure, the New Eurasian Strategies Centre in February published a report that is worth reading in full.

The report establishes that the much-trumpeted strategic partnership between Russia and China is more of a myth than a reality, and that the myth is driven by a narrative from the Russian side. The economies are complementary on paper and more or less equal in value terms, but the trade structure has acquired a colonial character: Russia sells China oil, gas, coal, metals, and timber. China sells Russia the cars that replaced Volkswagen, Toyota, and Renault — Chery, Haval, Geely, Changan — along with the smartphones (Huawei, Xiaomi), the drones (DJI), the machine tools, the military technology.

China is not replacing the pre-war Western investment, does not transfer technology, and has shown little interest in truly integrating financial systems. China has become indispensable to Russia’s war effort, and yet Russia accounts for roughly 3% of China’s exports and a little over 4% of its imports. The Chinese economy is nearly 8 times larger than the Russian one, and this gap is keeps widening.

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In Beijing’s view, the relationship is one of many, conducted with characteristic caution, and bounded by Chinese rather than Russian risk tolerance. In Moscow’s view, it is a civilisational pivot. Both descriptions can be internally coherent as descriptions of their author’s views, but only one of them matches the underlying reality.

The plane that wasn’t built

If you want to understand what “marriage without love” looks like in practice, look at the wide‑body airliner that Russia and China spent the past decade pretending to build together.

The CR929 began with a 2014 memorandum of cooperation between United Aircraft Corporation and COMAC. A formal joint venture, the China‑Russia Commercial Aircraft International Corporation, was launched in May 2017 in Shanghai. Initial commercial deliveries were scheduled for after 2025; the pandemic pushed them to 2028 or 2029; the sanctions imposed after February 2022 pushed them, in practical terms, off the calendar entirely. On 5 September 2025 the chief executive of Rostec, Sergei Chemezov, told Interfax what had been clear for some time: China had decided to build the aircraft without Russia. Moscow, he said, would attempt its own wide‑body once the PD‑35 engine was ready.

The PD‑35 engine is not ready. Russia is now planning a passenger aircraft that does not yet have an engine, intended for a market dominated by Boeing and Airbus, to be produced by a domestic industry stripped of the Western suppliers it had relied on for a generation, in competition with the partner that doesn’t find their partnership too valuable. The CR929 was meant to be the flagship of Sino‑Russian industrial cooperation and became a tribute for the idea that Russia is a serious industrial partner for China at all.

A quarter‑century treaty, in its present form

The Treaty of Good‑Neighborliness and Friendly Cooperation that Putin flew to Beijing this week to extend was signed in July 2001 by Putin and Jiang Zemin. It is a quarter of a century old. It was, at the time, a bilateral normalisation document: Article 6 affirmed the absence of mutual territorial claims after almost a century of border tension, and the rest of the treaty committed both sides to good‑neighbourliness, non‑aggression, and the principle that the two countries would not become enemies again. It did not propose a strategic alliance against anyone.
Putin had met George W. Bush in Slovenia a month earlier, and would, less than two months later, be the first foreign leader to call the White House after the attack on the World Trade Center. China was five months away from joining the World Trade Organization. What the treaty served to define then was the end of an enmity and not so much the beginning of a confrontation. What it serves to extend now is something rather different: a partnership that has become the principal external relationship for both governments, conducted under sanctions, against the same Washington, but for entirely different reasons and with entirely different expectations.

The treaty, in its present form, gives Russia an appearance of friendship it can use at home and abroad and China — a series of options it can choose from at its own discretion . Chinese banks remain cautious about Russian counterparties and often refuse transactions outright. Chinese direct investment in the Russian real economy is, as the NEST report puts it, “limited.” Beijing does not subsidise its companies for being loyal to Moscow; the flow of commercial interest runs in the other direction, with Russian firms hunting for Chinese intermediaries in Shenzhen and Hong Kong and paying commissions for access to factories that used to be reached through Munich and Milan. The Russian car market is now sixty‑one per cent Chinese by share, up from nine per cent in 2021, and ninety per cent of the revenue from those sales flows to Chinese producers. Russian industry has not benefited from this displacement. It has been displaced.

The clearest single test of where the partnership stands is the Power of Siberia 2 pipeline, which Russia desperately wants and which China, for more than a decade now, has not been in a hurry to agree to. The pipeline was first announced in November 2014 at the APEC summit in Beijing. Eleven and a half years later, after a binding memorandum signed last September and a state visit this week, there is still no final price, no final financing structure, and no construction date. Russia needs the project to demonstrate to its own elite that the European gas market lost in 2022 can be replaced. China can take Russian gas if the terms are good enough, and can wait if they are not.

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In March and April 2026, the two polling agencies the Kremlin trusts most began publishing numbers the Kremlin did not want to see. VTsIOM, the All-Russia Public Opinion Research Center, and FOM, the Public Opinion Foundation, are nominally independent institutions, but both operate firmly within the orbit of the presidential administration, and both recorded a steady decline in Vladimir Putin’s ratings. VTsIOM’s data showed Putin’s approval falling from 74 percent in February to 65.6 percent in April, while his trust rating dropped from 78 percent to 71 percent over the same period. Both numbers were the lowest since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began.

At the end of April, both agencies paused publication. When VTsIOM resumed, the ratings had recovered: approval was up 1.2 points to 66.8 percent, and trust was up 1.1 points to 72.1 percent. The agency explained the recovery by disclosing a change in methodology, namely that door-to-door interviews had been added to the existing telephone surveys.

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This is not a neutral adjustment: face-to-face interviews conducted in people’s homes during working hours systematically oversample the part of the electorate most loyal to the regime: older respondents, those at home in the middle of the working day, those most dependent on the state for income and security. And in person, respondents tend to give more cautious answers to a stranger holding a clipboard than they do on the telephone. FOM did not announce any change in methodology, but its numbers moved in the same direction.

Other indicators continue to show what VTsIOM’s revised methodology was designed to obscure. The Levada Center, which Moscow designated a “foreign agent” in 2016 but which is still treated by most outside observers as the country’s most credible independent pollster, reported that by April 2026 the share of Russians who think the country is moving “in the wrong direction” had risen to 28 percent, an increase of 11 percentage points since September 2025. Even VTsIOM’s own numbers, before the methodological change, showed the share saying the country is on the right track falling from 41 percent in March to 33 percent in April.

The forward-looking indicators move in the same direction, and more sharply. FOM’s data show the share of Russians expecting their lives to improve over the next six to twelve months falling from 28 percent in March to 21 percent in April, while VTsIOM’s twelve-month expectations index fell from 36 percent in January to 26 to 27 percent in March and April.

If VTsIOM and FOM continue to manage their numbers more aggressively, the implication is straightforward: the authorities are becoming less willing to publicly acknowledge what their own polling is telling them, and the cost is one the system tends to underestimate. By editing the picture of public sentiment, the Kremlin is closing down one of the last functional channels of feedback it still has from Russian society.

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For years, much of the democratic world treated Russian opposition politics as primarily a moral phenomenon: brave people exposing corruption and denouncing dictatorship. Important work, certainly. But moral opposition alone does not create a viable post-authoritarian political order.

The central problem is that Russian opposition structures in exile still struggle to answer a basic strategic question: what are we actually trying to build?

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Armed or underground resistance inside Russia is not a realistic option for the urban middle class under current conditions. Russia today is a highly securitized state with enormous surveillance capacity, an atomized society, and very limited public willingness to accept the personal costs of open rebellion.

That means the real task of the opposition is not to “spark a revolution.” It has to build ideological leadership capable of shaping Russia when the current regime eventually weakens or fractures. This distinction is crucial because history has shown what happens when authoritarian systems collapse without organized democratic alternatives ready to fill the vacuum.

The fall of a dictatorship does not automatically produce liberal democracy. Sometimes it produces chaos, sometimes fragmentation, and sometimes another authoritarian regime emerges with softer language and better public relations.

At the moment, much of the Russian opposition still revolves around a charismatic model of politics. This is understandable, but deeply fragile. Movements built around irreplaceable figures often struggle to survive the loss of those figures.

More importantly, charismatic politics tends to reproduce the very political culture it claims to oppose: excessive personalism, moral absolutism, intolerance of internal disagreement, and weak institutional thinking.

Russia has plenty of individual Kremlin critics, but the movement lacks ideological diversity. There are few organized liberal, conservative, social democratic, regionalist, or institutionalist movements capable of articulating distinct visions for the future, and too many opposition figures still try to remain “above ideology” to maximize their reach.

Without ideological structuring, there can be no meaningful coalition politics after authoritarianism. A democratic transition requires organized groups that already know who they are, what they believe, and what compromises they are willing to make.

Otherwise, the eventual transition inside Russia will be shaped not by prepared democratic actors, but by whoever possesses money, coercive power, media access, or informal networks at the moment the system weakens.

Western observers should not think of this as an abstract intellectual debate among exiles. It has enormous implications. Russia remains a nuclear power, a major military actor, and one of the central destabilizing forces in European security. Post-Putin infighting, revanchist nationalism, or continued authoritarianism would not be confined within Russia’s borders.

The West spent decades assuming that economic integration alone would gradually moderate the Russian state. That assumption failed. It would be dangerous to make a second mistake by assuming that the mere disappearance of Putinism will automatically produce a stable democratic Russia.

Political systems do not emerge spontaneously from moral outrage. They require institutions, ideological currents, organized interests, and people capable of governing rather than simply resisting. That is the real challenge facing the Russian opposition now. And whether it succeeds or fails will shape not only Russia’s future, but Europe’s as well.

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After more than four years of war, Russia and Ukraine are confronting the same reality: the front has largely stalled. Neither side is making meaningful gains, and any attempt to change that would carry serious costs and would require mobilizing more soldiers and and straining even more their already exhausted economies.

For that reason, the May ceasefire feels like a turning point.

To recap for those who didn’t follow: the negotiations around it were a very public mess. According to reports, Putin raised the idea of a temporary ceasefire for May 8–9 during a phone call with Donald Trump in late April. The Kremlin’s incentive here was obvious: Putin was desperate to avoid Ukrainian drones over Moscow during his Victory Day celebrations in Red Square. Meanwhile, Trump wanted a truce because it would have allowed him to show that he could still influence the peace process and push both sides toward talks. Trump expressed his support for the idea.

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The fact Trump had publicly backed the ceasefire essentially forced Zelenskyy into a balancing act. He could not easily reject the proposal, because that would put him at risk of yet another confrontation with the US. At the same time, accepting a ceasefire that had already been publicly framed as Putin’s initiative would have been politically damaging inside Ukraine.

So Zelenskyy took a smart detour and made a counterproposal: a longer ceasefire, beginning on May 6. Russia rejected it and bombed Ukrainian cities again, and threatened further escalation if Ukraine attempted to disrupt the May 9 parade. Behind the scenes, though, discussions continued, even as fighting persisted along the front line and both sides carried out heavy airstrikes.

A compromise was reached at the last minute, and announced by Trump on May 8: a three-day ceasefire from May 9–11 and a 1,000-for-1,000 prisoner exchange. This effectively gave both sides something they wanted. Putin was able to hold his parade safely and avoided clashing with Trump. Zelenskyy was able to demonstrate flexibility to Washington, while drone strikes near Moscow before the truce took effect served as a warning that Ukraine still had the ability to hit back.

Zelenskyy also got a domestic political win when he issued a decree effectively “authorizing” the Moscow parade and removing its route from Ukraine’s target list.

Although both sides have accused each other of violating the truce, there have also been some encouraging signs that Russia and Ukraine are open to future peace talks. Notably, for the first time, Putin has indicated that he would accept European involvement, although his nomination for an intermediary — his personal friend, former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder — is unlikely to gain much support among Europeans.

Nevertheless, there is cause for optimism. For the first time in years, it feels like genuine efforts toward an end to the war may not be beyond the realm of possibility.

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Full deck, translated →

The document contains warnings about economic exhaustion, manpower shortages, falling public patience, drone attacks deep inside Russia, rising pressure on businesses, and the possibility that continuing the war could eventually require full mobilization and a complete transition to a wartime economy.

One phrase in particular stands out: “You must know when to stop. Excess is defeat. Continuing the special military operation would become a Pyrrhic victory.”

While the peace scenario described in the document does not go nearly far enough to be considered a just end to the war, it is also a far cry from Putin’s original stated war aims. Ukraine would continue to exist, Zelenskyy would remain in office. Russia would keep Donetsk, Luhansk and Crimea, but would withdraw from Sumy and Kharkiv, freeze the front elsewhere, and quietly abandon any fantasies about taking Kyiv.

The main problem addressed in the document is how to sell this plan to the various factions of the population. At the start of the war, the regime promised a rapid, sweeping triumph, with the propagandists speaking of “taking Kyiv in three days” and Russian troops being “welcomed as liberators”. Of course, none of that materialized — but the messaging held onto the idea that only a complete victory would suffice. Through that lens, any concessions at all would be read as a failure.

Instead of a war against Ukraine, propagandists are now being told to frame the war as a “successful” confrontation with the “collective West” (as if they haven’t been doing it since the beginning — Putin’s literal video address that started the war was full of grievances about the West’s betrayal). Russian, they will say, has halted NATO expansion, survived the sanctions, and emerged from the ordeal stronger and more united. Never mind the fact that NATO’s border with Russia is now much longer than it was before the war, the Baltic Sea is now a NATO lake, and the economy is in such bad shape that even Putin has been forced to acknowledge it in public.

The Machine Prepares to Eat Its Own Patriots

Perhaps the most revealing section of the document concerns how the plans would be sold to the ultra-patriotic Z-community. The same bloggers and commentators who spent years demanding escalation are now described by regime officials as emotional “armchair patriots” who may need to be marginalized if they oppose peace. In other words, the machine is preparing to consume some of its own creators.

The authors of the document acknowledge that war veterans have legitimate reasons to be angry with the regime, so they have made plans to prevent any kind of uprising — namely, by channeling veterans’ energy in “useful” directions such as memorial events, reconstruction projects, involvement in politics, or foreign mercenary work with the “Africa Corps,” formerly known as the late Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner Group.

Ordinary Russians, meanwhile, are apparently supposed to receive a carefully managed “thaw”: a little more humor on television, selective amnesties, softer cultural messaging, and permission to use the word “peace” again. There’s no mention of lifting any of the restrictions on free speech, or of restoring any of the independent media outlets that were banned. Just a few steps the regime hopes will lower the temperature.

The Role of Putin

There’s no saying Putin would agree to such a plan, given that the whole point of the war in the first place was to keep him in power, and his approval ratings are currently plummeting. He might see any concessions as too much of a risk to himself. No, the really important thing is that people around Putin are now talking about the possibility of a negotiated peace at all, albeit one that’s still far too skewed in Moscow’s favor.

More than four years in, some within the Kremlin are starting to realize what most sensible people knew from the start: endless war is dangerous, not only for Ukraine, but for Russia and the regime too.

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Slide 1 — After Victory (Cover)

Slide 2 — Expectation and Reality

RISKS (left column)

WWII remains the only reference image of VICTORY in the public mind. This time it will be different.

• No “Act of Surrender.” Wars haven’t ended that way for a long time. Even WWII dragged on after Germany’s surrender and Japan’s first act of surrender.

• No “We took Kyiv.” That was never the objective.

• “Denazification” is being carried out on the battlefield.

• At the time of the framework agreement, Zelensky will most likely still be in power.

• In the information age, victory is never one-sided. The US, the West, and Ukraine will frame their own — as we saw with Iran, the US, and Israel in summer 2025. Western media are already prepping the line: “Ukraine’s survival is its victory.”

• There will probably be a framework agreement first. Standard practice in complex conflicts. But easy to spin as another “Khasavyurt” or “New Minsk.”

• The agreement will be a compromise, to one degree or another.

MOST LIKELY SCENARIO (Right column)

• Format. A framework peace agreement. Likely US–Russia and US–Ukraine.

• Territories. All of the DPR and LPR transfer to Russia. Kherson and Zaporizhia oblasts split along the line of contact. Russian forces withdraw from Sumy and Kharkiv.

• Demilitarization. Neutral status. A buffer zone.

• Denazification. Symbolic, limited.

• Sanctions. The US lifts theirs. European sanctions stay in place.

• Money. Part of the frozen assets goes to rebuilding war-affected territories — both in Ukraine and in Russia.

Slide 3 — The Image of Victory. Argumentation

The peace Putin achieved is a huge victory. Putin made the West bend. We thwarted the West’s plans to expand and prolong the conflict.

Victory over whom? Over international imperialism and globalism. Not Ukrainian nationalism — a far stronger, more skilled, more powerful enemy: the united West.

Victory for what? To protect our compatriots, the Russian people of the Donbas. Russia defended Russians and showed we don’t abandon our own. We built a shield for Russian-speakers across all of Ukraine.

Russia won, and won big. Gains: territory, people, resources. More than one-fifth of Ukraine (117,000 sq km) — an area the size of Bulgaria, Greece, or North Korea. Coal, rare earths. Especially fertile soil in Kherson and Zaporizhia. A land corridor to Crimea. The entire Sea of Azov coast — new resorts and recreation zones for millions of Russians. Millions of new fellow citizens, ethnically Russian.

The masks are off; everything is in its place. The whole world has now seen who is right and who is wrong. We showed that we are tougher, taller, better, more humane. The Ukrainian Nazis showed they really are Nazis, sadists, and moral degenerates. The Ukrainian elites had a full coming-out.

There will be no Ukraine after the defeat. Politicians aren’t saying it out loud, but Ukraine will cease to exist within 10–15 years. No people, no money, enormous debts, factories that don’t run and never will. Everything sold off. People are fleeing.

The EU is stagnating after its defeat. Brussels has shown its helplessness. It dragged its members into a needless, counterproductive standoff with Moscow. Every EU country is economically worse off. The EU is fractured.

Respect for the victor. Most of the world stood with us. During the SMO, our neighbors were sort of helping us while also testing us. After the victory, that’s behind us. Looking ahead, our victory could lead to integration around Russia.

Know when to stop. Going too far is defeat. Continuing the SMO would be a Pyrrhic victory.

Strength in unity. Those who left were the so-called elites who first betrayed and then fled. Russia has been cleansed and has closed ranks — that is our victory.

The joys of victory. Airports reopen, sanctions come off, trade picks up. Crucially for the defense industry: Russian weapons have been battle-tested — orders for Russian arms and Russian food will be huge again.

Slide 4 — Problem Audiences

“Armchair ultrapatriots” — Track: Pride / Risks of Continuing the War

Characteristics:

• Extreme emotionality

• Did not personally serve in the SMO

• Tunnel vision — one image of victory: “all the way to Kyiv,” “capitulation”

• Dominant in the public conversation

Approaches:

1. “Emotional flip” of their frontmen

2. Signal that “discrediting” the army is off-limits

3. Rationalization — why this is a Victory, why now, why dragging it out would have hurt Russia

4. Amplify moderate voices in the media

Veteran-ultrapatriots — Track: Pride / Risks of Continuing the War

Characteristics:

• Share the ultrapatriot image of victory, but have a right to be angry

• Socioeconomic losses, personal triggers

• Capable of organizing and acting decisively; can attract media attention

Approaches:

1. Environment control, support through the Foundation and veterans’ organizations

2. Emotional alignment — acknowledging negative emotions, mourning losses, validating disappointments

3. Channeling into conventional social activity (memorial events, future-oriented discussions, integration into political parties, rebuilding the territories)

4. A new contract — deployment to the Africa Corps on overseas missions

The tired, who want a normal life — Track: Win — For the Sake of Life

Characteristics: desire for a full return to “normal life,” expectation of a social thaw and growth.

Approaches:

1. Showcase “good news”

2. Restore normalcy — communications, flights

3. A traditional postwar amnesty (for those who spoke out in support of peace)

Defense-industry and NGO staff — Track: Win — For the Sake of Life

Characteristics: fear of losing income and work; possible layoffs; a drop in core activity.

Approaches:

1. Oversight, support

2. Showcase opportunities — promote export wins, replenish reserves, conversion (e.g., into drones)

Slide 5 — The Pride Track. Key Messages

HOORAY! RUSSIA HAS WON. THIS IS BEYOND DISPUTE.

• Russia defended its independence and uniqueness, its right to decide its own fate. Victory confirms we are on the right path.

• And the right of every country to sovereignty. We changed the world. (Putin, 2022: “in the new world order, everyone must hear everyone out, take into account every point of view — every people, every society, every culture, every worldview, every set of ideas and religious convictions, without imposing a single truth on anyone, and only on this basis, recognizing our responsibility for the fate of peoples and the planet, build the symphony of human civilization.”)

• Russia defended justice. Saved our own. Prevented a humanitarian catastrophe in the Donbas.

• Russia’s strength is recognized worldwide. Held the line against 50 countries. Nazism and globalization bowed before our might.

• Maximum result without general mobilization and without putting the entire economy and daily life on a war footing.

• Gained territory and won recognition.

ANYONE WHO BELITTLES THE VICTORY IS NO PATRIOT OF RUSSIA.

WE BELIEVE IN THE PRESIDENT. ONCE AGAIN HE OUTPLAYED THEM ALL! PUTIN KNOWS WHAT HE’S DOING — BETTER THAN ANYONE.

WE’RE PROUD OF OUR OWN. WARRIOR-VICTORS. AN IMMORTAL FEAT.

• Our army turned out to be the most combat-capable in the world, facing down the full might of the West.

• We have grown more united as a society — that, too, is a victory.

• The military, labor, and spiritual feats of ordinary people expanded Russia’s possibilities. We also discovered that anyone can become a “big person.”

Org. measures (the block with the image on the right): celebratory events; award ceremonies; congratulations from senior officials; interpretation of the meaning of unconditional victory; meetings with veterans; mourning rites and memorials. A signal to ultrapatriot influencers — including on the inadmissibility of “discrediting” the army.

Slide 6 — Risks of Continuation. Key Messages

The continuation that fringe ultrapatriots are demanding would mean abandoning core positions — declaring general mobilization, putting the entire economy and daily life on a war footing, losing years. Expensive. And no payoff to be had — we couldn’t feed 30 million Ukrainians anyway.

Economic risks. Good thing we didn’t tip into economic catastrophe. Putin’s goal is the country’s peaceful development and the quality of people’s lives — he has always said so. But in a war of attrition, development takes a back seat.

• Tightening sanctions pressure (we lost European markets during the SMO)

• Resource depletion

• Likely tax and fee hikes

• Layoffs as business has to adapt

• Cuts to social spending

• Inflation

Security.

• Possible mobilization — somehow our armchair patriots aren’t lining up to serve

• Strikes deep into Russian territory

• Drones, “Carpet” alerts at airports (the air-defense protocol that grounds flights)

• Rising terrorist pressure from the Ukrainian regime

Demographic risks.

• We can’t afford to fall into a new demographic hole

• Russia needs people. We have to work for the future. And it shouldn’t be migrants who fill the gap.

Geopolitical risks.

• Possible erosion of our position in the world

• The US could outmaneuver us in the contest over zones of influence and the architecture of the new world order

• Risk of losing position in promising territories — the Arctic and elsewhere

The country’s and people’s image. Russia is no aggressor. We won with dignity. We’re capable of finishing Ukraine off, but we are not at war with the country or its people — we are simply protecting our own citizens. We came to bring peace, as the Russian soldier always does.

Org. measures (the block with the image on the right): expert appearances; individual expert statements; reviews and analytical pieces; social media commentary; demonstrating that this position aligns with anti-Russian European maximalists (i.e., framing those who demand continuation as in agreement with hawks hostile to Russia).

Slide 7 — The Win-for-the-Future Track. Key Messages

Finally, we are returning to normal life.

• Life is becoming safe and comfortable again. Air-raid alerts are over. Terror attacks on airports and residential neighborhoods are over. Normal mobile service is back. You no longer have to fear for yourself or your children.

• Resources and attention are shifting to the simple, day-to-day questions of life on the ground.

• You feel the stability immediately. There will be no new taxes.

• It’s possible to travel again, and goods are returning.

Russia gained a great deal. Russia has acquired a macro-region with enormous economic potential. The cost of rebuilding is nothing compared to the gains.

• Russia incorporated its historical territories with a population of about 5 million.

• The Sea of Azov has become a Russian inland sea.

• These territories generated up to 30% of Ukraine’s GDP. Their economic integration is underway.

• Reliable water supply secured for Crimea, Sevastopol, and Donetsk.

• Confirmed coal reserves in the DPR estimated at roughly 10 billion tons.

• The new territories can yield at least an additional 5 million tons of grain per year.

• The Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant — Europe’s largest, capacity 6 GW.

• The sanctions cost Europe dearly.

• A stronger national currency.

• Russia continued its socioeconomic development, opened new markets, and secured technological sovereignty.

Time to think about the future. The country has a great future ahead. Clear prospects for markets and technology. BRICS opportunities. Opportunities for children and young people, including in education.

Org. measures (the block on the right with a futuristic image): discussions of the future (round tables, forums, etc.); good news; amnesty; return of mobile service, flights, and so on.

Slide 8 — For the Sake of Life. Key Messages

A bad peace is better than a good quarrel. Victory means the blood is no longer being spilled.

Peace that saves lives and lets us move into the future — that is victory. Our forces will be redirected to peacetime problems and the management of threats. Ukraine isn’t the only thing on our plate — the country has many tasks ahead. We need the strength and resources to develop the vast territories of the Far East, Siberia, and the Arctic.

Only Europe needs the war to continue — Europe, which was bent on grinding Russia down. The strain is already showing. We cannot allow a collapse.

“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the sons of God.” Putin offered peace many times, and stopped the fighting the moment it became possible. Putin and Trump are the good guys; Biden has blood dripping from his teeth.

The heroes of the special operation died fighting for peaceful skies over our heads. By restoring peace we make their sacrifice meaningful, not in vain.

Sidebar slogan (over a silhouette of Vera Mukhina’s “Worker and Kolkhoz Woman”): “FOR THE SAKE OF LIFE ON EARTH!”

Org. measures: celebratory events; online flash mobs; criticism of the narratives coming from European maximalists and the foreign opposition, to show that the push to continue the war is unacceptable.

Slide 9 — Projects

1. Agenda-shaping sociology (formative polling).

2. Online campaigns — Victory and Memory of the Fallen.

3. The Future Is Everywhere. Discussions, round tables, a steady stream of news about normalization, reports on social projects and social-infrastructure build-out. IT, pharma, the creative industries — different markers of progress.

4. “A Celebration with Tears in Our Eyes” (quoting the Soviet Victory Day song): congratulations from leadership; celebratory events; moments of silence and remembrance of the fallen.

5. Integrative project — “Russia’s Victories.” A package of media formats describing the various ways conflicts have ended, dispelling the idea that capitulation is the only kind of ending. Russia’s victories beyond the Patriotic Wars of 1812 and 1945. Tying announcements to historical victory anniversaries (e.g., in the Far East — the annexation of territories under the Treaty of Aigun). An educational track — lectures, round tables, debates and other projects on what kinds of victories exist (the “Znanie” Society and the academic community, popular history bloggers).

6. “Russia After Victory.” A futurology agenda focused on postwar development. Round tables, media discussions, articles. In different framings: victory, win. Lecture series and media formats: “We won. The next step is the future. What will it look like?” (the “Znanie” Society, “Sirius,” regional “Growth Points” centers, blogs, documentary series).

Slide 10 — Projects (continued)

7. Promoting the right behavioral track for SMO veterans — public-service ads, blogs, news, artistic formats. On the model: “NN became a respected member of the community / bought a Russian car / rebuilt his house / started his own manufacturing or service company / hotel / got into a prestigious university. His fellow soldier, meanwhile, drank away everything he earned / killed himself / wound up in prison.” Promote the norm, not the extremes; push new heroes and opinion leaders to the front.

8. The return of “postwar” culture as a background project. Modeled on the cinema and literature of the 1960s “Thaw.” Focus on human, peacetime themes. The aesthetic of “a return to normal.” A managed thaw. Bringing humor back into the political conversation, rehabilitating the word “peace,” overturning convictions.

9. Lowering the temperature on radicalism and bellicosity. Limiting the media presence of the “nuclear-option” turbo-radicals. Reorienting or marginalizing the most uncompromising of them.

10. Media formats about BRICS and success stories in the “new international politics.” New investment projects, factories, technological partnerships — explained in plain language. Moving away from a Western-centric framing of foreign policy and culture (”what’s interesting in China, who’s at the top of the Brazilian charts, what was invented in India”).

11. An amnesty in honor of victory. A tradition and a marker. Russia has practiced this since the end of the Crimean War. Above all for those who spoke out in support of peace. Rehabilitation (decriminalization) of the word “peace” and of the concept itself. A peace-loving disposition is part of our character and our traditions — we have always strived for peace and continue to do so. Emphasis on Russia’s peacemaking acts throughout history — historical excursions.

12. Introducing symbols of the people’s sacrifice in the SMO and of the victory. Erecting monuments, opening churches, maintaining archives.

    
    

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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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