Since Putin first assumed the Presidency, almost twenty-seven years ago, his rule has rested on a certain mythology: that he is the country’s unitary authority and arbiter, the one figure who can hold together Russia’s many factions, clans, and interests. For members of the élite, even if they don’t like every decision—including Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022—it is safer and more profitable to have Putin in charge than to face a Hobbesian all-against-all struggle for power and resources. “The defining characteristic of the Russian élite is its opportunism,” Konstantin Remchukov, a newspaper publisher in Moscow, said. “And its ability to survive in any conditions. That’s how they get to be the élite in the first place.” In Putin’s repressive state, the costs of disloyalty are clear: Moscow’s Lefortovo Prison, after all, is not only full of political prisoners but ministers, generals, and governors.
The war has tested but not yet broken that loyalty. “Just about everyone would like to stop the war tomorrow—that’s obvious,” a fixture of Russia’s political élite told me. “There’s not a single person, other than Putin and the military brass, who wants to keep on fighting. But no one would ever dare to express their displeasure.”
The only real threat to Putin’s authority came a year into the war, when Yevgeniy Prigozhin, the founder of Wagner, a Russian paramilitary organization, launched a mutiny directed against Russia’s military leadership. He claimed that he wasn’t targeting Putin, but the sight of Wagner mercenaries in armored vehicles barrelling toward Moscow was undeniably a sign of instability. Putin called it “treason against our country,” saying that “all those who consciously chose the path of betrayal . . . will suffer inevitable punishment.” Two months later, Prigozhin and Wagner’s top leadership were killed when a private jet they were on exploded shortly after takeoff from Moscow. Message received.
The recent series of events—none of which, on their face, are as dramatic as an armed uprising of mercenary fighters—has created a sense that the political system is at once tightly controlled and utterly rudderless. “On the one hand, the regime is more airless than ever,” Farida Rustamova, the founder of “Vlast,” a newsletter on Russian politics, said. “All the screws have been tightened to the max.” At the same time, she said, “it’s also never been as chaotic and unpredictable.” There is a sense, among everyone from military officials to regional bureaucrats, that “the old rules are breaking down, and no one knows what the new ones are, or whether they exist at all.”
The main factor is the seemingly unresolvable deadlock in Ukraine. Within weeks of the invasion, when Russian units failed to quickly capture Kyiv, Putin switched to pursuing a war of attrition. In such a struggle, the side with more resources—from industrial capacity to expendable soldiers—should eventually emerge with the upper hand. In the past few years, Russia, at an enormous cost to its own forces, made steady advances on the battlefield (most estimates suggest more than a million Russian soldiers have been killed or injured since the start of the conflict). The Russian military rarely achieved a strategic breakthrough, but it pushed forward with the brute force of a slow-moving steamroller.
So far in 2026, according to maps from the Ukrainian war-monitoring outfit DeepState, Russia is advancing at roughly half the rate it did last year. (In some cases, Ukraine has actually recaptured small swaths of territory previously held by Russia.) Ukraine’s technological innovations, especially in unmanned and A.I.-driven systems, have offset Russia’s previous advantages. The notion of a front line, where fighting is most intense, and a rear, where troops can regroup and vehicles can operate, has collapsed, replaced by a so-called kill zone that can stretch for ten miles or more.
Donald Trump’s return to the White House was expected to provide a newfound advantage for Russia in its negotiations with Ukraine. Russian officials continue to speak of a “spirit of Anchorage,” a supposed set of understandings that came out of a Trump-Putin summit in Alaska this past August. The member of Russia’s political élite told me that Putin left the summit believing that Trump would convince the Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, to withdraw from the parts of the Donbas that are currently under Ukraine’s control, effectively ceding them to Russia, and that the rest of the front line would freeze in place. “Well, it turned out that Trump and his team haven’t managed to do this,” the person said. “So the war continues, even as few like that fact.”
