Russian President Vladimir Putin has always been a paranoid man. We know, for example, that he has long eschewed the use of a personal cellphone, all too aware of how easily they can be tracked.
Yet a Kremlin document recently leaked to the press by a European intelligence service lays bare a whole new level of suspicion. Visitors can only approach him after they’ve gone through two layers of screening. His bodyguards now exercise full control over his schedule of appearances; they’ve essentially eliminated visits to any location that has to do with the military. And as for mobile phones: No one who works near Putin is now allowed to have one—they can only carry devices that aren’t connected to the internet. Surveillance systems have been placed in the homes of the cooks, drivers, and cleaners who work for him; they are prohibited from using public transportation. Most revealingly, he and his family members no longer live in their customary residences. Instead, they are sticking to secret locations with extra layers of protection. The document claims that Putin now works only in bunkers dispersed around southern Russia.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has always been a paranoid man. We know, for example, that he has long eschewed the use of a personal cellphone, all too aware of how easily they can be tracked.
Yet a Kremlin document recently leaked to the press by a European intelligence service lays bare a whole new level of suspicion. Visitors can only approach him after they’ve gone through two layers of screening. His bodyguards now exercise full control over his schedule of appearances; they’ve essentially eliminated visits to any location that has to do with the military. And as for mobile phones: No one who works near Putin is now allowed to have one—they can only carry devices that aren’t connected to the internet. Surveillance systems have been placed in the homes of the cooks, drivers, and cleaners who work for him; they are prohibited from using public transportation. Most revealingly, he and his family members no longer live in their customary residences. Instead, they are sticking to secret locations with extra layers of protection. The document claims that Putin now works only in bunkers dispersed around southern Russia.
It is possible, of course, that the spies who passed this document along to the media are playing a game of their own—perhaps using disinformation to sow dissension and mistrust within the Kremlin. But the details revealed by the leak make perfect sense given the constraints that Putin suddenly finds himself facing.
In January, U.S. forces succeeded in snatching Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro out of his compound without suffering a single fatality. At the end of February, the Israelis killed Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei on the first day of the war against Iran—and a host of other top Iranian leaders as well. Nor was it the first time that they were able to finger individual targets in Tehran. The Americans and Israelis have pulled off these operations through a combination of carefully cultivated human sources and signals intelligence, tracking the cellphone calls and internet use not just of the people targeted but also of their aides, guards, and support staffs. All this means that dictators can no longer sleep as easily as they used to.
The former head of Ukrainian military intelligence, Kyrylo Budanov—now chief of staff to President Volodymyr Zelensky—is known to be a student of Israeli targeted killings. His studies have paid off: The Ukrainians have assassinated a string of Russian military officers, politicians, and propagandists—some of them in the heart of Moscow.
In December, a car bomb in the capital took out Lt. Gen. Fanil Sarvarov. That particular hit seems to have sent a collective shiver through Russia’s power elite, allegedly—according to that leaked document—prompting a meeting of top security officials that had them blaming each other for lapses real and imagined. Given that Russia has repeatedly attempted to assassinate Zelensky, Putin has every reason to believe that he, too, has a target on his back.
Putin may well fear internal enemies as much as he does the Ukrainians; rumors of coup plots are rampant in Moscow. But the Russian president’s problems are actually bigger than that. He’s managed to stay in power for 26 years by always keeping a few steps ahead of his enemies. Now he may be running out of room to maneuver.
A Russian offensive planned for this spring has been derailed before it’s gotten off the ground. The Ukrainians claim to have inflicted 35,000 casualties on the Russians in March alone—the fifth straight month, according to Kyiv, that the number of Russians killed and seriously wounded has exceeded the Kremlin’s rate of recruiting fresh soldiers. Perhaps more importantly, the sacrifices of those soldiers were entirely in vain; no major objectives were achieved. “Ukraine is not just doing better than expected,” said Michael Kofman, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Time is not on Russia’s side in this war.”
Indeed, the Ukrainians have now actually pushed the Russians back along several stretches of the front. Putin’s military leaders appear to have no new ideas on how to alter the fundamental dynamic on the battlefield. Unless they can change that, throwing fresh manpower into the fight will prove equally fruitless.
The Ukrainians, by contrast, seem to have an endless supply of new ideas. Every day brings the unveiling of some startling new piece of technology or creative use of an old one. Every day also brings news of another audacious strike deep in the Russian heartland. On April 25, for example, Ukrainian drones hit a Russian airfield in the southern Urals city of Chelyabinsk—a little more than 1,100 miles away from Ukraine.
Kyiv’s forces have devoted considerable resources to eliminating Russian air defenses, which now simply aren’t sufficient to protect every strategic target. At one point a few weeks ago, the threat of Ukrainian attacks closed all four of Moscow’s international airports at the same time. Indeed, the growing range of Ukrainian strikes appears to have influenced the Kremlin’s decision to exclude military equipment from taking part in Victory Day celebrations on May 9. Humiliatingly, Putin even felt compelled to ask U.S. President Donald Trump to dissuade the Ukrainians from attacking during the parade. The Russians are clearly rattled.
Yet Kyiv is not staging such strikes for the sake of psychological impact. The evidence suggests that Ukrainian planners are thinking harder than ever about how to maximize the impact of their attacks. At the end of April, a Ukrainian long-range drone attack on an oil refinery in Perm, more than 900 miles away from the border, targeted distillation columns—the systems that enable the separation of crude oil into gasoline and other petroleum products. Hitting storage tanks provides spectacular footage of fires, but they are relatively easy to repair; core infrastructure like these columns is a different matter altogether. “The Ukrainians have developed a theory of victory which involves the destruction of Russia’s oil and gas infrastructure,” said Ben Hodges, a former commander of the U.S. Army in Europe. “Without that, it becomes very difficult for Russia to sustain what they’re doing.”
At the end of March, a Reuters analysis concluded that the strike campaign had succeeded in cutting Russia’s oil export capacity by 40 percent. Admittedly, this may not be enough to fully offset the windfall that Moscow has gained from the sharp rise in global oil prices unleashed by the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran. Even so, in the first quarter of this year, Russia’s budget deficit already exceeded its full-year target. Financial officials cited a 45 percent drop in oil and gas revenues.
This pattern of smart targeting repeats itself across industries. In their attacks on chemical plants, semiconductor fabrication facilities, and steel factories, the Ukrainians keep hitting core components of the industrial processes that feed Russia’s military machine. Strikingly, the Russians seem incapable of paying back Ukraine in the same coin.
The decentralization of Ukraine’s military production—scattered across myriad small factories in inconspicuous locations—is making it extremely hard for the Russians to find effective targets. So they keep attacking power plants and civilians, cruel tactics that may actually serve to stiffen Ukrainian spines.
That the momentum has shifted in Ukraine’s favor is also demonstrated by Zelensky’s increasingly confident tone toward the United States. “In my view, Russia played the Americans again—played the president of the United States,” he said recently, commenting on Trump’s policy of allowing Russia to skirt sanctions on oil sales. The days of flattery and appeasement are over.
Of course, Ukraine has plenty of problems. Its embrace of drones is driven in part by its persistent manpower personnel shortages; many Ukrainian men are refusing to join the military. And the government continues to contend with corruption scandals.
Even so, Kyiv is enjoying a boost in its international standing even as Moscow faces new headwinds. The war in Iran has given new diplomatic openings to the Ukrainians, who have been leveraging their anti-drone expertise to find new friends among the monarchies of the Persian Gulf. Trump seems so sufficiently preoccupied with his own war that he is finding fewer opportunities to pressure Kyiv into unfavorable peace deals.
And the recent electoral defeat of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has robbed Putin of his most trustworthy friend in the European Union. Orban’s exit has finally enabled the EU to break the deadlock over a long-anticipated $106 billion assistance package to Kyiv. That’s enough to keep the Ukrainians in weaponry for a long time to come—entirely apart from the variety of joint ventures for arms production that they have created with partners across the world.
Just to add insult to injury, Moscow is also in the process of losing one of its vaunted new allies in Africa: The Moscow-supported military government in Mali is losing its fight against Islamist rebels.
Losing Mali won’t be enough to cost Putin his throne. But losing the war in Ukraine certainly could—especially when combined with a stagnant economy, restless oligarchs, and a population riled by the Kremlin’s recent crackdown on the internet. Even Russia’s military bloggers, long the most enthusiastic supporters of the war, are starting to lose faith. “Little by little, the advantage is going to our enemies,” one of them recently wrote. “[T]he enemy is counterattacking, and he is succeeding.” Other Russians may well be coming to the same conclusion.
