From catastrophic casualties on the front line to popular discontent that is impossible to stifle, Russia’s war machine is showing signs that it is not in the best condition. Experts and even the regime’s most ardent propagandists admit that the Russian president is out of options
Signs of dissatisfaction are beginning to multiply in Moscow. When an influencer with 13 million followers made a video talking about popular frustration, alarms began to ring in the Kremlin. And the worst thing is that this young woman is not alone. For tens of millions of Russians, war stopped being a televised event and became a daily reality. Regime-imposed internet blackouts are actually happening, inflation has become impossible to mask, and long-range Ukrainian drone strikes have shattered the myth of Russian military supremacy. Something is changing in Putin’s Russia and experts warn that this spiral of erosion could jeopardize the very survival of the regime, cornering the president.
“There is a German word that defines Vladimir Putin’s situation well: Zugzwang. It is an expression used in chess that means that the player has to play but has no good options to do so. All options for moving Putin’s pieces are bad. Vladimir Putin showed the world that his regime is vulnerable”, analyzes Manuel Serrano, specialist in European Affairs.
Signs of the fragility of Putin’s regime are appearing where least expected and the case of Ilya Remeslo is proof of this. For a decade, this lawyer was one of the regime’s armed forces in persecuting Alexei Navalny, but everything changed abruptly in March, when Remeslo publicly demanded Putin’s resignation, calling him a “war criminal and thief.” What happened next was an unusual deviation for a country accustomed to one of the most efficient machines of repression. After being forcibly admitted to a psychiatric hospital, Remeslo was released in just 30 days, benefiting from what appears to be “an open conflict” between two of the most powerful groups in the Russian apparatus.
In an interview with the Washington Post newspaper, the lawyer admits that there is “a great battle for power” that pits the security apparatus, led by the all-powerful FSB, against the administration itself. “The scale of dissatisfaction is colossal. I have the impression that part of the system is already starting to turn against Putin”, the lawyer, after being released.
On the one hand, the hard wing of the security services and the ultranationalists demand more from the regime, with a new military and civil mobilization, the relentless repression of any dissent and a renewed effort to conquer, once and for all, the entire Donbass region. On the opposite side are the technocrats of the presidential administration, led by Sergei Kiriyenko, who are trying at all costs to stop an economic disaster that could further worsen Russian prospects in the war, but also on the international stage.
And the numbers support this pragmatic faction. This week, the Ministry of Economic Development revised growth prospects downwards, dropping them from 1.3% to an anemic 0.4%, and this despite high oil prices. At the same time, inflation insists on not falling below 5.4%, breaching the 4% target set by the government. All this happens as thousands of companies despair of meeting their financial obligations, crushed by the high interest rates of 14.5% imposed by the Central Bank of Russia. The scenario is so critical that the Vice Prime Minister himself, Alexander Novak, publicly admitted that the degradation of the economy is due to the shortage of labor – sucked into the front line -, excessive spending by the war machine and the weight of Western sanctions.
“There comes a time when the decline is so great that it becomes difficult to hide. None of what is happening would be possible without Russia’s position being highly fragile. The Russians are much worse off than they were before the war”, says Manuel Serrano.
In addition to an economic fragility that is increasingly difficult to hide, there is now a complicated scenario on the front line. Since Russian troops’ access to Starlink satellite internet terminals was cut off, Ukraine has managed to establish technological dominance over the battlefield. The massive and coordinated use of drones created a “death zone” that blocked Moscow’s advances, causing daily casualties to skyrocket and consuming almost all of Russia’s monthly recruiting capacity, throwing the army into a slow massacre without tactical victories.
The size of Russia’s losses has intensified criticism, among a group not usually known for protesting. One of the independent Russian media outlets Mediazona and Meduza, which cross-referenced the national inheritance register with court cases, concluded that 352,000 Russian soldiers had died in combat since the start of the invasion. Around 90,000 of these soldiers were declared dead by the courts without their bodies having been recovered or returned to their families.
This reality is causing criticism to begin to emerge even among those who most defended Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine. So-called “Z-bloggers”, followed by millions of Russians on Telegram, are adopting an increasingly critical tone in the face of the difference in capabilities in the field. Rybar, Russia’s most influential military analyst, recently admitted the end of mechanized tank assaults and warned that Russia is losing all the progress made last year in the Zaporizhzhia region, one of four annexed in an internationally unrecognized referendum. The reason is the superiority of Ukrainian drones and their operators. Worse than that, Rybar confesses that, at this moment, even if Moscow’s troops managed to advance, “it wouldn’t change anything.”
But he is far from the only hard-liner who shares this opinion. Alexei Larkin, a well-known blogger who spent years staunchly advocating for war, now describes scenarios where Ukrainian “mother drones,” guided by AI, fly over Russian positions to release swarms of small FPV drones that indiscriminately target Russian positions. Nikita Tretyakov, who fought in Ukraine, wrote a grim rant on the anniversary of Victory Day where he complained that new medium-range drones are “sucking the blood” of Russian troops through “irreversible assaults” on their logistics lines. Tretyakov assumes that Russia continues to lag behind in the arms race and bluntly admits that the army has no chance of victory under these conditions.
But for Moscow, the problem is that the war is no longer confined to Ukrainian territory. Ukraine made a point of “taking the war to Russia”, in a strategy calculated to strangle the industry that sustains the war machine. Almost every day there is news of a new attack on Russian cities, critical infrastructure and vital oil export points. For blogger Yevgeny Golman, the reality is revolting. The Ukrainians “are flying two thousand kilometers” into Russian territory, while inside the country “incompetence reigns.”
“In the beginning, for the majority of the Russian population, the war was distant. It was a special military operation far away. Now, that is no longer true with the Ukrainian attacks that hit almost the entire country. And the fact that these attacks forced the authorities to restrict the internet had an even greater impact. Furthermore, the economy is beginning to feel the effects of the war. The impacts of the war have become national”, recalls Manuel Serrano.
Faced with this total economic, military and technological siege, the Kremlin’s inaction is exasperating even its most loyal supporters. As Larkin ironizes, faced with an enemy that innovates daily, the Russian commander-in-chief reacts by “arresting engineers, banning the internet and asking the Ukrainians to let him hold a parade” without a hitch, going so far as to need North Koreans to reconquer the Kursk region.
And it is precisely in this whirlwind of contestation that Vladimir Putin arrives at an inevitable Zugzwang. Without victories to present to his elite or the population, the Russian leader’s options are limited to the most dangerous responses. As Manuel Serrano warns, “dictators often fall when they least expect it”, but the reaction to this fragility almost always involves resorting to what are “dictators’ most common tools”, tightening their grip on the population “through repression” and occupying the elites by starting “other wars”. According to this recipe, the expert anticipates that the most likely scenario is that Putin decides to “repress more internally and escalate the war in Ukraine.”
