An End to the War Doesn’t Mean the End of Putin

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has been an exercise in thinking the unthinkable—from the shocking barbarity of the invasion itself, to the unexpected course the conflict has taken, to the shattering of long-established national security norms and taboos on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.

The picture of how the war will end is about as clear as the muddy trenches scored into the black soil of the Donbas. Meanwhile, the contours of Ukraine’s post-war future are already being sketched: the billions of dollars of reconstruction aid required and the country’s prospective membership in NATO and the European Union.

Divining what Russia will look like once the conflict is over is altogether more difficult. Save for a radical change of heart in the Kremlin, perhaps the unlikeliest scenario of all, longtime Russia watchers and former U.S. government officials sketch a bleak picture of a country that will likely emerge from the war poorer, more aggrieved, and more unstable. In all likelihood, Russia will remain the world’s largest country, a major nuclear power whose shared border with NATO will more than double once Finland is admitted into the alliance. The Russia that emerges from the war will have profound ramifications for Europe, the United States, and the wider world. 

A portrait of Russian President Vladimir Putin is engraved on a tombstone donated by tombstone builders about a year ago and set on a barricade at a checkpoint in the Donetsk region of Ukraine on Feb. 9 amid Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. YASUYOSHI CHIBA/AFP via Getty Images

The picture of how the war will end is about as clear as the muddy trenches scored into the black soil of the Donbas. Meanwhile, the contours of Ukraine’s post-war future are already being sketched: the billions of dollars of reconstruction aid required and the country’s prospective membership in NATO and the European Union.

Divining what Russia will look like once the conflict is over is altogether more difficult. Save for a radical change of heart in the Kremlin, perhaps the unlikeliest scenario of all, longtime Russia watchers and former U.S. government officials sketch a bleak picture of a country that will likely emerge from the war poorer, more aggrieved, and more unstable. In all likelihood, Russia will remain the world’s largest country, a major nuclear power whose shared border with NATO will more than double once Finland is admitted into the alliance. The Russia that emerges from the war will have profound ramifications for Europe, the United States, and the wider world. 

“What might happen to Russia afterwards is, of course, something we need to think carefully about,” said British Foreign Secretary James Cleverly on a visit to Washington last month. “I don’t think it’s in anybody’s interest to see a failed state or a collapsed state in Russia.” 

Police officers detain a man protesting Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in Moscow on March 2. NATALIA KOLESNIKOVA/AFP via Getty Images

In invading Ukraine, the Russian president tore up the social contract that had underpinned his popularity during his 24 years in power—delivering relative prosperity to the Russian people. Hundreds of beloved Western brands pulled out of the country while sanctions sent shockwaves through the economy. 

“In some sense, the risks of Putin losing office are arguably higher now than they’ve been,” said Timothy Frye, a professor of political science at Columbia University. “The main achievement of his 20-plus years in power was delivering stability to Russia.” 

The war has made Putin’s position more precarious, and the Russian leader clearly views his conquest in Ukraine as an existential matter. A spectacular defeat, experts say, could pose a serious challenge to his rule, but Putin’s departure from office once the war is over is by no means a foregone conclusion. “I think we have to find a way forward based on the premise that Putin may still be president of Russia for some time to come,” said Fiona Hill, who served as Trump’s top Russia advisor on the U.S. National Security Council. 

Even if Putin were to leave office, there’s a strong chance that whoever follows will be cast in his image. “I would stress that so-called Putinism is widespread in Russia across many circles,” said Mikk Marran, who served as the head of Estonia’s Foreign Intelligence Service until October of last year.

Ukrainian forensics experts carry the body of a Russian soldier exhumed in the village of Zavalivka, west of Kyiv, on May 11, 2022.SERGEI SUPINSKY/AFP via Getty Images

Russian President Vladimir Putin addresses a rally and concert marking the annexation of four regions of Ukraine that Russian troops occupied—Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia—in central Moscow on Sept. 30.ALEXANDER NEMENOV/AFP via Getty Images

Opinion polls by the independent Levada Center and the Kremlin’s own internal surveys, obtained by Meduza, indicate growing support for peace talks, which could provide an avenue for Putin to bring the war to a negotiated end without risking public outrage. (This could be a fine needle to thread, however: Levada Center polling shows Russians are staunchly opposed to returning any Russian-occupied territories to Ukraine.)

“There is a chance, especially in the scenario of a negotiated outcome, that this does not become existential for Putin’s regime—but only if he is willing to move towards that aim,” said Liana Fix, a Europe fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. 

Another potential scenario is that the war instead ossifies into an intractable stalemate. Military analysts see no signs that Putin is backing down on his ultimate goal of seizing Ukraine in its entirety, even as Russian forces have sustained an eye-watering rate of casualties—most recently estimated by U.S. officials to be close to 200,000 deaths in a year of war. Such astonishing losses would quickly come to weigh on many leaders, but from Putin’s point of view, the price of not continuing with the war would be to lose Russia itself. “In Putin’s eyes, the alternative would be to lose 145 million Russians. It’s a question of Russia’s existence,” said Tatiana Stanovaya, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Wars, won or lost, rarely unseat strongmen like Putin. A 2016 study by scholars Sarah Croco and Jessica Weeks found that since 1919, authoritarian leaders atop highly personalized regimes largely weathered the wars they fought—no matter how badly. Wars can even offer protection against elite coups, reinforcing a “hang together or hang separately” mentality, said Andrea Kendall-Taylor, who studied the political dynamics of authoritarian regimes as a senior analyst at the CIA. 

Russian elites still see Putin as the best chance of preventing the system as they know it from collapsing entirely, Stanovaya said. In the eyes of Russia’s top officials, the two most immediate threats to the status quo come from upstart outsiders—such as Yevgeny Prigozhin, sponsor of the mercenary Wagner Group—or a popular uprising by Russian society, Stanovaya added. “There is such a prominent fear among the elites that everything can collapse that they prefer to have Putin than to face any changes,” she said. 

Visitors wearing military camouflage stand at the entrance of the private Wagner Group center during the official opening of its office block in St. Petersburg, Russia, on Nov. 4, which is the country’s Unity Day. OLGA MALTSEVA/AFP via Getty Images

With space for dissent in Russia winnowed by a brutal crackdown and opinion polls showing buoyant public support for the war, elite fears of a grassroots uprising appear misplaced. But sparks can be hard to spot; few people would have expected the suicide of a Tunisian fruit vendor in 2011 to spark uprisings and civil wars across the Middle East. “I always try to remind myself of the fallacy of linear thinking that we usually have. Who would have foreseen [former Soviet leader Mikhail] Gorbachev coming?” Fix said. “We should always prepare for surprises that can happen.” 

The faint glimmers of hope that do exist for Russia’s future lie in its population rather than among the elite. Russians, Frye noted in his book, are wealthier and better educated than your average citizen of an autocracy. Russia’s younger generations have, in opinion polls, shown themselves to be far more open to the West, and recent surveys indicate that the country’s youth are more skeptical about the war than their elders. On paper at least, Russia is not bound to remain an authoritarian regime. 

“The picture about Russia’s future is more mixed than the simple view that if we get rid of Putin everything will be fine or that Russia is condemned by the weight of history to being an autocratic regime,” Frye said.

People walk on Red Square prior to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s annual state of the nation address in central Moscow on Feb. 21. KIRILL KUDRYAVTSEV/AFP via Getty Images

Sanctions experts note penalties were never intended to collapse the Russian economy but rather were intended to poleax Moscow’s war machine—something U.S. officials do believe is happening. Russia’s ability to access advanced semiconductors has been curtailed by 70 percent, the U.S. Treasury estimated last year, bringing the production of sophisticated hypersonic ballistic missiles to a near standstill. (However, Moscow has proved able to wreak havoc in Ukraine using unsophisticated Iranian-made drones.)

At the same time, Russia has spent years trying to sanction-proof its economy, and authoritarian regimes can prove surprisingly resilient: Iran is still a menace to the Middle East despite years of international efforts to isolate the regime and cut off its funding. 

“There are countries around the world that somehow manage to keep it together and continue to have a lot of coercive capacity, such as Iran, but are not net contributors to the greater prosperity of mankind,” Hill said. 

Another scenario batted about in the West is that Putin may have unleashed the dissolution of the Russian Federation, as its constituent republics—many of which were seized during centuries of imperial expansion—could seek to break away from Moscow. Reports that Russian ethnic minorities have been disproportionately used as cannon fodder in the war has further fueled speculation. Most experts see an entire collapse of Russia as unlikely, as Moscow has worked steadily to strip its 21 constituent republics of political power.

“I don’t see too much power in those regions to break away. I think the probability of that is quite low,” said Marran, Estonia’s former spy chief. It’s also hard to envisage Russia fragmenting without descending into bloody chaos—as happened in the former Yugoslavia, albeit on a much larger scale. Moscow fought two spectacularly violent wars in the 1990s and early 2000s, seeking to quash separatist movements in the tiny mountainous republic of Chechnya. 

“If you think about a country breaking up like that with 6,000 nuclear warheads, that’s a pretty terrifying prospect,” said Angela Stent, an expert on Russian foreign policy. 

Russian President Vladimir Putin (left) and U.S. President Joe Biden meet during the U.S.-Russia summit in Geneva on June 16, 2021. Peter Klaunzer, Pool/Keystone via Getty Images

With Putin, or at least Putinism, set to stick around for the foreseeable future, Russia’s relationship with the West is unlikely to improve after the war and Ukraine will remain under threat. Necessary efforts to hold Moscow to account for atrocities committed in Ukraine will complicate matters further. 

“Despite all the positive effects that a Russian defeat might have … this will not be a golden age of stability. We should prepare ourselves for Russia’s defeat as much as we should prepare ourselves for Russia’s return,” Fix said. Any hopes that Russia might reconstitute itself as Germany did in the wake of World War II ignores how that happened. “It was not that it was suddenly coming out of the souls of Germans that they need democracy and [to reconsider] their own history. It was the occupying powers which forced Germany towards de-Nazification and towards building up democratic structures,” Fix added. 

While intelligence officials and policy planners across the West will keep closely analyzing Russia for clues as to where the country is heading, the range of realistic options to effect change within Russia remains highly limited. 

“One thing we’ve learned in the 30 years since the Soviet collapse is that the West, the U.S., we have very little influence on what happens domestically in Russia,” Stent said.