The longer Vladimir Putin remains in power, the likelier his regime’s much deserved collapse, and his country’s ignominious disintegration, becomes. The Russian Federation’s strongman has maneuvered the nation into a dead-end from which there may be no escape.
Ironically, Putin and his comrades insist that collapse is the West’s goal. It’s not, of course. The United States, Europe and their like-minded allies in the rest of the world desperately fear the Russian state’s possible disappearance. Not surprisingly, they worry about the worst-case scenario: “loose nukes,” civil war, massive instability and waves of refugees — which might cumulatively “spill over” into Russia’s neighboring states. And, since Russia is so huge, that means pretty much every nation in Eurasia.
That scenario is probably far less likely than a chaotic, though largely peaceful, dismantling of Russia’s political and economic institutions within its many regional units and subunits, with civil war confined to the capital city, Moscow. But one can easily appreciate why Western policymakers prefer to worry about the worst case, however improbable it may be.
In reality, it is Putin who has driven Russia to the point of near collapse. Contrary to the image that he propagates at home and abroad, the supposedly sage dictator is a serial bumbler who committed a plethora of mistakes pushing Russia down the slippery slope.
His first mistake was to have the gall to think that a second-rate career KGB officer could run a country as complex as Russia. Like his protégé Yevgeny Prigozhin, Putin should have sought his fortunes in unstable African states.
His second mistake was to believe that the otherworldly rise in energy prices in 1999-2000, at precisely the time he assumed office, would enable him to establish a stable dictatorship and make Russia great once again. He should have known that easy money goes just as easily as it comes and is no substitute for expertise.
His third mistake was to construct an authoritarian system with himself as its linchpin and object of veneration. Such highly centralized systems — which may rightly be called fascist — work as long as their supreme leaders make no major blunders and are able to maintain an image of vigor and wisdom. Such highly centralized systems are also most prone to strategic blunders because their self-absorbed leaders suffer from hubris and their subordinates tell them what they want to hear, thereby depriving them of accurate information. Putin should have known that he would grow old, bloated and flabby and that, sooner or later, his luck would run out.
His fourth mistake was to misunderstand fatally the substance and reality of Ukrainian identity. Persuaded that Ukraine was an artificial country and that Ukrainians didn’t exist, he imagined that reestablishing Russian control over its “Little Russian” neighbor would be easy. Putin should have known, or his spies should have told him, that Ukraine and Ukrainians were for real.
His fifth mistake was to have invaded parts of Ukraine in 2014 and to have continued with a full-scale war against all of Ukraine in 2022. Characteristically, he “misunderestimated” — to use George W. Bush’s neologism — Ukrainians at both times, believing that there’d be no resistance. The war of 2014-2015 should have taught him that the Ukrainians would fight in 2022. Instead, Putin stupidly launched a war that anybody resistant to his personality cult could have told him was unwinnable.
Putin’s sixth mistake is to continue the war regardless of the enormous costs it has imposed on his own country. (Ukrainian losses don’t matter to him and his fellow war criminals, of course.) What the Cassandras who predicted disaster in February 2022 said proved to be true. The war galvanized the Ukrainians, the Europeans, the United States and NATO. It devastated the Russian economy. It killed huge numbers of Russians. It transformed Russia into a North Korea writ large. And, most important as far as Putin is concerned, it turned most political and economic elites against him.
The Prigozhin Affair exposed Putin’s weakness and vulnerability. The army and secret police did nothing to stop the putsch attempt, leaving Putin confused and speechless for almost a week. Russian opposition analysts predict his imminent end, possibly physical, certainly political. Having turned Russia into an increasingly impoverished and unmodernized rogue state, Putin deserves nothing less than the opprobrium of elites who recognize a sinking ship when they see one.
When Putin goes, the political system of which he is the linchpin will collapse amidst a vicious power struggle. And when the system goes and chaos reigns, the incentive for Chechens, Bashkirs, Dagestanis, Tatars, Yakuts, and many others to save their skins by seceding will prove enormous. They need not leave simultaneously. It’ll be sufficient for one of them to get the ball rolling, as did Soviet Lithuania in 1989.
And since the systemically dysfunctional Russian Federation increasingly resembles the systemically dysfunctional Soviet Union in 1991, Russia’s collapse is becoming, thanks to the mastermind Putin, unavoidable.
Alexander J. Motyl is a professor of political science at Rutgers University-Newark. A specialist on Ukraine, Russia and the USSR, and on nationalism, revolutions, empires and theory, he is the author of 10 books of nonfiction, as well as “Imperial Ends: The Decay, Collapse, and Revival of Empires” and “Why Empires Reemerge: Imperial Collapse and Imperial Revival in Comparative Perspective.”