Russia Keeps Defying Western Predictions

Leonid Ragozin, a Russian journalist based in Riga who spent much of his career at the BBC in Moscow, argues in The American Conservative that Western commentary repeatedly mistakes signs of strain in Russia for evidence of imminent collapse.

His latest example is the liberal, anti-war Yabloko party’s exclusion from September’s State Duma election. When Yabloko was barred from the ballot, Western analysts, he writes, quickly returned to a familiar explanation: Vladimir Putin is increasingly afraid of his own people, while Ukrainian strikes and Western sanctions are forcing him to tighten the screws to prevent social unrest.

A similar narrative from the familiar “Russia is finished” genre accompanied reports that VEB, Russia’s state development bank, had fired its chief economist, Andrei Klepach, after he made gloomy predictions about the country’s future.

Yet Klepach’s remarks were more complicated than some of the coverage suggested. He did warn of a potential social crisis and argued that Ukraine was prevailing in the economic war of attrition. But he also said that the Russian economy could withstand severe pressure and made clear that he supported Putin’s war.

Seen in context, these stories look less like proof of imminent collapse than variations on a familiar theme. Today’s forecasts are also considerably more restrained than the optimism that followed the Wagner Group’s mutiny in 2023 or Ukraine’s Kursk incursion in 2024.

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None of this makes Putin’s Russia stable, benign or free of serious internal problems. Ragozin himself describes the system as authoritarian and says the Kremlin continues to rely on a familiar mixture of repression and propaganda to preserve the status quo. He also notes that Russians are growing tired of Putin and that sociologists typically estimate that around a quarter of the population is firmly hostile to him.

The latest polling from the independent Levada Center illustrates the ambiguity. While 66% of Russians say they support the actions of the Russian military in Ukraine, a separate question found that 62% would prefer Russia to move to peace negotiations rather than continue fighting. That combination hardly suggests revolutionary fervor, but neither does it fit a picture of unquestioning enthusiasm for the war.

The Overlooked Reality in Ukraine

Ragozin’s broader complaint is that relatively minor signs of trouble in Russia receive outsized attention while far more consequential developments in Ukraine attract less notice. He points to abuses surrounding mobilization, the threat they may pose to long-term political stability and the massive destruction Russia has inflicted on the Ukrainian economy.

This selective focus raises a deeper question: why have repeated predictions of Russia’s demise failed to materialize for more than a quarter of a century? The most famous example may be The Atlantic’s 2001 cover story, “Russia Is Finished”, which marked its 25th anniversary this year.

Hostility from the West, Ragozin argues, serves as one of Putin’s strongest safeguards against domestic upheaval. As long as the Russian president can present himself as defending the country against an aggressive and chauvinistic West, Russians are less likely to turn against him, even when they are dissatisfied with his rule.

Here the argument becomes much more contentious. Ragozin traces this perception back to the 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest and to what he regards as Western obstruction of subsequent diplomatic efforts, including attempts at settlement in 2014, the Minsk process, the Paris ceasefire agreements of 2019 and the Istanbul talks in 2022.

He believes these episodes have persuaded many Russians that Putin’s familiar authoritarianism is safer than what they regard as unpredictable Western geopolitical adventurism. Recent events in Gaza and Iran have, in his view, reinforced the perception of the West as an aggressive power.

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The Case Against Western Strategy

Ragozin rejects the idea that Western policymakers have consistently sought to turn Russia and Ukraine into stable liberal democracies. Instead, he contends that the West has alienated both apolitical and opposition-minded Russians through anti-Russian xenophobia and support for radical ethno-nationalist movements in Ukraine.

His criticism extends to the treatment of Ukrainians themselves. He points to reports of human rights abuses during wartime mobilization and criticizes the EU’s decision to restrict temporary protection for new applicants who cannot show that they are in compliance with their military obligations in Ukraine.

He sees such policies as evidence of a deeper cynicism. Going further, he argues that the West’s strategy makes sense only if its real objective is not a prosperous Russia or Ukraine, but the continuation of the conflict itself.

He also contends that Western arms manufacturers benefit in the short term from a prolonged war of attrition, but at the expense of the West’s long-term interests, stability and global influence.

For the time being, Ragozin says, Russians are unlikely to overthrow the regime for pragmatic reasons: they perceive the West as a far greater threat to their security and freedom than their own authoritarian government.

The trouble with tea leaves is that they can be misread in either direction. Russia has not collapsed, as so many Western forecasts suggested it might. But that does not make its war a success.

More than four years after the full-scale invasion, Russian forces are still grinding forward for limited gains, while Ukraine has suffered destruction on a staggering scale and Russia itself has paid a heavy human and economic price. The latest international assessment puts Ukraine’s reconstruction and recovery needs at almost $588bn over the next decade.

Perhaps the real lesson is not that those who predicted Russia’s collapse were wrong and their opponents right, but that nobody yet knows how this war will end – only how much senseless damage has already been done.