TL;DRussia Weekend Roundup

2 February 2025: Asked and answered, plus texts and tunes

“Cyclist”, Natalia Goncharova, 1923

Having promised in last weekend’s roundup that I’d lay off arcane discussions of Russian public opinion for a while, I found myself sorely tested this week. The Anti-Corruption Foundation (aka Team Navalny) published a massive new investigation—including a 30-minute video and an incredibly long blog post—into Igor Sechin and corruption in and around Rosneft, Russia’s largest oil company. As you’ve probably heard, it involves prostitutes.

The investigation, which is probably the largest put out by Team Navalny since the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, got 1.1 million views in just a couple of days, which is very far from nothing, but also likely equidistant from what their investigations used to get. Leaving aside the infamous unreliability of YouTube viewership statistics, there is a palpable sense that these sorts of investigations may not be relevant to as many people as they used to be, given everything that has transpired since the mid-2010s, when they were the bread and butter of the Anti-Corruption Foundation. Some out there in social-media land have gone as far as to suggest that they have become effectively meaningless—why should anybody care how the Russian state (effectively) spends on Sechin’s alleged prostitutes, when the real issue is Russia’s rape of Ukraine?—and thus that Team Navalny should move on.

In keeping with last week’s promise, I’m not going to delve into the issue in any depth here, save to say two things. First, the polarization engendered by the war and by Russian politics in general has eroded some of the audience for these kinds of investigations, if only because those who are inclined to believe them already believe much worse things about the regime, and because those not inclined to believe them will reject the source out of hand. Second, that does not mean that they are pointless. For one thing, when there is an opportunity for a genuine reckoning in Russian politics, these sorts of investigations will help form the basis for justice. And for another, even if fewer people are inclined to pay attention, not reporting on this scale of corruption contributes to the isolation of of those who believe that Russia can and should be governed differently. And that’s a favor Putin hasn’t earned.

In any case, I’m certain I’ll return to the subject sometime soon.

What I’m you’re thinking about

I put out a call last week and more recently on my Twitter and Bluesky accounts for questions and topics for the newsletter, and a few of you replied—so this section belongs to you this week! (To the rest of you, unless I’ve magically managed to address all of the questions you’ve been wondering about, please join the chat!)

What are your assessments thus far about how the new administration (1) is being influenced/led by Putin and company and (2) how they may approach negotiations to end Russia's barbaric invasion of Ukraine? Well, and one more: (3) How is Ukraine changing tactics now that US aid is getting cut? I've read some speculation that their increased bombing of Russian oil refineries is one change.

Ok, first things first: I’m not among those who think that Donald Trump is getting his marching orders from Vladimir Putin. While I see evidence of a confluence of interest in some areas, and much of the domestic and international chaos being sown by the Trump administration thus far redounds greatly to Putin’s benefit, I haven’t yet seen anything that would change my analysis from November: Trump and Putin are two deeply transactional politicians who value flexibility and unpredictability, and who are thus unlikely to find much genuine common ground. As a result, when Trump does things that cause anxiety in Kyiv or Brussels, it is not, I think, because Putin wants him to, but because Trump himself wants to. Not that that will help you sleep any more soundly.

When it comes to negotiations about the war in Ukraine, the early signals are a bit contradictory (unsurprisingly, I suppose). The good news is that the administration seems to understand that it needs to improve its leverage over Moscow, which it has done (or attempted) in a number of ways: by threatening new sanctions on Russia, by leaving untouched all of the sanctions imposed by the Biden administration, and by focusing the efforts of Special Envoy Keith Kellogg on supporting rather than undermining Ukraine. Kellogg also seems to be reaching out to the European allies, which will come as a welcome relief to many. And some of the more asinine rhetoric we saw immediately after the election seems to have died down.

But there’s bad news, too. Kellogg’s efforts notwithstanding, it is clear that the administration’s approach to ending the war is unilateralist: despite the rhetorical emphasis on Europe taking more of the burden, we haven’t heard much about allowing Europe itself to take the lead. Even more problematically, Ukraine’s own interests are hard to find in the discussion. It is not just the “as long as it takes” mantra that has been abandoned, then: Washington is no longer bound by the principle of “nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine.”

Taken together, for as long as this process can be pursued by people like Kellogg and National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, plus/minus Marco Rubio, I think there’s a reasonable chance of avoiding catastrophe. If and when the process begins to command the attention of some of the more overtly political animals in the administration, including the President himself, my confidence fades.

Your last question is an interesting one. Is Ukraine’s increased emphasis on hitting infrastructural targets within Russia itself related to a sense of impending abandonment by the Trump administration? I’m not certain. For one thing, the attacks began well before the election and, if anything, were likely a response at least in part to the six-month delay in passing the last supplemental appropriation for Ukraine support by Congress. (Indeed, Ukraine’s sense of impending abandonment predates the election by a number of months.) Beyond that, yes, I do think there’s some sense in Ukraine trying to demonstrate both to Moscow and to the West that it has its own capacity to create significant (though not crippling) damage within Russia, even without American permission to use long-range weapons. If anything, though, I suspect this is designed to help give Putin additional impetus to negotiate, rather than to create any near-term shifts on the front line.

I’m not, however, the best person to ask on this subject, so I’d direct you to a recent thread on exactly this topic by my King’s College London colleague Ruth Deyermond.

What happens when Putin dies? Who is positioned to do what?

There are two cardinal rules when it comes to predicting the future in politics: First, don’t do it. Second, if you’re going to do it anyway, make sure the future you’re predicting is far enough away that you won’t live to see yourself be proven wrong. Given that I’m likely to outlive Putin (he’s 24 years my senior), I’m going to stick with the first rule.

The real reason I’m not going to predict who will come to power when Putin dies, though, is I don’t think it matters all that much. Instead, I think we should be focusing on how the succession takes place. I outlined this logic, together with colleagues at CEPA, in a report back in early 2024. In particular, we wrote the following about the succession process:

Any transition phase would bring about political instability. The absence of an established process for choosing a new leader, along with the sway of informal structures over formal institutions and patronage connections within the “network state,” complicates the task of efficiently handling the transition and fostering the establishment of a successor government.

The key initial variable in any regime-change scenario is whether the change of leadership is planned. In some cases, this might happen because a leader cultivates a successor, as Nursultan Nazarbayev did in Kazakhstan. In others, it might happen because the leader is elderly and a transfer of power thus seems only a matter of time, as was the case in the Soviet Union in the early 1980s. Neither of those conditions appears plausible in Russia, however, at least in the near future; Putin has had ample opportunity to transfer power to a successor and has shown no appetite for doing so, and he appears to be in reasonably good health.

Assuming, then, that regime change happens in an unplanned manner, the next key variable is whether the existing ruling elite can come to a consensus on who takes over. A consensual transition would allow the successor to maintain most or all of the levers of power currently enjoyed by Putin, including control over the media, the Duma, the coercive apparatus, and the commanding heights of the economy, although the need to seek compromise with competing groups within the elite may lead to increased autonomy for some.

If the elite cannot agree on a consensus candidate to succeed Putin, then the process becomes competitive. The contours of the competition will depend in large measure on how much the competitors think is at stake. If competitors in one camp or another are convinced that there will be no place for them in the new system, then they have every incentive to prevent the emergence of a new system unless they are in charge at all costs. If elites cannot countenance losing the battle for the Kremlin — either because they fear for their survival or that they’ll be permanently excluded from the political game — they are thus likely to fight, or at least threaten violence. For a time, at least, this will force Russia to focus more on internal conflict than on external conflict, but the end state will depend on who comes to power and the resources they have gained and lost along the way.

If the various elite factions find that they cannot arrive at a consensus but decide that they don’t want to fight it out, they are likely to decide the contest via an election. This scenario is particularly plausible if the balance of force available to the elite factions is relatively even, and thus if nobody has the certainty of victory. Instead of risking a winner-takes-all fight to the death, the elite could — as many authoritarian elites have in the past — decide to fall back on constitutional procedure.

Given the state of Russian politics and political institutions, it is difficult to imagine that such an election would be free and fair. It would, as with all of Russia’s post-Soviet elections, be subject to fraud and manipulation. But even on that basis, it would be competitive, to the extent that the winner is not a forgone conclusion. It would also fracture the regime’s monopoly on the media and on the political space more broadly, helping a plethora of new conversations to emerge out into the open. To many people, it might even feel like democracy.

In such a scenario, however, anyone trying to argue that the war was a mistake will face the inertia of public opinion. It is likely, then, that such elections would bring to power someone who in important ways sounds a lot like Putin and pursues many of the same policies. And as a result, while there may be some shifts toward opening to the West, and while the power structure itself may begin to change, there is not likely to be a short-term improvement of Russia’s international standing.

There’s a lot more in the report, including a rough division of the Russian elite into ‘bears’ (who have benefitted from the war and would like to keep benefitting once Putin is gone), and the ‘foxes’ (for whom the war has been disastrous, and who might like at least some degree of change). Please check it out, or see a summary here and here.

Who is planning the rocket attacks on civilian buildings in Ukraine? The Kremlin or top brass in the Russian military?

With the caveat that I’m not a military analyst, my sense of the answer to this question is “all of the above”. We have long understood that Russian military doctrine emphasizes defeating an enemy’s political and social willingness to keep fighting as much or more than defeating its physical capacity to fight. This, combined with a public opinion that is seemingly impervious to pictures of the damage wrought by its military on others, means that attacking civilian targets is a core feature of Russian war-fighting. On that basis alone, we can conclude that the Kremlin is both aware and supportive of the sorts of attacks we’re seeing in Ukraine day after day.

Drawing on an as-yet unpublished paper by my colleagues at CEPA (stay tuned!), however, it appears equally clear that the Kremlin is not likely to be involved in the targeting of such attacks. Within the strategic parameters set by the Kremlin, the military will design and conduct its own operations. Thus, if Putin has to get involved, something must have gone badly wrong.

How are relations between North Korea and Russia, given the high level of combat deaths?

This is a great question, precisely because the underlying issue—the nature of the relationship between Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un—is so fundamentally opaque. Usually, an analyst would want to stay as far away as humanly possible from a question like that, but the fact that we can observe some of the key variables here means that we can set up and test two competing hypotheses with a reasonable degree of fidelity.

Let me explain. There are, basically, two competing explanations for why North Korean troops ended up fighting Russia’s war against Ukraine. The first is that this is an opportunistic relationship, with Russia purchasing (or otherwise leveraging) North Korean troops to help solve a manpower problem on the front. The second is that Moscow and Pyongyang have developed a truly strategic partnership, which serves the medium- or long-term interests of both regimes. Without access to the inner thoughts of Putin and Kim, we might struggle to know which of these stories is more likely to be true—that is, unless we can observe some of the implications of these two stories. Most obviously, if the first story is true, then we should expect to see the relationship fall apart in the face of significant North Korean casualties; if the second story is true, we should expect to see the relationship continue. (This ain’t rocket science.)

So, what do we know? We know that North Korean losses in Russia’s Kursk Oblast counteroffensive have been staggering, to such a degree that the troops have evidently been pulled from the fight. We also know that North Korea is planning to send more. That, then, would suggest that the second story is closer to the truth. And, in fact, some of the best analysts on the subject have been pointing to the ways in which this deployment, even if it was catastrophic in terms of losses, has been vital to Pyongyang’s efforts to galvanize and modernize its military. (To wit, see last week’s analysis by Alina Hrytsenko at the Atlantic Council and Olena Guseinova at the Lowy Institute.)

Who do you rely on for regular insightful analysis on Russia?

This is a difficult question to answer, both because my reading habits fluctuate so much, and because any list I produce is likely to leave off at least as many excellent analysts as it includes. Caveats aside, though, here’s a very short list. Apologies in advance to the very many excellent people I’ve inevitably left off. I’m sure I’ll come up with 20 more names as soon as I press ‘send’.

On Russian internal politics, regular readers will know that I am partial to Andrei Kolesnikov, and to the Meduza journalist and Carnegie contributor Andrei Pertsev. On the social dynamics I tend to focus on, Jeremy Morris (Arhus University) and Oleg Zhuravlev (PS Lab) are indispensable. I wish Maxim Trudolyubov would write more, but when he does, it’s always worth reading. On bigger political dynamics, Ben Noble, of Chatham House and UCL, is always good, as is my KCL colleague Jade McGlynn, alongside Maria Snegovaya (CSIS), Tatyana Stanovaya (Carnegie), Margarita Zavadskaya (Finnish Institute of International Affairs) and, of course, Ekaterina Schulman. On the Russian economy, I turn inevitably to my CEPA colleague Alex Kolyandr, and Carnegie’s Alexandra Prokopenko.

On Russian foreign policy and the war, I’ll give away no secrets by pointing to Michael Kofman. For my money, though, the most insightful analysts of Russian foreign policy decision-making are Kadri Liik (European Council on Foreign Relations), Pavel Baev (Peace Research Institute Oslo), Alexander Gabuev (Carnegie), Bobo Lo (Lowy Institute), and my KCL colleague Ruth Deyermond.

What I’m reading

Starting with the economy, Kommersant reported on Monday that the volume of subsidized mortgages issued in Russia—more or less the only type of mortgage doing any business these days—collapsed from 1.7 trillion rubles in the fourth quarter of 2023 to 610.9 billion rubles in the fourth quarter of 2024. This was, to be clear, entirely by design, as the Finance Ministry has been trying mightily to fight inflationary pressures while reducing the drag on the budget. Later in the week, the Russian edition of Forbes reported that banks are projecting a 30% decrease in consumer lending for 2025. While this, too, is the result of policy (in this case, the Central Bank of Russia’s uber-high interest rates), it’s a mixed bag for policymakers. On the one hand, decreased lending to consumers and home-buyers will relieve inflationary pressure. On the other, it will further concentrate the drivers of economic growth in the war economy.

Russia’s economic policymakers, meanwhile, will be less happy with news reported by Reuters on Tuesday that Russian crude oil sales to China and India are drying up, as a result of sanctions and bottlenecks in the shadow-shipping market. (Who knew?) That, in turn, may put more pressure on the government to seek a way out from under sanctions, particularly as some in Europe have evidently mooted reopening the gas trade as part of a deal in Ukraine, according to a Financial Times report last week.

Turning to politics, I’ve written before (channeling Andrei Kolesnikov) that Putin has tried to create in Russia a “tyranny of the everlasting present”, in part by avoiding any discussion of the country’s future. It was thus not terribly surprising to read in Kommersant on Saturday that the Communist Party of the Russian Federation is struggling to do much better. The “image of the future” they’re proposing is built on limiting prices on food and pharmaceuticals, nationalizing utilities, and lowering the retirement age. A day earlier, Kommersant reported on a new survey about how Russians see both the past and the future, which illustrates the problem that anyone seeking to fill the gap left by Putin’s futureless rhetoric faces. The problem is not so much that 52 percent of respondents said of the future that “Russia must follow its own path” and 33 percent said it needed a strong leaders—those numbers are not insurmountable—but in what people said about the past. Asked about historical events that they thought were important, responses went up for every single event on the pollsters’ list, ranging from victory in World War II and the annexation of Crimea to both the creation and the fall of the USSR. As I wrote a couple of weeks ago, the “collective avoidance” that has come to dominate Russians’ attitudes to the war privileges a performative consensus. The survey reported in Kommersant, meanwhile, suggests that this consensus increasingly reflect’s Putin’s view of past, present and future as an undifferentiated story of unsullied Russian greatness and uninterrupted conflict with the West. If that’s the case, how can anyone latch onto a vision of the future that is different from the past or the present?

On a related note, Novaya Gazeta Europe ran a fascinating essay by Andrei Sapozhnikov on Friday, arguing that the roots of the above-mentioned “collective avoidance” (though they don’t use the term) can be found less in the repression of the late 2010s and early 2020s, and more in the hedonism of the 2000s. Sapozhnikov writes:

It is hard not to notice in contemporary Russia the continuation of the aughties vogue for the prettification of reality—through music, journalism, TV series and, of course, consumption. The Russian parties at Courchevel this year look like archival footage from twenty years ago. All of this grows out of the same idea that was so fundamental in the aughties, that everything around you will always be in flux, and so the individual should focus on personal enrichment and ignore everything else. In 2025, that’s the only principle on which you can live in Russia.

Elsewhere:

• The non-exiled edition of Novaya Gazeta published two depressing but necessary long-reads this week: an interview with Olga Orlova, editor-in-chief of the website T-invariant, which reports on Russia’s scientific community, diagnosing the epidemic of arrests of hundreds of Russia’s leading scientists; and an interview and excerpts of correspondence between the psychologist Marina Melia and Russian political prisoners; and

• iStories reported on a Russian strike on a school in Sudzha, in Ukrainian-occupied Kursk Oblast, which appears to have been the first time Russia’s counter-offensive caused mass casualties of Russian civilians in the region.

What I’m listening to

When the world goes low, go high.