As the Tide Turns Against Putin, Beware the Drowning Man

Unsurprisingly, discontent over Putin’s management of the war is brewing. “Everyone is furious,” an anonymous senior Russian businessman told the Financial Times last month. All are “in full agreement this is a catastrophe,” he said. The Guardian quoted another anonymous business leader who concurred: “[T]here is a growing realisation that utterly senseless, self-destructive decisions keep being made. People who once defended Putin no longer do. Any sense of a future has disappeared.” The only consolation the Guardian’s source offered was that “[n]o one believes everything will suddenly collapse tomorrow.”

The latter assessment is probably correct, but angry Russian bloggers think otherwise. “We are on the verge of dramatic events,” wrote Maxim Kalashnikov earlier his year, asking, “Are we heading towards something like 1917?”—a reference to the revolutionary year in which the Russian Empire fell, the Russian military collapsed in World War I, and the Soviet Union was ushered in.

The discontent expressed by anonymous businessmen, vociferous bloggers, and ordinary citizens is increasingly widespread. Rather than another revolution, what likely lies ahead is that economic pain—along with disenchantment over the war now that the tide is turning against Russia—convinces factions in Moscow that it is time for a new start. Today’s cracks can become tomorrow’s fissures.

As life gets harder, the reality of war starts to bite. In May, for example, Russian financial institutions were granted paramilitary powers—including the right to operate jamming devices and air defense weapons on their rooftops, as well as for banking staff to carry guns to shoot down drones.

Putin, who often invokes Peter the Great and other Russian tsars, has not shown courage, vision, or direction. Instead, he has been playing the role of Nicholas II during World War I: micromanaging the war, disappearing for long spells, and then making bizarre public appearances. Putin’s fears about his personal security—he spends much of his time out of sight, and subjects visitors to much more stringent checks than usual—have been widely reported in Western media.

When he recently turned up at a Moscow hotel to pick up his old teacher for dinner, it may have been intended to show his caring side (and that he was out and about rather than spending all his time in hiding); instead, it came across as out of touch with reality. So did his decision to talk about sauerkraut recipes when Ukrainian drones had just hit a Lukoil refinery in Perm. Being out of sight is one thing, being out of touch another—as Nicholas found out in 1917.

It can be tempting to overinterpret Kyiv’s new success and confidence. Although Ukraine is in the ascendancy, its chances of recovering significant territories or delivering a knockout blow seem remote. Nevertheless, as things get worse for Russia on the battlefield, in the economy, and for Putin personally, there is the risk that the flailing Russian leader will succumb to drowning man syndrome—when a swimmer in difficulty pushes others under the water in a desperate attempt to stay afloat.

Whenever he has felt cornered during this war, Putin’s recourse has been to threaten further escalation against Ukraine and the West. And so, Moscow’s warnings have once again become more vocal and urgent. At the end of May, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov warned U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio that Russia would launch “systematic and sustained strikes on facilities serving the needs of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in Kiev, as well as relevant decision-making centres” and warned that Western countries should evacuate their diplomatic staff. (Because they’re familiar with the Kremlin’s threats, they all stayed put.)

After a Russian drone hit an apartment block in Romania, Dmitry Medvedev, the deputy chair of Russia’s Security Council (a presidential advisory body), warned Europeans that they should get used to such incidents. “[T]he citizens of [European Union] states, as the population of the belligerent countries, will not be able to sleep peacefully,” he warned. This kind of rhetoric is par for Medvedev’s course, too.

Rattling sabers is often a sign of limited leverage. But while few Russia watchers take the Kremlin’s threats of nuclear escalation seriously, the fact that Putin formally revised the country’s official nuclear doctrine at the end of 2024—significantly lowering the threshold for the use of such weapons while also declaring that aggression by a non-nuclear state against Russia could set off nuclear retaliation if that state is supported by a nuclear power—was clearly intended to send a warning. Russia has also long dropped hints that it has stationed nuclear weapons in Belarus, although some commentators have treated these hints with skepticism.

In May, the Russian Ministry of Defense announced that Russian and Belarusian army units had begun joint exercises that included preparations for nuclear weapons use. The purpose of these exercises, the statement said, was to preempt alleged Western aggression in response to “provocative statements and threats made by certain Western officials against the Russian Federation.”

Playing up fears of a NATO plot to attack Russia has been a hallmark of the Kremlin playbook since Putin came to power more than 25 years ago. But it is being articulated ever more forcefully as Russia’s war in Ukraine goes from bad to worse. At the end of May, Russian Foreign Intelligence Service Director Sergei Naryshkin claimed that “hypocritical and treacherous Albion” was behind a plan for NATO to attack Russia—a claim that is out of kilter with the current capabilities of the British armed forces.

Shrill warnings also characterized this year’s St. Petersburg forum, where successive speakers talked in terms of apocalyptic showdowns with the West, of decades of war ahead, and of the assessment that the war in Ukraine “will end either with Russia’s victory or it will never end.”

Putin during Russian-Slovak talks in the Grand Kremlin Palace in Moscow on May 9, following Russia’s Victory Day parade. Getty Images