The picture that emerges amid war is a Russia that is constrained, still capable and genuinely disruptive.
Take a look at the numerous press reports in Western capitals about the future of Russia and you’ll find there are two narratives that come up time and time again. Either Russia is on the verge of collapse, or enough pressure will talk Vladimir Putin into moderation. Both are appealing precisely because they promise an ending to the current confrontation. But both are wrong. They rest on the same premise that squeezing an authoritarian system reliably pushes it towards an exit. It doesn’t.
It’s well known that a number of significant pressures are currently bearing down on Putin’s Russia. Demographic decline, fiscal strain, technological isolation, and institutional decay, to name just a few. But none began with the invasion of Ukraine. They were building for years before February 2022. The war has simply sharpened them, not created them, which is why how the war ends matters less than Western policymakers might hope. Whether its settlement, frozen conflict or grinding continuation, is irrelevant, as the underlying pressures persist regardless. In a system built for confrontation rather than for delivering results to its own population, being squeezed does not produce caution. It produces brittleness at home and disruption abroad.
These strains feed each other. Labour shortages deepen fiscal problems, as a shrinking workforce hollows out the very apparatus the regime relies on to maintain control. Those occupied Ukrainian territories are of little help as they drain resources rather than supply them. The picture that emerges is a Russia that is constrained, still capable and genuinely disruptive.
The deepest misreading, though, is treating this as rational calculation, open to correction through the right mix of incentives. It isn’t. It’s about identity, grievance and the story Russia tells about itself. A West still waiting for the incentive that finally produces moderation is asking Moscow a question it was never going to answer. And there’s no going back. Putin’s war has already shaped Russian society itself, and that transformation, not the front line, will shape what comes next.
If you want to understand how Russia is actually governed, look past the Duma, the courts and the federal structure that still exists on paper. Look instead at where decisions get made, who makes them, and what happens to those who refuse to fall in line. Under Vladimir Putin, two decades of centralisation have produced a system exceptionally good at issuing commands and exceptionally bad at tolerating any challenge to them. That imbalance, more than any single policy or personality, is the defining fact of Russian politics today, and it is the mechanism behind the brittleness described above.
This did not happen overnight, nor by accident. Over twenty years, real decision-making authority has drained steadily out of parliament, the courts and regional government, concentrating instead in the presidency and the small circle around it. The old institutions remain in place. They still vote, rule and legislate, but increasingly they exist to ratify decisions taken elsewhere, not to check them. This is more than one man’s accumulation of power, though it is certainly that too. It amounts to an entire governing philosophy, in which loyalty and execution count for far more than deliberation.
One of the more consequential shifts has been the rise of what might be called securitised administration: the use of legal and administrative machinery, backed by the security services, to run every-day political, economic and social life. Laws targeting “foreign agents” and threats to “national security” have widened steadily, giving the state broad and often deliberately vague grounds to brand organisations, journalists and individuals as threats. The security services now operate in territory that in most countries would belong to civilian regulators and courts. The effect builds cumulatively rather than through any one dramatic crackdown. Businesses, regional governments, media outlets and civil-society groups all live under the same pressure: uncertainty about exactly where the line sits, and a strong incentive never to find out. That uncertainty shapes the incentives facing Russia’s political and business elite in a very particular way. When influence, protection and economic opportunity all flow from the centre, demonstrating loyalty stops being good politics and becomes existential. Officials and businessmen alike understand that their standing depends on alignment with central priorities, not on competence or popularity. A well-timed investigation or a sudden regulatory headache sends a message well beyond its immediate target: independent decision-making is risky. Compliance is safe. Initiative, unless it serves the centre’s own aims, is dangerous.
Perhaps no single career illustrates this system’s internal logic better than that of Sergey Kiriyenko, First Deputy Chief of Staff of the Presidential Administration. Since 2022 he has overseen the political integration of the occupied Ukrainian territories, using tools that will be familiar to any student of Russian domestic politics: managed elections, careful rotation of local officials, youth-indoctrination programmes and tight ideological control. None of it is new. It has simply been exported to newly occupied ground. What is telling is what has happened to Kiriyenko himself. Rather than being confined to one difficult assignment, his brief has grown. In 2024 and 2025 his responsibilities expanded to cover Russian policy toward Abkhazia, Transnistria and Armenia, a considerable widening of influence for a man whose defining talent is execution, not independent judgement. That is the pattern to watch. Officials who deliver quietly, within the parameters the centre has set, are handed more authority. Those who push back or insist on doing things differently simply do not rise. Over time this does not just shape careers; it shapes the character of the entire governing class, selecting compliance over judgment. All this produces a system that looks formidable, and often is. It can enforce decisions with remarkable speed and consistency across an enormous and diverse country. But that strength carries a real cost: limited flexibility, and a reduced capacity to adapt when circumstances shift.
Stability of this kind is not the product of responsive government, the sort in which feedback from below shapes decisions from above. It is the product of administrative control and coercion that keep dissent in check. That works well enough while conditions are stable and the centre’s priorities are clear. It works far less well when the ground shifts, when problems arise that do not fit the existing playbook, or when what is actually needed is local knowledge and initiative rather than obedience. A system built to enforce decisions is not the same thing as a system built to make good ones, or to correct course once a decision turns out to be wrong.
There’s a further dimension worth noting. The occupied Ukrainian territories are not simply being run using Russia’s existing domestic playbook. They have become a testing ground of their own. Techniques of population control and security management, refined under the specific pressures of wartime occupation, are already migrating back into how Russia governs itself. This is how authoritarian systems typically evolve: not through some grand, deliberate redesign, but through trial and error in the places where oversight is weakest and the stakes highest, followed by the quiet adoption of whatever works. The war has accelerated trends that were already under way, reinforcing the broader shift toward government by security apparatus, known as the Siloviki. None of this, of course, means the Russian system is fragile, or that centralisation and coercion cannot sustain a state indefinitely. What It does mean is that the system’s greatest strength, its capacity to enforce, sits alongside a genuine weakness: a diminished ability to sense when something is going wrong and adjust accordingly.
Put the two halves of this picture together, and a clearer story emerges. The pressures squeezing Russia from outside won’t collapse the system, neither will they talk it into moderation. The machinery of power inside Russia isn’t built to listen, only to enforce. Formidable control paired with limited adaptability may be the single most important thing to understand about how the country is actually run today, and about what it’s likely to do next.
*John Dobson is a former British diplomat, who also worked in UK Prime Minister John Major’s office between 1995 and 1998. He is currently a visiting fellow at the University of Plymouth.
