By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

The Limits of Putin’s Balancing Act

Russian President Vladimir Putin has achieved an eerie calm at home. Shortly after assuming the presidency in 2000, he tied once independent oligarchs to the state while placating the growing middle class with rising living standards and greater material comforts. Gradually, he assembled a ruling ideology from bits and pieces of Russia’s past, one that was nationalistic enough to inspire pride but not so nationalistic as to be divisive.

As a result, after a quarter century in power, Putin has brought Russia to a point of equilibrium. Russian life can now be soothingly predictable, even if it demands adaptation at times. Chaos is engulfing the Middle East, American politics can be tempestuous, and Europe is witnessing its worst war since 1945. But Putin has given Russians the gift they were most eager to receive: stability. The country is not enduring visible disruptions or political tumult. Indeed, Russia hardly has any politics at all—it lacks real political parties and does not stage meaningful elections. The state, which reserves the right to repress, mostly represses those who dare to display their disapproval, a vanishingly small minority of Russians. In this arrangement, the Kremlin retains control and most Russians can go about their business, provided that their business is unobtrusive.

Another reality shadows this carefully crafted equilibrium. Putin has long promised Russians a country gilded with ambition, power, and glory. He stressed a “belief in the greatness of Russia” as early as his 1999 “millennium manifesto,” an article published in a Russian daily shortly before he assumed the presidency. In that essay, Putin implied that Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, and Boris Yeltsin, the first president of a post-Soviet Russia, had brought Russia to its knees, in part by letting post-Soviet states and former Warsaw Pact countries spin out of its orbit. Putin’s historic task, as he saw it, was to restore Russia as a major actor on the international stage. At the 2007 Munich Security Conference, he approached the West without any deference, reproaching the United States and its allies for “unilateral and frequently illegitimate actions” that had “caused new human tragedies and created new centers of tension.”

Four months later, Putin dispatched tens of thousands of Russian troops to Georgia, seizing a fifth of that country’s territory. In 2014, Russia invaded the Donbas, in eastern Ukraine, and annexed Crimea. The following year, the Russian military demonstrated its expeditionary capabilities in Syria. And in 2022, Putin launched a full-scale war on Ukraine, with the intent of redrawing the map of Europe and asserting Russia’s global heft.

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Yet overreach abroad has landed Putin in a dilemma. Russia’s foreign policy is increasingly marked by failure. The war in Ukraine has stalemated. Contrary to Putin’s hopes, U.S. President Donald Trump’s election in 2024 did not compel the West to abandon Kyiv. In the Middle East, Israel has assailed Russia’s clients and partners. It might be tempting to view these developments as harbingers of Russia’s eventual retreat from Ukraine, but they are not. Putin can afford to lose influence in the Middle East, which is not an existential theater for him, but he will not reverse course in Ukraine, where he recognizes no dilemma. If pushed, he would likely sacrifice Russia’s equilibrium to a mass mobilization and to harshly coercive measures. Russia’s rise to greatness may be Sisyphean for Putin, but he will go to extreme lengths to avoid defeat. In Ukraine, Putin will risk everything.

For him, equilibrium—the complacency he has inculcated in the Russian population—is in danger of becoming a faded luxury. The grim necessity is the war.

 

An Eerie Calm

Russia’s current placidity stems in large part from the changes of the past decade. Putin’s popularity, which has always been high, surged following his annexation of Crimea, in 2014. Russians greeted a more muscular foreign policy with a pride that was hard to detect in the late Soviet decades and in early post-Soviet Russia. This patriotism did not require sacrifice from Russians. After all, the rupture with the West was limited; the sanctions that Western countries imposed on Russia in 2014 proved to be weak.

Putin had begun this balancing act—behaving assertively abroad while insulating the home front from risk—two decades ago. By 2022, he had perfected it. At first, the public struggled to understand the full-scale war on Ukraine, but Putin exploited the conflict to strike patriotic chords and to consolidate devotion to the state. He was helped by the exodus of many Russians opposed to the war and of dozens of journalists and media figures critical of the government. Putin had never welcomed criticism. After 2022, he could stigmatize any attempt at political opposition as an affront to the war effort. Vaguely defined antiwar sentiment was criminalized, and many vocal critics went into exile or were imprisoned.

For many of the Russians who stayed, the war brought opportunity. Economic activity in defense-related manufacturing sectors took off, and the unemployment rate plummeted. It currently stands at a historic low of 2.2 percent. The Kremlin got hundreds of thousands of young men to enlist, enticing them with substantial sign-up bonuses, while most Russians could ignore the war altogether. Sanctions and visa restrictions have curtailed some high-end consumerist pleasures, and vacations in Europe are mostly off limits to non-wealthy Russians, but many countries continue to export to Russia, and Russians are free to travel throughout much of Asia, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, and the South Caucasus. One can make do and get ahead in Putin’s Russia without being ardently patriotic—as long as one avoids being notably unpatriotic.

Unlike Joseph Stalin, Putin has not maximized the state’s dictatorial potential. The Russian president has eschewed mass bloodshed internally. Instead, he has become skilled in the practice of representative violence. There are around 2,000 political prisoners in Russia today. In their growing sum, they form a warning to everyone else. Although young people are increasingly subjected to indoctrination, apolitical adults can lead their professional and private lives largely untroubled by the government. The state rarely makes onerous demands on the Russian public, mostly leaving the urban and middle classes to their own devices. Even with mandatory military service, Russians are more or less free to choose how much or how little to participate in the system. Some opt for a martial patriotism, voluntarily enlisting or just waving the flag at rallies. The quiet majority, by remaining quiet, gets to enjoy relative prosperity and the relative indifference of the state.

 

Compounding Pressures

The equilibrium that Putin has fostered, however, is more fragile than it seems. A short, victorious war in Ukraine would have safeguarded the status quo at home. Successful wars strengthen the domestic political position of the victors, and Putin might have spun a narrative of triumph over NATO and over a United States that had once credited itself for winning the Cold War. On the eve of invasion, Putin may have had this outcome in mind: a shoring up of Russian nationhood so profound that it would allow him to anoint a successor and to keep the ship of state moving along.

But unfortunately for the Kremlin, the war in Ukraine has been anything but a triumph. By February 2026, the war will have lasted as long as the fight against Nazi Germany did for the Soviet Union. World War II launched the Soviet Union into superpower status, whereas Russia’s position in Europe and in the world more broadly is deteriorating. By pouring vast resources into the war, Moscow has constrained its military positions elsewhere. In 2023, Russia did nothing when its partner Armenia lost Nagorno-Karabakh to Azerbaijan. And late last year, it failed to prevent the fall of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Another of Russia’s key partners, Iran, has been getting pummeled by Israel and the United States, while Moscow stands helplessly on the sidelines. Russia is increasingly dependent on China for access to foreign markets and for dual-use goods that fuel the war effort, but Chinese direct investment and transfers of technology have been limited.

All told, Russia has burned through enormous resources in a war it is not winning. Ukraine is itself very far from victory, but the country’s biggest cities and much of its territory are beyond the Kremlin’s grasp. The territories that Russia has managed to occupy do not constitute a vital bridge to Europe. Rather than flourishing colonies, they are places scarred by immiseration and war. Ukraine’s talent for technological innovation poses another problem for the Kremlin. In May, Ukraine orchestrated an extraordinary attack on airbases deep within Russia. As the war drags on, the Ukrainian armed forces may spring similarly bold surprises.

Last week, Trump shifted gears on Ukraine. He has pledged to supply the country with advanced weaponry, via NATO, and criticized Putin for needlessly prolonging the war. Meanwhile, Europe is spending more on defense and NATO member states are stepping up their military coordination. In the unlikely event that the United States were to altogether abandon Ukraine, Europe will not follow suit. Prosperous, strong European countries will continue to back Kyiv. And no major European country is likely to lift sanctions or return to prewar levels of trade with Russia.

In the face of these compounding pressures, Putin is not backing down. Determined to win whatever the cost, he has chosen to subordinate the Russian economy to the war, devoting more and more resources to producing materiel. Because of sanctions, the loss of the European market, and the inefficiencies of wartime spending, the Russian economy is stagnating, with high inflation and ever lower rates of growth. The Kremlin recently acknowledged that a recession looms. And crises outside of Russia, such as the collapse of the Iranian government or a global economic downturn, could make things even worse.

Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Eurasian Economic Forum, Minsk, June 2025

 

A Dictatorship Unbound

These developments could disturb the equilibrium that Putin has so assiduously cultivated. At the moment, Russians are far from revolting against the regime, but they could start to turn against the war, refusing to enlist and publicly questioning the merits of this seemingly endless conflict. In the summer of 2023, the mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin mounted a small mutiny, dispatching a convoy of tanks toward Moscow before striking a deal with Putin and, two months later, dying in a plane crash that was almost certainly orchestrated by the Kremlin. Soldiers and veterans exhausted and disillusioned by the war could be harder for Putin to handle. For this reason, the Kremlin has bent over backward to mollify them with money and privileges. Another potential source of disruption is the Russian elite itself. Although so far there is no sign of insubordination among the government-dependent Russians who command wealth and power, some may be tempted to explore subtle forms of dissent, testing the waters by suggesting that the war should be moderated, slowed down, or ended.

To suppress potential political threats, Putin would surely double down on the war, bidding farewell to his domestic political balancing act. He might agree to temporary cease-fires and to cosmetic diplomacy, even to the pretense of a negotiated settlement, but he cannot let go of a simple fact: that Russia’s military, by his logic, has not accomplished enough. Russia does not control Ukraine, and any settlement that leaves Ukraine outside of Russian control—that is, a Ukraine free to integrate into Europe—would amount to a defeat. For the time being, the war Putin waged to halt Ukraine’s westward turn has only propelled Ukraine westward. That remains an outcome that Putin will never accept.

Within Russia, Putin has many options. He commands the infrastructure for mass mobilization, including the security services and the state-controlled media. He could enact a ruthless, ideological conscription campaign with harsh punishments for those unwilling to enlist. If Putin has so far refrained from traveling down this path, it is not because he is unwilling to deploy coercive power in Russia but because he is hesitant to destroy the calm that he has so painstakingly fashioned. Were he to abandon that equilibrium, Putin would end up waging a fanatic’s war in Ukraine, dragging Russia further in and wreaking ever greater havoc on the Ukrainian peopleWithin Russia, Putin has many options. He commands the infrastructure for mass mobilization, including the security services and the state-controlled media. He could enact a ruthless, ideological conscription campaign with harsh punishments for those unwilling to enlist. If Putin has so far refrained from traveling down this path, it is not because he is unwilling to deploy coercive power in Russia but because he is hesitant to destroy the calm that he has so painstakingly fashioned. Were he to abandon that equilibrium, Putin would end up waging a fanatic’s war in Ukraine, dragging Russia further in and wreaking ever greater havoc on the Ukrainian people. He would be unrestrained as generalissimo abroad and as tyrant at home. As such, he could transform a tacit dictatorship into a full-blown one, with a dictatorship’s grim political prerogatives and a dictatorship’s unbound geopolitical appetites.

 

 

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