Even a cursory sift through high-density, objective reporting and careful analysis should leave no doubt: this ‘russia’ is imploding. Call it by that sarcastic set of parentheses if you like — they sit well around a hollowing thing. Historically, this polity has been astonishingly resilient: autocratic, masochistically proud of austerity, an entire culture that thinks suffering is character-building. Yet resilience has a breaking point. What we’re watching now is not a few stitches tearing; it’s the surgical removal of the lower half of the body, with a lot more blood and far less dignity than the 1990s orgy of collapse.
Let’s be clinical first. The macroeconomy — even after the kremlin’s fortressification — carries scars you can measure. Growth has been propped up by state spending and energy price swings, but structural losses are substantial: cumulative GDP is many percentage points lower than it might have been, with export structures weakened and technological choke-points biting deep. The IMF and other multilateral trackers show a nation scrambling to plug fiscal holes while confronting inflation and constrained access to advanced inputs. This isn’t mere turbulence; it’s systemic sclerosis: the organs keep working, but the bloodstream is thinned and riddled with clots. IMF+1
Politically and militarily, the last few years have been a confetti of amateur pyrotechnics and professional paranoia. That revolting Wagner affair — the mutiny that smelled faintly of coup-d’oeuvre in June 2023 — shook the kremlin’s aura of invulnerability. Whether you read it as a humiliating blot for the state or a managed purge, the fact remains that paramilitary networks, prison-recruitment campaigns, and a shadow economy of force are baked into the system. Removing one boogeyman didn’t put the ghost back in the box; it redistributed fear and assets into darker, less predictable corners. This is the sort of instability that metastasizes outward — into Africa, the Middle East, and the grey zones where rule-of-law is optional and looting is a business model. Wikipedia+1
Inside the country, the social contract is fraying (or has frayed some time ago). Conscription pressure, labor shortages, repression of dissent, and the state’s increasing legal paranoia create a pressure-cooker. Civic space is shrinking; universities, media, and NGOs are under heavy pressure. When a polity leans harder on coercion to maintain a narrative, it often produces two things at once: brittle obedience and an energetic, if underground, opposition. The more the center clamps down, the more centrifugal forces feed on corruption, local grievances, and ethnic/regional fissures. In practice, that means the kremlin can maintain control on paper while losing legitimacy in practice — and legitimacy, once lost, is fiendishly hard to rebuild. ovd.info+1
Now the mood: desperation. Picture a mob don with RICO indictments coming down, tossing his ledger into a trash fire and inviting everyone into the flames. That image isn’t merely dramatic flourish; it maps reasonably well onto how kleptocratic networks operate when the gravy train stalls. They don’t fold politely. They lash out, export instability, and weaponize deniability. The mechanics here are important: economic squeeze plus political isolation equals a higher likelihood of risky external behavior—incursions, hybrid attacks, or proxy adventurism—that seeks to reorder the immediate security environment or at least to distract a discontented domestic audience. If a place like “russia” experiences regime change, it doesn’t end with the likes of “putin” receiving ‘a stern scolding’. It ends like it ended with Khadaffi.
European capitals must internalize that when a kleptocracy is cornered, it behaves less like a rational state actor and more like a criminal enterprise with missiles. Consilium+1
Which brings us to the practical question: how should the West react? First, stop mistaking politeness for strategy. A fair criticism of parts of Western Europe is that we can be occasional cultural aesthetes in the face of street-level danger — effete, gullible, complacent, maybe even infantile in the face of clearly instrumental aggression. The civilized world must wake up. But wakefulness does not mean vigilante justice or torture masquerading as “enhanced interrogation.” It means law, not lawlessness. It means a calibrated set of instruments: targeted sanctions that bite real actors (not just flag-wavers), financial forensics that starve kleptocratic supply chains, intelligence and counterintelligence cooperation, and solid legal pathways for prosecuting those who commit transnational crimes — all while preserving liberal norms that the Kremlin would happily burn down for propaganda points.
On enforcement: there’s a temptation to dunk everyone involved in sabotage operations into the same barrel and call for medieval remedies. Resist that temptation. Do prosecute — rigorously — under clear, lawful frameworks. That means: strengthen legal tools to charge foreign actors who materially assist attacks on allied territory; expand mutual legal assistance treaties to make asset freezes and extraditions practical; harmonize definitions of terrorism, sabotage, and treason where it matters for international cooperation; and invest heavily in deradicalization and community resilience programs that reduce the recruitment pool for proxy actors. In short: treat these actors like criminals and terrorists under the rule of law — not as fodder for revenge. Law is slower, but it’s enduring. The alternative is to model the very barbarity we claim to oppose.
We must also invest in political immunities at the domestic level. That means protection for journalists, rapid support for independent media, and sanctions for institutions that facilitate laundering and propaganda. It also means a hard look at the naïveté of outsourcing security to mercenaries and private outfits; if a state is using quasi-state actors for plausible deniability, we should treat those arrangements as red flags in the same way tax havens are red flags. Publish the registries. Follow the money. Cut the oxygen.
Another vector is resilience in the physical sense: hardening airports, ports, energy infrastructure, and communications. Sabotage is often low-cost, high-impact. Defensive investments are not glamorous, but they are cheaper than the bill for chaos. That’s not theater; it’s boring, effective policy. And where possible, build redundant systems and shared situational awareness across allies to reduce the single-point-of-failure magic that amateur saboteurs so often exploit.
Let’s be clear about one thing: a “russian” collapse — if it happens — will be messy and is not synonymous with immediate democratization or moral clarity. Failed or failing polities are fertile ground for warlords, transnational crime, and humanitarian disaster. If the ‘russian Federation’ (again: parentheses) truly enters a phase of centrifugal collapse, the immediate European task will be containment and humanitarian triage, not triumphalism. We’re not auditioning for a geopolitical fireworks display; we’re running triage on a continent-sized patient. We have to have the moral courage to be patient and humane with what eventually remains.
This is why the West must prepare dual tracks: deny Russia the capacity to project coercive power while building the institutional scaffolding to manage spillovers. That involves pre-positioned humanitarian stocks, refugee frameworks, contingency military planning, and a legal architecture that prevents kleptocrats from simply relocating and continuing to siphon resources and power. It also means working with proximate countries — in Central Asia, the Caucasus, and Eastern Europe — to provide early-warning systems and economic buffers.
And finally: don’t moralize simplicity where nuance is required. There’s an aesthetic pleasure in painting villains as cartoonish, but political strategy lives in fine-grained trade-offs. Sanctions that hurt ordinary people — and therefore bolster a regime’s domestic propaganda — are self-defeating. Military adventurism without a post-operation plan is worse. The best path is to be ruthless on kleptocracy and protective of civic life: choke off illicit finance, protect whistleblowers, make sanctuary for defectors, and prosecute crimes transparently so the law becomes a tool of delegitimization for predators.
So yes: call a spade a spade. The ‘russian’ polity is brittle and dangerous, and the risk of destabilizing lash-outs is material. Do not fall into the trap of romanticizing collapse as a moral corrective. Prepare — legally, financially, militarily, and humanely — for messy fallout. Above all, don’t sacrifice our norms in the name of defending them. That’s what the villain would want.
If you want the bite turned up further — more forensic threads on the kleptocratic financial plumbing, a map of probable points of spillover, or a case-by-case rundown of actors who should face cross-border prosecution — I’ll stitch that dossier with relish. But the headline is clear: wake up, stop being genteel when action is required, and do the hard legal work — because law, oddly enough, is the best weapon for dismantling a criminalized state without becoming one.
Key sources underpinning the main claims: IMF/World Bank projections and assessments of Russia’s economic trajectory; reporting and analysis of the Wagner mutiny and its aftermath; studies on sanctions’ structural impact; civil society monitoring of repression and protest; and policy think-tank assessments of Russia’s hybrid activities abroad. European Council on Foreign Relations+4IMF+4Chatham House+4