In recent months, the normally placid waters of Russian politics have been marked by the appearance of small but noticeable ripples—not yet indicators that Vladimir Putin’s hold on power is in immediate danger but that the war in Ukraine is beginning to meaningfully transform the country’s economy and politics. The current tensions began to appear around the start of the year, when the Kremlin banned or restricted most messaging apps, except for one that had been developed by the state. During the next three weeks, mobile internet was impeded or shut off in the center of Moscow. The crackdown—which came amid a shrinking economy, rising costs, tax increases, and Ukrainian drone strikes on the country’s energy sector—led to a rare outburst of public discontent and an equally uncommon acknowledgment of the dissatisfaction from Putin. Of the internet outages, he said, “It does happen, unfortunately,” but he made clear that Russia’s security considerations were paramount.

Last month, Victoria Bonya, a popular TV personality and influencer, posted an eighteen-minute video to social media critiquing the many ills of modern Russia, in which she said, addressing Putin, “The people are afraid of you, artists are afraid, governors are afraid.” She warned that Russians are “being squeezed into a coiled spring,” which, one day, “will shoot out.” (Tellingly, although Bonya touched on everything from environmental disasters to the internet blackout, she did not mention the war or criticize Putin directly.) The video, which has been viewed some thirty million times, became a topic of discussion on the floor of the Duma. Gennady Zyuganov, the head of Russia’s Communist Party—which is an opposition party in name only—warned of “inevitable” economic collapse and a looming repeat of 1917, the year of the Bolshevik Revolution. It’s time, he said, to “make long-overdue decisions.”

Earlier this month, the Kremlin announced that this year’s Victory Day parade, held every May 9th in Red Square to commemorate the Soviet victory in the Second World War, which is typically a show of Russian might, would be a modest, small-scale affair. The usual columns of tanks and missile launchers and marching soldiers will be absent—they present too inviting a target for Ukrainian drones. (Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s spokesman, acknowledged the “terrorist threat.”) Tatiana Stanovaya, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, called the parade’s downscaling a “pragmatic decision.” But, she went on, “It nonetheless serves as a reminder to everyone that, as concerns the war, Russia finds itself at an impasse, with no obvious plans or hopes for getting out.”

Then, on May 4th, multiple news outlets published stories on a leaked report from an unnamed European intelligence agency which describes disorder in the Russian security services over their inability to protect the country from Ukrainian drone attacks and assassination attempts. (Among other things, the report alleged that a car bombing in Moscow last December, which killed Lieutenant General Fanil Sarvarov, had prompted a tense meeting chaired by Putin in the Kremlin.) The intelligence assessment also claims that Putin is in a heightened state of paranoia, fearing assassination or a possible coup, and has limited his travel and public appearances. Among those that published the document was iStories, an investigation site founded by a pair of high-profile Russian journalists who are now working in exile. In describing its significance, Roman Anin, iStories’s editor-in-chief, wrote, “We are witnessing the transition of the Russian regime into a fundamentally different state.”

Since Putin first assumed the Presidency, almost twenty-seven years ago, his rule has rested on a certain mythology: that he is the country’s unitary authority and arbiter, the one figure who can hold together Russia’s many factions, clans, and interests. For members of the élite, even if they don’t like every decision—including Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022—it is safer and more profitable to have Putin in charge than to face a Hobbesian all-against-all struggle for power and resources. “The defining characteristic of the Russian élite is its opportunism,” Konstantin Remchukov, a newspaper publisher in Moscow, said. “And its ability to survive in any conditions. That’s how they get to be the élite in the first place.” In Putin’s repressive state, the costs of disloyalty are clear: Moscow’s Lefortovo Prison, after all, is not only full of political prisoners but ministers, generals, and governors.

The war has tested but not yet broken that loyalty. “Just about everyone would like to stop the war tomorrow—that’s obvious,” a fixture of Russia’s political élite told me. “There’s not a single person, other than Putin and the military brass, who wants to keep on fighting. But no one would ever dare to express their displeasure.”

The only real threat to Putin’s authority came a year into the war, when Yevgeniy Prigozhin, the founder of Wagner, a Russian paramilitary organization, launched a mutiny directed against Russia’s military leadership. He claimed that he wasn’t targeting Putin, but the sight of Wagner mercenaries in armored vehicles barrelling toward Moscow was undeniably a sign of instability. Putin called it “treason against our country,” saying that “all those who consciously chose the path of betrayal . . . will suffer inevitable punishment.” Two months later, Prigozhin and Wagner’s top leadership were killed when a private jet they were on exploded shortly after takeoff from Moscow. Message received.

The recent series of events—none of which, on their face, are as dramatic as an armed uprising of mercenary fighters—has created a sense that the political system is at once tightly controlled and utterly rudderless. “On the one hand, the regime is more airless than ever,” Farida Rustamova, the founder of “Vlast,” a newsletter on Russian politics, said. “All the screws have been tightened to the max.” At the same time, she said, “it’s also never been as chaotic and unpredictable.” There is a sense, among everyone from military officials to regional bureaucrats, that “the old rules are breaking down, and no one knows what the new ones are, or whether they exist at all.”

The main factor is the seemingly unresolvable deadlock in Ukraine. Within weeks of the invasion, when Russian units failed to quickly capture Kyiv, Putin switched to pursuing a war of attrition. In such a struggle, the side with more resources—from industrial capacity to expendable soldiers—should eventually emerge with the upper hand. In the past few years, Russia, at an enormous cost to its own forces, made steady advances on the battlefield (most estimates suggest more than a million Russian soldiers have been killed or injured since the start of the conflict). The Russian military rarely achieved a strategic breakthrough, but it pushed forward with the brute force of a slow-moving steamroller.

So far in 2026, according to maps from the Ukrainian war-monitoring outfit DeepState, Russia is advancing at roughly half the rate it did last year. (In some cases, Ukraine has actually recaptured small swaths of territory previously held by Russia.) Ukraine’s technological innovations, especially in unmanned and A.I.-driven systems, have offset Russia’s previous advantages. The notion of a front line, where fighting is most intense, and a rear, where troops can regroup and vehicles can operate, has collapsed, replaced by a so-called kill zone that can stretch for ten miles or more.

Donald Trump’s return to the White House was expected to provide a newfound advantage for Russia in its negotiations with Ukraine. Russian officials continue to speak of a “spirit of Anchorage,” a supposed set of understandings that came out of a Trump-Putin summit in Alaska this past August. The member of Russia’s political élite told me that Putin left the summit believing that Trump would convince the Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, to withdraw from the parts of the Donbas that are currently under Ukraine’s control, effectively ceding them to Russia, and that the rest of the front line would freeze in place. “Well, it turned out that Trump and his team haven’t managed to do this,” the person said. “So the war continues, even as few like that fact.”

This feeling of stasis is made all the more worrying by Ukraine’s increasing ability to strike inside Russia itself. The killing of Sarvarov, in Moscow, was one of a string of similar attacks. In February, the deputy head of Russian military intelligence was shot in the stairwell of his apartment building (he survived); in April, a bomb hidden in a mailbox killed an Army officer, but the real target is believed to have been another higher-ranking commander who led Russian units in Bucha, the site of a notorious massacre of Ukrainian civilians.

Ukrainian drones have targeted several key sites among the country’s oil infrastructure, some of which were situated nearly a thousand miles from the border. Repeated strikes in March and April brought export traffic from Ust-Luga, a major port on the Baltic Sea, to a near-standstill for more than a week; around the same time, Russia’s second-largest oil refinery, Kirishi, was forced to halt processing after a drone attack. Still, Ukraine’s campaign has been overshadowed by a rise in global oil prices, a result of the U.S.-Israel war in Iran and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. “Russia exports less than it otherwise could,” Sergey Vakulenko, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, who previously worked in the Russian energy sector, said. “But higher prices more than compensate.” But what happens if oil prices stabilize and Ukrainian drone strikes continue?

Meanwhile, Russia’s over-all economy is beginning to suffocate under the many distortions and externalities caused by four-plus years of full-scale war. Spending on military-industrial production and bonuses for new recruits has led to high inflation, which the Central Bank has tried to control with high interest rates—at fourteen and a half per cent, they are almost twice as high as prewar levels. At the same time, labor is expensive and hard to find: potential workers have, in large part, either been commandeered by the war effort or, in smaller numbers, emigrated. “We have never had anything like this before,” Elvira Nabiullina, the governor of Russia’s Central Bank, said last month.

Buoyed by war spending, Russia’s G.D.P. grew by roughly four per cent in both 2023 and 2024. Last year, it was just one per cent. This past month, at a gathering of economic officials in the Kremlin, Putin revealed that the G.D.P. in 2026 had, so far, shrunk by nearly two per cent, which would mean Russia is now facing a recession. He said that he wanted answers as to why “macroeconomic indicators are still falling short of expectations” and called for “additional measures aimed at reviving growth.” But he has yet to offer any specifics on what he might do to reverse the trend.

Some of the more dramatic claims in the leaked European intelligence report—for instance, that the former Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu is a figure of influence who could mount a challenge to Putin—seem far-fetched. “Sure, people may be nervous, uncertain, even gloomy,” the member of the élite said. But, the person added, talk of an immediate threat to Putin’s rule is overblown, a fiction that should be read not as analysis but as an attempt at informational warfare: “He retains full control. Any notion to the contrary is nonsense.”

But talk of coups and plots doesn’t come from nowhere. Even pro-war Telegram channels inside Russia have been rife with such theories and predictions. Last month, Ilya Remeslo, a pro-Kremlin lawyer and agitator turned unexpected critic, spoke of a “palace coup” coming “within a year.” In Russia, indulging in such conspiracies is often less an exercise in political prediction than an expression of deeper anxieties that can be otherwise hard to express. “Too many problems and challenges have accumulated with implications for people’s everyday lives,” Stanovaya told me. “People are used to uncertainty, but there are seemingly no reactions.” Putin looks passive, even absent. Previously, he rarely consulted with anyone and kept his plans to himself. Now, Stanovaya said, “It’s not clear he has a plan at all.” ♦