A change in Russia’s government is more likely to take place than conventional wisdom allows.
On February 24, Russia will begin the fifth year of its disastrous war against Ukraine. It has sacrificed over a million men, killed and incapacitated, in order to gain a fragile hold on only a fifth of Ukraine’s territory. It has crippled Russia’s flagship energy industry, depleted the National Wealth Fund, and impoverished the Russian countryside, meanwhile crystallizing Ukraine’s national identity and transforming the country into a major producer of advanced military hardware.
It has led to NATO’s expansion by two members, the doubling of Russia’s border with NATO countries, and the sharpest increases ever in NATO defense spending. American pundits, who treat it as a high school football game, debate over who is winning and losing. But retired Russian generals, commentators on Moscow’s state TV, prominent members of Russia’s parliament (Duma), and ultra-patriotic “Z bloggers” have all declared not only that Russia has lost the war but that it is in danger of destroying itself in the process. Finland’s president, Alexander Stubb, calls the war “an utter strategic failure.”
Russia’s Three Unresolvable Challenges
How does this defeat affect Russia’s future? Most commentators frame the question in terms of the personal fate of Vladimir Putin. Some note that he has already outlived the average Russian male by half a decade and is increasingly viewed by large segments of the public as an ancient who is out of touch. Yet at 73, he is in reasonably good shape. Hence, when change occurs at the top, it is less likely that it will arise from Putin’s physical decay than from the accumulated impact of three intractable crises.
First, Russia has no money to maintain 2.4 million men in the military, yet to demobilize them would pose enormous social risks. A high percentage of the 1.3 million under arms are criminals and former convicts who were promised freedom if they served at the front. Those who have already returned home are generating the major crime wave sweeping the country today. Hundreds of thousands of returnees who served under contract have yet to be paid. Desperate and embittered, they have turned to criminality.
Second, Russia’s demand for fresh capital is huge and insatiable. The war swallowed most of the funds needed to maintain basic infrastructures and services across the land. Outside of the three main cities, domestic heating, water supplies, and building and road maintenance have collapsed. When several desperate governors complained publicly and pointed their fingers at Moscow, they were jailed.
Meanwhile, Russian businesses that Putin ordered to retool to make drones, bombs, and other military hardware have no access to the major funds needed to convert back to making refrigerators and other civilian products. Elvira Nabiullina, the director of the State Bank, puts the crisis bluntly: Russia has “exhausted” its financial reserves. It even lacks the funds needed to restore its crippled energy industry and will be in hock to whoever provides them, be it China, the Gulf states, or the US.
Third, Moscow is desperately short of the skilled and unskilled labor needed to restore the national economy. Close to 1.2 million men were lost through death or injury in Ukraine, not to mention the hundreds of thousands who fled at the start of the war. While some of these have returned, there are still 3 million Russians in Germany alone. These staggering figures pale in comparison with the demographic collapse that has been underway for a generation due to the Russians’ exceptionally low rate of fertility. Overall, Russia’s population shrinks by one person every 30 seconds, leaving the labor force today barely two-fifths the size of the US labor force.
The obvious solution to this demographic collapse is to welcome more immigrants. But Russia already hosts the world’s third-largest number of immigrants, lagging behind only the United States and Germany. Most of Russia’s newcomers are from Turkic and Muslim Central Asia, and they pose what most Russians perceive as an ominous and grave cultural threat. An attractive alternative might be to embrace new labor-saving technologies so comprehensively as to reduce the demand for common laborers. Yet this is a will-o’-the-wisp, as today’s Russia lacks both the money and skills needed to effect such a transformation.
Military Defeat and Reform
Together, these are unavoidable features of Russian life today and will remain so with or without Putin. What, then, can we expect to happen to the country? Few analysts have addressed this question despite its importance. Back in 2024, a group of American, European, and Japanese analysts pondered Russia’s future and reached generally dark conclusions.
Among them, Luke Coffey of the Hudson Institute predicted that several regions would secede, leading to great power competition over the entire territory; Pavel Baev of the Peace Research Institute in Oslo declared that Russia had reached a “dead end”; Paul Goble of “Window on Eurasia” predicted Russia’s fragmentation along ethnic lines; while Hiroyuku Akita, Nikkei’s commentator, predicted that Russia could evolve into a “giant North Korea,” resentfully dependent on China. A year later, Stephen Kotkin of the Hoover Institution sketched six possible lines of Russia’s future evolution, then reduced them to five, ranging from vassalage to China to a kind of post-Algeria France without Charles de Gaulle.
Surprisingly absent from these prognostications are the lessons of history. Whatever Putin may claim, Russia has already failed in its war against Ukraine, and an ever-increasing number of Russians know it. This reality demands comparison with the three major military defeats suffered by the armies of the Russian czars since 1800—all present lessons of importance for Putin’s Russia.
Russia’s defeat in World War I led to the abdication of Nicholas II and the 1917 February Revolution. Alexander Kerensky proposed extensive reforms but continued the war, which opened the way for Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks.
Only a dozen years earlier, imperial Japan destroyed Russia’s navy at Tsushima Bay, the first time an Asian state had defeated a European power. In an effort to recover from his humiliating defeat in the Russo-Japanese War, Nicholas II grudgingly established Russia’s first elected national representative assembly, the Duma. He appointed the reformist Pyotr Stolypin as prime minister. Riding the wave of reform, Stolypin established the first unconditional right of peasants to own land.
Three generations before Stolypin, Russia had suffered a humiliating defeat by France, Britain, Ottoman Turkey, and Sardinia in the Crimean War of 1853–1856. In that case, the defeated Czar Nicholas I conveniently died, clearing the way for his 37-year-old son, Alexander II, and a new generation of reformers to take power. Not only did they abolish serfdom two years before Abraham Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation, but they also established Russia’s first European-type courts and elective regional councils. Indeed, defeat in the first Crimean War led to what Russians still call their “Era of Great Reforms.”
While all three of these military defeats were accompanied by the loss of thousands to millions of lives, the depletion of material and financial resources, and institutional exhaustion, they all led directly to important reforms. All the men who instituted the reforms had previously been loyal toilers within the system, but whose experience led them to embrace change. In the most successful of these post-defeat reform projects—that of the Great Reforms—reform arose not from foreign pressure or a single leader but from an entire new generation of like-minded Russians. All three of these episodes of reform occurred because the old regime had played its last cards and was exhausted.
The Inevitable Transition: Phase One
This brief historical review suggests two conclusions. First, regime failures can lead to change and reform with or without a change of the top leader. According to Russia’s constitution, if President Putin were incapacitated or removed, his successor would be the prime minister, Mikhail Mishustin, a respected economist and long-term head of the tax service. Thoughtful and respected, the mild-mannered and piano-playing Mishustin would normally be an obvious candidate for a transitional role or more, were he not hindered by his Jewish origin and the constitutional demand for prompt elections. Even then, Mikhail Mishustin could emerge as everyone’s compromise candidate.
At that point, there will be only two groups likely to exert a decisive role in the course of events: the Federal Security Service (FSB), successor to the KGB, and the captains of Russian industry. Why not also the military? Because the high command, discredited by its strategies in Ukraine, riddled by corruption, and narrowly focused on its own survival, will be sidelined. By contrast, the FSB will dedicate its ample resources to preserving the regime, whether or not it publicly controls events. This is natural, not only because Putin himself rose through the KGB’s ranks and relied on its help throughout his reign, but also because the security services, having survived the collapse of the USSR, now view themselves as the main guarantor of Russian continuity.
Meanwhile, Russia’s very survival will depend on its leaders’ ability to advance policies that reverse the current downward economic spiral and begin rebuilding the country’s resources. For this task, the key people will be Russia’s business elite. In the West, it is customary to focus on the few dozen so-called “oligarchs” who, after the Soviet collapse, seized control of the country’s main industries and diverted the profits into their own pockets.
They are still relevant. Not only do they have formidable resources and connections worldwide, but they are, for the most part, still in their 60s and therefore still able and willing to assume major national roles. Moreover, their numbers have been augmented by the emergence of somewhat younger business leaders in many fields, who have also done exceedingly well and are now keen to test themselves on the national stage.
Together, these two groups of Russia’s top bosses, along with the FSB working behind the scenes, will demand and likely play a key role in shaping Russia’s future direction. However, it is a fool’s errand to try to predict the direction of their efforts, or even to foresee the level of harmony or disharmony between them. Yet some form of collaboration seems likely, for each needs the other: the FSB needs a public face, and the business elite needs behind-the-scenes muscle.
What can be predicted with some certainty is that many core problems will remain unresolved and that such a condition of irresolution will impede Russia’s ability to gain favorable economic and political terms in its dealings with the major sources of capital worldwide. With or without Putin, some elements of the ideology he has championed, with its blending of Lev Gumilev’s Eurasianism and Alexander Dugin’s retrograde Orthodoxy, will linger on. Russian “Z bloggers” and other national zealots will continue to demand permanent control over Crimea. And in response to the chauvinism lingering in Moscow, Chechens and Ingush peoples in the Caucasus and some Turkic peoples in the Volga basin will demand independence, which will provoke a muscular response from Moscow.
However, after the war, it is highly unlikely that Russia’s leaders—with or without Putin—will solve these and other issues. At best, they will remain in a state of semi-resolution. Meanwhile, Moscow will have to address its deepening dependence on China and China’s evident interest in expanding its economic and social presence in Russia’s East. It will be no simple matter to come up with other relations to balance this force, without making the kind of concessions to Europe that the FSB is unlikely to countenance. Meanwhile, Moscow will continue its plodding efforts to keep alive its own faltering answer to the European Union, the Commonwealth of Independent States. It is no simple matter to acknowledge the end of one’s empire.
Can any group of leaders last if faced with such formidable and incompatible challenges? More seriously, can any regime do so if at the same time it is facing an acute and broad-gauged social crisis at home and is racked by crippling shortages of both capital and labor?
Phase Two: The Rising Generation
Most efforts to conjure up the contours of post-Ukraine and post-Putin are static. Like photographs, they are sometimes brilliant in outline or detail; they tend to focus on the short term and to capture only a single moment in time. As such, they are useless for anticipating longer-term developments and the strategies needed to manage them. In this context, let us try to ferret out some of the main forces shaping Russia’s longer-term future.
We must do so because no arrangements designed to address the immediate problems besetting the country today are likely to be effective in addressing the issues that will dominate the future. Given that we lack the gift of prophecy, are there developments visible today that are likely to shape how Russia addresses future challenges? Thoughtful observers will propose many answers to this question, but the one force that is both powerful and inevitable is generational change.
Why should this be the case? For one thing, the Putin generation and all those now over 50 have monopolized leadership roles since the start of the new century. As a result, whenever the inevitable crisis of generational leadership occurs, there is no large cadre of slightly younger but experienced leaders to step into their shoes. Russia is therefore likely to skip a generation, or at least to promote scores of men and women who are many decades younger than their predecessors were when they rose to power. Such a transition is likely to occur swiftly, far earlier than most today expect, and with a decisive impact.
Who, then, are Russia’s future leaders? One thing is for sure: we shall see the emergence of an emphatically post-Soviet generation of Russian men and women in leadership roles. Considering that Putin himself was almost 40 when the USSR collapsed and that he is now in his third decade in power, the contrast between members of his cohort and their post-Soviet successors could not be greater, far sharper than any generational divide in the West. Beyond the rising generation’s lack of rooting in the Soviet era and addiction to new information technologies, it is members of that cohort who fought and died in the war and whose professional and personal lives have been most affected by it.
Those Russian men and women who will soon take charge of national life are by no means a homogeneous cohort. In fact, they consist of three quite different sub-groups: first, the upwardly mobile professional men and women in diverse fields who live in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Novosibirsk; second, the far more numerous group of men and women in smaller cities and towns across the federation; and third, the 900,000 young Russians who fled the country in 2022 when Putin announced his war on Ukraine. Despite their differences, they will emerge onto the national stage together, with an impact that is as yet unknown but will inevitably be consequential.
The young men and women of the major cities view themselves as God’s anointed and conduct themselves accordingly. Lifted by relatively good salaries, they are competent, worldly, and ambitious, yet very judicious in choosing with whom to associate and which causes to espouse. While there are a few outspoken souls among them, most of them are quiet and prefer fashionable socializing to risky political engagements.
By careful design, very few of the million and a half million of Russian men who died or were disabled in the war came from the big cities. Most of these came from smaller centers or towns that were barely touched by the oil-fed boom that lasted into 2011. This second group comprises those who survived. Most cities with populations under 100,000 lost population after 2010, causing the number of jobs available to this group to plummet. Those not drafted were lucky if they found work in war-related industries, but they would be unemployed when the war ended.
Their wives and young families are already suffering. Experiencing the decay of local life resulting from the collapse of local budgets, young men and women in this group cannot help but compare their fate unfavorably with that of those only a few years older, and their own poverty with the comforts of their undrafted contemporaries in the largest cities. It is no wonder that millions of such young people came to despise the war and everything related to it, and that today they harbor resentments that have yet to be aired publicly.
A much smaller yet very important segment of the rising generation is comprised of the estimated 900,000 young men and women who fled Russia after 2022 and the smaller number who departed thereafter. There were certainly many draft dodgers and scammers among this third group, but there were also many skilled engineers, computer programmers, and architects among those who fled.
Some have settled permanently abroad, but the war’s end will doubtless bring a flood of returnees, who will bring with them important skills, international contacts, and expectations that have been fanned by their experience abroad. Prominent among them will be political activists and pundits from many fields, who have been meeting abroad and have formed networks of like-minded people both abroad and in Russia itself.
This successor generation will come to power on the heels of a defeated and discredited regime. Its members will pick over the ruins of the Putin era, saving what they consider worthy and discarding the rest. Both the differences and the commonalities among these three segments in the rising generation are bound to affect Russia’s politics. While it is far too early to predict, it is more than likely that the sheer number of those who stayed home in smaller cities and towns and who suffered the most wartime casualties will lead that group to demand higher taxes on wealth, fiscal decentralization, and both local and regional self-government.
Those who have lived and worked abroad may hold central roles in international investments and foreign relations. At the same time, it is also safe to assume that many already active in major cities will demand that the government not interfere with their enterprises or overtax them. Members of all three groups will likely view the ideology and chauvinist harrumphing of the Putin era with revulsion, and will delay years before embracing any new national ideology.
Obviously, we can only speculate about how members of Russia’s successor generation will view their country’s place in the world. However, we can be sure that any arrangements regarding Ukraine, Russia, and the West that Putin or his immediate successors make today are bound to be temporary. Not only are Putin, his team, and his generation all long in the tooth, but their eyes are focused on the rear-view mirror, trying to salvage what they can of their dignity after a bold initiative that went badly awry. We should therefore not expect great discontinuity in Moscow’s first steps to end the war and beyond, but we can be confident that they will be temporary and that more fundamental shifts will soon follow.
These will be driven by the diverse members of the rising generation who have either been neglected by national policy or exploited as cannon fodder. They will likely reject Putin’s fantasies of imperial leadership and the martial pomp that accompanied it, just as their forebears turned their backs on the empty pomposity that preceded and accompanied the Crimean War. No one knows whether or how long such a period of relative openness and reform will last, or whether or when it might be followed by a new phase of imperial conquest and domestic repression.
The Western Response
Whatever the longer-term prospects for democratization, Russia’s disastrous war on Ukraine has created the potential for a period of reform and renewal in Russia. How should the United States and Europe respond in the present? In the short run, they will still be dealing with Putin or members of his circle. They should have learned by now that Putin respects only armed might, and that no deal will provide more than a pause in the battle. It is therefore imperative for NATO to continue to support Kyiv militarily as its forces grind down Russia’s willingness and ability to sustain the war.
When more serious negotiations finally begin, the Western partners should bear in mind that a successor generation is on the verge of power in Russia and that they should therefore not “hand away the store” beforehand. A resolute and unhurried negotiating posture, combined with quiet outreach to the rising generation of Russians, will hasten the inevitable transition in Moscow. Only this promises the kind of long-term settlement and peace that Ukraine, Europe, and America all seek.
Younger Russian men and women are already exploring paths to their future and bringing to that task a far deeper understanding of the world than their predecessors. Their grasp of modernity embraces the West, while also taking sober cognizance of China, India, Asia, and the Middle East. Americans and Europeans should engage with them as colleagues, potential competitors, and friends.
Given the rich and sometimes painful life experiences of younger Russians, there will be no place for the condescension that marred many East-West interactions after the collapse of the USSR. Instead, the inevitable rise of a new generation in Russian public life brings the West an opportunity to listen to new voices from post-Putin Russia and not do all the talking itself.
About the Author: S. Frederick Starr
S. Frederick Starr is the founding chairman of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute and Silk Road Studies Program, a joint transatlantic research and policy center affiliated with the American Foreign Policy Council (AFPC) in Washington and the Institute for Security and Development Policy in Stockholm. Dr. Starr is a distinguished fellow for Eurasia at AFPC.
