Reading tea leaves can’t predict a person’s future, but it can capture a gullible clientele with immersive, meditative ritual. The same applies to what currently passes for Russia expertise in the U.S.-led West. Attention given to certain news events related to next month’s elections for the Duma, the lower house of Russia’s parliament, serves as a perfect illustration.
As the liberal Yabloko party got dropped from the ballot, a chorus of analysts came up with predictable claims that Putin increasingly fears his own people. Ukrainian deep strikes and Western sanctions, the story goes, have forced him to tighten the screws to try to prevent social unrest. Also predictably, another story in the hackneyed “Russia is finished” genre is making headlines: Russia’s major state-run bank VEB has fired its chief economist Andrey Klepach for making dark predictions of the country’s future.
One can only pity the professional doomsayers for the shortage of really inspiring stories as they try—for the umpteenth time—to sell the idea that Ukraine should suffer for just a little while longer in hopes of Russian collapse. The current tea leaves are not nearly as reassuring as those observed at the time of the mercenary Wagner Group’s mutiny in 2023 or Ukraine’s Kursk incursion in 2024.
As for the Yabloko ban, we’ve been here already. It echoes the removal of the party’s founder, Grigory Yavlinsky, from the presidential ballot in 2012, when Putin faced a genuinely powerful wave of public protests against his rule, known as the Bolotnaya protests. Yavlinsky was not a real rival, but his party had helped field thousands of observers who registered gross violations at the Duma election a few months earlier. The Kremlin didn’t want it to happen again. Besides, it had its own preferred pseudo-liberal spoiler candidate, the oligarch Mikhail Prokhorov, so Yavlinsky, who threatened to steal his votes, was given the boot.
Just like 14 years ago, the Kremlin is now using a mixture of repressive and propagandist methods to preserve a status quo it finds comfortable. One can only speculate about what prompted the Kremlin’s decision on Yabloko. Possibly, though improbably, internal Kremlin polling showed the party could overcome the 5 percent threshold and enter the Duma for the first time since 2003. Or maybe it was stealing too many votes from the New People, the Kremlin’s current pet project in the quasi-liberal field.
In any case, it was a technical decision typical of this authoritarian regime and doesn’t reflect any significant change in public attitudes or in the political pressure that Putin faces. Consider: Sixty-six percent of Russians support the actions of the Russian army in Ukraine, according to the latest Levada Centre poll. The number of those preferring peace talks to prolonged hostilities stands at 62 percent, but it has almost always hovered above 50 percent since the start of the war. Indeed, the only time when it dipped below 50 percent was a brief period in the spring of 2023 when it felt like Russia could be losing.
The firing of Klepach is another storm in a teacup. A prominent economist who once served as the deputy minister of economics, Klepach fell victim to his own candor at a professional event that happened in May but came to public attention only recently when Russian émigré media picked up the story. Klepach’s speech was mainly an attack on the Central Bank for its religious adherence to neoliberal dogma, which he said would undermine the economy in the long run.
The quotes cherrypicked by anti-Putin media derive from a follow-up Q&A session. Klepach indeed said that he believed Russia would face a social crisis, that Ukraine was winning the war of economic attrition, and he made a questionable claim that no one could have predicted the Russian Revolution of 1917 even just a year earlier. But he said in the same breath that the Russian economy would withstand any storm, and he also made it clear that he supported Putin’s war.
A business executive losing his job for inadvertently causing unwanted media hype—quelle surprise. More interesting is the level of attention these stories continue to get, especially by contrast with far more apocalyptic stories from Ukraine that Western media tend to overlook—like the brutal mobilisation that imperils long-term political stability, or the devastation Russia has inflicted on Ukraine’s economy in response to Ukraine’s damaging, but considerably less impactful, deep strikes against Russia.
Imbalanced and selective coverage of the Russian–Ukrainian conflict by Western mainstream media is part of a familiar problem: the lack of introspection exhibited by the U.S.-led West about its relations with and apparent misreadings of Russia. Failing to even contemplate the question of why myriad Russia doomsday forecasts have failed to materialize over a quarter of a century (The Atlantic’s infamous “Russia is Finished” cover story turned 25 this year) illustrates well the phenomenon.
Perhaps the question is rarely asked because one part of the answer is too troubling to ponder: Rudderless, trigger-happy, and captured by jingoistic grifters, the U.S.-led West serves as Putin’s most bulletproof insurance against any domestic upheaval. So long as Putin can present himself as defending Russia from a malign and aggressive West, Russians will be less likely to rise up against him. That would remain the case even amid a sharp economic downturn, which Russia is currently very far away from; It still maintains better living standards (measured by GDP PPP) than EU countries like Latvia.
To be sure, Russians are growing tired of Putin. A considerable portion of the population (sociologists typically estimate around a quarter) is firmly hostile to him. In the same Levada poll, a whopping 10 percent say what could easily cost them a prison sentence—that Russia, not Ukraine or the West, is responsible for the ongoing war. But the entire trajectory of the West’s conflict with Russia, especially the plight of Ukrainians, persuades most Russians that Putin’s familiar evil is safer than the West’s irrational geopolitical adventurism.
A key early moment in this story was NATO’s Bucharest Summit in 2008—attended by Putin, who at the time still hoped for a Western–Russian partnership—when President George W. Bush made an ill-fated decision to open the path for Ukraine (and Georgia) to join the alliance, lighting a fuse that led to war. The story continued with the West obstructing every chance for a diplomatic settlement of the Russia–Ukraine conflict that began in 2014—the Maidan agreements that year, the Minsk framework agreements after 2015, the Paris ceasefire agreements of 2019, and the Istanbul talks in 2022.
In recent years, other conflicts have confirmed Russians’ view that the collective West is a belligerent and dangerous threat. The devastation in Gaza and the unwarranted attack on Iran seem, to them, vindication of Putin’s narrative that the conflict with Western powers was inevitable and that it was better to fight in a neighboring country than inside Russia itself.
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If the Western goal has been to divert both Russia and Ukraine from an authoritarian path and convert them to liberal democracy for the sake of eternal peace in Europe, then Western political planners have been making the most absurdly irrational choices throughout the conflict. That has included alienating Russia’s apolitical majority, as well as anti-Putin Russians, through rabid xenophobia from pro-Ukrainian psy-ops groups, as well as the tacit, if not overt, support for Ukrainian ethnonationalism, which draws inspiration from the totalitarian ideologies of Europe’s dreadful 1930s. The anti-Russia approach has also been openly cynical toward Ukrainians, as in downplaying the human rights catastrophe caused by mobilisation or ending the eligibility of draft-age Ukrainian men to seek asylum in the EU.
This seemingly self-defeating strategy makes much more sense when you realize that the goal is not a better Russia or Ukraine, but conflict itself, which Western planners have hoped would hobble Putin’s Russia. The longer conflict lasts, the more Western arms manufacturers will profit, though at the expense of the West’s own long-term interests and global clout.
Russians, for pragmatic reasons, likely will not rise up against Putin: They simply see the West as a greater threat to their security, quality of life, and even freedom than their dictatorial leader. That calculation may change once the war in Ukraine ends and the perception of the Western threat goes down. But even in that case, Russia would not be the optimistic, newly-minted democratic Russia of the 1990s, which the West could have integrated had its leaders possessed any vision or sense of history.
