Over 1600 days of war. Is that a lot? Maybe it is when you consider full-scale war has lasted more than a sixth of Putin’s time in power. Really this is just an excuse for me to do something in this blog I’m usually critical of others for: a bit of Kremlinology. It’s prompted by what seems to me to be the beginning of accelerated unravelling of the spool we could call ‘decision avoidance once path is taken’. It started unspooling in 2022 and now the reel is just singing as the twine pays out. When will it end? Well, it would be foolish to judge.
I like Stanimir Dobrev’s coverage of the fuel crisis of 2026; I always find his work useful to triangulate with “my guy” observations in the field. On Twitter, Dobrev wrote last week: “If the Kremlin had a plan on how to deal with a new fuel crisis in 2026 they could have signed long term contracts for fuel deliveries earlier in the year when fuel prices were low, they could have tried inventive ways to store fuel in non permanent storage. They exported.”
“There are plenty of reason to say they don’t have a contingency for something that Ukraine was bound to repeat based on 2025 results.”
“Now what they have as their main options are rationing and forcing people to abandon vehicle use.”
“Destructive optimism, they believed the situation would improve for them while the higher energy costs and imposing some costs on the US would aid them. They simply did not take into account they might be forced to look at importing products. Chronic arrogance strikes again”
The last sentence here is telling for today’s theme: a Russian version of magical thinking. While some say Putin has lost touch with reality, it’s probably better to think of him being cognitively trammelled by his anxiety, poor knowledge of his own country, and his compulsions to control. However, these alone should not be fatal.
Meanwhile, Gosha from the ‘objekt’ overcomes his own fears to write to me and we later talk about his ‘options’. The last time Gosha took the risk to write to me – usually he prefers only in-person conversations – was during the outbreak of the war in February 2022. Then he ended up relocating to Asia with his family for three months until the money ran out. Since 2024 he’s worked at what I will just call the ‘objekt’. ‘They burnt it down’, he writes me in early July this year. ‘What to do? What’s the view from Europe?’ It’s hard to know what he means by the latter. But it could be part of a trend where some Russians ask me to evaluate European support for Ukraine. In other words, as Dobrev indicated, the strategy of targeting fuel infrastructure is working.
Gosha has told me lots of things about his wartime life. He’s not unusual in taking risks, though almost all the ethnographically ‘heavy’ conversations have been in person (and not only with Gosha). One of the recent exchanges was about how few people want to work at these ‘objekty’ because there’s no money for spares, no money for shelters for the staff, and while furloughed, staff get their ‘basic’ pay only – not enough to live on.
Gosha used to occasionally say he trusted ‘the leadership’ to have a plan. But what is Putin doing in response to all this? According to Meduza it is going to be more double-down because he is focused on taking Donbas. But this seems predicated on his poor grasp on both the economic realities and the capacity for societal resilience inside his own country.
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Andrey Pertsev among others recently noted how the Presidential Administration is only the most visible actor vainly attempting to signal to Putin that his popularity is dangerously tied to the prosecution of the war and that this brings perilous risks to the presidency. Pertsev writes that regime-adjacent sociologists have begun releasing their surveys later than usual, and one report was even quickly removed shortly after publication. What to do with ‘early warning’ signals? The answer seems to be pretend they never happened. A process that started in the spring of 2026 is obviously accelerating because of the Ukrainian switch-up to US-sanctioned consistent strikes on fuel infrastructure.
Notwithstanding a proud discursive embracing of multipolarity and the assumptions that ‘partners’ will get behind his leadership of the multipolar world, a more realistic assessment would be that bluster hides an increasingly ‘paranoid style’ of politics – even if that politics is mainly hidden from direct view behind the Kremlin walls.
What is really happening, since 2022, is what we can call Putin’s double-down on his core emergent ideology about encirclement by Western forces, a coalition intent on dismantling Russia or severely weakening it. Since the war became an entrenched reality, it’s important to note also his wavering belief in the concept of Russian allies. This existential doubt about even the possibility of allies can be deduced from the inconstancy of relations with mercantile and unreliable fellow travellers in the journey towards multipolarity.
More importantly though than a fortress mentality itself is what could be termed a resort to magical thinking by the core inner elite as they increasingly refuse to accept reality – even that reality reported to them by sociologists and economic ministries and Central Bank. Part of that magical thinking is embedded within a classic, deeper cognitive set of (mistaken) beliefs: the idea that Russia is a ‘lucky civilization’ and that fortune ever shines on it. (This is easily shown to be both strongly held and a mistaken belief on a long enough timeline: look at Prussia and the Miracle of the House of Brandenburg, for example). (There’s also the characteristic social racism of the elite who genuinely, and equally mistakenly, do believe that most Russians live like animals and therefore can put up with endless privation – but that’s a topic I’ve done to death).
The cognitive pitfall of voluntarism and trust to luck is powerful. Revealing was Putin’s response in late spring to the ‘news’ that the Russian economy faces recession. His response was declarative – ‘fix it’! Behind the façade: that words of the leader can magically right the situation, lies the old Russian ‘muddle-through’ mentality. Putin resorts to ‘avos’ (a concept that expresses the idea that contingency or luck will save the day and course-correction or re-evaluation is therefore unnecessary. Putin, after all, does believe that Russia is a ‘special’, or lucky civilization with a destiny.
This in turn should idea us to the familiar idea that decisionmakers get trapped by their over-identification with earlier policy errors yet are unable to learn from them and which then leads to increasingly reactive irrationalism and trusting to fortune. In other words, this is a form of path-dependency and even walled-in thinking. The war must continue until complete victory (taking the remaining parts of Donbas at a rate of 2.6 kilometres a day would take until 2032 at the earliest), or almost unthinkable concessions from the US, Europe and Ukraine.
The sacrifice demographically, and in terms of economic costs to the country is secondary to this aim-fixation. Sunk cost fallacy mixed in with avos’. Once a pathway is taken and significant resources expended on it, it becomes increasingly difficult to explore alternative possibilities because that would lead to admitting some failure in the path taken. You don’t even need psychology here but just systems theory. There is good evidence even now that much of the poor performance militarily has been because of the reinforcement of prior failure (and strategy) due to co-dependency between the executive (including Putin himself) and the Chiefs of Staff and Security Council.
This line of thinking can be evidenced by reports from insiders accessed by the RAND Corporation which concluded that Putin was making key decisions largely on his own, without substantial influence from the Russian General Staff at least in 2023-2024. Putin’s failure to use the opportunity of his Alaska summit to extract realistic concessions from Ukraine is evidence of an increasingly irrationality where clear strategic aims get lost in favour of magical thinking based on ‘muddling through’, and believing that things will turn out well because of Russia’s history/civilisational superiority/force of arms. This is a form of metaphysical voluntarism (personal will is the basic factor in human conduct) mixed with a belief in good luck or fortune emerging from not necessarily overconfidence, but dangerous avoidance of critical thinking. After all, Putin also believes all other political actors are either weak, puppets, or inferior in some way.
While there is plenty of opportunity for those willing to take Putin at his word when he expresses a worldview aligned with a multipolar world and future, at heart he remains a certified ‘subaltern’ (as Viacheslav Morozov memorably argued) Eurocentric or even Anglocentric thinker. He believes only recognition – and some concessions by the hegemon – matter to Russia’s and his own futures. With Trump at the helm for at least another two years, Putin is unlikely to get genuine satisfaction he craves.
It remains for a ‘first mover’ in the Russian security elite or government to burst the bubble and ‘speak truth to power’. However, contrary to the myth that the first mover gains an advantage in negotiations or innovation, politically, the first mover is always more likely to become a scapegoat in Russian politics. Nonetheless, what we often forget is that Putin’s real power was based on his ability to elicit (not just force) compromise among the elite. In return, they were able to enjoy a high level of rent seeking at the cost of long term economic stagnation. In times of distress, he risks becoming the scapegoat that will be sorely needed in the next two years.
