Estonia’s intelligence chief has just offered one of the more arresting judgments about Vladimir Putin’s Russia to emerge from a Western intelligence service during this war. He says Russia is in “a very bad place” and warns that political change in an authoritarian system can sometimes happen with extraordinary speed. The headline inevitably becomes revolution. The intelligence question is considerably more interesting: what would have to be happening inside Russia for a government that still appears firmly in control to become less stable than it looks?
Rosin is worth listening to for reasons that go beyond Estonia’s geography. Estonia spent almost five decades incorporated into the Soviet Union, regained its independence in 1991 and today sits directly on Russia’s western frontier. Understanding Moscow is therefore not an academic exercise for Tallinn. It is a matter of national survival. The Estonian Foreign Intelligence Service spends much of its institutional energy studying Russia’s political leadership, military capabilities, intelligence services and intentions. Earlier this year Rosin’s service made an important judgment that also restrains the more sensational interpretation of his latest remarks: it assessed that Russia had no intention of militarily attacking Estonia or another NATO member during the coming year, while warning that Russia’s continuing military reform could increase its capabilities later.
Estonia
That distinction matters. Rosin is not telling us that Putin will fall tomorrow, that crowds are about to fill Red Square, or that another Russian revolution has been scheduled. He is describing something more subtle and potentially more important: the accumulation of military, economic, demographic and political pressures inside an authoritarian system whose apparent stability depends heavily upon confidence in the man at its center.
There is a familiar mistake in intelligence work when an official says something dramatic. The headline gets ahead of the evidence. A warning becomes a prediction, a possibility becomes a timetable, and before long analysis has been replaced by speculation.
Two of the most consequential American strategists of the last century spent their careers resisting precisely that temptation.
George F. Kennan was the American diplomat and Soviet specialist serving in Moscow who, in February 1946, sent Washington what became known as the Long Telegram. Kennan tried to explain not simply what Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union was doing, but why the system behaved as it did. His analysis became the intellectual foundation for containment, the strategy of resisting Soviet expansion without assuming that every confrontation required war. Kennan’s enduring contribution was methodological as much as geopolitical: understand an adversary from inside his history, political system, fears and conception of his own interests before deciding what his behavior means.
Andrew W. Marshall attacked strategic problems from a different direction. Beginning in 1973, Marshall created and then led the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment for forty-two years, advising defense secretaries from the Nixon administration through the Obama administration. His job was not to predict next Tuesday’s crisis. It was to examine long-term military competition: what each side could sustain, where technology or economics might change the balance, which apparent advantages were temporary and which structural, and how an opponent might adapt. The Department of Defense described him after his death at 97, as the pioneer of the practice of comparing not simply weapons and forces but the broader national characteristics shaping military competition.
Put Kennan and Marshall together and Rosin’s warning becomes more useful. Do not begin by asking whether Putin is about to fall. Ask what is actually changing inside Russia, what remains durable, what may be temporary, and whether pressures that appear manageable individually are becoming more consequential as they begin to interact.
Russia may not be approaching revolution.
It may be entering a more brittle phase of the war.
THE PRESSURES ARE REAL
Russia has absorbed extraordinary military losses while the price of replacing those men has increased. For much of the war, the Kremlin managed the political consequences by distributing the human cost unevenly. Contract soldiers, poorer regions, prisoners, migrants and communities far from Moscow and St. Petersburg could bear a disproportionate share of the burden while millions of other Russians experienced the war principally through television, sanctions, inflation and patriotic rhetoric.
That arrangement helped Putin separate support for the war from personal exposure to it. Another large compulsory mobilization would make that separation harder to maintain.
The numbers require particular care because casualty statistics in this war have become instruments of information warfare as well as measures of battlefield performance. Ukraine’s General Staff has reported cumulative Russian personnel losses exceeding 1.4 million. That figure is a Ukrainian wartime estimate; it should neither be discarded nor presented as an independently audited count of Russian deaths. More importantly, “personnel losses” does not mean soldiers killed. Depending upon the methodology, casualty estimates can include killed, wounded and missing personnel, and some wounded soldiers eventually return to duty.
Russian KIA - WIA
Independent analysis nevertheless confirms that the scale of Russian attrition is enormous. The Center for Strategic and International Studies estimated in July that Russian forces had suffered approximately 1.4 million battlefield casualties between February 2022 and June 2026, including an estimated 400,000 to 450,000 fatalities. CSIS estimated Russian casualties during 2026 at roughly 30,000 to 34,000 per month, while recruitment was running at approximately 27,000 per month.
NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte has publicly described Russian monthly losses as similarly extraordinary. The precise numbers should not distract us from the analytical point: Russia possesses an enormous population and can continue generating forces, but it is paying heavily for comparatively incremental battlefield gains.
Then, on August 27, Ukrainian intelligence provided a more immediate warning. Kyiv’s Defense Intelligence and Foreign Intelligence Service said Russia had suffered approximately 240,000 personnel losses between January and July 2026, including at least 140,000 it classified as “irrecoverable losses,” while recruiting fewer than 232,000 contract soldiers during the same period. “Irrecoverable” is a military accounting category rather than a synonym for battlefield deaths; depending upon the accounting system it can encompass personnel who will not return to their units, including those killed, missing, captured or permanently removed from service. Because these particular figures come from Ukrainian intelligence, they should be understood as Kyiv’s assessment rather than independently verified Russian personnel records.
The same briefing said the Russian General Staff had prepared a scenario for mobilizing another 600,000 people—300,000 during 2026 and another 300,000 in 2027. Mobilization in this context means something different from offering larger signing bonuses to volunteers. It would allow the state to compel substantially more citizens into military service. That could solve an immediate force-generation problem while creating a political one by moving the personal cost of the war into families and communities that Putin has spent four years trying to insulate from it.
Current Russian Mobilization Strategy
Russia has also reached beyond its own population. An April investigation by the International Federation for Human Rights, Truth Hounds and the Kazakhstan International Bureau for Human Rights and Rule of Law concluded that Russia had recruited at least 27,000 foreign nationals from more than 130 countries since the full-scale invasion began, documenting cases involving deceptive and coercive recruitment practices.
None of this means Russia is running out of men. It is not. Nor does it mean the Russian army is about to collapse. Russia can increase bonuses, recruit abroad, accept declining manpower quality, move people from civilian employment into uniform and, if Putin judges it necessary, compel another large group of Russians into service. The more important issue is what those choices cost elsewhere. The military and the civilian economy are increasingly competing for the same finite supply of working-age people, against a demographic background already complicated before the invasion by low fertility, an aging population and comparatively high male mortality.
The Kremlin can continue buying manpower. What becomes progressively more expensive is insulating the rest of Russia from the transaction.
The same logic applies to the economy. Russia adapted to Western sanctions after 2022 far more effectively than many early forecasts anticipated. Energy exports continued, trade was redirected, defense production expanded and the state demonstrated considerable capacity to mobilize resources for war. Any analysis that begins with the assumption that sanctions should already have collapsed the Russian economy begins with evidence that reality has disproved.
But resilience is not the same thing as absence of cost. A wartime economy can simultaneously produce more weapons and become less healthy in other respects. Military factories compete with civilian industry for workers and capital. Government spending sustains output while increasing fiscal pressure. Scarce labor becomes more expensive. Resources devoted to replacing destroyed equipment cannot be used elsewhere. The question is not whether Russia’s economy suddenly stops functioning; it is how much distortion and additional expense Moscow must absorb to keep the war functioning.
Ukraine has now introduced another cost by taking the war into Russia’s energy infrastructure.
Repeated long-range drone attacks against refineries and associated facilities have become sufficiently disruptive that, by late August, Reuters reported Russian gasoline production had fallen to roughly 70 percent of domestic demand, forcing Moscow to increase imports and extend restrictions on fuel exports. Russia remains one of the world’s great energy producers, and this should not be mistaken for evidence that the country is running out of oil. Refineries turn crude oil into usable products such as gasoline and diesel; damaging refining capacity can therefore create domestic fuel problems even in a country sitting on enormous petroleum reserves.
That is strategically more interesting than another photograph of a burning refinery. Ukraine is forcing Moscow to spend resources defending infrastructure hundreds of kilometers from the front while simultaneously imposing costs on the system that finances and supplies the war. Putin has now issued a decree permitting temporary state control of critical infrastructure damaged by Ukrainian attacks when private owners fail adequately to repair or protect it—another indication that the problem has become significant enough to require intervention from the center.
None of this proves economic collapse.
It demonstrates penetration of the protective barrier that once kept much of the war away from ordinary Russian life.
For most of Putin’s rule, the political bargain was comparatively straightforward. Russians were not required to exercise meaningful control over the state. In return, Putin offered order after the chaos of the 1990s, rising national confidence, a restored sense of Russian power and a degree of predictability in daily life. Political opposition could be marginalized because enough of the population and, more importantly, enough of the elite believed the system worked better for them than the available alternatives.
The war is steadily renegotiating that bargain. The important question is not whether Russians suddenly stop supporting Putin. It is whether the cost of preserving his system is beginning to rise faster than the benefits the system can distribute.
WATCH THE PEOPLE WHO KEEP THE SYSTEM ALIVE
This is where Kennan’s method becomes especially useful. Public opinion matters, but authoritarian governments do not survive through opinion polling alone. They survive because institutions and powerful individuals continue behaving as though the existing order will endure.
Putin does not personally govern every ministry, command every military formation, manage every corporation or police every Russian city. His power rests upon a network: the presidential administration, intelligence and security services, military leadership, National Guard, regional governors, economic technocrats, state corporations, wealthy business interests and political clients. Some are loyal. Some are afraid. Some profit from the arrangement. Many are probably all three.
Putin’s Grip On Russia
The distinction that matters is between affection and confidence.
A Russian official does not have to love Putin to support him. He merely has to believe that his position, wealth, family and personal safety are more secure with Putin than they would be during a struggle over what comes after him. Personalized authoritarian systems can therefore remain remarkably durable even when many people inside them privately dislike the leader. Collective fear of uncertainty becomes one of the mechanisms holding the regime together.
That is why changes in elite behavior can be more revealing than changes in public rhetoric. Wealthy Russians being required to surrender more resources to the state, politically directed seizures of assets, bureaucratic infighting, unusual prosecutions, unexplained removals and competition among security institutions do not individually demonstrate regime instability. They become important when enough of them begin pointing toward declining confidence in the center.
Russia has already experienced one extraordinary demonstration of how quickly that confidence can be tested.
WHAT PRIGOZHIN SHOWED US
Yevgeny Prigozhin was not a democratic dissident. He was a businessman who became wealthy through his relationship with the Kremlin and built the Wagner Group, a private military organization that fought on Russia’s behalf in Ukraine, Syria and several African countries. During the battle for Bakhmut in Ukraine, Prigozhin increasingly and publicly attacked Russia’s senior military leadership, accusing Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and General Valery Gerasimov of incompetence and of denying Wagner the ammunition it needed.
In Russia - Events Can Turn on a Rubble
In June 2023 the dispute became an armed rebellion.
Wagner forces seized key military facilities in Rostov-on-Don, the headquarters city for Russia’s war effort in southern Ukraine, and an armed column began driving north toward Moscow. Putin appeared on television and denounced the rebellion as treason. Russian authorities introduced emergency security measures. Yet the column advanced hundreds of kilometers before Prigozhin abruptly halted the operation under a Belarusian-brokered arrangement.
The mutiny failed. Putin remained president. Prigozhin died two months later when his aircraft crashed northwest of Moscow.
But judging the episode only by its outcome misses what it exposed.
For several hours, the world watched a heavily centralized Russian state confront an armed internal challenge and discovered that the machinery of state power did not respond everywhere with the instantaneous cohesion its public image suggested. The lesson was not that Putin was weak or that another coup was imminent. It was that authoritarian control and institutional initiative are not the same thing.
A system built around instructions from the center can appear extraordinarily disciplined when the center is unquestionably strong. Its vulnerability emerges when officials become uncertain about who will prevail. A governor who delays, a commander who waits for clearer orders, an intelligence officer who protects his organization before protecting the leader, or a businessman who begins moving his money may each be behaving rationally. If enough people make similar calculations simultaneously, however, the political character of the crisis can change very quickly.
That is the useful meaning behind Rosin’s warning that change can happen “overnight.” He is not giving us the date of the next Russian revolution. He is describing how confidence can fail faster than the underlying pressures that caused it.
MARSHALL WOULD MEASURE THE CHOICES
Andrew Marshall would probably have been less interested in the word revolution than in the changing structure of Putin’s choices.
Net assessment—the discipline Marshall developed at the Pentagon—asks us to compare competitors over time rather than simply photograph their strength at a particular moment. Russia may possess more artillery ammunition today while simultaneously exhausting some resource that becomes important three years from now. Ukraine may lose territory while forcing Russia to pay a price disproportionate to the ground gained. A military can grow more tactically proficient while its country’s economic choices become progressively worse.
Marshall Practiced Advanced Analysis - Asking Better Questions - Never Predicting
Seen that way, Putin’s problem is not that he has no options.
It is that his options increasingly impose costs on one another.
Continuing the war consumes manpower, equipment, money and political tolerance. Another mobilization could generate soldiers but remove workers from an already constrained labor market and spread the war’s human cost more broadly through Russian society. Avoiding mobilization reduces that political risk but makes replacing battlefield losses harder. Expanding attacks against Ukraine can increase Ukrainian suffering and damage its military capacity, but it also encourages Kyiv and its supporters to deepen Ukraine’s long-range strike capability against targets inside Russia. Ending the war without an outcome that can credibly be presented as victory creates a different problem: explaining why Russia paid such an extraordinary price for something substantially less than the transformative outcome Moscow originally sought.
This does not mean Putin is trapped.
It means comfortable choices are becoming scarcer.
Thinking like Russia requires us to understand that Putin’s power rests on more than coercion. It rests on confidence among the security services, military leadership, political and economic elite, and institutions whose obedience makes presidential authority real. As long as those people believe the system will still be standing tomorrow, they have every reason to defend it today.
The warning comes when that confidence begins to fracture. Authoritarian systems rarely announce the moment. The ministries still function, generals still salute and television still broadcasts the approved story. The change appears first in behavior: a commander hesitates, an intelligence chief protects his institution, a governor waits, a businessman moves his money. Prigozhin’s march toward Moscow showed how quickly such individual calculations can acquire strategic consequences.
That is the importance of Kaupo Rosin’s warning. He is not predicting revolution, and neither should we. Kennan taught us to understand Russia from inside the pressures shaping its behavior; Marshall taught us to measure those pressures over time rather than mistake a snapshot for a trend. Russia can remain formidable, repressive and dangerous while becoming less stable beneath the surface.
The mistake would be to predict Putin’s collapse. The greater mistake would be to assume that because he has not collapsed, nothing fundamental is changing. The question is not whether Putin falls tomorrow. It is whether the people who make his power possible eventually begin to believe that protecting Putin and protecting Russia are no longer the same thing.
If that day comes, the Russia problem will have changed before the world realizes it.
Coming Soon:
By: Ken Robinson
Nice try but again ( after 4 years): the demise of Russia/ Putin being 'predicted'. It is standard propaganda.
I would start w Europe as the obvious nr 1 on the demise list. The baltic states are completely dependant on Europe/ the EU. And Europe is completely dependant upon the US, which is not able to directly turn the tide but rather sees Europe as the frontline where the casualties pile up.
This raises a question that may be even deeper than the debate over whether the Taliban have brought “security” or “stability” to Afghanistan.
What happens when violence does not disappear, but changes form—when it moves from the battlefield into the institutions of power?
A country can become quieter without becoming more peaceful, and a government can exercise effective control without necessarily possessing political legitimacy. The harder question, therefore, may be whether Afghanistan can eventually move from a political order sustained by force toward one in which power can be contested, changed, and legitimised through political participation.
In that sense, the real measure of peace may not be the absence of war, but whether Afghans eventually regain a peaceful mechanism for changing power.
— Wahidullah Noorzai