Kenneth Glad
More than four years into the war in Ukraine, Vladimir Putin’s rule is being tested by elite unease, economic warnings and questions over who could eventually replace him. None of these pressures points to an imminent break, but together they suggest a Kremlin with fewer easy choices.
The war has left Putin in a more exposed position than he appeared to expect when Russia launched its full-scale invasion in 2022.
According to The Times, Moscow has become increasingly alert to internal threats and security breaches, including concerns that surveillance systems or mobile data could be used to track senior officials.
Sergei Shoigu, Russia’s former defense minister and now secretary of the country’s Security Council, was cited as a figure who still holds influence among senior military commanders.
That matters because any serious challenge to Putin would likely depend less on street politics than on calculations made inside Russia’s military, security and business elite.
Taken together, the reports suggest that Putin’s greatest vulnerability may not be one obvious rival, but the narrowing space inside the political system he built.
Economic warnings
Additional economic context came from 19FortyFive, citing Russian academic Robert Nigmatulin’s warning at last month’s Moscow Economic Forum that Russia faced an “existential crisis.”
Nigmatulin pointed to weak incomes, high mortality, inflation, poor investment and failures to implement Putin’s economic orders since 2012. His warning was blunt: “We are late! TIME DOES NOT WAIT!”
Digi24 furthermore cited polling indicating that Putin’s approval had fallen to its lowest level since the beginning of the war, even in surveys linked to the Russian state.
No easy exit
The succession question remains dangerous because no senior figure can openly campaign to inherit Putin’s position.
Alexei Dyumin, Sergei Sobyanin and Dmitry Patrushev are the names discussed by analysts.
Opposition figure Ilya Yashin was quoted as saying: “I doubt Putin will be able to keep power for another 10 years.”
Yashin also argued that Putin’s personal rule makes a peaceful handover unlikely. For analysts cited in the reports, the fear is not only that Putin stays too long, but that any successor could preserve or harden the same system.
That makes succession not just a question of who follows Putin, but what kind of system survives him.
Sources: Digi24, The Times, 19FortyFive
