Growing Cracks in Putin’s Dictatorship

At his Substack, Senior Fellow Michael McFaul says signs of stress in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s grip on his country are slowly trickling out for all to see. The war is not going well, the internet is practically unusable because of restrictions, and the economy is teetering. Even low estimates suggest Russia has suffered about 1.2 million casualties in its war against Ukraine. Citing Russia’s highly dubious, state-owned polling firms, McFaul says Putin’s approval fell to 66 percent in April, a surprisingly low number in a nation where expressing displeasure with him publicly or even criticizing the “special military operation” can result in a penal sentence. On the economic front, high oil prices are not enough to stem the collapse of the private sector and the overgrowth of military industry to feed the Russian war machine. “The signs of strain visible in Russia today are limited and fragmented, and on their own, they are unlikely to produce change,” McFaul writes. “Yet taken together, they hint at a system that is no longer as stable as it once seemed.”