Putin is a man on the edge. These are the tell-tale signs

Robert Service
Published 24 May 2026 2:31pm BST
Russians are brought up to rejoice in their past military triumphs. Tolstoy’s great novel War and Peace celebrated their hard-won victory over Napoleon. The Soviet army’s capture of Berlin in 1945 remains at the core of the Russian people’s sense of self-worth.

Woe betides a Russian leader who is seen to fail at war. Tsar Nicholas II never recovered politically from losing the war against Japan in 1905, a war that he had started and then mismanaged. In 1917 he was forced to abdicate in the February Revolution when blamed as commander-in-chief for failure against Germany and its allies in the Great War. In fact, the Russian army was acquitting itself well by that point in the fighting, and the Eastern Front was crucial in wearing down the German war machine. But Nicholas was seen as a loser and, as it were, given his marching orders.

Vladimir Putin has had several military successes that were easily achievable. Crimea was annexed in a walkover in 2014, and Syrian cities were bombed from the air starting in 2015 without need for ground forces. But Ukraine as a whole has proved a tougher enemy in the greater conflict he started in February 2022. This year, for the very first time, Victory Day saw a Red Square parade without tanks and the most advanced military hardware for fear of attack by Ukrainian drones. Cities deep in the Russian heartland have been attacked.

The Russian leader oversaw a pathetic spectacle at the Victory Day parade in the Red Square Credit: Getty Images
Putin planned for the war to be over within a few days. Some of his tank crews brought smart uniforms with them for the expected parade through the main streets of Kyiv. Instead, the fighting is in its fifth year and no sensible Russian imagines it is going smoothly for the Russian cause.

The civilian economy, starved by wartime priorities, is faltering and Putin is unable to protect people against a rise in the cost of living. Manpower for the armed forces is proving difficult. Russia is incurring at least 30,000 troop fatalities or casualties each month and Putin in November 2025 signed a law enabling the defence ministry to conduct conscription throughout the year, rather than in seasonal drafts. This will be a highly unpopular measure. When he attempted a partial mobilisation in autumn 2022, the public discontent was vocal and disturbing.

Putin goes on claiming that “victory will be ours”. He does have some high cards in his hand: one being Donald Trump, who has showered favours on him. Trump’s war against Iran could not have happened at a better time for Putin. The blockage of the Strait of Hormuz has already led the Americans to remove the ban on Russia selling oil to India. Putin’s tax revenues benefit by more than $100m per day, which he can use to buy more of the products he needs from China. Xi Jinping and Putin had a joyous encounter in Beijing last week.

But the atmosphere is heavy in the Kremlin. Ever since coming to the presidency in 2000, Putin has maintained tight control of TV news. The Telegram social media channel with its guarantees of privacy became the principal challenger to this monopoly. Not only Russian troops but Ukrainian ones too used it. This month Putin has restricted its operations, and evangelised for the rival Max channel, which provides no barriers to Federal Security Service (FSB) investigators.

The move has won him no friends, especially among Russian youth. Mass conscription will inevitably cause unpopularity. Until spring 2026 the army relied heavily on volunteers.

The blandishments are financial as well as patriotic. Troops are paid well by Russian standards, and until recently they mostly came from the poorer and rural parts of the federation where families are desperate to supplement their income. The switch to conscription will affect the swathes of society where young men want nothing to do with the war. The Russian high command’s penchant for treating conscripts as cannon fodder – or drone fodder in our day – is well understood.

Whether Putin can weather the storm clouds is unclear. He has militarised schooling and the media more systematically than any Kremlin ruler since Joseph Stalin. Like Stalin, he is an implacable ruler who punishes dissent severely. Politicians who annoy him suffer humiliation, as did ex-premier Mikhail Kasyanov, who was filmed in his bedroom with a lover. Oppositionist leader Boris Nemtsov was assassinated on a bridge near the Kremlin. Alexei Navalny was meant to be dispatched by the Novichok poison. He survived but his end came soon afterwards in a Siberian penal colony.

Putin cultivates an image of affability – he even calls the BBC correspondent “Steve”. He presents himself as the model of rationality and national duty. He is not anti-Ukrainian, he says, but anti-Nazi and he continues to condemn Zelensky, who is of Jewish parentage, as a neo-Nazi.

But the image is beginning to crack. Putin is 72 but starting to look older. The Ukraine war is a war of his choice. The ruler who brought stability, pride and a degree of contentment to Russia after the unsteady 1990s has thrown it all away. Change will come to Russia, but no one can tell when that will be.

Putin’s mind is fixed on proving he was right to invade Ukraine rather than benefit from trading with it amicably. He has fulminated against the West when he could have played off China and the US to Russia’s advantage.

Even if peace were to come to Russia and Ukraine on terms acceptable to the Kremlin, the damage already done to Russia’s geopolitical standing will remain. This war has been a gigantic geopolitical blunder.

Is anyone going to call him to account? There are no signs that the ruling group is willing to turn against him. Street protests are ruthlessly suppressed. But Nicholas II was sleeping easily at the eastern front until news came to him in February 1917 that politicians and people had turned against him in the Russian capital. The tsar quietly agreed to abdicate and Romanov dynastic rule ended with a whimper.

Putin is unlikely to leave without a tremendous bang, and we cannot be sure that his successor would be any better than he has been. But there is at least a chance that without him, a return to gentler politics in both Russia and the world scene might become possible.

The things that Putin most definitely is are a war criminal, a liar, a spineless shitbag and Tucker Carlson’s sugar daddy. 

Haha, love to hear this