Vladimir Putin’s ability to sustain the war in Ukraine is weakening, but neither economic pressure nor public discontent is likely to force him to stop soon, former Russian oligarch turned dissident Mikhail Khodorkovsky told a group of journalists in Berlin on October 15.
Europe’s task is to destroy the Russian president’s confidence that he can outlast Ukraine and its allies — while preparing for a future Russia in which decisions over war and peace no longer rest with just one man, Khodorkovsky said, formerly the owner of the Yukos oil company and richest man in the world under 40 in the early noughties.
Assessing the Kremlin’s resilience, Khodorkovsky said there were a number of institutional changes needed to make Russia less dangerous and Europe was able to influence this process.
The state of the war
The pressure is growing, but Russian President Vladimir Putin has time to manoeuvre. Khodorkovsky’s central warning is that Russia’s growing difficulties and the current economic slowdown should not be confused with an imminent crisis for the regime.
“We have several aspects of potential problems for the regime,” he said. “The bad thing is that all these potential problems are not critical.”
The economic stimulus generated by military spending has weakened and the initial military Keynesianism boost has faded away. Early in the war, recruitment payments, compensation to soldiers’ families and orders for defence factories channelled money towards poorer households and industrial towns. A study by BOFIT found that the irony of war was that Russia’s poorest regions were the biggest winners from the torrent of money spent on putting the economy on a war footing. That bolstered Putin’s popularity and reduced the wide social inequalities.
“The least secure part of the Russian population at the beginning of the war received significant economic benefits,” said Khodorkovsky.
But once the capacity utilisation maxed out in around 2025 all that more spending did was to fuel inflation which is now eroding those gains. The continued diversion of resources towards military production is damaging the civilian economy. Infrastructure is deteriorating. And restrictions on access to foreign technology are becoming harder to overcome as equipment ages. However, taken together this adds up to attrition rather than collapse.
“This is a process of gradual degradation,” Khodorkovsky said. “And we can confidently say that for the next two years it will not become a limiter for the war.”
Public opinion offers a similarly mixed picture. Khodorkovsky argued that the Kremlin had initially succeeded in presenting the invasion as a distant campaign fought by a separate military force. That has changed this year as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy takes the fight to Russia with new long-range drones that are attacking oil refineries across the country and even hitting Moscow itself. In the most recent attacks on Wildberries’ warehouses, Zelenskiy has managed to bring the war into the living rooms of regular Russians.
Yet wanting the war to end does not necessarily mean accepting the concessions needed to end it. Khodorkovsky, who was jailed by Putin for ten years on fraud and tax evasion charges, cited polling in which 81% of respondents wanted the fighting to stop, but only 35% were prepared to accept giving up some captured territory.
“This is actually not an anti-war mood, in the sense that we understand them,” he said. “The propaganda managed to convince the Russian public that if they lose the war, they, the Russians, will all bear significant costs.”
For Putin, meanwhile, the conflict serves a domestic political purpose beyond territorial conquest or control over Kyiv.
“The stability of the regime depends on the continuation of the war,” Khodorkovsky said. “Not even on victory, but on continuation.”
That does not rule out a ceasefire, but it does, in his view, make a durable settlement under Putin unlikely.
“I am sure that as long as Putin is in power, there will be no end to the war, simply because for him this is a condition of preservation of power. But freezing the conflict is quite possible.”
Nevertheless, the nature of the war may change as this story unfolders. Putin does not necessarily require a permanent, full-scale military campaign. An external enemy, recurring confrontations and smaller operations could serve the same political role – to sustain Putin’s personal power in an Orwellian never ending struggle, without the need for material victory on the battlefield.
What must change in Russia
Khodorkovsky urged European governments to distinguish between the long-term ambition of a democratic Russia and the more immediate objective of a less aggressive state by constraining the Kremlin’s power to wage war.
Rather than making rapid democratisation the organising principle of western policy, he advocated what he called “institutional de-escalation”: changing the Russian institutions that decide whether the country goes to war.
“We need to put in front of us a realistic task, which is institutional de-escalation.”
The first step would be to end the concentration of decision-making in a single ruler. Even collective authoritarian leadership would offer more constraints than Putin’s personal rule, he argued.
“If the Security Council was not a cardboard cut-out, but a political bureau, then the war would not have started,” he said, adding that many in the elite did not want an invasion of Ukraine, but it happened anyway – due to one’s decision. Dispersing power could reduce the likelihood of another war before Russia became recognisably democratic.
“Even the transition from a monopolistic dictator to a political bureau is already a step towards institutional de-escalation.”
Further changes would give parliament meaningful authority and transfer economic and political powers from Moscow to the regions.
“The next step towards institutional de-escalation is the transfer of real, substantial powers in favour of the Parliament. In this case, the war would be even less likely.”
However, that comes in the context of the recent Duma elections that returned the incumbent United Russia to power in what has been dubbed the “dirtiest elections in Russia’s modern history.” The ruling party was officially awarded 57% of the vote, whereas statistical studies of the voting pattern show it probably won closer to 35% - not enough to even form a simple majority.
EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas has explicitly called for the dismembering of the Russian Federations, but Khodorkovsky explicitly rejected equating decentralisation with Russia’s disintegration.
“Once again, it is not the collapse, it is the federalization that is important,” he said.
Before such a transition, however, weakening the cohesion of the ruling elite would be essential. Khodorkovsky argued that the early hostility of many elite figures towards the invasion had failed to develop into an effective break with Putin. The security services, the FSB, had since strengthened their position.
“The split of the elite, nevertheless, is a necessary condition for the destabilization of the Putin regime.”
As IntelliNews reported, as the war drags on there is a growing tension in the Kremlin between the doves and the hawks with the first wanting to freeze the conflict along the current line of contact, which the latter want to see a general mobilisation and flood the Donbas with some 300,000 fresh troops to bring a speedy end to the fighting.
But it is generally assumed that Putin is not leaving office anytime soon and he remains on the fence biding his time.
“The thing to understand about Putin is he is a tactician and an opportunist. He is sitting and watching and reacting to the events as they unfold,” says Khodorkovsky. “The West will have a significant influence on these events, not defining, but significant.”
Western governments would have some influence over a succession, he argued, and should prepare to use it in favour of institutional constraints rather than simply hoping for a more accommodating leader.
What Europe can do
Europe needs to undermine Putin’s expectations and offer a way out. Khodorkovsky’s prescription for Europe starts with Putin’s calculation that time is on his side.
He argued that the Russian president expects pressure on Ukraine’s energy system, fatigue among its supporters and political divisions within Europe to eventually produce the concessions he wants. He is playing a long game and waiting for internal tensions in Europe and Ukraine to do his work for him.
The objective should therefore be “to destroy Putin’s confidence in the fact that his goals are achievable. The Western de-escalation approach is intuitive, but wrong.”
That requires credible military capacity and a demonstrated willingness to use it for deterrence. Khodorkovsky challenged the assumption that restraint would necessarily encourage reciprocal restraint from Moscow.
In his account, Putin responds primarily to power. Europe’s ReArm programme to rapidly modernise its military is delusional. Europe simply doesn’t have €800bn to spend on weapons and especially at a time when the Draghi report says it needs to spend that amount on innovation to catch up with the US. But military deployments could alter Putin’s calculations while forcing Russia to spread its own resources more thinly. The recent talk about Russia’s imminent attack on Nato has been dunked on by serious milbloggers who point out that all Russia’s military assets are tied down in Ukraine and the only danger of an invasion of say the Baltic states would become possible if Ukraine’s AFU is defeated.
Still, one of the hot button issues is military manoeuvres around Kaliningrad, where Khodorkovsky acknowledged the danger but pointed to their practical effect.
“This forces Putin to stretch his troops and does not give him the opportunity to concentrate on those areas that are important to him. Is it risky? Yes, of course it is risky.”
Europe should also recognise the political purpose of Russia’s hybrid operations, he argued. Their immediate aim was to weaken support for Ukraine by frightening European publics and undermining confidence in collective defence.
One objective was “to create the feeling that Nato is not a defence, that it is necessary to have a separate negotiating line with Putin in each country”.
Asked about the recent decision to remove fellow oligarchs Mikhail Fridman of Alfa group and Alisher Usmanov of Metalloinvest from the EU sanctions lists, Khodorkovsky again advocated for clearer incentives for members of Russia’s elite to distance themselves from the regime. Sanctions should provide a credible route out for individuals willing to break with the Kremlin.
“People need to be shown a clear way out of the sanctions,” he said. “It may be difficult, it may not be fast, but people should understand that they have an individual, separate from the regime, way out of the war.”
Without that prospect, sanctions risk leaving elite figures bound together by a shared lack of alternatives. And that forces them to stay in Russia and keep their money and talent there, which is a net plus for the Kremlin.
“Then the split of the elite is possible. If this is not done, we will have to deal with a rather monolithic elite,” Khodorkovsky said.