Russia after Putin

Vladimir Putin has rubber stamped himself in power for another six years, but at 71 he has no successor, no living rivals and no retirement plan, so his eventual death will set off a vicious power struggle for the ruins of the country he leaves behind.

Six more years of Sauron

Russian dictator Vladimir Putin is about to rubber stamp his disastrous reign over Russia for another six years in a farcical election process in which opposition figures are not just banned and ignored but imprisoned and murdered.

He will not die in vain

“Listen, I’ve got something very obvious to tell you. You’re not allowed to give up. If they decide to kill me, it means that we are incredibly strong.”

Death of a hero

Alexei Navalny had the courage to stand up to Russian dictator Vladimir Putin and offer Russia a path out of barbarism. His reward was to be persecuted, exiled, poisoned and now die in a Siberian prison.

Where is Alexei Navalny?

Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny is reported to have disappeared from the Russian prison colony in which he has been serving a lengthy sentence for opposing the dictatorship of Vladimir Putin.

One man, one vote

The ‘election campaign’ in Russia has already begun, but in an authoritarian terror state, there’s truly only one man with one vote.

Putin’s Potemkin state

Russia’s imperial ambitions have always dwarfed its backward economy and blinkered political hierarchy, and just as the Romanov and Soviet regimes collapsed under the strain, so Putin’s failed war on Ukraine threatens to bring the pariah nation to its knees once again.

The hangover

Three months after Yevgeny Prigozhin’s failed mutiny, in which the former Putin ally marched towards Moscow with thousands of his brutal, ramshackle troops, the mercenary leader lies cold in his grave but Putin’s grip on power has also been severely shaken.

Do Russians believe Putin’s propaganda?

Do Russian people, restricted from the global internet and fed a relentless diet of propaganda, really trust their state media? To understand the answer requires a proper understanding of the Russian concept of “vranyo”.

Russian roulette

Vladimir Putin, like Josef Stalin before him, deals with his critics by murdering them, but the underlying problem – his disastrous military campaign in Ukraine – has not gone away with the death of Prigozhin.

Ouroboros

The only surprise about Prigozhin’s death is that Vladimir Putin took two months to murder him, but as the brutal Russian regime turns on itself, it’s only a matter of time before Putin himself suffers a similar fate.

Dealing with post-Putin Russia

The death of Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin signals both Vladimir Putin’s ambition to crush any threat to his dictatorship, and the vulnerability of his hold on power, so how should the West deal with his successor, when the time arrives?