What would a Russian defeat look like? — interview with Vlad Vexler

This video features an interview I did with Vlad Vexler for the Conversations channel, where we discuss the prospects of a Russian defeat in the war and what Putin might do in that situation. This is a discussion that becomes more and more relevant as Ukraine increases its ability to strike deep into Russia.

You can watch the video here or on YouTube. I've included a machine-generated transcript below. The quality should be pretty high, but bear in mind that there could be errors.

Best,
Anders

Transcript:

Anders: Vlad Vexler, thank you so much for finding the time and coming on my channel here. This is something we've been talking about for so long that we should do it. I think there's a big overlap between the viewers of your channel, my channel, and really many people have said that you should have a conversation with Vlad. So I'm glad we finally made it.

Vlad: It's really lovely to be with you. This has been coming a long time, so it's just such a pleasure and delight to speak to you in semi-real life.

Anders: Semi-real life, exactly. And if there are some viewers here who are not familiar with it, I'm just going to quickly introduce you. You are a British philosopher. You were born in the Soviet Union but moved when you were like nine, I believe. I've noticed you often say that you left the Soviet Union and you don't say you left Russia. Is that on purpose or is that, do you make a distinction between that or...

Vlad: I think I make a distinction because I was living in the Soviet Union and because it was right at the end of its tether and it was a very interesting kind of project and because it's also very different to the government of Russia today. It was a very different political entity. It was back then a failing, collapsing, hard left globalist project. And now we've got a hard right kind of tyranny in Russia that shares some things with the Soviet period.

There's a Soviet inheritance, of course, but it's more unlike than like the Soviet Union overall. That's one of the reasons I make the distinction. But then apart from that, my early years, I would say were in Russia. And that makes sense in the sense that even though by blood I am all Polish and Ukrainian, actually, I'm only 7% Russian. But in terms of my origins, I clearly grew up in Russia and that has a truth and a place too.

Anders: Okay. So, but and then you moved around different when you ended up in Britain. And today, maybe just also just if anybody is wondering why you are sitting in bed, you are sick, you have ME and long COVID. I'm not going to pretend that I can pronounce what ME stands for, but maybe you want to.

Vlad: So ME is myalgic encephalomyelitis. It's a neuroimmune condition. And I've had it since I was a post-grad student in 2003. And I got sick with a couple of viruses that then triggered it. And much more recently, I got COVID. Fortunately, most people who get it are absolutely fine. But in my case, I nearly died and lost my ability to stand up. So I last stood a year and a half ago.

And when I'm out of bed, I am always in the wheelchair. And even the wheelchair is not something I can use all day long. So I'm living a life that is uneventful, but also very eventful because managing all of that, of course, is itself a way of living life at the edge. And in some ways, it has actually some overlap with healthy people who have different challenges, like political challenges.

Living in the war zone and being healthy has some overlaps with being sick and living in a privileged, peaceful town. So it just shows that life is about good things happening to us. And life is about difficult things happening to us, things we haven't asked for. The Ukrainian people did not ask for the Russians to invade in 2014 and invade full scale in 2022. And it's a part of life that terrible things like that happen.

Anders: Indeed. And even though you are down in bed for much of the day, you still manage to be extremely prolific. You run like four different YouTube channels, I think. You have the main channel, you have the chat channel. Those are about great power, international politics, things like that. And then the philosophy channel, you have the ME channel. You manage to do many things even with that condition.

Vlad: I try. You're not meant to know about all of my channels and some of them are really under the radar.

Anders: Oh, okay. You have even more.

Vlad: No, no. No, no. That's all I've got. Okay.

Anders: Four is all. Okay. What I wanted to do today was actually to try to focus on a question of what a Russian defeat in this war would look like. Because I think we could have an interesting conversation about that and I'd like to pick your brain on various kinds of scenarios and perspectives on that. And I think it's something that hasn't been talked about all that much.

There's been a lot of discussion about what would a Russian victory look like? What would a Russian victory mean for European security? Things like that. But I don't think there's been all that much focus on what a Russian defeat would look like and with Ukraine's growing ability to strike into Russia and questions about bringing the war home, I think these kinds of perspectives become more important to discuss.

But before we come to the defeat part, though, maybe we should still actually start with the Russian victory or at least what is it that Putin is fighting for? Because I think having an idea of that is a good starting point for this discussion. So if you were to sort of explain, what is the war about?

Vlad: So in my view and in your view and in the view of most country experts, there's a very big regime security component to the origins of the war, that the war has a lot to do with Putin's thought about what keeps him in power. And the thought there is that certain kinds of foreign escalation or war help Putin in Putin's view and probably objectively to an extent help him keep power.

That's a very strange idea because for people from different backgrounds, there's a tendency to think of international affairs in slightly a kind of a self-enclosed way where the first concerns are all national security concerns. And you don't think about the stability of the domestic regime. And that can be very hard for us to break out of as a way of thinking about international politics. And you see people who support Ukraine and people who support Russia not quite be able to get out of this conception of national security that doesn't really directly relate to regime security when they try to explain the war.

It's not possible to just give one regime security reason. I mean, this is an ocean of reasons. So let me try to pull one. And I'm not saying it's the most important one. But in my view, and this is also something that used to be very much talked about by a strange character in Russia called Gleb Pavlovsky, who worked for Putin, was a Putin propagandist, then left at the time of the Medvedev-Putin transition and got both triggered by the Russian opposition, but also very critical of Putin.

Eventually, he thought that Putin was just a walking catastrophe. And he spoke about it openly, including during the war from Russia. But he died around 2023, if I recall. And he ventilated an idea that I think captures something in this ocean of regime security considerations. And it's that Putin was feeling the diminution of his power as a referee. If you observe the way this regime functions for years and even decades, you see that there's a predilection for Putin to outsource presidential powers, definitely unconstitutionally and probably illegally, to various clans, watch them compete, and then come in and sort of score the competitive outcome.

And I'm going to side with this group, I'm going to side with that group, I'm going to take a position in the middle. Putin felt, according to Pavlovsky, the diminution of his powers to act as an effective referee. He felt that things were just happening. And he was increasingly, relative to his previous powers, a bystander, at least in some dimensions, obviously starting a war would concentrate power back in his hands.

And he did that. It made that power that he holds in his hands more vulnerable and more precarious, but it was more concentrated there. So that's an illustration, and it might not be more than 10, 20% of the whole regime security picture. That's an illustration of how these considerations to do with, "I need to start a war to keep power work." Another consideration is that starting a war gives you an opportunity to take a measure of authoritarian turns that allows you to pacify discontent among the very youngest generation.

In my view, that was a generation that Putin was worried about, and his fantasy was to sort of skip them and then recreate a generation that was sort of more patriotic in alignment with various fantasies that Putin had. So Putin feels that without foreign escalation, elite conflict intensifies, various kinds of instability in the country intensify, his power begins to diminish. And I think that regime security is probably 70, 80% of the sort of motivational force behind the war.

The other 20, 30% are to do with a kind of mystical turn that, in my view, Putin began to take around 2012, 2014, where he really associated himself in a sort of Wagnerian way with the destiny of Russian culture. So what happens to Russia is what happens to me, we're more or less the same thing. There are some people living here who are Russians, but they don't matter.

What matters is what happens to this culture across a long stretch of history. And there was therefore a need for some kind of zigzag, for some kind of escalation against the West, that went together with a mystical idea that victors in history are those who start right at the back, who start as losers, and in a series of rapid zigzag moves and gestures can propel themselves to the front line of nations.

Now, this is crazy. It's completely weird to us. It's also weird to Sovietologists, because no Soviet leader thought like that. They were much more explicable in rational choice theory than this sort of motivation. But I do think this kind of idea of a mystical vision of the propulsion of Russia into its historical destiny plays a role. I think it's very important to emphasize that Putin is spectacularly unreligious, but he is enormously superstitious and enormously prone to various kinds of mystical ways of thinking about his country's destiny.

And just to ground this a little bit for people listening to us, imagine how nuts Anders and I would go if we had 30 years of increasingly informalized and unchecked power, and almost no conversations with any other humans except perhaps children. I mean, we would need every resource of sanity we possibly have to not go completely potty. And we would avoid that by not going into politics and by not staying in politics when that required tyrannical measures.

So that's a couple of cents in that direction, in my view.

Anders: Yeah, I can actually confirm that thing about going nuts. I mean, I remember when I was a young naval officer and I got my first command of a small boat. And after about two years of serving as the commanding officer of that, I really started seeing myself doing things that I really could... That was not correct. I should not have done that, but I did it because I know I can get away with it and nobody's going to say anything, right?

So I can attest to that. Nobody's immune to these kinds of dynamics. Just imagining what it would mean to actually be like the supreme leader of Russia for 20 years.

Vlad: And there's a much more banal example we can give people, and that's YouTube. Now, one of the things I really love about your work is that your expertise is off YouTube, but you happen to also be a YouTuber. And that, I think, helps anybody who is in that position to keep sane with the algorithm. Because what do we see? We see a lot of people who are completely exclusive YouTubers.

We see people who think in order to say their thoughts on YouTube, who don't have an independent sort of professional existence of any kind of YouTube, we see them lose their rudder and begin to drift where the algorithm takes them. And that's just a little YouTube channel with a few hundred thousand viewers sending people potty. So multiply that by about eight million, and you get the kind of insane environment in which you find Putin.

So it's crazy. I mean, it's really the case that Putin will be sane when it comes to personal conversations, like, "Did you spill your hot chocolate? You spilled some water, and I spilled some hot chocolate just before we started." Putin will talk about that normally. He wouldn't think that you didn't spill your water when you spilled it. But as soon as you begin to distance him from the imminence of everyday experience, he will begin to have thoughts that are absolutely wild to us, especially when it comes to the less factual aspects of the world.

He's not going to think that a country has double the population it has. But as soon as you drive him out of this sort of imminent experience, he's going to scare us by how definite he is about things that seem quite wild to us. And that's very strange and alien when you think about it properly. It's really like a sort of cold wind blowing over you. But you've got to respect that that's the reality.

That's how power screws human beings up, especially if they're screwed up before they got there.

Anders: If I could just ask a question more about the reasons why the war started. I think there is a question that is super important, and that is why Ukraine. Because the explanations you gave, the regime security thing, the need for a foreign conflict, that could have taken him in many different directions. But what is so special about Ukraine in Putin's mind that drove him to make the war there at not so many other places?

Vlad: I think it's very important not to overestimate this. I think it's very important to understand that some kind of escalation elsewhere, you've talked a lot about some kind of low threshold challenge to Article 5 in the Baltics could have happened. If you stopped me in about 2015 or 16 and asked me what do I think is more likely Ukraine or the Baltics, I may have leaned to the Baltics.

And so it's very important to understand, first of all, that it could have gone differently. So that's one thought. The second thought is that when Putin came to power, he was surrounded by some people who were obsessed with Ukraine. And there's a tradition right from the early 90s in Russia of a kind of unbelievable obsession with the gathering back of Soviet lands, which often didn't mean the reconstitution of the Soviet Union.

It was often justified for fascistized right-wing reasons. But that cultural element was always there. I think if you pulled Putin off the street in 1999 and shoved him in the room full of these people, he would have thought they're crazy. So he was not a Ukraine nut early on. And I think that there were people around him who were. So he was very low on this kind of stuff.

But I think that it's part of this missionary turn that I mentioned taking place around the time that Medvedev was still in power, insofar as he was in power, that Putin turned to Ukraine. And I think he would have been very surprised by himself. The Putin from the early 90s would have been very surprised by himself in the 2010s. And there he began to read history, tell himself various kinds of things, and began to deeply believe in this idea of a very, very weird sort of atypical colonial relation with Ukraine.

Ukraine is not an outsider like Chechnya. Chechnya is in no way an "us" as far as Putin is concerned. But Ukraine is an "us". Ukrainians are Russians who suffer from false consciousness, which if they are freed from, they will realize they're just Russian. A couple of Ukrainians in the west of Ukraine maybe, but they can go to Poland and shut up really. But the rest of the country, they're Russian.

And that became enormously important to Putin as he retreated more and more deeply into history. And I think that this obsession with Ukraine from the 2010s onwards coincides with Putin really beginning to have conversations with himself. I mean, think of a guy who is sort of addressing himself, the history hovering above maps of the world as they are and as they used to be, and sort of fantasizing about his role in history and how that's tied to sort of Russia's self-propulsion in history.

And that landed him in a place of being the nuttiest of these nuts that he would have found completely nutty right at the beginning. Now, I think that if we look at Putin's Security Council in 2022, and we go name by name, we try to name the people who would have started a full scale invasion of Ukraine, I would struggle to name a single one. I think there were people with fantasies about Ukraine who would have attacked Ukraine in 2022.

But that kind of full scale invasion slash coup that was attempted, I think nobody was definitely committed to it the way Putin was, not even Mr. Patrushev. And that is to do with this sort of deep obsession with the unity of the two peoples, and with the reconstitution of various historical grievances that Putin began to increasingly tie to Russia's relationship to Ukraine. So this is if you like, a regime security case with that then mystical case attaching Ukraine to the regime security case, as opposed to thinking what would be the most pragmatic thing to do here, right.

And again, if Putin stopped the war tomorrow, there's a strong, probably a strong reason for him to start something again in another year or two, even if it's not a full scale war. And it might be that there'd be good reason for him to think of escalating elsewhere, but his obsessiveness could take him back to Ukraine if that happened, because now that is absolutely embedded. But I would date that just to the last 15 years, it wasn't there before.

And now he's a Ukraine nut. He's a sort of Ukraine as just a version of Russia that is in denial about being Russian nut. And he believes it. And he is obsessed with all of these dates and stories, and he likes to go back, you know, over a thousand years and somehow imply that that is all relevant to where we are today. I think he spends a hell of a lot of his time thinking about this, even as sort of wild breeze burn, as he has a fuel distribution crisis.

I think he still sits around thinking about this stuff. Russia and Ukraine are the same place. There should be some kind of, you know, bringing of Ukraine back into the Russian fold. So he genuinely believes it. And yeah, I date that back to the early 2010s.

Anders: So you've said a couple of times now that Putin is nuts, and that he kind of, you know, the way he looks at things, it just might seem crazy to some people. But also that he himself, I guess, believes much of this. I mean, the whole thing about Ukraine and the big myth about Russian greatness and all those things, of course. But how about something that I think has become more and more evident right now as things are not going well for Russia, and they're trying to uphold this facade of, well, things are going great.

The special military operation, everything is according to plan. And when you have increasingly these examples of Putin, just, you know, starting long speeches where he will mention all kinds of battlefield successes that just never happened. And, you know, is this also an example of him just not having the right picture of how things are? Or is this more in the realm of just sort of communication tactics?

Well, I'd love to know what you think.

Vlad: I think this is mostly in the realm of communication tactics, because he sees Ukrainian attacks on Russian territory as a psyop designed to destabilize Russian elites actually more than the Russian population, funnily enough. And he thinks that you simply play into Ukraine's hands when you talk about it, because that's what Ukraine wants you to do. So he finds a way to minimally acknowledge it. Yes, we are inconvenienced, and we've got a bit of a fuel crisis.

But it's very important for him that that's not talked about too much in public, because he thinks that the aim of the Ukrainian government is to get Russian officials to talk in public about how much damage Ukraine is doing on Russian territory, because he sees that the primary aim there is not even directly economic damage, but the consequences of economic damage as something that could conceivably destabilize his regime.

And the way he'd think about that is primarily in terms of inter-elite conflict, not in terms of some kind of bottom-up politicization of the population. And I bet he's getting privately pissed off at people who are reporting bad things happening around Russia to him, because he feels that this stuff should be played down as much as possible. He thinks that they are naive, and they're playing into Ukraine's hands when they sort of address themselves to what is happening.

So my instinct, having thought about Putin for 20, 30 years, is that he is privately pissed off at people for talking to him about the damage that's happening on Russian territory. He'd be happy for a brief mention of the minimal things that need to be put on the table, the barest factual reality. But beyond that, this shouldn't be dwelt on, and it shouldn't even be something that's sort of top of mind.

We need to be sort of stoic about this, because the point is they are trying to get us to stay awake at night thinking about what this means, what we're going to do as a result. And instead, you've got to put the fires out metaphorically and literally, and then get on with attending to the really big picture that is not about what happens in 2026. It's a longer run story.

So I think this is mostly political technology. I don't actually think that Putin has false views about how many wildberries have been incinerated, for example.

Anders: No, I don't think so either. But he might have. I mean, there is this ongoing discussion about how much lying goes on through the military hierarchy, right? And how many layers are there where people will make things look more pretty? And I don't know. I don't know what the answer is but I could be concerned that he does not actually have an accurate perception of what the front line situation is, for example.

Vlad: You would be an expert here. I'm not. So you you would need to talk to me about it. I'd love to understand what you think about it in terms of how much the reality is played down and distorted along a broken telephone. What I see politically is that Putin has a kind of faith that eventually Gerasimov will get him over the line somehow, whatever that means. Eventually we'll get there.

The reason it's hard to know what that means is that Putin thinks in extremely political terms about what happens on the front line. He sees it as a mechanism for causing political crisis in Ukraine. So when he thinks of a gained bit of territory, he's thinking does this increase the fight that is going to happen within Ukraine's regime or some kind of pressure on the regime from some other political faction.

So he thinks of it in these terms and he thinks that eventually the level of pressure exerted over a very long period of time will be sufficient to cause political crisis. But beyond that, I don't know. What do you think when we talk about Russia having taken the same village eight times over and you see that shown in Russian propaganda. Do you think Putin is sitting there and thinking that it's another victory when they retook the same village eight times in a row without having ever taken it?

Anders: You're right in that situation, right? Even him, he must have noticed that, well, I'm pretty sure we have taken this Kupiansk before, right? But I think you're right that what's fundamentally going on here is that Putin has such a deep assumption about the relationship between Russia and Ukraine and Russia being the great power and Ukraine being a small state that and obviously Russia is going to be able to defeat Ukraine in the end.

So he is so convinced that that is going to be the final outcome that perhaps all these sort of situation here and now and what's exactly, I mean, it's not that important. So maybe don't talk too much about where things are not succeeding. Just keep it going. Even if you're like, but in this practice of running ahead and planting a flag or as I've seen now in some situations, well, they have they've tried doing this with AI, right?

AI generated videos of Russian soldiers planting flags or drones flying in and planting a flag somewhere. But like, they have to know at the top of the Russian system that this is not an accurate portrayal, right?

Vlad: But it's still... What do you think of that broken telephone? Because there are going to be several rungs along which people are going to be scared to both lie and to tell the truth. So they'll try to, as it were, not misrepresent anything too gravely, so don't get into trouble with it, but they're going to try to couch it in a way that is vaguely palatable. I have no idea how to assess that.

But what do you think about this? How much do you think gets distorted as things travel up to the Russian military?

Anders: I think a lot gets distorted, but a lot also starts at the very sort of tactical lower levels, right? We've seen examples of how, in Russian, they have this expression of taking territory on credit, right? So you claim that you've taken it before you actually have taken it. And then we have seen examples of how when you approach the time when the unit is supposed to rotate out and the new unit will come in, suddenly the commander of that unit will go absolutely crazy and push everyone forward because he has to actually, by the time the rotation happens, he actually has to have taken the territory that he claimed he already took.

Right? So I mean, it's... And I'm sure this practice goes on all the way to the top, many layers, many people just kind of... So Putin might very well have a distorted view of the situation, but on the other hand, he has to also know that this is happening at some level.

Vlad: It's so hard for me to... Because I have so little experience with the institution of the military and institution of the Russian Soviet military in particular. So I just can't judge.

Anders: I mean, I'm sure it's worse in Russia than it would be in NATO militaries, but I would say we see actually the same tendency in NATO militaries. The hierarchy just creates that kind of... Well, you don't want to disappoint, right? You want to obey the orders. You want to deliver on the task. So I don't know. There's something in that situation. And when you then couple that with the way the Russian system works, where loyalty is typically preferred over competence in many situations, then it just gets worse.

But one thing, and maybe we should try to turn it over to what I actually said was going to be the theme of this, the idea for Russian defeat, right? Because one is how Putin looks at it and what he would like to achieve, but another thing is what he can achieve. And I think it becomes more and more obvious that it will be very, very hard to actually achieve the things that Putin wants and that things are not really going in the right direction.

And at least, I don't know, I'm not an economist, but when I look at the Russian economy, when I follow discussions about the Russian economy, it seems pretty clear to me that they're on a countdown here. They're not going to have the resources to continue doing this forever. So at some point, he's going to run into a capacity problem. And how is that going to play in?

And how is he going to deal with that?

Vlad: He thinks that Ukraine will run into that capacity. I know that's not your question. The question is about the reality. But in terms of what Putin thinks, he thinks that Ukraine, with the fragmentation of European support, will run into that capacity problem first. So the question is, what happens if that's not the reality? What is Putin going to do? And I think the answer there is that it depends on how he thinks the stability of his regime is going.

And he's going to face the dilemma that a certain kind of foreign escalation is unsustainable, but he needs some kind of foreign escalation to stay in power. And what Putin typically does in these situations is wait as long as possible to make a decision, hoping that the world will deliver him some kind of reprieve. So I think that he is conscious of the ticking clock, but he thinks that his clock has a few more ticks in it than the other sides.

But again, your question is about what happens if that proves not to be the case. And I mean, basically, very roughly speaking, Putin's answer is going to have to be a series of authoritarian and totalitarian turns at home. The worse the Russian economy is doing and the worse Putin's capacity to do various things he wants abroad, the more he is going to have to reset the nature of his regime, hoping that as he resets it, it doesn't crack.

And I think here is the sort of the blackest space of Western Russia analysis. It's to do with the question of the flexibility of the Putin regime as it evolves. It's the biggest epistemic uncertainty for what I would call the best Russia experts. And it's understandable that's a black hole, because in part we don't know, because two things are true. The regime is spectacularly flexible and Hydra-like in the sense that it is not dependent on its previous forms to a degree that is just dazzling on the one hand.

On the other hand, it is becoming more brittle and that flexible quality will deplete over time. But this is a real black hole of analysis. It's very, very difficult to judge this because there's a risk of underestimating the regime's flexibility because it is so flexible. But there's also a risk of not understanding that whatever else is true, the flexibility of the regime is diminishing. And there are going to be points of brittleness.

And that is not too far off into the future either. So this is really difficult to analyze because previous demonstrations of successful flexibility aren't proof that the regime will be able to be flexible in the future. The regime was not ready for the kind of war it started in 2022 because they were thinking of a semi-coup type operation that they could have got away with as what some social scientists would call an informational autocracy.

And an informational autocracy is a political order that can keep a war it starts out of the new cycle, out of central place of the new cycle if it wants to. And they got themselves into a war that began to define everything that they had to speak about. And so the regime needed to evolve. And the regime took a series of authoritarian turns and arrived at some kind of precarious balance.

And the question is, as Putin needs to evolve his regime and as the regime just naturally evolves without Putin being at the wheel of controlling it, what are the breaking points and when are they going to come? And no academic expertise actually helps. And when I talk about democratic decline, I talk about how important it is for us to respect all of our academic experts that they are really an essential pillar of democracy the way parliaments and courts are.

But this is about pattern recognition, about smell, about nous and about intuition, and about just following events and having a sense of how this sort of very weird and formalized network that that regime is works. And then making judgments about it. So I think everybody's struggling with this question. When does that sort of thing stop being flexible and crack? Is the single biggest question that I think we in the West when they talk, I don't regard myself as a Russia expert directly.

I am a political philosopher who comments a lot and Russia knows a lot about it from a big picture perspective. But in particular, all the direct country experts, I think, have a problem here because this is very difficult to judge.

Anders: Yeah, it absolutely is. I mean, I think in many ways, and this is might sound strange because there is this big debate about why so many experts got it wrong about the war breaking out. But in many ways, I think it was actually easier to see the war would start than it is to see how it's going to end. Because how do you actually get out of this mess?

And as you say, probably Putin doesn't know. I mean, he still believes he's winning. So he doesn't think that he really needs an exit plan at this point. But even if he gets to that point, then it's going to be decided. Yeah.

Vlad: Here is what you and I are not saying in this moment, but you and I are always saying it in our commentary. Putin is dependent on external events that he thinks are going to go his way for a good outcome. And one of the things he is dependent on is some kind of political crisis in Ukraine. And another thing he's dependent on is that eventually France, Germany, and the UK are going to be run by Trumps.

That might not happen next year or the year after, but it'll happen eventually. And he thinks that will change things when essentially they manifest a kind of ideological affinity between Western Europe and Russia. He thinks that this is inevitable. And he's wrong about that because that's a matter of contingency. I think the trend is unfortunately in that but how far it'll go there and how much we'll successfully be able to do to slow it down or alter it at least partially in its course.

All of that is up for grabs. Putin doesn't think so because he thinks that when you and I talk about defending democracy and defending institutions, that we're full of crap. We're talking about just power. When you say, I can understand what it means to have a parliament that has authority and a parliament that's a fake parliament that has no authority. Putin thinks there isn't that difference. He thinks that we're lying to ourselves about it.

It's not that there's this democracy, you've got to defeat it. It's that it's a sort of bullshit. It's still power versus power in the most democratic systems in the world with a facade of some kind of institutional proceduralism. So, and the proceduralism is annoying. It stops people from, you know, acting effectively. So it's ultimately real. It's not sort of an ephemeral facade. It's a facade that alters reality.

But it is a facade in the sense that the individual actors within the system are all motivated by power at core. And so that's why he thinks this is inevitable. And it's just a matter of time. But he is dependent on external events. He probably thinks Ukraine is going to go first. There's going to be some kind of cataclysmic political event in Ukraine first before Western democracies collapse.

But that is really what he's waiting for. Another thing that I think he is thinking about is what do I want the shape of my regime to be and who do I want to be around me when things get rocky? This I do think he's thinking about. And actually, it's part of his paranoia that he does want to go there and reflect on these questions. And sort of I call that sort of endgame coup proofing or endgame regime proofing.

When things get rocky, either biologically, let's say Putin gets an illness that means that it's not clear he can run the country, or there's too much political instability. Who does he want to have around him? He thinks about that. What I would say when we talk about Putin's defeat is that it's very difficult to talk about this because it's a question that is also relative to what happens in Ukraine and relative to what happens in the West.

I think this is what we're touching on. It's not that there is such a thing as Putin's defeat that can be captured, irrespective of what is happening in the West and irrespective of what is happening in Ukraine, at least the way I would think of defeat. I think there are different conceptions of defeat. But one question that matters is what will historians say about this 50 years from now?

We can't be definite about this, but here are some things we can say. This doesn't help Ukraine, by the way, but Putin is one of the worst leaders Russia has ever had. Putinism will definitely collapse and Russia's imperial project in its current form will collapse, simply because it doesn't have enough to offer. It's not because it's evil and destructive. Plenty of evil and destructive things endure. It is so shallow in what it sustainably brings, both to Russians and people around Russia, that Russia might attack, that it doesn't have a very long shelf life.

So I'm seeing these being kind of death throes. Death throes take decades in history. So death throes does not mean in 2028 Putin is gone. But I think that a certain mode of imperial politics is in its death throes in Russia and something will need to replace it. But that's not a very easy process or a very easy trajectory. And Russia will face head on the question, what holds all of us together?

What holds this together? Can we develop a story about why we're all here on this territory, presumably with some potential authority in Moscow running us? If they fail at that, the country will be more likely to begin disintegrating. If they succeed, which would require that kind of national vision being reconstituted and an enormous amount of federalization, decentralization too, then they could succeed in some way. But what Putin has done, he has dramatically endangered Russia's survival as a state over the next 50 years, dramatically endangered it.

He's taken the collapse of Russia from a small probability to almost a 50-50 shot. He has also sort of accelerated a very ugly way, a kind of imperial implosion, imperial disintegration. So Putin's politics is dead. His project will be over and it'll be a catastrophe. And there is no chance that it won't be. And there is no chance that it won't be a catastrophe for Russia in the medium term of a couple of more decades.

That thing we can be certain about. Here is the problem. In what sense is that a victory for anybody over Russia if at the same time Trumps are running all of Western Europe and Ukraine is a semi-functioning tyrannical state that in fact practices Putinist politics minus the imperialism. So in historical terms, we have to recognize that a catastrophe for Russia and Russia is heading for some kind of catastrophe doesn't mean that everybody else has a great outcome.

It's possible that Ukraine has a catastrophic outcome and Russia has a catastrophic outcome. But I think I'm probably running ahead of what you asked me about. What you asked me about is what if things begin to go really badly for Putin. And the answer to that is that he's going to have to begin resetting his regime and he's going to make the country take more totalitarian turns and hope that that keeps the show on the road.

And he's going to be deeply reliant on this kind of blend of depoliticization among the majority of the population and the politicization among a certain section of the population. But Putin will think that economic catastrophe in of itself should not bring him down if he can take political measures to counter it, which would create a more authoritarian order, but one that maybe can endure. I mean that's what he'll try for.

Anders: In many ways, it is easier when you have the long perspective, as you say. I mean, it's sometimes much more clear where things will go in 50 years. I fully agree that that is the overall direction. Putin is not sustainable in the long run, so that's where it will go. And that's super practical to have in mind, right? Because then you can, when you try to assess the moment, you can say, "This is the overall direction."

Another thing that I think is pretty, I see as pretty clear when I follow the more military things, is that I think that over time, things are tipping in Ukraine's favor militarily. That is the situation we're seeing, and that is to a large extent determined by the economy. It's going to be the war economy, essentially, that is going to decide this in the long run. And as long as Western European countries are willing to keep supporting Ukraine, so Ukraine has enough money to keep fighting, then the Ukrainian war economy is actually quite stable, whereas the Russian one is on a countdown.

And Putin doesn't see it like that, but that's how I would interpret it. So I think when I look at the war, I tend to look at it as trying to figure out, "Okay, the overall direction of this is that things are going to get worse and worse and harder and harder for Russia." But what exactly that is going to look like is extremely difficult to predict when we get to the shorter perspective.

I'm going to throw something at you now that is a kind of short perspective here, and hear your idea about how you think the Russians are going to deal with that. And that's going to be the winter. I think Putin has great hopes that winter is going to be a turning point for him, because he hopes that he will be able to make this winter even worse than the last one for Ukraine.

And when he looks at things like how Zelensky today has talked about how they really are running out of Patriot missiles, it's difficult. They don't have anything to defend with, right? So that's really something that will give Putin optimism about what will be achieved this winter. But I think the big theme when we look at it is actually going to be that this is going to be the first winter when Ukraine is really going to be able to put pain on Russia.

And I think the fuel shortages that we see now, which are inconvenient in the summer, they might be devastating for the Russian winter. So how would you see such a scenario there where we move into and things just develop really badly internally in Russia?

Vlad: It's very important that I'm not an economist, and Russia's economy is incredibly complex, and I consume a lot of economic analysis, but I don't comment on it for that reason. I think that there are some thoughts I have all over the place. One is that Putin believes that he could stop the war tomorrow and get away with it for perhaps 18 or 24 months before the boat begins to rock.

And that's why he's so reluctant to do that. And that's probably a fair picture. If the war stopped tomorrow, there would be overwhelming relief among the Russian population. Probably 90% of people would be relieved, even if it was on terms that the Z radicals despise. But eventually, it would become an existential danger for Putin to not be involved in the war and not replace it with anything.

That's one thought. A second thought is that it's important what depoliticization looks like in a society like Russia's, with Russia's political system. People do not begin to act just because things get worse. The immediate instinct of a very, in response to a very bad winter for Russia, among the Russian population would be to dig themselves into a deeper hole and stay even more ferociously determined to avoid politics.

We're seeing a small hint of that in my sort of superficial assessment from the outside with the Wildberries story. We're seeing a small pro-war section getting more pro-war. We're seeing a small anti-war section get more anti-war. And we're seeing a majority that faces a situation that is even more difficult to reckon with and accept. They're turning away even more aggressively. Passivity is a positive step here. It's not doing nothing.

You have to try really, really hard to evade politics at the moment in Russia. Russians are trying. They're working every day. If you listen to daily conversations in Russia, they are about how nothing is happening and how there aren't that many drones above them. You have to try to abstract this stuff away. So the first effect, I think, of a terrible winter for Russia will be even deeper depoliticization among the majority of the population.

What that means is that down the line, there's going to be more material built up ready to explode when another cause comes and triggers it. I don't see, now I cannot assess the military dimensions. I cannot assess the economic dimensions. I cannot see anything happening to Russia this winter that will destabilize the Putin regime significantly. It's just not available to me. It could create problems, but it's not easy for me to foresee how anything existential happens.

What that would do, it'll make the blow up that comes later more dramatic. So Ukraine, with all of these actions, is investing into some kind of calamity on the Russian space. But the kind of actions I'm seeing right now are not in of themselves going to trigger that. Certainly not in the next half a year. Unless you're able to paint me a picture that is much more dramatic than I can envisage about the sort of calamity that's could happen in the Russian space in winter.

If we then project that forward another year or two, then maybe we could begin to have a different conversation. Putin's response is going to be to focus with all of his might on keeping power and stabilizing power and taking radical turns at home to make it a more authoritarian society and engaging in some kind of foreign escalation the more desperate he gets. So that's kind of the scenario I see.

I see for an existential crisis the need of a crack in the regime. And I think that something could produce that eventually. But I do not think that Ukraine's current capacity to prosecute the war on Russian territory is close to reliably delivering that in the next year, let's say. That could be different two or three years from now, possibly. But I don't see that being a reliable outcome soon.

What I will say is it's a kind of regime that can fall apart in 12 months. That's also true. So you've got to be double-minded here. This is a regime that is very stable until it begins to disintegrate. We saw that with the Prigozhin mutiny. And I am a bit more radical than most experts are about what actually happened during the Prigozhin period. In other words, I think that Putin could actually have lost power if Prigozhin had handled this differently.

And one of the things I was absolutely missing there was a positive proposal for a future for Russia. It was just pure critique about incompetence. But if Prigozhin had released a manifesto about seven things he was going to do to the army, eight things he was going to do to the FSB, the sort of things the Russian opposition never proposes, reform the key institutions which you need to address to change the country, it could have made more of a difference.

So I'm not saying this is something that just couldn't collapse fairly rapidly. But I'm saying that the kind of pressure that will be exerted on Russia for me is not going to reliably deliver a regime crisis. It's going to make a regime crisis worse when something else causes it. And we don't yet know what that something else will be. But I mean, what do you think about it?

Do you think Ukraine could force Putin to reconsider the war over the winter?

Anders: No, I don't think so. I think what it will take to push Putin into real discussions, negotiations would be a reversal of the trends on the front line. If Russia starts losing territory in Ukraine, it will be very, very difficult for Putin to uphold the narrative that things are going great and that the situation is under control. So I think it's something like that. It doesn't necessarily have to be dramatic.

It wouldn't have to be like super fast Blitzkrieg, Russians out in a moment or taking all of Crimea, but just reversing the trends significantly enough that it's undeniable. That I think is something that really could put Putin under pressure

Vlad: and make him stop the war. And then we'll be in this dynamic of what he's going to do next and when, because he is going to be aware that there is some kind of dependence relation between regime security and foreign escalation. So he's going to be thinking that he's going to need to do something next. He's going to be reluctant about the need to do it, but he's going to be thinking about it.

And he'll be aware that he has a certain window of time, but that eventually you cannot stop this war and replace it with nothing and stay in power, in my view. I think that I would put a two year window on Putin's chances of simply stopping this war on terms that are not remotely like the terms he has advertised. So stopping the war on these kinds of terms and replacing it with nothing, I think, does create a regime crisis for him within perhaps a two year window.

And my sense is that he probably does think that himself.

Anders: I think so too. And I think you've said actually that if Putin continues the war, he will need more repression. And if he ends the war, he will need more repression. So in some way, he will need to control whatever happens and it will require more and more repression, control of the population in different ways. It's very difficult to see really how this can go in any other way in Putin maintaining the position he has.

Vlad: I think your analysis is right. The key variable there about this notion that the war may trend against Russia is a European support for Ukraine and this fantasy of Putin's of having Trumps in power everywhere. And I may be more skeptical and maybe more pessimistic than you are. But obviously, I'm desperate for you to be right, like really desperate for you to be right about this. And then, of course, we also need to talk about Ukraine's domestic politics, which is complex, which is precarious.

We don't talk enough about it partly because sort of and this is this is a strange sort of compliment in reverse to Russian imperialism. Most of my audience, who is vehemently pro-Ukraine knows five times more about Russia than about Ukraine. A lot of them have read articles on who Mr. Patrushev is and they can name people in Putin's Security Council. Whereas they know a few people in the Ukrainian military, they know Budanov, they know Zelensky, They knew Yermak.

beyond that, there's this very little knowledge that people who go to Ukraine, of course, and that's different. But there's very little knowledge about Ukrainian politics. And it's important to recognize that there's a lot of fragility there, too. And there's a lot of risk and there's a lot of precarity. And Ukraine has got this enormous challenge about how do you talk about your own future when so many of the ingredients required for that conversation are not entirely in your control and you are under extreme external pressure constantly.

And in this extraordinarily vulnerable relation of dependence on the West, it's a situation that really deserves for all of the problems that there are there for all of the, you know, criticism that we can level at the Zelensky administration and Ukrainians level a lot of criticism at the Zelensky administration. We need great empathy about this unbelievably difficult predicament that Ukraine is in. It's really politics does not get any harder.

And yet this is a country that needs to talk to itself about its own future, imagine some kind of future and begin to walk toward it. So I'm also somebody who has a kind of sort of loving protective disposition about just the incredible difficulty, the incredible strain Ukraine is under domestically. And what we can be sure about is that Ukraine is not Russia. That we can be absolutely sure about.

But nevertheless, there are all kinds of structural risks in Ukraine's domestic politics too. And many hurdles for it to overcome because don't forget what Putin fantasizes about happening to us is all of these social forces making democracy unsustainable. The state of the internet. I talk about this all the time on my channels, the various kinds of atomization and untethering of social bonds in our society, the various kinds of economic patterns that make people feel excluded.

You just name it. I think that Ukraine is also pressured by these forces, but 2x relative to us because of its more precarious institutions because of the low trust aspects of Ukrainian society. It's high trust in some dimensions. It's a low trust society in other dimensions. So Ukraine is going to be beaten by these historical forces that in my view are as dangerous as Putin to Ukraine, to Ukraine's survival as even a semi-democratic state.

So it's a lot of hard work that needs to be done. And that's why I think support for Ukraine is so important, but also just empathy about the extraordinarily difficult situation that they're in. So I am conscious of these variables, Ukrainian domestic stability and the sustenance of European support. Putin is delusional that these are inexorable sort of crises waiting to happen, but there are worrying trends and obviously uncertainties there.

But if things go relatively close to the best case scenario for European countries and for Ukraine, then I think your analysis stands and that Putin is going to be increasingly faced with difficult decisions and decisions that are going to feel in equal measure unsustainable to him.

Anders: Yeah, I think it has come to a point where so many European countries today understand how dependent we are on Ukraine for security and how big a threat Russia actually is. That's my impression when I talk with politicians, people in power. Many of them actually do understand these things now, and especially with the uncertainty about Article 5 in NATO and all that, Ukraine is just more important for our security.

So I actually see our support for Ukraine as being probably quite solid and durable and much more so than Putin things. But I don't know if it's necessarily, I mean, you say it's a very optimistic vision and you hope I'm right. I mean, I'm super concerned about it because I don't know what Putin is going to do. I mean, on the one hand, it is good that things are probably going in Ukraine's favor militarily.

I think it is tipping in that direction. But I am super concerned about what Putin will do in that situation. I think many people underestimate Russia as a military power, how much, like they look at the front line in Ukraine. They say, well, this army is not even able to take the Donbass. They can't take the city of Kramatorsk. How could they be a danger to NATO?

That's totally misunderstanding what's going on here and that the reason Russia can't progress there is not because Russia is weak, but because Ukraine is incredibly strong and that we are just not currently ready to face such an enemy. I am super concerned that when we get to that situation that what Putin is going to do is to try to change the dynamic, shake things up to exactly make us give up on supporting Ukraine, convince us that we need to stop this because it's going to drag us into the war ourselves.

If we don't want war, we need to let him have Ukraine. That's why I'm so concerned that even though on the one hand, it's an optimistic take, I also see it really increasing the risk of real confrontation between NATO and Russia in the coming years.

Vlad: I meant something, I think, quite narrow, so maybe I misspoke when I talked about your optimism that I wish to materialize. I was simply speaking about the idea that the politicians you're speaking to now are going to be the politicians five years from now. What I'm saying is that it'd be fascinating to know where we sit on this. I suspect I'm more pessimistic than you are. Certainly, the Trump-style politicians in the UK might be constrained when they come to power, but the private dispositions of somebody like Nigel Farage will be to ally with Putin the way Trump has allied with Putin.

I do think that other leaders that might get born over the coming years in Western Europe of that ilk, post-truth ex-conservative authoritarian populists, are going to be Putin fanciers. That's where I have a degree of pessimistic concern, but they're all beatable in any given election. Every single one of them is beatable. We need to understand that when a trend is going against us, it doesn't mean we are destined to lose.

It means that we're fighting with a deficit, but there's always the possibility to turn election our way. But then coming to what you're saying, I think that's quite right. Putin is not going to be somebody who gives up without escalation if his survival and power is at hand. I'm not a kind of sort of panicker about what Putin might do by attacking NATO or how Putin might use nuclear weapons, but there is absolutely no doubt that Putin is not going to leave power freely because he associates that with his own physical destruction.

And that's a very visceral association. I think some people talk about all these stories about how Putin is still traumatized by what happened to Gaddafi and what happened to Saddam being exaggerated. Maybe the specifics are exaggerated about what Putin watched on repeat and so on. But I think the fundamental reality is that Putin thinks that him losing power is the same as his physical destruction. And therefore, his propensity to escalate is going to be very, very high if he is losing power.

So we do need to be aware of that. And I think one of the things that's so valuable about your analysis here is that you lay it out very persuasively, even though still for us, it seems completely implausible. It seems implausible that Russia would attack NATO because NATO does not get attacked. NATO in Europe does not get attacked. And so I think we need to be having a responsible conversation, the kind that you are leading, about this question, not just so that we're politically, militarily ready, but also so that our populations are psychologically ready.

Because I don't fancy our instincts, funnily enough, if Putin were to escalate against us. I do not fancy the instincts of French, British, German citizens, if that happens. I think the overwhelming instinct would be that Eastern Europe is not Europe, basically. The Baltics are not Europe. They're just not. Sorry. I mean, there might not be Russia either, but they've not got much to do with us. That's the psychological default of civic sentiment if we get really, really threatened by Russia.

That wouldn't be shared. Every weight wouldn't be shared in parts of Scandinavia. It wouldn't be shared in parts of Eastern Europe. But I'm a pessimist about Western European sentiment here. And I think we need to do a lot of this work of explaining how this is to do with us and how this is an existential part of our future. Not because Putin will attack Denmark, but because you cannot separate our security interests from the sustenance of our basic needs and our domestic politics.

That's one of the things I always rave on about. That's what Putin wants. He wants the scenario of some kind of provocation against NATO to destabilize our domestic politics so that we become, in turn, then not efficacious on the foreign stage. So I'm seeing that alarmism in you. And I think it's wise and it's well-placed without being excessive.

Anders: Thanks. Time is running, but there is something on this that I just want to pick your brain on. And I thought myself or an answer myself. But is this sort of populist right movement Trumpism thing that we see brewing in many countries, is that necessarily going to be pro-Russian? Because isn't there a variation of this that could occur in, especially, Eastern European countries, where it would be much more, actually, even if these people come to power?

I think we see it in Poland, actually. We see these kinds of politicians coming in, sharing many of the same tendencies, but still being vehemently anti-Russian and willing to stand up for Poland and invest in the military. Wouldn't it be maybe the same, actually, if we saw this kind of movement coming into Ukraine, that there's a pretty good chance it would still be anti-Russian, after all that Ukraine has endured?

So even with this whole wash of populist movements that we are in, that it might not all go Putin's way.

Vlad: I think that you're right about Eastern Europe. My feeling about Western Europe is that we've got to stop as much of that wave as possible. I don't think we can rely on it not being pro-Russian because I expect it to be. And one of the reasons it will be is that it's Putinism. It's the same politics. Putinism, minus the mystical stuff we mentioned, is roughly Trumpism on steroids.

So there's going to be tremendous ideological affinity. Ideological affinity is not, "Here are my views, and I present them, and I compare them to Putin's, and they overlap." That's not how it works. It's about basic, almost subconscious predispositions to relate to politics in a certain way. So what do these people think? They tend to think that might is right. And I call this with this weird term, "hyper-neoliberalism."

They tend to have several elements of fascist ideology. Might is right itself could be said to be a fascist ideology, but there are certain elements of fascization there. And the biggest part of this ideological wash that I emphasize is a kind of monarchism, which says that you relate to your population as the leader beyond the institutions. You have a magical connection with the population. The institutions are relatively secondary, but you still need to have elections to engage in these sort of relegitimation rituals that demonstrate to the people, to the people in the regime, and to the opponents of the regime, that the people are with the leader.

So these elements, which I don't want to bore you by because I go on about them a lot, and I think I made one video specifically about these elements shared between Trumpism and Putinism. There's going to be monarchism, there's going to be might is right, there's going to be elements of fascization. So I think what this is going to be is Putinism, effectively. And therefore, the risks of alliance with Russia are going to be high, but we have complex political systems with very deep historical inheritance.

They're also going to put brakes on the dispositions of these politicians. So how far the story that they actually won't side with Putin and how far the story that they will will turn out to be right will depend on the conflict between their personal dispositions and how far they are held back by certain kinds of historical institutional inheritance in their country. And we're seeing that with Trump.

Trump would like to sell Ukraine to Putin. He can't. He's constrained in various ways. So I think what I'm confident about is the disposition of these leaders. What I'm less confident about is what kind of constraints they're going to be under, which might mitigate what they would really like to do. So that's the extent of my optimism. But at the level of the disposition of these people, I'm pessimistic, and therefore we need to kick them out from having a chance of running our lives.

Anders: Okay. I think we're going to wrap it up there. It's been a super big pleasure talking with you. I don't know if we actually ended up with an answer to the question of what a Russian defeat looked like, but I think we discussed many perspectives on it. And hopefully that has value as well. And if anyone out there watching for some reason is not subscribed to Vlad's channels, please go ahead and do so. I'm going to leave some links in the video description.

Okay. Vlad Vexler. Thanks a lot.