What Comes After Putin?

Russia's annual Victory Day parade was a disaster. As the war in Ukraine takes its toll, rumors swirl of a coup against Vladimir Putin. But what comes after Putin may just end up being so, so much worse. Welcome to America Uncovered, I'm Chris Chappell. Today, we're going to explore some dark places. Not the sort of thing YouTube likes monetizing. That's why I'm so grateful to this week's sponsor, Outskill, for making this episode possible. Outskill has already educated more than 10 million people across the globe, including a lot of America Uncovered viewers who have found it really valuable. Lars Rocha writes, Chris, I've taken the AI course and I'm creating programs that are out of this world. Thank you for you and your sponsor. Wartime writes, I've also done Outskill two or three times. They really opened my eyes to what can be done. Why would it take more than once? Because every month, there's something completely new that AI can do for you. 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What you learn in two days could change in the next two years for you. So click the link in the description or scan the QR code. So on Saturday, Russia celebrated one of its most sacred holidays. And no, I'm not talking about a free weekend in Escape from Tarkov. I'm talking about May the 9th, Victory Day, the anniversary of the Soviet defeat of Nazi Germany. It is, by most accounts, the most important secular holiday in Russia. Every year, Russia marks it the same way. Military parades across the country, with the headliner a massive military parade through Red Square. There are large numbers of troops in dress uniforms alongside vintage World War II-era tanks— the same design that stopped the Third Reich in its tracks. And then the main event. Russia's newest and best hardware— armored infantry vehicles, top-of-the-line modern battle tanks, anti-air guns, self-propelled artillery, missile launchers, and nuclear-capable ICBMs— all of it rolling past the Kremlin while Putin watches from the review stand. Or at least, that's how Russia used to celebrate Victory Day. This year, things went a little... differently. This year, Putin stood at that same review stand. He watched the troops march past, and it was followed up by... nothing. No missiles, no giant artillery guns, and not a single tank. Not even one of those old museum pieces. Instead, they watched a video of the equipment being used in Ukraine. Which is just lame. Half the reason you even do these parades is to show off all the cool tech. So what's the deal? Well, Al Jazeera's correspondent on the ground explained, tanks are needed at the front, not at the parade. Which, when you think about it, is kind of weird. I mean, Russia, you're supposed to be this military-industrial giant. Your economy is like 10 times the size of Ukraine's. And you're telling me you couldn't spare a single tank for one of the most important days of the year? Heck, what about those ancient Cold War tanks you got lying around? Couldn't you spare at least a few of them? Just to make the history nerds happy? Well, according to military analysts, Russia is so desperate for armor that they've been forced to bring out of storage decades-old T-62s, T-54s, and T-55s. Some whose basic designs date back to the 1940s and return them to war. When your prop tanks are needed at the front, something has gone very, very wrong. But it's not just a supply issue. They were also worried about the event's security. Officials said the event's change of format was due to the current operational situation and pointed to the threat of Ukrainian attacks. Oof, that's bad. You're telling me that the country whose nearest land border is 300 miles away from Moscow gets to decide whether or not the Kremlin can put on a parade? What, is Putin afraid Russian air defense wouldn't be able to take down a few measly drones? He maybe has a point. Those are the same anti-air systems used by Venezuela and Iran. And the reviews are in. They're not very good. But still, I don't know what Putin was so worried about. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said he was fine with the parade. Just a day before, he issued an official presidential decree authorizing Russia to hold the parade, including the precise GPS coordinates of Red Square, and promising that Ukraine wouldn't strike the event. Ok, I gotta hand it to Zelensky. He's way funnier as president than he ever was as a comedian. So how did Russia get here? Well, in February 2022, Putin sent his army to Kiev. The plan was regime change in 10 days, install a friendly government, make Ukraine neutral again, and restore Russia's fear of influence. That plan fell apart within a week. So the goalposts moved. Putin started talking about denazification, securing the Donbas. Each new objective a smaller, more achievable-sounding version of the last. But those were never the real objectives. The entire point of the war was to keep Ukraine from becoming a NATO ally. And achieving that objective is now basically impossible. Even if Russia could just grind it out for years and years, absorbing horrific numbers of casualties, and somehow reach the Dnieper River, what would they really gain? The rest of Ukraine would still be free. That's 25 million people now with a battle-hardened army, years of combat experience, NATO weapons, and a population which holds Russia in complete and utter contempt. It would become a permanent base for insurgents and a NATO partner in everything but name. And the cost of this impossible war? Western estimates put them at well over a million Russian casualties, be they killed, wounded, or captured. The Russian death toll alone could be anywhere from 230,000 to over half a million. Now, against this backdrop, a report started circulating recently. It was picked up by CNN, the Financial Times, and others. It claimed that, according to an unnamed European intelligence agency, the Kremlin is tightening security over fears of a possible assassination or coup against Putin. Should we take this seriously? Mark Gagliotti, one of the more credible Russia analysts working today, didn't mince words. Writing in The Spectator, he said it may all just be a deliberate deception, and a psyop meant to generate paranoia in the Russian elite rather than a serious assessment. His skepticism is warranted. Kremlinology has a terrible track record. Analysts have been predicting Putin's downfall for years now, be it from illness, isolation, or internal revolt. And don't forget, experts got blindsided when the USSR collapsed. But more importantly, Putin has spent the last 30 years eliminating anyone who could threaten his power. The Wagner mutiny was the exception that proved the rule. And Purgosin was dead within two months. Another big reason there's been no serious coup attempt against Putin is the structure of the Russian state. As one analyst told the Carnegie Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Putin's power structure works like competing pyramids, each built around an individual patron competing for resources and access. The patrons lack coordination with each other, which means it's difficult for them to act as a collective. And as long as the patrons get more from Putin than they could without him, there's no incentive to act against him. So no, we're probably not looking at the start of a coup. But here's what everyone should worry about. Putin is 73 years old. Whether there's a coup or not, he won't be around forever. And when you look at who's waiting in the wings to take over, you'll realize that Putin was the moderate in the room. Now let me be clear. There's no clear indication that Putin is grooming any of these guys to be his successor. And if there was, that would just make the successor a target of the other elites. And once Putin is gone, we're likely to see a repeat of the sort of internal power struggles that have defined Russia's history over the last century. Anyone who's seen Death of Stalin will know what I'm talking about. Great flick, by the way. So who do we got? One candidate is Alexei Dumin. He's 53, a former Putin bodyguard, and now Secretary of the State Council. He's loyal and relatively young by Russian elite standards. At best, we could expect more of the same. But many of the other candidates are a lot more... ideological. Nikolai Petrushchev is the former Director of Russia's Intelligence Service, the FSB, and the former Secretary of the Security Council. Before 2014, his rhetoric was basically the same as any other Russian bureaucrat. But after 2014, something changed. According to the Moscow Times, Petrushchev began to paint a picture of the West as Russia's eternal enemy, bent on its total destruction, saying they would prefer Russia not to exist at all. This isn't just performance. Petrushchev has publicly claimed all sorts of crazy conspiracy theories. For example, that Anglo-Saxon elites want to seize Siberia as a reference from the Yellowstone supervolcano. And this is the reason the West wants to capture Russia. Yeah, who wouldn't trust that guy with Russia's nukes? Then there's Yuri Kovalchuk. A secretive billionaire, Putin's personal banker, and a major controller of Russian media. Putin spent much of the Covid lockdown with Kovalchuk, who seems to have convinced Putin that history matters more than the present, and that Putin needs to think of his legacy as part of Russia's long-term history. Great a nationalist, mystic with no public profile, whispering in the ear of the most powerful man in Russia. Move over Dugin, this guy's the real Rasputin. And of course you have Dmitry Medvedev, who served as Russia's president before the laws were changed to allow Putin to stay in office forever. He's threatened to nuke the US, UK, Germany, and Ukraine should Russia lose the territory it currently occupies. Now Medvedev is sort of a clown, but this guy was the president of Russia, and Putin does let him go out and say stuff like this, so something worth considering. And these are just a few examples of who Putin has lurking around the Kremlin. But Chris, you say surely there's someone from outside Putin's circle who could take power? What about the Democratic opposition? Well, I'm sad to report Russia's opposition is pretty fractured. And the leaders they did have often weren't too different from the Kremlin insiders. Take Alexei Navalny, the man the West held up as the face of Russian liberal democracy. He spent years in the 2000s marching with far-right groups like the National Russian Liberation Movement, making videos comparing Muslims to cockroaches, and demanding the annexation of pro-Russian breakaway regions in Georgia and Moldova. As late as 2020, as he was recovering from poisoning in Berlin, he declined to renounce his earlier positions. So even the reformers are operating within a political culture where imperial chauvinism is a baseline assumption. But looking at Russia's history, you can start to understand why this sort of outlook keeps rising to the top. After the Soviet Union fell in the 1990s, Russia didn't just have an economic crisis. It experienced total institutional collapse. The state, the military, the currency, social services, national prestige, life expectancy for Russian men dropped catastrophically. The oligarchs looted the country in broad daylight. And a failed war in Chechnya heaped on even more national humiliation. When Putin came in and stabilized things, the population made a rational trade. Give your freedom up to the strongman, and he will bring order and restore Russia's glory. The tragedy is that the strongman system guarantees the lesson keeps reinforcing itself. It hollows out every institution that could provide an alternative. Independent courts, free press, civil society, and the next crisis always seems to validate the need for another strongman. The system reproduces itself. Which brings us back to Ukraine. Putin's original war aims are permanently unachievable. A neutral Ukraine, a subordinate Ukraine, is not possible anymore. The war accomplished. The exact opposite of every strategic objective. NATO expanded. European defense spending spiked. Ukrainian national identity was forged into something harder than it has ever been. This is regime-ending stuff. Not immediately. Putin may cling on for years. But historically, leaders who start wars they cannot win do not die peacefully in their beds. Yeltsin's Chechnya adventure didn't end him directly. His drinking took care of that. But it hollowed him out. He limped to 1999, made a desperate bet on an obscure FSB hardliner, and handed him the country. The system's response to a leader weakened by a failed war was to produce someone harder. We may be watching that process begin again. And here's the uncomfortable conclusion. The people waiting to inherit the system aren't like Putin. Putin is, by the standards of his own inner circle, a moderate. A cynical pragmatist who has managed an insane system without blowing up the world. But his potential successors are true believers. They'll inherit a military that has been bled white for no strategic gain. They inherit a war they cannot win conventionally. And they inherit a nuclear doctrine written under Putin that's already lowered the threshold for using nukes from an existential threat to Russia, to a critical threat to Russia's sovereignty or territory. That person may have some very different ideas about how to end the war in Europe once and for all. So regardless of what you think of Putin, let's all just say a little prayer that he stays with us, just for a little while longer. And if you're not skilled yet in using AI, there's still a chance to get ahead before everyone else in your industry does. Click my link below and register for Outskill's free AI training this weekend. I'm Chris Chappell. Thanks for watching.