Cartoon by Nathz

5 Scenarios for Russia After Putin’s Next Term

By Casey Michel

Politico: his weekend, Vladimir Putin will win another election as Russia’s president. The election will, of course, be rigged in Putin’s favor, just as all of his past elections have been, but Putin is all but assured to claim another six-year term, taking him to at least 2030.

Yet for all that inevitability, Putin’s next term as president has been the focus of surprisingly little discussion, including what it is likely to mean both inside and outside Russia. And that’s all the more surprising given that Putin’s regime is arguably more destabilized now than it’s ever been, with little end in sight for Russia’s growing economic troubles or the spiraling deaths on the battlefields of Ukraine. Since last summer alone, Russia has seen a sudden mutiny, led by a renegade militia that nearly marched on Moscow; rampaging anti-Semitic riots, with security services nowhere to be found; and protests erupt in normally placid places like Bashkortostan.

No one can say what these events portend. But it’s clear that the war in Ukraine has helped make Russia’s domestic situation more unstable than it’s been in decades, and all kinds of potential future scenarios are no longer unthinkable.

So it’s a good time to think about them. In at least considering the paths below — and the likelihood of their arrival in the not-too-distant future — the West can begin preparing accordingly, especially in terms of strategy and policy. We know much about Russia’s past and plenty about Russia’s present. But what about Russia’s future?

Below are five scenarios that Russia might (or might not) experience by the end of Putin’s next term in 2030.

Why It Might Happen: As the anti-communist, anti-colonial revolutions in 1989 across Eastern Europe illustrated, totalitarian regimes can rest on quicksand and quickly crumble in the face of democratic movements. Putin’s disastrous decision-making in Ukraine has already had unforeseen knock-on effects, which will only continue to generate discontent moving forward — and more interest in potential alternatives, including outright democracy.

And that was true even before Alexei Navalny’s suspicious death in prison. While Navalny may have been the most prominent leader of democratic movements in Russia, killing him has hardly eliminated pro-democratic energies in the country. With Navalny transformed from a campaigner into a martyr, such momentum for democratic reform — even democratic revolution — might actually begin building anew. As a prisoner, Navalny was out of sight, and largely out of mind for most Russians. But as a symbol of the lengths Putin’s regime will go to snuff out any opposition, Navalny may now become something more.

Combined with the other protests still gurgling around Russia, not least those organized by soldiers’ mothers and wives, a sudden burst of democratic momentum around the country is now possible. Nothing would be more of a testament to Navalny’s life, and to Navalny’s legacy.

Why It Might Not Happen: As much as many in the West would like to see a full flourishing of democracy in Russia — whether led by Navalny’s widow, Yulia Navalnaya, or someone else — the likelihood of such a scenario playing out before 2030 is minimal. And that was the case even before Navalny’s death. Now, with the leader of Russian democratic hopes suddenly snuffed out, any chance at rallying Russians to a democratic cause has almost certainly died with him, at least for the foreseeable future.

Just look at where Russia is. Navalny is, in many ways, irreplaceable, just as jailed pro-democratic figures like Vaclav Havel or Nelson Mandela before him were irreplaceable, and whose countries’ democratic transformations happened only after they were freed. The rest of Navalny’s pro-democracy infrastructure has been effectively undone, stamped out by Putin’s repression. And even with the shock of Navalny’s death still settling, the Russian body politic has hardly evinced any interest in liberal democracy anyway. Rather than rallying to his cause, many have simply shrugged their shoulders at Navalny’s demise, and gone on with their lives. The same goes for hopes of rising opposition to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine; even two years into Putin’s disastrous war, the majority of Russians are still passively, if not actively, supportive of the unprovoked invasion.

What the West Should Do: The best hopes for a democratic Russia lie, perhaps ironically, not in Russia itself, but in Ukraine. Just as colonial failures in places like Angola and Algeria led to democratic, post-imperial reforms in places like Portugal and France, so too could a Ukrainian victory kill off Russian nationalism and Russian revanchism — and finally spur the kind of democratic flourishing Navalny called for.

If this scenario does come to pass, it’s incumbent on the West to return to an old strategic staple: trust, but verify. Don’t get overexcited about Russia’s democratic prospects — a mistake far too many in the West made in the 1990s — but encourage what you can. Be open to lifting sanctions and hydrocarbon price caps, but only in return for concrete reforms and prosecutions of Putin-era officials. All the while, keep building out relations with Russia’s neighbors and former colonies, places like Moldova and Armenia.

Perhaps above all else — and as sacrilegious as it may sound right now — don’t put your hopes in a single leader. Navalny was the clear lodestar for Russian democratic hopes, but even he had his nationalist weaknesses, claiming, for instance, that Crimea is rightfully Russian. If nothing else, Navalny should be the last singular Russian figure so many in the West place hopes of democratic reform on — a belief that has burned the West in the past and that led the West to miss just how ingrained Russian imperialism still is.

Why It Might Happen: Picture this: on the back of a devastating war, with hundreds of thousands of Moscow’s troops slaughtered in a meaningless fight, Russians turn out to protest en masse, and overthrow an aging, doddering regime. Long-buried frictions and frustrations ripple across the country and a nation supposedly united under the steady hand of Moscow suddenly splinters along ethnonationalist lines. Chaos sprints across the nation, which collapses into a mixture of anarchy, territorial fragmentation, and violence that leaves no region, and no family, untouched.

Sound farfetched? Think again. This is, after all, precisely what happened in Russia in the late 1910s and early 1920s, when the tsarist collapse ripped apart the Russian Empire, with peoples and polities across Eastern Europe and the Caucasus and northern Asia all declaring independence — only for most to eventually be gobbled up by a rising Soviet regime  >>>