By Kit Klarenberg, Substack, 12/21/25

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On December 4th, a long-running Inquiry into the mysterious July 2018 death of Dawn Sturgess delivered its final report. To the surprise of surely no one, it concluded Sturgess was contaminated with Novichok as a result of the attempted assassination of GRU defector Sergei Skripal in Salisbury by Russian intelligence operatives, directed by Vladimir Putin, four months earlier. While the mainstream media unquestioningly accepted the findings as unchallengeable gospel, evidence heard and produced throughout the Inquiry raised considerably more questions than it provided answers.

Sturgess’ death, many miles away from Salisbury, was a puzzling coda to the already enigmatic poisonings of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in March 2018. She is the only person in history known to have died from coming into contact with Novichok, despite the substance being the most lethal nerve agent known to man, and Russian intelligence repeatedly using it to strike targets – purportedly. Her boyfriend Charlie Rowley allegedly gifted her a bottle of Novichok disguised as perfume, which he found – when and where, he seemingly doesn’t know.

Despite apparently spraying the substance on his hands, then wiping it on his jeans, Rowley didn’t die. He was hospitalised unconscious on June 30th 2018, hours after Sturgess collapsed, having unwittingly contaminated herself with Novichok. Or so British authorities would have us believe. Rowley awoke on July 10th, two days after Sturgess’ death. Mysteriously, he was one of many absolutely key witnesses the Inquiry neglected to call to testify. Then again, the process was a flagrant whitewash farce from start to finish.

Under English law, a coroner’s inquest should typically be completed within six to nine months of an individual’s passing. However, as independent journalist John Helmer has extensively documented, British authorities were suspiciously resistant to convening one for Sturgess. It was only after intense legal battles between Sturgess’ family and the government that an Inquiry was instituted. Unlike inquests, which have sweeping legal powers, inquiries are little more than flaccid public relations exercises. Those interviewed and evidence considered was strictly limited, by state decree.

This fudge conveniently prevented British intelligence agencies from scrutiny – an astonishing shortfall, given much of the Inquiry focused on the supposed link between the poisonings of the Skripals and Sturgess’ death. Inquiry chief Anthony Hughes, a former Supreme Court judge, concluded the Skripals’ alleged GRU assassins, Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov, “brought with them to Salisbury” Novichok secreted in a perfume bottle. He added, “it was probably [emphasis added] this bottle that they used to apply poison to the door handle of Sergei Skripal’s house”.

“There is a clear causative link between the use and discarding of the Novichok by Petrov and Boshirov, and the death of Dawn Sturgess,” Hughes ruled. Squaring this circle required extraordinary mental gymnastics. Multiple witnesses – some anonymous – suggested the two would-be GRU assassins used a portable heat sealer to conceal the Novichok delivery mechanism in a perfume box, after applying the deadly poison to Skripal’s doorknob. The pair then allegedly dumped it in parts unknown for Rowley to find, at an indeterminate place and date.

The Inquiry expended enormous time and energy attempting to validate this dubious narrative, to the extent of consulting an expert on heat sealers at some length. Despite this monumental effort though, Keith Asman, a senior counter-terror officer who participated in the probe of the Skripals’ poisoning, acknowledged under questioning during the Inquiry there was “no forensic evidence whatsoever” to support the assessment a portable heat sealer was used by the alleged GRU assassins. But the Inquiry’s glaring evidentiary issues didn’t end there.

‘Under Surveillance’

Independent journalist Tim Norman has documented in forensic detail the myriad contradictions, discrepancies and confounding dualities thrown up over the course of the Inquiry. For example, it was revealed Yulia Skripal, contrary to all prior mainstream reporting, awoke in hospital just four days after her poisoning. Moreover, via blinking, she communicated to an on-duty intensive care doctor she and her father had been “sprayed” with an uncertain substance while they lunched together on March 4th 2018. Police had initially made the exact same judgment.

Nonetheless, the Inquiry attributed no credibility to Yulia’s potentially bombshell, hitherto unrevealed hospital testimony, on the basis she was sedated at the time. By contrast, the Inquiry unquestioningly accepted Charlie Rowley gifted the bottle of Novichok disguised as perfume and discarded by the Skripals’ failed assassins to Sturgess, leading to her death. This is despite Rowley providing wildly discrepant and implausible accounts of when and where he supposedly found the bottle over time, and avowedly poor memory, due to drug addiction and alcoholism.

Yet, perhaps the most marked paradox to emerge over proceedings was Sergei Skripal’s apparently heightened concern, and simultaneous lack of anxiety, about his personal safety. A statement he purportedly wrote in October 2024 – albeit unsigned and undated, rendering it inadmissible under British law – asserts he believed there was a significant risk “Putin would ‘get me’”. Mysteriously though, Skripal refused to undertake any measures to conceal his identity or location while living in Britain.

His handlers reportedly offered him “protection, including changing my name,” but Skripal “wanted to lead as normal a life as possible, including maintaining my personal and family relationships,” and “felt quite safe” as he’d “received a Presidential pardon from the Russian state.” Besides, his MI6-purchased Salisbury home was situated in “a quiet street built for police officers,” and “several neighbours” of his “were ex-police” – “residents knew and kept an eye out for each other.”

Such was Skripal’s sense of sanctuary, he allegedly didn’t even have “a house security alarm or sensor activated security lights,” let alone CCTV attached to his home, despite this being “recommended”. Skripal reportedly didn’t want to make his house “conspicuous or live under surveillance,” although domestic CCTV cameras are extremely common in Britain. This supposedly self-professed lax attitude to security is at stark odds with the accounts of his friend Roy Cassidy, both in the wake of the Salisbury incident and during the Inquiry itself.

Repeatedly, Cassidy has described Sergei as “watchful and suspicious,” and publicly expressed intense doubt over the proposition Novichok was applied to his front door while he was at home with his daughter, during daytime, without anyone noticing. On top of Sergei’s high-alert ex-police neighbours, his house lay at the end of a cul-de-sac, while his office was sited in a converted garage, providing “a full view of the street” ahead. Sergei spent most of his time at home there. Cassidy has observed:

“These guys are professional assassins. It would have been far too brazen for them to have walked down a dead end cul-de-sac in broad daylight on a Sunday lunchtime…Almost always, Sergei used to open the door to us before we had chance to knock. Whenever we visited, he’d see us approaching.”

According to the Inquiry, Skripal’s GRU assassins conducted a reconnaissance mission on March 3rd in the middle of the day, while Sergei was collecting Yulia from Heathrow airport. A counter-terror officer speculated this was specifically timed for when Sergei was absent from his home. The would-be killers not only went unnoticed by Skripal’s neighbours during this alleged dummy run, but again evaded detection the next day as they supposedly applied Novichok to his doorknob – right when British police place Sergei in his street-facing office.

‘Entirely Unconnected’

In September 2018, it was reported Skripal and Cassidy, who drove the GRU defector to meet Yulia at Heathrow, told police they were being “tailed” by persons unknown during their journey back to Salisbury. Resultantly, British security services were said to “believe a second team” – in addition to the Boshirov and Petrov two-man “hit squad” – had been involved in the “operation” to assassinate Skripal. Further detail on this “tailing” was provided subsequently by Russopohobic British intelligence mouthpiece Luke Harding:

“On the ride home…at some point it became obvious that a black BMW was shadowing their car. Inside the vehicle was a woman with bleached blonde hair and a man in his forties.”

The Inquiry addressed Cassidy’s certainty an “undercover police car” was “tailing him” and the Skripals from Heathrow. In testimony, he described how “after passing what he believed was a white unmarked police car and slowing down, he then noticed the black BMW keeping pace, either in front or behind him…for a long distance.” However, the inquiry subsequently “heard” while the two vehicles were correctly flagged by Cassidy and Skripal as undercover cop cars, “they were engaged in ‘entirely unconnected’ police activities at the time.”

This extraordinary co-occurrence is all the more unbelievable, given Harding’s description of individuals in the black BMW “shadowing” Skripal’s car precisely matches a man and woman caught on CCTV walking side-by-side down a Salisbury alley leading to the bench where the unconscious Skripals were found, around 30 minutes prior to their discovery. On March 6th 2018, British police released brief footage of the pair. Reports varied on whether authorities believed them to be the Skripals, or considered them potential suspects in the poisoning attack.

CCTV clips of the Skripals on March 4th 2018 released by the Inquiry indicate the alley twosome bore zero even vague similarity to Sergei and Yulia whatsoever, suggesting they weren’t mistaken for the Skripals by police. Coincidentally though, the unidentified blonde woman was carrying a red bag, just as Yulia was widely reported to have in her possession when found comatose. If officials did view the pair as suspicious, then publishing the images – particularly at such an early stage – was a highly unusual move.

British authorities are typically reticent to release CCTV footage of suspects in unsolved crimes. Such disclosure by definition alerts guilty parties they are on law enforcement’s radar, providing ample impetus to destroy incriminating evidence, or make a break for it. The unidentified pair’s presence in intimate proximity with the poisoned Skripals has been completely forgotten today, and was not probed by the Inquiry. Who they were, and the reasons for their apparent elimination from inquiries if considered suspects, has never been clarified.

Perhaps there was a “second team” of spies “shadowing” Cassidy and Skripal. As this journalist has previously revealed, there are sinister insinuations Anglo-American intelligence was well-aware of the arrival of Boshirov and Petrov in Britain, and sought to exploit their presence for malign ends. It may be significant that of the 11,000 hours of CCTV footage in Salisbury supposedly seized by police, little has been released. Although, certain frames strongly suggest Skripal’s alleged assassins were under intensive surveillance as they travelled throughout the city.

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The Guardian, 12/17/25

One point I picked up from this report is that Ukrainian drone units are given extra supplies depending on the number of Russians they claim to have killed – which may help explain the wildly exaggerated Russian casualties figures the Ukrainians are so keen to publicise. – Prof. Geoffrey Roberts

In a warm bunker, lined with wooden logs, it is Dmytro’s job to monitor and help the drone crews on the frontline. Perhaps a dozen video feeds come through to his screen on an increasingly hot section of the front, running roughly from Pokrovske to Huliaipole, 50 miles east of Zaporizhzhia city.

Dmytro, 33, is with the 423rd drone battalion, a specialist unit only formed in 2024. He cycles through the feeds, on Ukraine’s battlefield Delta system, expanding each in turn. The grainy images come from one-way FPV (first person view) drones; clearer footage, with heights and speed, from commercially bought Mavic drones; at another point there is a bomber drone, available munitions marked in green.

It is a common sight across Ukraine’s front, though as Dmytro and his commander, Kostya, a captain, point out, the terrain below is distinctive. This is not the more defendable Donetsk, with its towns and slag heaps. It is flat, farming land punctuated by destroyed villages, the meeting point of the Dnipropetrovsk and Zaporizhzhia oblasts.

While Vladimir Putin’s most recently stated goal is to take all Donetsk, by diplomacy or force, it is near here that the line yielded in November. The geography makes it tricky to defend, Kostya observes: “There are a lot of fields and if we lose a height advantage, we have to retreat for kilometres.”

An opportunistic Russian attack east of Huliaipole caught the Ukrainian defenders short. The area had been held since 2022 by a war-weary 102nd territorial defence brigade, soldiers from Ivano-Frankivsk in the west, but they could not withstand the sudden pressure. A battalion gave way completely. In November about six miles was lost.

The difficulties were caused partly by Ukraine’s intense defence to the east, said Serhii Kuzan, the chair of the Ukrainian Security and Cooperation Centre. “Because of the big concentration of forces in Pokrovsk and Myrnohrad, the reserves were exhausted and that’s why this offensive was possible.” Troops from the 225th assault regiment, were redeployed to stabilise the situation by the end of the month.

Though the Ukrainian Mavic drones have an extraordinary reconnaissance ability, with experienced pilots able to pick out movement from a couple of hundred metres away, the Russian invaders have been able to exploit frequent late autumn fog. “They take advantage of our lack of visibility because of the weather,” Kuzan says, and allying it with 250kg glide-bomb strikes.

The Russian airforce still operates about 300 jets and can launch the munitions from 50 to 75 miles away, beyond the range of Ukrainian air-to-air missiles. Though planes and missiles can be tracked on radar, the defenders only have four minutes’ notice. Electronic countermeasures can divert their path, a process that Ukrainian soldiers estimate is effective 70% of the time.

When the weather is clearer, the drone crews work on an unceasing defence. Russian soldiers head forward in ones or twos to pre-assigned points, to try to avoid deadly drones above, often with little food and water, and sometimes even without arms, the weapons to be picked up later if they can survive. But if the weather is clear, the flat terrain and the lack of foliage means that it is not difficult to spot the infiltrators.

Maksym, 29, and Serhii, 24, have just returned from five days on the front, part of a mixed crew of FPV and Mavic pilots. Now they are resting, one playing a video game, Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl, a post-apocalyptic shooter set in the exclusion zone surrounding the destroyed nuclear power plant – raising the obvious question of whether there is any similarity to their frontline work.

“It helps us do our job,” Maksym says, smiling. “If you are flying a jet in one of the battlefield games, it’s basically the same as flying a Mavic. It’s good practise.”

Rest for pilots in position depends on the level of Russian activity. “You can always have enough [time] to sleep 15 minutes and you are OK,” Maksym claims. Both FPV and Mavic drones have up to 20 minutes of battery life, and they can be deployed one after the other if needed, striking at up to 9 miles (15km) – and farther, to 18 miles if an FPV is launched from a second “mother drone”, which also acts as a re-transmitter.

The pilots struggle to recall their most recent deployment, but Maksym brightens and says “on the previous time there was one day when we killed seven Russians and wounded three”, which was “a regular, normal good day”. What does it feel like to kill Russians? “We feel joy because you killed your enemy,” he says, such is the reality of the war.

The statistics make stark reading. In November, the 423rd battalion reported it had killed 418 Russian soldiers, in line with other specialist Ukrainian drone units, their casualty totals publicly reported, part of an established points system, where extra supplies are given to those with the most enemy killed.

Russia’s military suffered an estimated 1,033 casualties a day in November, and 382,000 during 2025, according to British estimates. Drones account for 60% of Russians killed and wounded, Oleksandr Syrskyi, Ukraine’s chief military commander, said, with the country’s pilots flying 10,000 combat missions a day in November.

Vitaliy Hersak, the commander of the unit, speaking from a large bunker near Zaporizhzhia, emphasises that the battalion was created last November, such is the relative novelty of drone warfare. His claim that “we are destroying one and half battalions of the enemy a month” may be a slight exaggeration, but it is not far off the mark. The problem is that Russia seems to have “infinite numbers” while Ukraine is “basically out of infantry” making sectors of the line harder to hold.

Farther east along the front, two experienced drone pilots from the Da Vinci Wolves battalion, in Dnipropetrovsk region, wonder how long they can keep defending with the intensity required. How many of the enemy they have killed? Each wonders if it could be as many as 1,000, though they have no idea, and on an official count the unit’s most successful pilot has more than 400 kills. “I think I could do it for another six months, that’s it,” says one, although the war may well last longer.

There is little sign of any desire to stop resisting, though maintaining an active defence will require new pilots and longer breaks from the frontline. Sasha, whose call sign is Lego, because he was a 3D artist and student, is 23, and learning how to fly FPV drones. He signed up three months ago, telling his father “just before I was going to jump on the train” because he wanted to avoid an extended family conversation.

The softly spoken young man does not know how he will fare. “I haven’t been on a position yet,” he says, but reasons he has to try: “There was a moment when I realised: I can’t sit and do nothing and just live.” Sasha is also reluctant to comment on the ongoing peace negotiations, arguing he has no right to do so, because has had never been in the front. Instead he says, simply, that for Ukraine “the first thing is just survive”.

By Ben Aris, Intellinews, 12/16/25

Nearly three years into the war in Ukraine, a former senior White House official has acknowledged that the conflict might have been avoided had the United States been willing to forgo Nato membership for Ukraine.

Amanda Sloat, who served as Senior Director for Europe at the US National Security Council and lead policy on the region for President Joe Biden – directly overseeing policy on Ukraine – admitted to Russian pranksters that if Kyiv had agreed to abandon its Nato aspirations in early 2022 during a round of diplomacy or shortly after the invasion at the Istanbul peace talks, it “may well have [prevented/stopped the war].” She added, “It certainly would have prevented the destruction and the loss of life.”

The interview with Sloat was conducted by two well-known Russian pranksters who go by the aliases Vovan and Lexus — real names are Vladimir Kuznetsov (Vovan) and Alexei Stolyarov (Lexus) – who have regularly tricked western officials, often posing as foreign officials, into giving candid interviews and admitting embarrassing details as part of the deteriorating relations with Russia.

The interview with Sloat was particularly damning as she admitted that the Biden administration had no particular plan to protect Ukraine nor bring it into Nato, and simply refused to negotiate with Russia on principle in failed talks that led to war. Russian state TV aired the interview which bolsters the Kremlin’s claim that Russia is fighting a proxy war against Nato.

Sloat’s remarks prompted sharp criticism from foreign policy commentators, who described Sloat’s framing as both revealing and misleading.

“She’s being dishonest,” political commentator and IntelliNews contributor Arnaud Bertrand said. “By definition, neutrality for Ukraine wouldn’t have given Russia ‘some sort of sphere of influence’ but would have made it… neutral, i.e. in-between spheres of influence.”

Bertrand contends that the refusal to consider neutrality was based less on principle than on Washington’s reluctance to relinquish strategic leverage. “She [Sloat] was uncomfortable with the idea of implicitly giving Russia some sort of veto power,” he noted. “But that’s exactly what she wanted to preserve for the US—keeping the theoretical possibility of pulling Ukraine into Nato. It wasn’t even about an actual gain, just the optionality.”

The human cost of that decision has been catastrophic. Hundreds of thousands of men have died and Ukraine has been devastated. It stands in stark contrast to the abstract policy preferences that shaped US policy on Ukraine.

“Think about the cost equation,” Bertrand says. “Not even an actual security commitment, just the potential of one, outweighed any serious effort to prevent the war.”

The issue of Nato expansion has long been a fault line in relations between Russia and the West. Russian President Vladimir Putin has complained about Nato’s inextricable expansion eastwards that started in 1999, when Poland, Hungary and Czechia joined, eventually adding eight new members, starting with his famous speech at the Munich Security Conference (MSC) in 2007. In that speech he claimed that Nato had given verbal promises to Mikhail Gorbachev of “not one inch” expansion that was subsequently broken.

Ukraine’s supporters point to an essay that Putin wrote in July 2021 to claim that Russia wants to conquer all of Ukraine and recreate the Soviet Union. However, last year former Nato Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg admitted that the war in Ukraine began after Nato refused to respond and Russia’s security concerns were the root cause of the war in Ukraine in another embarrassing revelation. Sloat’s interview corroborates that revelation.

During the early stages of the war, Ukrainian and Russian delegations struck the Istanbul peace deal that included an agreement for Ukraine to give up its Nato ambitions. However, the deal failed after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy met with former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who refused to sign off on security deals and told the Ukrainian president to “fight on.” Over a million men have been killed or wounded since.

At the Berlin meeting on December 14, between EU leaders, US President Donald Trump’s special envoys and Zelenskiy, all the same points that the Kremlin was pushing for in January 2022 before the invasion started have come up again.

Sloat’s comments now confirm that strategic discomfort in Washington played a direct role in foreclosing what may have been a viable diplomatic off-ramp. “She’s describing her own position and projecting it onto Russia,” Bertrand said.

(Watch interview with Sloat here.)

By Kautilya The Contemplator, Substack, 12/13/25

Western political discourse often treats President Vladimir Putin’s twenty-five years in power as an aberration, a manifestation of uniquely Russian authoritarianism and a personalistic dictatorship incompatible with modern political norms. Russia is, therefore, an inevitable target for Western-engineered so-called “democratic transformation.” Yet, this narrative reveals far more about Western ideological assumptions than it does about Russia’s own political culture. It assumes that the institutional patterns of the North Atlantic world in the form of frequent electoral turnover, procedural legitimacy and entrenched party competition, represent a universal model toward which all societies naturally evolve. Russia’s own historical trajectory suggests something different.

In the long continuum of Russian statehood, from the medieval princes of Muscovy through the imperial Tsars, the long-serving General Secretaries of the Soviet Union and into the modern Russian presidency, extended leadership tenures are not deviations. Instead, they are characteristic expressions of a civilizational logic shaped by geography, historical trauma, ethnic complexity and enduring geopolitical pressures. Putin’s longevity, far from being anomalous, represents a return to structural equilibrium after the turbulence of the 1990s. Understanding why requires situating Russia’s political patterns within their deep historical and cultural contexts.

Historical Continuity of Long Rule

The Tsarist Era: Sovereignty Until Death

The pattern of long-term centralized authority predates modern Russia and permeates its political evolution. From the 15th century onward, Muscovite and Imperial Russia developed governance structures in which the sovereign ruled until death or violent overthrow. Ivan III ruled for forty-three years (1462–1505), unifying Russian lands, ending Mongol suzerainty and consolidating the state. Ivan IV reigned for thirty-seven years (1547–1584), centralizing authority and expanding Russian territory to Siberia. Peter the Great’s forty-three-year rule (1682–1725) modernized the military, restructured state institutions and expanded the empire westward. Catherine the Great’s thirty-four-year reign (1762–1796) extended Russian influence across Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and the Black Sea. Nicholas I ruled for thirty years (1825–1855), overseeing an era of ideological conservatism and imperial cohesion.

These rulers were not constrained by term limits or regularized succession mechanisms. Their tenures reflected the structural demands of governing a vast, diverse empire exposed to external threats and internal fragmentation. Stability depended on sustained personal authority, not rotation of office.

The Soviet Era: Ideology Changed, Political Logic Did Not

The Soviet period preserved this deeper continuity beneath the veneer of revolutionary ideology. Vladimir Lenin ruled until incapacitation and death. Joseph Stalin governed for twenty-nine years until his death in 1953, industrializing the country, mobilizing it for total war and engineering an authoritarian modernization that transformed Russia into a superpower.

Leonid Brezhnev ruled for nearly two decades, presiding over an era of détente and cautious conservatism. Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko died in office. Only Nikita Khrushchev was removed before death, and even his removal came through an intra-elite party coup rather than through any democratic mechanism.

Across five centuries of statehood, the pattern is unmistakable. Russian leadership is long-term, centralized and stable, disrupted only by systemic crises. Putin’s tenure fits squarely into this lineage.

Russia as a Multi-Ethnic and Civilizational State

Western misunderstandings of Russia begin with the false assumption that it is a conventional nation-state comparable to European parliamentary democracies. Russia has never been that. It is a multi-ethnic, continental-scale civilization whose political culture and strategic behavior are shaped by sheer geographic immensity and profound internal diversity.

A state stretching across eleven time zones and uniting more than 190 ethnic groups and multiple religious traditions cannot be governed through the rapid political turnover typical of Western systems. Long-term, centralized leadership is not an ideological quirk but a structural necessity. The memory of the Soviet collapse, when a weakened center allowed entire regions to break away, reinforces the conviction that discontinuity at the top risks fragmentation.

Russian thinkers have long argued that geography imprints itself on political psychology. Nikolai Berdyaev famously described “Nature” in Russia as an elemental force that is vast, overwhelming and spiritually formative. Pre-Christian pagan impulses blended with Byzantine Orthodoxy, creating a national character marked by a tension between boundless, earthly vitality and ascetic, otherworldly discipline. This duality mirrors Russia’s physical landscape that is immense and formless.

Such a landscape demands strong organizing authority. Russian historians contend that centralized rule emerged not from a cultural affinity for despotism but from the practical challenge of imposing order on the steppe. Where Western civilization grew within compact, clearly bounded territories conducive to stable institutions, Russia grew outward into open space. In such conditions, only a powerful state could hold the civilizational whole together.

Russia’s political model is therefore not rhetorical but existential. The state is expected to serve as the unifying principle of a vast and varied civilization, preventing centrifugal drift among its many peoples. This explains why long-term leadership whether Tsarist, Soviet or presidential, has been the dominant pattern across Russian history. The state’s authority is the spine of the Russian world.

This civilizational logic of thinking in centuries rather than electoral cycles, treating sovereignty as sacred and viewing instability as an existential threat, shapes both elite expectations and public attitudes. Rapid leadership rotation appears dangerous and Western-style party competition brittle. Continuity at the top is understood not as authoritarian stagnation but as strategic prudence. Putin’s long tenure reflects this deeper civilizational demand that only durable, centralized power can sustain a state of Russia’s scale and historical vulnerability.

Political Trauma and the Fear of Collapse

If Russia privileges stability and continuity, it is because its history repeatedly demonstrates the catastrophic consequences of state weakness. Three moments in particular form a continuous chain of trauma that deeply informs the Russian political imagination.

The Time of Troubles (1598–1613): Collapse of Sovereignty

The Time of Troubles (Smutnoye vremya) was not merely a dynastic crisis. It was a near-extinction event for the Russian state. After the death of Tsar Feodor I and the extinction of the Rurik dynasty, tsars were made and unmade by factions, pretenders proliferated, foreign armies occupied Moscow and famine killed perhaps one-third of the population. The infamous Seven Boyars (Semiboyarschina), a council of aristocrats who effectively handed Moscow over to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1610, became a lasting symbol of elite treachery, factionalism and the dangers of state disintegration. In Russian historical consciousness, the boyars represent what happens when elites prioritize gain over national survival.

The 1990s: The Modern Time of Troubles

The symbolic template of the Smutnoye vremya resurfaced with extraordinary force in the 1990s when the Seven Bankers (Semibankirschina) comprising Boris Berezovsky, Mikhail Fridman, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Vladimir Gusinsky, Vladimir Potanin, Alexander Smolensky and Petr Aven, became in the public imagination, a modern ‘Boyarshina’. They privatized not merely state assets but functional sovereignty itself. Gusinsky and Berezovsky controlled national television networks. Khodorkovsky controlled strategic energy assets and funded political parties. Regional governors treated their territories as personal fiefdoms and the Russian mafia effectively acted as the arbiter of property rights and security across the country. In parallel, de-industrialization, population decline, IMF dependency and NATO expansion exacerbated the sense of humiliation and hopelessness.

As such, for ordinary Russians, the “Wild 1990s” were not a time of freedom but a time when the state vanished, the police were powerless, wages went unpaid and criminals, or oligarchs indistinguishable from criminals, ruled. The parallel to the Seven Boyars is not metaphorical but structural. In both cases, the absence of a coherent state allowed powerful private interests to seize control, fragment authority and invite external manipulation.

February–October 1917: Liberal Democracy as Paralysis

The 1917 interregnum between the February and October Revolutions represents a third foundational trauma. The Provisional Government under Alexander Kerensky attempted to impose Western-style democratic reforms on a war-exhausted society. Instead of stabilizing the state, Kerensky presided over the collapse of army discipline, the rise of rival power centers, land seizures and economic disarray. In later recollections, he is reported to have answered that preventing Bolshevik victory would have required “shooting one man – Kerensky himself”. His liberal democratic vision was not wrong in theory. It was simply incompatible with the conditions of a vast, wounded, agrarian empire on the brink of disintegration. To Russians, 1917 did not show that democracy was impossible. It showed that democracy imposed prematurely without state capacity or order, leads directly to collapse.

Collective Memory of Collapse

These three historical traumas form a continuous thread in Russian collective memory. Each period taught the same civilizational lesson that when the central state weakens, Russia become vulnerable to internal predation, external interference and territorial dismemberment. Authority is not merely a political preference. It is a shield against national dissolution.

For Westerners, instability often signals the birth pangs of democracy. For Russians, instability is the prelude to famine, occupation, civil war and criminal rule. This deep-seated fear of collapse, encoded across four centuries of historical experience, helps explain why Russian political culture places such a premium on continuity, long-term leadership and centralized authority. The trauma of past disintegration creates a powerful societal mandate that the state must never again be allowed to fall apart.

Performance-Based Versus Procedural Legitimacy

Against this backdrop, Western efforts to promote regime change in Russia, whether through sanctions, information campaigns or normative pressure, fundamentally misunderstand the nature of Russian political legitimacy. In the West, legitimacy emerges from adherence to democratic procedures, term limits, party competition and electoral rotation. In Russia, legitimacy derives not from procedural formalism but from performance and specifically, the leader’s ability to provide stability, economic predictability, social order, protection from foreign threats and the restoration of national dignity after humiliating periods of weakness.

Networked Power and the “Besieged Fortress”

Western narratives often reduce Russia’s political system to the personal will of Vladimir Putin, as if it were a one-man dictatorship divorced from institutional, bureaucratic and elite dynamics. In reality, Putin occupies the position of primus inter pares, the “first among equals,” within a tightly interwoven elite ecosystem that includes the security services, the military, major state corporations, regional governors, loyal oligarchs and technocratic administrators. His authority rests not on isolated personal power but on his ability to manage, balance and embody the interests of this wider ruling coalition.

This elite configuration bears far greater resemblance to the Tsarist bureaucratic machine and the Soviet nomenklatura than to any Western-style presidential administration. It is a system designed to be self-protective and consensus-oriented, structured to prevent internal fragmentation and maintain continuity in a vast and diverse state. Because the locus of power is collective rather than personal, removing Putin would not dismantle the system. It would simply elevate another figure emerging from the same institutional matrix and shaped by the same strategic assumptions. Western regime-change fantasies persist only because they misinterpret the nature of Russian governance, imagining it as personalistic rather than structurally embedded.

To understand why such a system coalesced and why it prizes continuity, it is necessary to recognize Russia’s deeply rooted besieged fortress mentality, something Western observers often dismiss as paranoia but which arises from centuries of traumatic experience. Russia’s identity has been forged through repeated invasions that consistently threatened its political survival: the Mongol-Tatar domination, the Polish occupation of Moscow in 1610, Swedish incursions under Charles XII, Napoleon’s invasion, the Austro-German offensives in World War I, Allied interventions during the Civil War and the Nazi onslaught of 1941. Each episode reinforced the belief that a fragmented or indecisive state invites catastrophe.

Even earlier, during the Northern Crusades, the Teutonic Knights attempted to subjugate the Novgorod Republic. Viewing Orthodox Christians as indistinguishable from pagans, the Catholic Church sanctioned the campaign as part of its mission to extend Latin Christendom. The Knights also sought to control Novgorod’s lucrative trade routes. Their defeat by Alexander Nevsky in the 1242 Battle on the Ice became a foundational memory in Russian statecraft, an enduring symbol of the necessity of strong, unified leadership to repel existential threats.

This long arc of historical insecurity shaped Russia’s perception of the modern world. The Cold War reinforced expectations of Western encirclement, and post-Soviet developments such as NATO expansion, color revolutions along Russia’s periphery, and openly stated Western goals of “weakening”, “decolonizing” or “dismembering” Russia have appeared to confirm, rather than alleviate, these anxieties. In such an environment, the logic of centralized authority, elite cohesion and strategic continuity becomes deeply entrenched. The state sees itself operating under perpetual external threat and its leadership structures reflect a civilizational imperative: to ensure stability in a world perceived as chronically hostile.

Elections as Political Ritual

One of the most misunderstood aspects of Russian political life is the function of elections. Western analysts often describe Russian elections as “sham contests” or “fake versions” of Western democracy. However, such comparisons assume that all elections serve the same purpose. In Russia, elections function less as mechanisms of leadership rotation and more as rituals of affirmation. They demonstrate mass cohesion, test regional elite loyalty and symbolically renew the legitimacy of continuity.

Critics also point to the exclusion of figures such as Alexey Navalny and the dominance of Kremlin-approved “systemic opposition” candidates as evidence that Russian elections are hollow. Yet this, too, confirms rather than refutes their ritualized function. In an electoral-authoritarian system, the ballot is structured not to decide who will govern but to stage society’s consent to an already-decided leadership arrangement. Allowing a genuinely competitive challenger would undermine the very continuity the system is designed to preserve.

The Medvedev Interlude: Continuity Under Constitutional Constraint

The 2008–2012 Medvedev presidency illustrates this logic. Although Putin stepped aside due to constitutional term limits, elite networks, policy direction and strategic objectives remained unchanged. Russia fought the 2008 war with Georgia under Medvedev, the state continued consolidating power and the groundwork for later constitutional reforms was laid. The “tandemocracy” maintained continuity while respecting constitutional formalities.

The 2020 Constitutional Amendments and Mishustin’s Appointment

A more significant institutional adaptation occurred in 2020 with sweeping constitutional reforms. These amendments extended presidential terms to six years and reset Putin’s previous terms, allowing him to run again as though beginning anew. This was not merely a personal power play. It reflected elite consensus that continuity was strategically essential amid rising geopolitical confrontation.

Simultaneously, Putin appointed Mikhail Mishustin, a technocratic and non-political figure from the Federal Tax Service, as prime minister. Mishustin symbolized managerial continuity rather than political rivalry. His role underscores that the Russian system prizes technocratic competence and loyalty over pluralistic competition.

Continuity and Survival in Crisis

What Western critics call “stagnation” often manifests in Russia as resilience. Leadership continuity has repeatedly enabled Russia to endure and ultimately triumph over crises that would have shattered more fragile states. Alexander I’s long reign allowed Russia not only to survive Napoleon’s invasion but to rebuild, reform and ultimately advance into Paris in 1814. Stalin’s lengthy rule provided the organizational capacity to industrialize the Soviet Union, transplant entire industries eastward during the Great Patriotic War, mobilize tens of millions and rebuild the nation after victory.

In the post-Soviet era, Putin’s long tenure has allowed him to centralize authority after the chaos of the 1990s, tame the oligarchs, restore the fiscal foundations of the state, defeat separatism, modernize the military, rebalance the economy, diversify energy exports and reposition Russia within a multipolar global order. These undertakings could not have been accomplished within the time horizons of Western leadership cycles.

Putin’s Strategic Advantage in a World of Short-Term Leaders

Putin’s unique strategic advantage lies in his continuity. He has outlasted five American presidents – Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden – each of whom dramatically shifted US policies toward Russia, China and the Middle East.

While American strategy oscillated from reset to rivalry, from interventionism to retrenchment, Russia pursued a coherent long-term program of resisting NATO expansion, consolidating influence in the post-Soviet space, engaging China and India, strengthening domestic sovereignty and cultivating a Eurasian orientation. No Western leader has accumulated such extensive experiential knowledge of global statecraft. In the international arena, time itself is a resource and Russia has wielded it more effectively than any Western power.

Traits Required to Rule a State Like Russia

The traits required to rule Russia thus differ markedly from those valued in Western democracies. A Russian leader must possess strategic patience, the ability to think in decades and the willingness to make difficult decisions to preserve the integrity of the state. A mastery of diplomacy as an existential craft is indispensable as well as the capacity to act as a symbolic embodiment of national continuity.

These traits are not optional but structurally necessary for managing a state with Russia’s geographic, ethnic and geopolitical complexities. Leaders who lack such qualities either perish, as many did in Russia’s turbulent periods, or are removed by the elite, as in Khrushchev’s case.

After Putin: Continuity Without the Man

The question of Russia’s future after Putin often animates Western commentary, usually through two mistaken assumptions. First, that Putin alone holds the system together, and second, that removing him would catalyze liberalization. Neither assumption withstands scrutiny.

Putin is not the creator of Russia’s political logic but its product and its guardian. The system he leads is robust, diversified among powerful elite blocs and deeply rooted in historical patterns. His successor, whenever he emerges, will be shaped by this system, not liberated from it. The next leader may, in fact, be more rigid, more security-driven and less internationally experienced than Putin, especially given the intensifying geopolitical confrontation with the West. Many Russian elites believe that Putin’s relative pragmatism and diplomatic skill will be difficult to replicate. The West may one day “lose Putin” only to confront a leader more nationalistic and less flexible.

Russia will not liberalize into a Western model after Putin because the structural foundations of its political culture such as its geography, ethnic diversity, civilizational identity, historical trauma, elite configuration and security imperatives do not disappear with a change in leadership. If anything, the system will likely consolidate further. The logic of continuity will outlast the individual who currently embodies it.

The Deeper Lesson for the West

Across six centuries, Russian governance has survived Mongol domination, the Time of Troubles, Napoleonic invasion, imperial collapse, civil war, the devastation of the Second World War, Stalin’s excesses, Khrushchev’s volatility, Brezhnev’s stagnation, Soviet dissolution and the post-Soviet collapse. In each case, the state eventually reasserted continuity and stability. This pattern illustrates a profound truth: Russia’s political system is not centered on specific leaders, but on a civilizational logic that prioritizes order, sovereignty and endurance over procedural turnover.

Western misunderstandings of Russia persist because they rest on the false premise that all political systems aspire to mimic Western liberal democracy. Russia’s political model is not a deviation from an imagined global norm. It is the product of its geography, history, civilization and strategic culture. Putin’s twenty-five years in power reflect not the idiosyncrasies of one man, but the structural necessities of a civilizational state that thinks in centuries, not electoral cycles. When he eventually leaves the political stage, Russia will continue along its historical trajectory, guided by the same imperatives of stability, continuity and strategic patience that have shaped it since the age of Ivan III. In this sense, the West does not misunderstand Putin. It misunderstands Russia.

By Joe Lauria, Consortium News, 12/16/25

The British Crown Prosecution Service has dropped its terrorism investigation of independent journalist Richard Medhurst 16 months after he was stopped at Heathrow Airport and interrogated about his reporting on Gaza. 

Medhurst reported the CPS decision in an X post. 

Medhurst said Britain dropped the case by turning it over to Austrian authorities, who raided Medhurst’s home in Vienna last February, taking his devices and interrogating him about his reporting on Gaza. 

He said British authorities turned over their files to the Austrians and gave them “primacy” over the case.  They also lifted bail against him.

Medhurst said Austria can’t have primacy because he was arrested first by Britain and that the claims against him are different. “The U.K. claims that journalism is terrorism,” he said. “The Austrians say journalism makes you a member of a terrorist organization.”

Medhurst said that his government went out of its way to give Austria “whatever so-called files they have on me shows”  you how “vicious” they are.  “Literally blowing people up on a daily basis and then they have the nerve to call me a terrorist because I’m sitting in a room by myself talking to a camera.”

Austrian immigration authorities called him to a meeting in February where they threatened to revoke his residency because of his reporting on Palestine and Lebanon.  

When he thought the interview at the immigration office was over, he said a group of plainesclothes officers entered the room flashing their badges. He was detained and served with a search warrant.

Medhurst said he was accused by them of encouraging terrorism, disseminating propaganda and being involved in organized crime. 

Medhurst was arrested by Britain in August 2024 entering his own country at Heathrow Airport and detained nearly 24 hours for allegedly violating the British Terrorism Act by supporting a “proscribed organization,” namely Hamas. 

[See: Journalist Richie Medhurst Arrested at Heathrow Airport Under ‘Terrorism Act’]

Section 12 of the British Terrorism Act actually criminalizes holding certain opinions or beliefs. It reads: 

“12 Support.

(1) A person commits an offence if—

(a) he invites support for a proscribed organisation, and

(b) the support is not, or is not restricted to, the provision of money or other property. …

(1A) A person commits an offence if the person—

(a) expresses an opinion or belief that is supportive of a proscribed organisation, and

(b) in doing so is reckless as to whether a person to whom the expression is directed will be encouraged to support a proscribed organisation.” 

Under these provisions other journalists, including Craig Murray and Asa Winstanley have been interrogated and likewise threatened with prosecution for critical reporting about Israel in Gaza, which is being misconstrued by the state as support for Hamas. 

Criticism of one side in a conflict does not automatically amount to support for the other. 

Under (1A) (a) above, thousands of Britons have been arrested this year only for publicly proclaiming support for Palestine Action, an activist group opposing Israel’s genocide that has been designated a terrorist organization for damaging RAF property in a protest. 

“Now that the U.K. has dropped the case, I really hope the Austrians will realize that they’ve been taken for a ride and sent on a wild goose chase with ridiculous accusations,” Medhurst said. “The fact this case is allowed for almost a year and a half—it’s a crime in and of itself.”

Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former U.N. correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and other newspapers, including The Montreal Gazette, the London Daily Mail and The Star of Johannesburg. He was an investigative reporter for the Sunday Times of London, a financial reporter for Bloomberg News and began his professional work as a 19-year old stringer for The New York Times. He is the author of two books, A Political Odyssey, with Sen. Mike Gravel, foreword by Daniel Ellsberg; and How I Lost By Hillary Clinton, foreword by Julian Assange.