WIREDGOV

Historic economic and social conditions point to a change of leadership in Russia, but a triggering event is still on the horizon for Putin.

In October 2025, your author published a paper with RUSI concluding that Putin had the resources to continue and even expand the war in Europe. Since then, things have got worse economically, militarily and socially. In April 2026, Thomas Nilsson the head of Sweden’s Military Intelligence and Security argued that that Russia’s economy was much weaker than official figures report and that Moscow was ‘living on borrowed time’. How weak is Russia? How much of a threat are current conditions to Putin’s reign?

This article develops a framework intended to identify when an authoritarian leadership enters a historically significant zone of vulnerability.

The purpose is not to predict regime collapse. That would be foolish. The aim is to produce a historical framework of conditions that coincided with leadership (not regime) change in an array of dictatorships (including Russia) in the past.

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