From Newsweek, May 6:
Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky tauntingly said the Kremlin is worried that “drones may buzz over Red Square” as Moscow locked down hard ahead of the May 9 Victory Day parade.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has plenty of reasons to look over his shoulder and above his head. A leaked European intelligence document, reported by the U.K.’s Financial Times and Russia’s Important Stories, claimed Putin is increasingly spending time safely ensconced in bunkers, fearing assassination or a coup.
Security around Putin has tightened sharply, the intelligence says, with more checks, fewer aides, restricted movements, limited communications. Many in the Western world, and especially those in Ukraine, will welcome the news and fantasize about the idea of drone-delivered justice against the Russian president.
But a gratifying fantasy would meet a grim reality. A ruler who trusts fewer rooms, fewer phones, and fewer aides is not presiding over a calm succession machine. And that's the big problem. Russia’s eccentric system of gangster politics is built around one man: Putin. It would be most dangerous the moment that man suddenly disappears.
The State Putin Built
Putin has spent a quarter-century making himself the Russian system’s referee, patron, and final court of appeal, playing elite factions off against each other so they compete for his favor—a key to wealth and success in modern Russia. Little of political substance happens without his explicit or tacit approval.And Putin has built that vast personal power while substantially reducing the checking influence of institutions and individuals around him. He is now the center of the universe in the Russian state, and his implosion would leave a black hole into which all else is swallowed.
Ukraine no doubt poses a serious threat to Putin, and it has demonstrated capabilities to hit targets deep inside Russia, including Moscow, be it through drones or special operations to plant car bombs.
But the gravest threat to Putin is probably from within the vast mob-state of his making; an opportunistic, ambitious rival sensing both advantage and a window of opportunity (though it’s best advised to avoid open windows in Russia) with the dire state of the economy and the botched handling of the war in Ukraine.
The potential is clearly there. Just look at the recent past. In June 2023, Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner fighters seized the military headquarters in Rostov-on-Don and advanced toward Moscow before abruptly turning back. It was a reminder that loyalty in Putin’s system can become armed leverage with startling speed.
Prigozhin later died in a suspicious plane crash. Putin prevailed this time.
The New Faces of Putinism
According to the intelligence report, bitter tensions have now risen among Russian security services, including disputes involving the FSB, military leadership, Rosgvardiya, and the Federal Protective Service over keeping senior officials safe from assassins.The same report connected concern about Sergei Shoigu’s network and the risk of a coup against Putin to the arrest of former Deputy Defense Minister Ruslan Tsalikov in March 2026.
Shoigu, who was moved from defense minister to secretary of Russia’s Security Council in 2024, had been one of the most visible figures in Putin’s wartime elite before he was pulled from the role as the Ukraine war faltered.
Russia doesn’t lack names for those who might hope to replace Putin when the time comes, either by nature or by plot. Perhaps Aleksey Dyumin, a former Putin bodyguard and presidential aide. Or Sergei Kiriyenko, the Kremlin official overseeing domestic politics, propaganda, and managed elections.
Maybe even Dmitry Patrushev, a deputy prime minister and son of Putin’s longtime close friend and aide Nikolai Patrushev, who represents a youthful form of continuity to the aging intelligence “siloviki” elite to which his father belongs.
Elder hard-liners such as Nikolai Patrushev or Alexander Bortnikov, the current FSB director, may matter more as veto players on certain contenders than heirs themselves.
But none of the names resolves the system’s central problem, which is Putin's indispensable role as its lynchpin. He is a kind of unifier of the factions, using patronage and menace to keep them balanced and pacified by a consensus that he and he alone is the legitimate ruler. Who from the elite factions could truly replicate or reform that?
The prime minister, currently Mikhail Mishustin, would serve under the constitution as the immediate acting president were Putin to die. Behind Mishustin, where the true power rests, a knife fight for the Russian state—a highly militarized and aggressive nuclear power, we mustn't forget—would begin between the elite clans.
The “anyone but Putin” instinct is tempting but too tidy. Russia is not a parliamentary system waiting for an opposition leader to walk through the front door and make a democratic case to a free electorate able to vote on conscience alone.
It is a wartime autocracy with intelligence chiefs, military commanders, presidential guards, oligarchic interests, and regional brokers whose fortunes depend on proximity to coercive power, and often in contest against each other.
Elite acceptance of any acting president could be uncertain because Russian institutions are weak and presidential authority is unusually concentrated. The successor most likely to survive is the one best able to frighten the others.
The opposing case deserves its due: Putin’s sudden exit could create an opening for a successor who wants sanctions relief, battlefield respite, or a less ruinous relationship with the West. There are opportunities aplenty in those regards.
But that possibility belongs to a later phase, after someone has survived the first scramble. Even then, it would require a wholesale shift in mindset among officials in a system Putin has spent more than 25 years creating in his image.
And most potential successors look to have bought into Putin's geopolitical strategy of imperial expansionism, anti-Western antagonism, and hard-power realism.
The immediate test for Putin’s successor won’t be moderation or reflection, a kind of de-Stalinization for the 21st century. It would be to take control of coercive institutions, elite money, battlefield command, and a hypernationalist narrative about Russian greatness.
Put simply, Putinism with a different face, and perhaps an angrier one.
The Tinder of Russian Instability
Russia's structural weaknesses won't limit its explosive potential in a succession fight. If anything, they might turn a fire into an inferno. The state of Russian society, and the challenges that lie ahead, are sobering....
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