Putin is afraid of a new coup and is losing leverage precisely when US President Donald Trump is “tightening the screws,” as Russia begins to “burst at the seams,” the article says.
According to the publication, Putin again considers former oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who now lives in London and heads the Anti-War Committee of Russia, a threat. The FSB accused Khodorkovsky and his associates of preparing a coup, but he denies all accusations.
The Russian economy is “beginning to bend”: high interest rates, problems with servicing corporate loans and falling oil revenues threaten the state with financial collapse, the media notes. Russian Economy Minister Maxim Reshetnikov warned back in June that the country was “on the verge of recession.”
Small pockets of protests are emerging – at the beginning of the month, hundreds of people gathered in a square in St. Petersburg to sing a forbidden song calling for the overthrow of Putin, the author of the material writes.
John Herbst, director of the Atlantic Council's Eurasia Center and former US ambassador to Ukraine, said that “the Kremlin is becoming paranoid” and Putin is looking for enemies to strengthen his regime.
Timothy Ash of Chatham House believes that “for the first time in three and a half years, Russia is really hurting” and that “there is panic.”
Additionally, Russia is under pressure from Ukraine, which regularly attacks oil refineries with drones, and the United States. On October 22, Trump announced sanctions against Rosneft and Lukoil, while simultaneously threatening international banks servicing payments for Russian oil. As the publication writes, these steps could “cut off key oil revenues that Putin uses to finance the war.”
The Russian economy has proven surprisingly resistant to sanctions, but only because the Kremlin forced banks to lend to defense enterprises without standard checks, the media notes. Craig Kennedy of Harvard University explained that “the Russians financed the war with borrowed money – it just wasn't visible in the government budget.” According to his estimates, approximately 23% of all corporate loans from Russian banks – that is, $190 billion – are now issued to military-industrial complex enterprises. This is approximately 37% of Russia's annual budget.
Loans were issued without checking creditworthiness, and now, against the backdrop of the highest rates in 20 years (16.5%), many companies were on the verge of bankruptcy, the media notes.
“Most of our enterprises will go bankrupt if everything continues like this,” warned Rostec head Sergei Chemezov last year. In June, the head of Sberbank, German Gref, admitted that many companies can no longer service their loans.
Although the head of the Central Bank of the Russian Federation, Elvira Nabiullina, assures that the system is “stable,” independent analysts see the preconditions for a systemic crisis.
Kennedy emphasized that the same signs were seen before previous financial collapses in Russia and that “there will be an explosion – the only question is when.”
The fact that the FSB is now accusing Khodorkovsky, in his opinion, shows the Kremlin’s anxiety regarding the transfer of power. He stressed that if Putin dies tomorrow, he has no obvious successor and that “the international legitimacy of the opposition could be a decisive factor in the event of a sudden change of power.”
Angela Stent of Georgetown University agrees. According to her, the Kremlin wants to strengthen the narrative that the West is trying to destroy Russia.
Khodorkovsky believes that Putin's war machine rests on cooperation with China and that Chinese leader Xi Jinping can stop the war by simply stopping buying Russian oil.
Against the backdrop of sanctions and internal problems, Trump seems to be going into “bad cop” mode, The Telegraph emphasizes.
Context
Since coming to power, Putin has systematically eliminated those who contradict him. This happened in 2023 with the leader of the Wagner PPK, Yevgeny Prigozhin, who tried to go to Moscow against the illegitimate president, but the rebellion failed, and Prigozhin himself died in a plane crash.
