Kremlin Is FURIOUS at Putin… YOU Are DESTROYING Russia

On May 9, Russian President Vladimir Putin stood  in Red Square to oversee Russia’s Victory Day   parade, the single most important ritual in the  Russian geopolitical calendar.

The ceremony was   an attempt to remind the world, and the Russian  people above all, that the nation that helped   defeat Nazi Germany had earned its place at the  top table of history.

Usually, the tanks would   roll, and intercontinental ballistic missiles  would be proudly showcased through the square   while fighter jets streamed across the sky.

The  message was always: “We always were and always   will be victorious.

” Except this year.

In this  year’s version, there were no tanks.

There were   no advanced missile systems or heavy military  hardware of any kind on display.

For the first   time in the last 20 years of the Victory Day  parade, the armored columns stayed home.

They   were simply shown on video because the Kremlin was  afraid that Ukrainian drones would destroy them   on live television.

Let that sink in for a moment.

The country that kept the world’s largest nuclear   arsenal on hair-trigger alert for decades wouldn’t  roll out its tanks through its own capital city,   all because a country it confidently said it would  conquer in a matter of days can now strike Moscow.

Four years ago, Putin’s tank crews drove toward  Kyiv with dress uniforms packed in their kit   bags.

They expected a victory parade through the  Ukrainian capital within the week.

Today, it is   Putin who cannot hold his own parade.

But the  tanks missing from Red Square are just the most   visible symptom of something much deeper.

Right  now, behind the façade of state television and   carefully staged photo opportunities, something  is breaking inside the Russian system and the   Kremlin itself.

The elite is disillusioned, the  public is angry, and the economy is cracking.

And   Vladimir Putin, the man whose blind ambition  started it all, is increasingly isolated,   increasingly lied to, and increasingly unable to  stop what he set in motion.

What we are watching,   according to some of the most credible Russia  watchers in the world, is the beginning of a   geopolitical catastrophe of Putin’s own making.

And history tells us that for Russian leaders,   catastrophes like this rarely end quietly.

To  understand what is happening to Putin right now,   let’s delve into how power actually works in  Russia.

According to Robert Service, a British   historian who wrote extensively on the subject of  the Soviet Union, Russian political legitimacy is   not really built on elections or constitutional  norms.

Instead, it’s built on military glory.

Russians are raised to revere their battlefield  history above all else.

Tolstoy’s “War and Peace”   is essentially a treatise on Russia’s victory over  Napoleon.

The Soviet army’s capture of Berlin in   1945 is the foundation of its national identity,  the thing the country reaches for when it needs to   remind itself of who it is.

So any Russian leader  who wins wars is legitimate, and one who loses   them is not.

And if history is any indication,  the Russian people move quickly to remove the   latter.

Consider Tsar Nicholas II.

He started  a war against Japan in 1904, which Russia lost,   and the humiliation cracked the foundations of  his rule.

Then came the First World War.

Russia’s   military was, by 1917, actually performing  reasonably well on the Eastern Front, but the   public did not see that.

What they saw was a tsar  who had appointed himself commander-in-chief and   presided over years of slaughter and suffering.

In February 1917, politicians and people turned   against him in the capital, and three centuries  of Romanov dynastic rule ended with Nicholas   quietly signing an abdication document.

A year  later, he was summarily executed.

Putin has   an intimate knowledge of Russia’s culture and  rules for ruling.

In his first years in power,   he built legitimacy on the Second Chechen War.

The  war started in 1999, while Putin was still Prime   Minister and arguably catapulted his career with  a Russian victory proclaimed in 2000.

This was   followed by the 2008 war in Georgia, a blitzkrieg  lasting only five days.

Moving on to Ukraine,   Crimea in 2014 was a walkover, using unmarked  soldiers to storm the local center of government,   rush a referendum, and occupy the region  before the West could even mount a response.

Putin looked like a decisive leader who acted  where his predecessor dithered and where the West   retreated.

The “Special Military Operation” in  Ukraine was supposed to follow the same formula as   the 2014 annexation of Crimea.

Russia would show  off its power, plow through Ukraine’s defenses,   and remove the center of government in Kyiv.

Tank  crews packed their dress uniforms to wear on the   supposedly inevitable victory parade in Kyiv.

It  is now the fifth year of the war.

And no sensible   Russian, whether in the Kremlin or outside  it, imagines it is going smoothly.

According   to NATO figures from the start of the year,  Russia is incurring between 20,000 and 25,000   casualties every single month.

Another figure  from Ukraine suggests Russia is losing at least   1,000 soldiers per day, extrapolating  to around 30,000 per month.

In total,   Russia has been estimated to have incurred over  1.

2 million casualties, with at least 300,000   deaths.

The manpower deficiency created by the  war has been severe enough that, in November 2025,   Putin signed a law enabling the Russian defense  ministry to conduct conscription throughout the   year, rather than in the seasonal drafts that  had been standard practice.

Surprisingly,   we’ve been at that point before.

Putin already  knew what he was signing up for when he attempted   a partial mobilization in the autumn of 2022.

Hundreds of thousands of Russian men fled the   country rather than be called up.

The mere concept  of a mass exodus of such proportions was deeply   embarrassing for a government projecting an image  of national unity and patriotic fervor.

Hence, the   government began cracking down on dissent and any  opinions that didn’t paint Russia as a surefire   winner.

And the new year-round conscription law  will be worse.

The earlier mobilization waves drew   heavily from poorer regions, rural communities,  and ethnic minority areas away from the capital.

In these places, the military pay was heralded as  a genuine lifeline, considering that some figures   proposed the yearly wage plus sign-in bonus to  be up to four times the national average.

This   was a grim calculation on the Kremlin’s part,  and for a while it worked, in the sense that   it kept the war away from the Moscow dinner  table.

But that pool of recruits is running   dry.

And now the draft could reach into parts  of Russian society that have, until this point,   been largely insulated from it: young men and  the urban class in Moscow and St.

Petersburg who   want nothing to do with this war.

This will upend  the tenuous social contract that Putin maintained   throughout the past four years: so long as you  pay taxes and stay in line with the propaganda,   the war won’t come for you.

The taxes have  increased, the propaganda is slowing down,   and Ukraine has slowly managed to penetrate  deeper into Russia’s territory.

There is   another dimension to the military picture that is  arguably more alarming than the casualty figures,   and it goes to the heart of how Putin is making  decisions.

Multiple sources with access to the   Russian leadership have confirmed that Putin  has told his inner circle he believes Russia   can capture the entirety of the Donbas by the end  of 2026.

And much like with the start of the war,   it seems Putin genuinely appears to believe  this claim.

Ukrainian intelligence officials   have a different explanation for why he believes  it.

They believe his generals are lying to him,   with fabricated reports being fed up the chain of  command, claiming victory is imminent.

This is not   a new phenomenon in Russian military culture, but  just a continuation of what we’ve seen.

In 2024,   commanders were removed from their posts for doing  the same, but chances are they weren’t the only   ones and could’ve been scapegoats for the “real”  falsifiers.

Even if many around Putin understand   the reality of the situation, it’s not clear what  Putin himself knows and understands.

So Russia now   has a leader making strategic decisions  based on falsified intelligence reports,   surrounded by subordinates too afraid to  tell him the truth, prosecuting a war that   is consuming 30,000 of his soldiers every month.

It’s no wonder the Victory Parade in 2026 looked   like anything but.

Beyond military losses,  Russia’s economy and social dynamics are under   increasing pressure.

The civilian economy has been  starved by wartime priorities for four years now,   and the strain is becoming impossible to ignore.

In 2026, there have been higher taxes and rising   inflation.

All the while, the government is  allocating roughly 40 percent of the budget   to war-related spending.

The country has announced  it expects a GDP growth of only 0.

4 percent this   year, against the more optimistic 1.

3 percent  prediction.

It has also run out of workers,   with “only” a 2.

1 percent unemployment rate.

But while that figure might sound promising   under “ordinary” scenarios, it’s different for a  country that has spent the last four years in war.

An unemployment figure as low as this suggests  that Russian companies have no unemployed people   to find.

Pitted against one another, businesses  advertise higher wages, where the costs are passed   onto the consumer (that consumer being the Russian  citizen).

So Russian workers are caught in a loop   where they nominally earn more money on account of  being able to pick their job, only to have to pay   more to live.

The social consequences also show  up in the data.

Russia’s general happiness index   fell to a 15-year low in April 2026, according  to a state pollster.

Curiously, the last time   the index was this low was when Putin was set  to become president for the second time in 2011,   replacing his “deputy” Medvedev.

Putin’s approval  rating has fallen to its lowest point since the   start of the full-scale invasion.

Then there’s the  geopolitical dimension behind Russia’s situation   and lack of progress, which is a double-edged  sword for its economy.

But before we continue,   make sure to subscribe to The Military Show.

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President Donald Trump’s confrontation with Iran,   which led to the blockage of the Strait of Hormuz,  prompted the United States to lift some of its   sanctions on Russia selling oil to India.

This was  a significant windfall that has added more than   $100,000,000 per day to Putin’s tax revenues.

That  money buys weapons, parts, technology, and, most   importantly, continues Chinese political support.

But $100,000,000 a day in oil revenue doesn’t   bring down inflation.

When Trump came into power,  Putin believed that Trump would fully side with   Russia.

Early negotiations were focused on Trump  trying to force Ukraine to accept an agreement   that would have it cede the occupied territory  for no return.

Not only did that attempt fail,   but Trump has publicly withdrawn from negotiating  between Russia and Ukraine, leaving the former   with only China at its side and the latter with  most of Western Europe, which has correctly   identified that Ukraine is Russia’s first stop  to trying to reclaim lost Soviet territory on   the continent, and went full steam ahead with  collaborative projects and military donations.

So   any leverage that Putin thought he had with Trump  is now gone, while Ukraine has drastically reduced   its dependence on assistance from the U.

S.

itself.

And if the economic pressure doesn’t cause Russia   to collapse, the information crackdown just might.

In late summer 2025, the Kremlin started promoting   Max, a Russian-made alternative to Telegram (which  was arguably already considered a social media   network dominated by Russian speakers).

The new  network provided seemingly no barriers to Federal   Security Service investigators, so using it meant  the FSB could see what you write.

Switching to Max   was basically asking the civilians and military to  open surveillance on themselves.

The backlash has   been thorough, with strategic bloggers suggesting  this could collapse frontline command due to the   app’s lack of basic security features.

Mere  months after the promotion, the government   reversed course, citing the so-called lack of  security as the main reason.

One Kremlin insider   described dinner party conversation in the Kremlin  as dominated by a single subject: the internet.

They suggested that the way Russia is going, it’s  going to start looking more like North Korea.

This   is particularly noteworthy since Russia has, for  the past decade, been trying to emulate China’s   system of internet controls.

The journalist Ksenia  Sobchak, who is the daughter of Anatoly Sobchak,   the St.

Petersburg mayor who was Putin’s early  political mentor, told The Guardian that she   believes it is only a matter of time before  Russian authorities move to block all Western   social media platforms entirely.

However, unlike  China, where the internet is monitored but at   least works consistently, Russia can’t properly  monitor its citizens, nor can it provide stable   connections.

Case in point, businesses complained  that they kept losing broadband, to which the   government responded that it was trying to shut  down internet access for vital targets to improve   security, i.

e.

, make them less susceptible  to drone tracking.

Regardless of its success,   this looks to be the intended trajectory of  domestic affairs for Russia, where the information   space will get progressively more sealed, and each  sealing generates a new wave of anger.

The public   will either try to go around the restriction  or fully buy into the government’s propaganda,   leading to the media and schooling systems  becoming increasingly militant and on par with the   Soviet regime.

And we all know how it ended for  the Soviets.

The clearest picture of where things   stand comes from Putin’s inner circle, where  the winds of fortune have shifted.

The Guardian,   citing interviews with multiple people in the  orbit of the Russian leadership and prominent   officials, has painted Putin as an isolated leader  surrounded by an elite that is becoming rapidly   disillusioned.

Of course, they’re not openly  plotting for the change of government, as none   of them would survive such an act.

There are talks  of a loss of faith in the current Russian leader.

And that loss is basically translating to the slow  degradation of the country’s authoritarian rule.

Putin has seemingly become aware of the narratives  circulating about his state of mind and leadership   capabilities.

A European intelligence report,  shared with several outlets in early May and   reportedly produced by a European country,  claimed that security measures around Putin had   been significantly tightened since March over  fears of a possible plot or coup attempt and   suggested that the former defense minister Sergei  Shoigu could emerge as a threat.

A week after
those reports circulated, the Kremlin released  a carefully produced video of Putin visiting his   former schoolteacher, Vera Gurevich, in central  Moscow.

The Putin in the video appeared relaxed,   wearing what could amount to casual clothing,  as if to purposefully dispel the notion that   he was hiding in a bunker.

But the staging itself  speaks to the pressure.

After 25 years in power,   the Kremlin feels compelled to release footage of  Putin buying flowers to prove he is not afraid.

The government has also debunked the “Shoigu  scenario” by arresting several officials close   to the former defense minister and thus further  isolating him from Putin’s inner circles.

Most   analysts now believe that if a real threat to  Putin’s rule emerges, it will come from within   his inner circle.

This would be someone with  access, with institutional support, and with   the conviction that the current trajectory is  genuinely catastrophic.

That person or group   doesn’t seem to exist or to have emerged yet.

And  Russia’s ruling and oligarch classes seemingly   suffer from what could be called the dissolution  of responsibility.

Everyone is afraid of Putin,   and nobody trusts him.

The Russian president  has also spent the better part of three decades   dismantling the upper class to fill it with an  elite that is fully subservient to him.

Nobody   actually wants to make the first move.

Instead,  the oligarchs are hiding either within Russia or   completely out of the country, waiting for the  shoe to drop and for someone else to dismantle   Russia’s current regime.

So the people who  arguably have the means and opportunity to   make changes are paralyzed, watching the country’s  economy sink into oblivion.

Even if we set aside   everything else, the casualties, the conscription  crisis, the economic pressure, the information   crackdown, the elite disillusionment, there is the  geopolitical dimension of the War in Ukraine and   its current trajectory.

Robert Service (remember,  he’s one of Britain’s foremost experts on Soviet   history and geopolitics) called Putin’s invasion  of Ukraine a gigantic geopolitical blunder,   and he is far from the only one.

Consider what  Russia had, and what Putin chose to do with it.

Russia in the early 2010s was an energy superpower  with a seat at every major international table,   a functional relationship with Europe, and  the option to play China and the United States   off against each other to Moscow’s advantage.

Instead, Putin chose to cut ties with the West,   to invade a neighbor, and to transform Russia from  an indispensable player into a geopolitical pariah   dependent on Chinese patronage and Iranian drones.

And even if peace comes on terms the Kremlin can   present as acceptable (one where Putin can claim  he fulfilled the ambitious objectives from 2022),   permanent damage has already been done  to Russia’s geopolitical standing.

NATO has expanded to include Finland and Sweden,  doubling its land border with Russia and absorbing   two countries that could further strangle Russia’s  naval access in the Baltic Sea.

European defense   spending has exploded, with countries across the  continent finally meeting NATO’s requirements of   2 percent of GDP (where its biggest economy  promised it would go up to 3.

5 percent of GDP   with collaborative and infrastructure efforts).

Four years after being battered by drones,   missiles, and tanks, Ukraine has emerged as a  battle-hardened military force with deep ties   to Western intelligence and defense industries.

Conversely, Russia’s reputation as a military   power to be feared has been degraded to the point  where it barely has any buyers of its equipment,   that is even if it had any equipment to spare  to sell.

And remember, it has been suggested   multiple times that Putin considered Ukraine only  the start.

When the war began, analysts thought   he’d take over the collapsing Ukraine, then move  on to a full conflict with NATO back in 2025.

That   timeline then moved to 2027, then only vaguely to  “within the next couple of years after the war.

”   Today, it’s unclear whether Russia could even  mount an assault on another nation.

Regardless   of reality, Putin’s aggressiveness doesn’t seem to  have abated.

He has spent a quarter of a century   constructing an image of himself as the man who  restored Russia’s dignity, who speaks truth to   Western hypocrisy.

And at seventy-three, he is  starting to look older.

The image is beginning   to crack.

The ruler who delivered stability after  the unsteady 1990s has thrown that legacy away.

So   where does this end? The honest answer is that  no one knows, including the people closest to   the Russian leadership.

What the spring of 2026  makes clear is that the War in Ukraine is poised   to go on for at least the remainder of 2026.

Meanwhile, Russia will need to survive its cascade   of domestic pressures, a generation of casualties,  an economy bent out of shape, an information space   sealed against reality, and an elite that  sits at dinner tables discussing how much   Russia now resembles North Korea.