August 3, 2025
By Janusz Bugajski
The National Interest
Messaging from the Kremlin over the last year reveals deep concerns about Russia’s internal unity and stability.
Russian officials are sounding increasingly alarmed and even paranoid in their public statements about the future of their country. Most notably, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov claimed in September of last year that Western governments have assembled a coalition of at least fifty countries in order to dismember Russia.
What may appear to be political paranoia or an attempt to mobilize citizens behind the regime is not necessarily based on imagined enemies. It reveals the official realization that numerous negative trends are converging on Russia and that the current regime, and even the state itself, may be running out of time.
Three overarching fears preoccupy Russian officialdom: losing the war, economic collapse, and state fracture. The prospect of all three occurring soon looms on the horizon. Regarding war losses, in June, Russia’s Ambassador to the UK, Andrey Kelin, inadvertently confirmed the hundreds of thousands of casualties sustained by Russian forces during its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The coming injection of US and NATO weapons and more onerous US sanctions on Russian oil exports have led to the usual desperate threats of nuclear retaliation, including a direct warning from former President Dmitry Medvedev to President Trump that Moscow possessed Soviet-era nuclear strike capabilities.
The fear of defeat and international isolation is palpable at the highest levels of government. As if preparing Russia for defeat, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has acknowledged that Russia is fighting the war against Ukraine without any Western allies, a situation the country has never faced before in its history. He warned that Russia must rely on itself and cannot afford weakness or laxity.
Defeat in war or a prolonged conflict that drains the economy will increase pressure on the regime and can turn large sectors of society against the Kremlin. Russia has historical experiences of lost wars or disruptive economic conditions leading to state fracture, most notably during the collapse of the empire during World War I and the demise of the Soviet Union at the end of the Cold War.
Margarita Simonyan, editor-in-chief of the Kremlin-controlled Russia Today network, admitted that Russian authorities are increasingly concerned that the war in Ukraine could turn ordinary, apolitical citizens against the government—not only through battlefield losses, but through disruptions to their everyday lives and economic living standards. Officials are also fearful that returning veterans will turn to gangsterism and organized crime.
The First Deputy Chief of Staff of the Presidential Administration, Sergei Kiriyenko, told local administrators in July that the Kremlin considers returning veterans to be “the main factor of political and social risks.”
Warnings of an impending economic crisis are also commonplace in official circles. Economy Minister Maxim Reshetnikov cautioned at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum in June that the economy is “on the brink of going into a recession.” Ironically, the annual Forum is designed to highlight the country’s alleged economic prowess and to attract foreign investors.
Russian officials seem to have accepted the fact that war losses and international sanctions are plunging the economy into a long-term crisis. German Gref, the head of Sberbank, one of the largest state-owned financial institutions, has acknowledged that because of increased military spending, high interest rates, and snowballing inflation, Russia’s financial system is heading into “difficult times.”
Indeed, economic analysts calculate that the country is on the brink of a deep banking crisis due to increasing defaults on loans. This could precipitate mass bankruptcies and further damage the civilian economy. Officials may have finally concluded that no amount of propaganda and disinformation can hide the grim economic realities from society.
Regime collapse and state fracture are undoubtedly the Kremlin’s biggest fears. Officials have tried to perform a difficult balancing act—on the one hand, claiming that Russia is indestructible while simultaneously warning that it faces a serious danger of fragmentation. The alarm signals are intended to mobilize and unite society behind the government. Still, they also reveal a fear that Russian history may repeat itself, and the authorities may be powerless to prevent it.
A major target of Moscow’s attacks is the specter of state-wide separatism. Since April 2024, the Putin regime has intensified its campaign against allegedly expanding separatist movements. The Ministry of Justice demanded that an “international social movement for the destruction of the multinational unity and territorial integrity of Russia”—defined as the “Anti-Russian Separatist Movement” and all of its structural divisions—be recognized as an extremist organization, even though such an organization did not exist.
The proposal has enabled the authorities to persecute national and regionalist movements more aggressively and to target any citizen it considers a threat. The repression of regionalists, including those simply calling for political and economic decentralization, indicates how fearful the Kremlin has become of any potential dissent, even among ethnic Russians.
In January 2025, the FSB designated 172 ethnic and religious groups associated with the international Free Nations of Post-Russia as “terrorist organizations” because the Forum called for Russia’s decolonization and the independence of captive nations. They included movements such as Asians of Russia, Free Buryatia, Free Yakutiya, New Tyva, the League of Free Nations, the Association of Indigenous Peoples of the Russian Federation, Free Idel-Ural, Free Bashkortostan, the Congress of Peoples of the North Caucasus, the All-Tatar Social Center, and the Karelian National Movement.
To reinforce its repression of any independent anti-regime activities, Moscow also prepared to fine people searching for banned content online, evidently fearful that news about the separatist groups would attract a wider public. Paradoxically, the Kremlin’s attacks have backfired, as leaders of various groups often based abroad or online now consider themselves part of a major movement that Moscow views as a direct threat to the country’s integrity and existence.
The rising fear in the Kremlin over Russia’s decolonization was reflected in the draft of its new nationality policy strategy released in July 2025. It devoted significant attention to preserving and developing the culture of ethnic Russians as the sole “state-forming” nation and countering foreign threats to Russia’s stability, including the impact of outside efforts to reach various ethnic groups inside Russia.
To distract from Russia’s failures and blame its projected disintegration on foreign scapegoats, official propaganda is reviving the old stereotype of “Russophobia.” A foreign ministry spokesperson has even proposed establishing an “international day” to counter the prejudice. Such declarations are designed to disguise the fact that Russia’s imperial agenda is coming unstuck not because of foreign machinations but because of its irresolvable internal problems.
Janusz Bugajski is a Senior Fellow at the Jamestown Foundation in Washington, DC, and author of three new books: Pivotal Poland: Europe’s Rising Power, Failed State: A Guide to Russia’s Rupture, and Free Nations, New States: The End Stage of Russian Colonialism (Anthology).