Vladimir Putin’s regime structurally requires perpetual war in Ukraine.
Understanding this changes everything about NATO strategy, European defense, and support for Kyiv.
Western policymakers have long assumed that a negotiated peace in Ukraine would strengthen Russian leader Vladimir Putin‘s authoritarian position, handing him a victory, reducing military costs, and allowing consolidation of control.
This analysis is widely accepted in Western capitals, and has informed NATO’s strategy, both in its provision of aid to Ukraine and in efforts to negotiate with the Kremlin. However, it is fundamentally mistaken.
Since 2022, Putin has engineered a domestic political system in which perpetual war is no longer a consequence of ambition, but a structural requirement for regime survival. A ceasefire, even a ceasefire on terms largely favorable to Moscow, would now destabilize the Putin regime more acutely than continued war.
Understanding this fact changes everything about NATO strategy, European defense, and support for Ukraine; it requires the West to quickly and fundamentally rethink its approach to Russia, and to abandon the assumption that a near-term settlement is achievable.
Treating the Kremlin’s external aggression and internal repression as separate phenomena misses a fundamental insight: they are two expressions of a single internal political logic.
Putin’s regime is not aggressive despite internal instability; it is aggressive because maintaining internal stability now necessitates perpetual external conflict.
Yale political science professor Milan Svolik’s framework for understanding authoritarian rule illuminates this: all autocrats must solve both the “problem of power-sharing” with elites and the “problem of control” over the masses.
For more than two decades, Putin has managed both through rising prosperity and elite arbitration.
The conflict in Ukraine has irreversibly brought that era to an end. Facing prolonged war, Putin has fundamentally restructured both solutions into a “Fortress Russia”—in which perpetual conflict is no longer a choice, but a prerequisite for regime stability.
Putin Has Fragmented Russia’s Elites
Svolik contends that the greatest threat to any autocrat comes from within the palace.
Elite power-sharing in autocratic countries without organized transitions of power is inherently a precarious balance; a leader depends on elites to stay in power, but elites are primarily interested in accruing as much power, wealth, and influence for themselves as possible, and will tolerate a ruler only so long as the status quo benefits them more than a coup would.
War often accelerates this threat by weakening patronage networks, exposing military vulnerability, and creating opportunities for elite coordination.
A century ago, Tsar Nicholas II’s catastrophic decision to enter World War I weakened the patronage networks that bound elites.
As military disasters multiplied and resources dried up, a range of Russian elites, Duma leaders Paul Milyukov and Alexander Guchkov, the military high command under General Mikhail Alexeyev, and the senior nobility, began to coordinate against him. When popular unrest erupted in February 1917, they maneuvered to overthrow him.
A longtime student of Russian history, Putin knows this pathway well and has moved to close it off through deliberate elite fragmentation and systematically raising the personal cost of dissent.
In the late 1990s and 2000s, senior officials operated under an informal guarantee of physical safety in exchange for political quiet; today, asset seizures, prosecutions, and sudden dismissals follow even the vague suspicion of disloyalty.
Russian gold magnate Konstantin Strukov, who funded the war effort and purchased drones for the military from his own pocket, saw his and his family’s assets and accounts seized amid vague corruption charges.
Dmitry Kozak, a veteran Putin ally who internally advocated de-escalation and privately confronted Putin, was also quietly removed from his post.
The squeeze has worked its way down the hierarchy. Governors and former governors from regions including Khabarovsk, Ryazan, Penza, Ivanovo, Kursk, and Tambov have been arrested, prosecuted, or removed from office.
The message cascades through every level of the administrative and business elite: political rank no longer guarantees protection once loyalty, usefulness, or discipline comes into question.
The Wagner Group’s June 2023 mutiny was both a stress test of this system and a demonstration of its effectiveness.
When Wagner leader Yevgeny Prigozhin led an armed column toward Moscow, no security institution defected, no regional authority moved, and no elite faction followed him. The system held.
Yet the first hours revealed a different vulnerability: the Rosgvardia, Putin’s personal internal security force, was essentially a police force rather than an army, and was unprepared to defend Moscow as a military force would.
The Kremlin took the lesson seriously. By February 2026, Viktor Zolotov, Putin’s one-time bodyguard, had transformed it into a parallel military force outside of the Ministry of Defense’s control, with 340,000 soldiers, tanks, artillery, and its own “General Staff.”
In effect, the Rosgvardia became a praetorian guard answerable only to the president, mirroring the model of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) in Iran, a hybrid force capable of both domestic repression and high-intensity warfare.
(National Interest)
