Public Humiliation Can Be Fatal for Aging Dictators

Ines Burrell 

 

 

When Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, issued a decree on 8 May authorising Russia to hold the military parade on Red Square on 9 May from 10am Kyiv time, many took it as a brilliant publicity stunt and masterful trolling. In reality, Zelenskyy was dead serious. He did authorise the parade. From this year onwards until the end of the war, come May, the Kremlin will need to seek Kyiv’s permission to hold the parade in front of the mausoleum holding Lenin’s corpse, because the expectation will be that Kyiv will otherwise gatecrash it. Putin knows it. Putin’s elites know it. This bell cannot be unrung.

Pathetic Spectacle by the Mausoleum

In hindsight, it might have been more prudent for Putin to chance the Ukrainian long-range drones and Flamingo missiles. It is highly likely that Kyiv would not have struck Moscow anyhow — the countless rings of air defence around Moscow left other targets wide open, and Ukraine might have considered those juicier. Putin could have framed any attacks as proof of righteous war. It would have been a weak response, but he might have looked more like a man and less like Gollum during his brief speech at the parade. Instead, he decided to believe Ukraine would crash his party, and paid for it by looking pitiful.

A popular joke in Russia suggested that Russians should persuade Zelenskyy to authorise the return of mobile internet, blocked on and off for the past few months. Another joke spoke of popular surprise at seeing a president who allows things instead of banning them.

In a system where authority is derived entirely from the appearance of strength, any sign of weakness is treated as a cause to question that authority. This is especially true in Russia. Russians accept ruthless leaders, they do not accept weak ones.

If this was not enough, earlier Moscow had tried to threaten Kyiv with the usual end of the world to get its way on the parade front. The Kremlin declared a unilateral ceasefire from midnight on 8 May and, as a way to enforce it, told embassies in Kyiv to evacuate and warned of a massive missile strike on the city centre. The fear of the attack was supposed to ensure Kyiv’s compliance. This time nobody was scared. Kyiv ignored the threat completely, continuing to strike defence industry and oil infrastructure deep inside Russia. Russia issued threats it could not back up with actions and had to retreat. Ukraine did not even issue threats, but Russia had to seek protection from Donald Trump, and the only way Trump could deliver Ukrainian compliance was by meeting Kyiv’s price — a prisoner exchange.

The humiliation this brought was unrivalled and very public. Putin now has to act — except that his options are very limited, each worse than the last.

Kneejerk Threats

The initial reaction was taken straight from the standard Kremlin rulebook. At a press conference following bilateral meetings in the Kremlin on 9 May, Putin tried to inflate Russian significance and present Russia as a major player in the South Caucasus by suggesting Armenia put its EU aspirations to a public vote via referendum — as if Russia had any say in Armenia’s future. He also issued a thinly veiled threat by reminding his audience that the current situation in Ukraine was a consequence of Ukraine’s EU bid.

This, of course, was the direct result of the Western leader summit (sans US) in Yerevan showing the Kremlin’s diminishing reach in the region. In truth, the longer the war in Ukraine lasts, the further Armenia moves from Russia. Additionally, Armenian integration in the EU is in Azerbaijan’s interests — the last thing Baku wants is for Russia to renew its destabilisation attempts in the region. Short of removing the Prime Minister of Armenia, Nikol Pashinyan, by force, there is not much Russia can do to change Armenia’s course while Russia is otherwise occupied. Russia is slowly learning that its threats can no longer change outcomes.

In the same speech, Putin stated that he was amenable to meeting with Volodymyr Zelenskyy even outside Moscow, which is where he had previously insisted the meeting should happen. This was supposed to show his flexibility — however, he immediately walked that back by insisting that any such meeting was to be held only to sign the final agreement. Considering that his presidential aide Yuri Ushakov had reaffirmed on 10 May that Moscow would only start negotiating in earnest once Ukraine had walked out of Donbas, Putin clearly meant the meeting was intended to accept Zelenskyy’s capitulation. Russia’s position has not changed one bit — they still want control over as much of Ukraine as they can get, even if they cannot take it by force.

And finally, Putin tried to walk back on the prisoner exchange — the price Russia was supposed to pay for the humiliation on Red Square. President Zelenskyy did not even deign to grant Putin any agency in this matter — he announced that the US was in charge of the prisoner swap. Putin could try to weasel out of it, but he would be punishing the US as the guarantor of the agreement, not Ukraine as the beneficiary.

All the traditional Kremlin tactics have stopped working. And yet a response is required. Putin must prove to his elites that he has not lost control, grip, and influence over the country and the situation.

Three Doors, No Exit

At this point, Putin has three choices available to him.

He can push forward with military action and try to take the remainder of Donbas to show he has not been throwing around empty threats. In current circumstances this would be almost impossible to achieve — with the Russian offensive coming to a virtual standstill, Russia might soon be walking backwards instead of forwards. Ukraine’s mid-range drones — known among Ukrainian engineers as “middle-strikes” — have extended the kill zone, a term popularised by former commander-in-chief Zaluzhny to describe territory controlled by enemy drones where all movement stops, to up to 250km behind Russian lines, effectively collapsing logistics and supply chains.

Ukraine’s plan to kill more troops than Russia can recruit is slowly showing results. With current recruitment levels Russia cannot sustain traditional offensives. More manpower is needed, but the number of men willing to die for Putin’s goals is dwindling. A new mobilisation is needed, and yet Putin does not dare call one. The grumbling in Russia has increased. Russians stayed largely uninvolved when Ukraine was invaded in their name, remained aloof when some of their compatriots were scooped off the streets and sent to the frontline meat-grinder, or when their opposition leader was murdered in prison. However, taking away their mobile internet connection turned out to be the rallying cause. And then, of course, there are the regions hosting oil processing plants which suddenly discovered that when you attack your neighbour, that neighbour can hit back. In other words, there is a palpable air of displeasure in Russia. It is not a sign of impending revolution — Russian people have abdicated any agency long ago. However, it is enough for Putin to fear the consequences of wider mobilisation, including individual non-compliance from the conscripts who might not want to die. And that leads to loss of control.

Putin can also stop yanking everybody’s chain and give diplomacy a real chance. This, however, leaves him vulnerable to a different kind of reality — the one where millions of men who are used to killing, raping, and pillaging, plus getting paid handsomely for it, are released into wider society alongside former criminals recruited from prisons, and expected to come to terms with the fact that all that blood and violence has effectively bought them barely 1% of Ukraine’s territory per year.

Between the promises of stability Putin gave his subjects and the chaos a demobilisation would unleash, the wild 90s, when criminal gangs created by chaos and violent elements returning from colonial wars in Afghanistan and Chechnya controlled Russian streets, will seem like a fond childhood memory.

Even the last argument — nuclear weapons — is a card that can never be played. Once used, you can no longer control the reaction of your adversaries, and dropping a nuclear bomb on Ukraine would not give Putin control over it. Putin is a coward (literally, according to the Russian opposition) and would never choose an option that can cost him everything and still not create a favourable outcome.

And this leaves Putin with door No 3. He can do nothing. This, however, will not mean that things will stay the same. Quite the opposite — they will only get worse.

The state of the Russian economy is such that according to almost all economists, including Russian ones in exile, even a miracle cannot save it. It is going down, and one day it will hit rock bottom. Time is the only variable. And it is capable of inflicting untold pain in the process even before it expires completely.

The other element is the stagnating (indeed, reversing) frontline. In April 2026, for the first time since Ukraine’s Kursk incursion, Russia suffered a net loss of controlled territory. A year ago, it was gaining an average of 171 square miles a month. The loss of internet connection and overall quality of life were supposed to be offset by the glory of wiping out yet another village in Ukraine nobody in Russia had ever heard of before. Living much worse and not getting the glory people were promised can create the kind of cognitive dissonance that snowballs.

And then, of course, there is the ever-growing impact of Ukrainian attacks on Russian industrial targets. Most of the oil industry and defence sector has been built within city limits. When oil starts to rain from the sky or burn through streets to the accompaniment of air raid sirens, and the population increasingly has to search for shelters that do not exist, doing nothing no longer looks like a winning strategy.

The Cornered Rat

Putin has no good moves left. Every single action he takes brings him closer to an outcome he is trying to avoid. And so does inaction. In chess terms this is called zugzwang — a position where the obligation to move is itself the problem, because every available move makes things worse.

As a very gifted tactician and abysmal strategist, Putin can nonetheless employ moves that would temporarily correct the course of action. He did so in the autumn of 2022 when Russian defeat seemed unavoidable. The mobilisation and deployment of Iranian drones stalled the Ukrainian counter-offensive and stretched the war by several years. None of it changed the overall outcome — Russia will not be able to control Ukraine. What it did was drag other countries into the agony of the eventual collapse of Putin’s power.

In his fight for relevance, Putin can still inflict untold suffering not only on Ukraine but on other neighbouring countries. After all, he is not constrained by the welfare of his subjects or even by sustaining minimum life-preserving conditions. For Putin, the goal is his own physical survival and that of his immediate family. The loss of power threatens that survival, so holding on to power is all that matters. Yet all the options available to him lead to loss of power, making him the proverbial cornered rat. This cornered rat has no plan but still has plenty of moves it can throw at us without worrying about consequences.