The liberation of Kherson is the beginning of the end of the Russian world, which Putinism promised in February 2022. The architecture of this new empire, which was supposed to match the granite strength of the Stalinist state, is about to crack. One of the territories taken by pirates in Ukraine is finally freed from the yoke of Russian occupation. The fake referendum celebrated in the Kremlin is already in history.

Putin’s Russia is increasingly revealing its true nature – a mixture of endemic corruption, autocracy and organized crime. A regime that has lasted more than two decades is at the end of the road. Sooner or later, Putin’s henchmen will eliminate the one who, from a terrible tyrant, will become an obstacle to their ascent to absolute power.

The war in Ukraine dramatically accelerated this process of expansion of organized crime. In the absence of an army to support the aggression, private Chechen militias and mercenary groups are the image of Putin’s Russia. The impunity with which they operate is a sign of the mutation that will shape Russia’s destiny in the circumstances that will follow the fall of the dictator.

Because Putin’s autocracy programmatically and thoughtfully eliminated any political alternative and reduced the Russian nation to an amorphous mass of subjects incapable of civil reaction. More than at any time since 1991, the government is confused with the tyrant and his clique. And around them are irreplaceable tools of the mafia.

Apart from the bloody grotesque, the career of this criminal lord of Chechnya illustrates the pathology of Putinism. The expansion of Kadyrov’s powers is accelerated by the expansion of the room for maneuver that is offered to him. A gangster discovers ambitions for a political destiny that goes beyond his fiefdom in Kozas. As for Wagner’s mercenaries, they are the embodiment of this Russia, where the privatization of violence gives criminals a badge of respectability.

The future of Russia will not be decided by domesticated people, but by those who have grown up all these years in an environment dominated by Putinist pathology. Putin’s legacy is a landscape from which institutions and civil society have disappeared to make way for a dubious synthesis of kleptocracy and criminal vocation. A state within a state of Chechens and mercenaries can become a model from which to begin the construction of Russia without Putin.

It would be naive to hope for the emergence of a future Russia that would have something in common with reformism or moderation. The vacuum created by Putin is the perfect breeding ground for an even more ferocious species of predator. Their behavioral reflexes are shaped by an appetite for barbarism. Cruelty grows on soil fueled by a criminal past.

Putin has put the Russian state in the dead end of a historical impasse. What may follow is a period of instability reminiscent of the dark times that preceded the rise of the Romanovs in the early 17th century. But, in addition to the brutality of the new candidates for supreme power, there remains a factor of succession: the expansionist vocation of the empire.

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