The military defeats in Ukraine dramatically reveal the hopelessness of the Russian political regime. Images of a disorderly and humiliating departure undermine the propagandistic scaffolding on which Putinism is built. The restoration of the Soviet Union becomes a war that a demotivated and ill-equipped army can no longer easily win.

And even if the victories won by Ukraine are not an unequivocal sign of the beginning of the end, they are a memorable moment that cannot be ignored in the political and symbolic history of Putinism itself. An emulation of Stalin, the modern incarnation of the mighty Leader, Putin based his power on this myth of the invincibility of a resurgent and aggressive Russia. The official speech mobilized an entire nation’s delusions of grandeur, fueling the chimera of a surgically precise and efficient special military operation.

This edifice of Putinism is beginning to crack. And even nuclear blackmail cannot avoid humiliating an empire that has created an image of unstoppable power. Putin’s Russia turns out to be what it really is: a kleptocratic state undermined by corruption, seduced by the Potemkiniad, and capable of being militarily reliable only in the face of the Syrian civilian population.

Putin’s order can last as long as the points of the social contract are fulfilled: maintaining economic normality and feeding the pride of those enslaved by the Moscow dictatorship with victories and international blackmail. The fiction of a prosperous and triumphant Russia, this is the basis of its power.

The triumphalism of Russian television can no longer hide the cracks in the walls of the Russian city. Quite internationally isolated, technologically out of step with the West, Russia can rely only on the psychological terror generated by nuclear weapons.

The regime in Moscow is obliged to get out of this strategic impasse. Announcing general mobilization would not only mean abandoning the semblance of everyday life, but also entering a stage whose consequences are already impossible to predict. Traditionally, the military failures of Russia and the USSR were the starting point for profound changes in the character of the regime. Putin may become another Nicholas II: a sovereign who, seduced by illusions of grandeur, destroys the very empire he leads.

Putinism is a moment of existential options. Putin’s tyranny cannot survive without the legitimacy given to it by exploiting Russia’s vulnerability: the flattery of imperial nostalgia cannot be reconciled with failure in Ukraine. Read the whole article and comment on Contributors.ro