The Death of Putin

A Field Guide to the Day After In Russia

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Picture it. A crisp early summer Tuesday morning, Moscow time.

Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, Tsar of All the Russias, Conqueror of Crimea, Bare-Chested Equestrian of the Steppe, Owner of a Stolen Super Bowl Ring discovers the unique cardiovascular properties of the third-floor window plunge workout.

Or the tea tastes…off. You know…oolong with a note of polonium. Or some cousin or younger brother of a Wagner remnant takes his shot. Or by sheer dumb luck, a Ukrainian drone swarm finds Putin’s motorcade.

However it goes down, the small bald man is gone, and the world wakes up to a Russia-shaped hole in the geopolitical map.

Like most of you, I can’t wait.

Why does this matter more than the death of any other autocrat?

Because there has never been a more uniquely pernicious figure since World War II. Putin isn’t just a thug with nukes; he’s the patron node of a global authoritarian franchise. Financial sanctuary for kleptocrats. Mercenary infrastructure (Wagner, Africa Corps, whatever they’re calling the rebrand this quarter).

Think about what Russia funds and pushes: Kompromat archives that go back to the Cold War, including one on the current President of the United States of America. An ideology factory pumping Duganist garbage into every Western post-liberal podcast feed. The source of global election interference on an industrial scale. And an alliance of grievance states, big cheese of the Axis of A-holes: Iran, North Korea, Belarus, Venezuela (still), Cuba (still), and dozens of proxies all running on Russian cash.

Look at the May 9 parade. No tanks. No ICBMs. No mobile column. For the first time since 2008, Red Square’s cobblestones carried some iffy-looking infantry and prerecorded propaganda videos because the actual hardware is either on fire in Donetsk or rusting in Novorossiysk. The guest list was Lukashenko, the King of Malaysia, and the President of Laos, a tableau so threadbare that even Slovakia’s thirsty Robert Fico couldn’t bring himself to attend the parade itself.

Forty-five minutes, start to finish. They call it “scaled back.” It was a wake.

And then there was Zelenskyy. The day before the parade, Kyiv issued Presidential Decree 374, a formal document, with coordinates, “permitting” the Russian Federation to hold a parade on Red Square and graciously excluding that exact patch of Moscow from Ukrainian targeting plans for the duration.

Ukraine’s government Twitter account posted it with a hand-over-mouth giggle emoji. Russia’s Dimitri Peskov sputtered about “silly jokes.” It was the geopolitical mic-drop of the decade: a smaller, four-times-invaded country reminding the world’s nominal second-place military that Kyiv now decides whether the parade happens. Putin (if it was Putin and not one of his many doubles) sat under a portico in body armor, a cope cage for his wee frame, while a former sketch comic rented him Red Square for an afternoon.

So how does the actual exit go?

Forget the Hollywood coup. Russian power transfers, when they happen, are sloppy, internal, and humiliatingly mundane. The most likely scenario isn’t tanks on Red Square (that was a one-off) it’s three guys from the FSO, a doctor with a flexible conscience, and a Wednesday afternoon.

The siloviki don’t want a rando Wagner colonel running things any more than the oligarchs do. What you get is a frightened committee that pretends for a few days as if nothing happened, a quick selection of some thick-necked nobody as caretaker, and a frantically negotiated exfiltration of oligarch billions before the ruble fully evaporates.

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The thick-necked nobody is almost certainly Sergei Shoigu, who’s spent the post-Prigozhin years quietly clawing back to relevance as Security Council Secretary.

Picture him as the new Andropov: ex-defense apparatchik with no real constituency, propped up by the security services because he’s the least scary option, geriatric kidney drama optional but highly likely, useful chiefly for the fifteen-month interregnum he can buy the actual successor faction to organize itself. We’ll know the coup is real when state TV swaps Swan Lake for a slickly choreographed Shoigu rollout with K-pop production values, synchronized backup generals, a bridge, a key change.

It’s 2026. Everything is downstream of TikTok now, including Russian succession theater.

The weirder timeline: Shoigu 2, Russian Boogaloo, in which some opportunistic frontline commander or warlord with a militia and a death wish marches on Moscow, and this time nobody calls him off. Either way, the new boss is weaker, broker, and wildly more interested in personal survival than in Novorossiya dreams.

What follows Putin’s entry to the Hot Place?

Russia stops being a European power. China takes the lease on the east.

Without the war machine, the gas leverage, or the nuclear bluff still working, Russia is Italy with worse winters and a drinking problem. Beijing has spent a decade eating the Russian Far East with a delicate economic move, leasing timber stands, farmland, Vladivostok commerce, and mineral rights. The entire energy pipeline infrastructure that flows energy West falls under Xi’s control.

With Moscow on its back and unable to project force east of the Urals (or for that matter, outside the Moscow Ring Road), Xi doesn’t invade anything. He doesn’t have to. He calls in the markers. Russian governors east of Krasnoyarsk start taking very long meetings with Chinese delegations. Welcome to the world’s largest tributary state.

The Axis of Upheaval implodes.

This is the part that doesn’t get talked about enough. Iran’s air defenses, what’s left of them, were Russian. North Korea’s hard-currency lifeline is Russian artillery contracts. Venezuela’s sanctions-evasion playbook was written in Cyrillic. The Houthis’ anti-ship targeting flowed through Moscow and Tehran.

Every grievance regime on the planet has been nursing at the Russian teat for survival, and when the milk dries up, none of them survives intact. Tehran scrambles for a deal with China because it has to. Pyongyang loses its munitions client. Lukashenko has roughly six weeks to decide whether to flee to Caracas or hang from a Minsk lamppost.

Pull the central node, and the entire structure degrades. The global offensive against liberal Western democracy deflates. In the UK, the Russia-stoked hatred of Europe evaporates.

Suddenly, the “multipolar world” the Global South kept publishing op-eds about looks like just another Putin fantasy.

Ukraine wins. Loudly. Permanently.

Crimea was already going. The Black Sea Fleet HQ in Sevastopol got slagged this winter, the ships fled to Novorossiysk, and Novorossiysk itself is now in range. Ukrainian naval drones…the $50,000 ones, mass-produced in commercial workshops have made the entire northwestern Black Sea functionally a Ukrainian lake.

The ground war finally caught up with the sea war this spring: Russian advances are down two-thirds in eighteen months, Kyiv has clawed back 470 square kilometers this year, the Pokrovsk axis is stalling, and Russian regional governors are conscripting employees from local businesses to make the manpower numbers.

With Putin gone and a panicked caretaker in the Kremlin, Russian conscripts on the Donetsk steppe will drop their rifles the second Moscow starts cutting deals, because no Russian boy wants to be the last one to die for a dead man’s vanity project.

Crimea goes home. The Kerch Bridge becomes a Ukrainian customs post. Donbas stays Ukrainian, and the reconstruction money flows. Zelenskyy gets his Churchill statue, and rightly so. NATO accession for Kyiv accelerates, and frankly, the Ukrainians may not bother waiting.

I’d lay even money they develop a bespoke nuclear arsenal within five years. Nothing massive…just a kind of DeGaulle-level “rip off an arm or a leg” style deterrence. After what they’ve been through, can you blame them?

Ukraine becomes the Israel of Europe, except, importantly, well-liked.

This dimension nobody has fully digested. Ukraine ends this war as the world’s leading authority on drone warfare, electronic warfare, contested-spectrum operations, and combined-arms innovation under fire.

Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, and Jordan are already lined up for joint drone production deals. Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Australia, the Philippines…everyone with a certain scary hostile neighbor wants a piece of the Ukrainian curriculum.

The IDF will quietly send delegations to Kyiv to learn how to think about Iran. The Pentagon’s force structure gets rebuilt from a Ukrainian template after Trump’s breif flirtation with wanting battleships and cavalry regiments.

Twenty years from now, Ukrainian defense exports will be an order of magnitude larger than Israel’s, and the brand will be “the country that beat Russia” rather than “the country under perpetual attack.”

The ocean of dirty money recedes.

There’s an ocean of stolen Russian cash parked in Miami condos, London townhouses, Dubai marinas, Limassol shells, and Vienna foundations, in holding companies in the UAE, Panama, and the Caymans…and the second the regime cracks, you’ll know it.

Every sanctions lawyer from Mayfair to Brickell starts billing 24/7. Some cash gets repatriated. Some gets frozen and clawed back to fund Ukrainian reconstruction, mark my words, this is where the West finally finds its spine. And some, the most interesting some, vanish into that network of shell companies that suddenly seem very flush indeed.

Watch which Florida real estate developers, which Kensington estate agents, and which Trump Organization filings start mysteriously catching fire. The cleanup produces indictments for a generation. Russians have become very, very good at exfiltrating their money from Russia in the last 30 years. This flood will make the post-1991 moves look mild in comparison.

The Mitrokhin Archive 2.0

This is the part that keeps me up at night, friends, in the very best way. Imagine the FSB and SVR’s hard drives dumped on the open internet by a vengeful colonel looking for asylum and cash.

Imagine the receipts. The wire transfers. The compromised congressmen. The useful-idiot podcasters whose who mysteriously cleared $400k a month. The NRA delegations to Russia suddenly make a lot more sense.

The “America First” influencers whose rent gets paid in Bitcoin. The Tucker pilgrimage to the Moscow grocery store stops being a punchline and starts being Exhibit B. Half the MAGA commentariat gets re-classified overnight from “edgy populists” to “registered foreign agents who forgot the registering under FARA part.”

And Trump? Oh, Trump. Here is the thing nobody on the populist right has internalized yet: Trump can no longer save Putin. That ship sailed in October 2025, when the Budapest summit collapsed and Trump, frustrated, embarrassed, finally registering that he’d been played a decade, dropped blocking sanctions on Rosneft and Lukoil onto the desk.

Which means when the kompromat finally leaks, and it will leak, because the new Kremlin needs leverage on Washington, and the new oligarchs need cash, and Russian counterintelligence will be a sieve, there will be no White House protection, no DOJ slow-walk, no friendly Cabinet to bury it.

The tapes from the 1990s. The Deutsche Bank back channel via Malta and Cypress. The “we own this clown” memos will drip, drip, drip out. The financing trail. It lands on a news cycle where Trump is politically diminished and Putin is dead. The carefully constructed Trumpist mythos of “deep state lies” collapses under the weight of actual, documented, dollar-denominated Russian influence operations and blackmail.

NATO becomes the most powerful economic bloc on earth overnight.

The defense premium evaporates. European energy markets stabilize. The euro strengthens. German manufacturing, already pivoting hard, takes off. Poland becomes the new Germany. The Baltics stop sleeping with one eye open. A Nordic-Baltic-Polish axis emerges as the continent’s actual center of gravity, and Berlin and Paris belatedly realize they need to keep up. Defense spending stays elevated for a decade, but it’s productive spending: drones, AI, semiconductors, shipyards. Ukraine’s tech becomes the security spine of the continent.

Duginism dies, finally.

Aleksandr Dugin’s grease-stained Eurasianist fever dream, the “Fourth Political Theory,” the mystic Russian-Orthodox-civilizational nonsense that’s become the lingua franca (even if they don’t realize it) of every Bannon podcast and Heritage Foundation post-liberal panel, collapses the moment its sponsoring state collapses. Ideologies need patrons.

Without Kremlin oxygen, Dugin becomes what he always was: a long-bearded crank yelling at clouds. The American post-liberal right loses its theoretical scaffolding and reverts to what it actually is: racial grievance, retconned and kitschy Americana, and grift, without the borrowed Slavophile gravitas to make it sound profound.

The Vance-Hawley-Hegseth axis spends a decade hunting for a new philosophical sponsor. They don’t find one.

Sic semper, indeed.

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