1) The Core

• Strategic Archetype: Euroasian Irredentist Power.
• Civilizational Trajectory: Determined to entrench itself as one of the poles in a multipolar world.
• Key Driver: Preservation of political status quo at home and projection of Russia as a civilizational core state whose sphere must be respected.

2) The Power Map

Operating Logic: Russia is governed through overlapping coalitions rather than formal hierarchies. Putin functions as arbiter, balancing factions through selective appointments, prosecutions, and resource allocation. Power flows through four principal groupings:

Siloviki (Security Apparatus)

• Composition: FSB, SVR, GRU, Investigative Committee, Security Council staff
• Key Figures:
  • Nikolai Patrushev (Security Council Secretary) — ideological strategist and doctrinal architect
  • Alexander Bortnikov (FSB Director) — domestic intelligence and counter-intelligence
  • Alexander Bastrykin (Investigative Committee) — prosecutorial coercion and selective enforcement
• Function: Provide regime security, ideological framing, and control over succession mechanisms. They define threats, manage political prosecutions, and enforce loyalty within state structures.

The Inner Circle (Petersburg Associates)

• Composition: Long-standing personal associates from Putin's St. Petersburg period
• Key Figures:
  • Gennady Timchenko — energy trading, infrastructure
  • Yury Kovalchuk (Bank Rossiya) — finance, media holdings (including parts of Gazprom-Media)
  • Arkady and Boris Rotenberg — construction, infrastructure megaprojects, sanctions-proofing mechanisms
• Function: Control strategic sectors immune to competitive pressure, manage offshore wealth structures, and provide financial backstop for regime priorities. They operate as trusted executors for sensitive projects requiring discretion and loyalty over efficiency.

Technocrats (Governance Machine)

• Composition: Professional administrators managing fiscal, monetary, and digital policy
• Key Figures:
  • Mikhail Mishustin (Prime Minister) — government operations, tax administration, digital governance
  • Elvira Nabiullina (Central Bank Governor) — monetary policy, inflation control, financial stability
  • Maksut Shadaev (Digital Development Minister) — state digitalization, IT infrastructure
  • Dmitry Medvedev (Security Council Deputy Chairman) — institutional memory, legal-bureaucratic networks
• Function: Maintain economic functionality under sanctions, ensure budget solvency, modernize administrative systems. They provide technical competence without political ambition, executing policy rather than shaping it.

Business Elites (Industrial Oligarchs)

• Composition: Heads of major private and state-adjacent industrial groups
• Key Figures:
  • Igor Sechin (Rosneft) — oil production and export, fiscal revenue anchor
  • Sergey Chemezov (Rostec) — defense industry, military-industrial complex, import substitution
  • Vladimir Potanin (Norilsk Nickel) — metals, mining
  • Oleg Deripaska (Rusal/En+) — aluminum, energy
  • Alexey Mordashov (Severstal) — steel, industrial manufacturing
• Function: Deliver economic output, provide employment, generate export revenue, and execute strategic industrial policy. They retain operational autonomy in exchange for political loyalty and acceptance of state priorities (defense orders, infrastructure commitments, sanctions adaptation). Their survival depends on maintaining utility to the regime.

System Dynamics: Power is distributed to prevent any single faction from accumulating decisive leverage. The Siloviki ensure security and ideological coherence. The Inner Circle provides personal trust and financial discretion. Technocrats deliver competent administration. Business Elites generate economic capacity. Putin's role is to arbitrate disputes, rotate responsibilities, and ensure no coalition becomes structurally independent.

3) The Worldview (NAT & Strategic Posture)

• Natural Allies: North Korea, Belarus.
• Transactional Allies: China, India, CA5.
• Situational Allies: Brazil, Iran, South Africa.
• Neutral Positive: Saudi Arabia, UAE, Vietnam, Indonesia.
• Neutral Negative: Israel, Qatar, Argentina, Azerbaijan, South Korea.
• Adversaries: Japan, France, Germany, USA, Canada.
• Existential Enemies: Baltics, Poland, Scandinavia, UK.

GS Lens: Russia acts from a fortress mentality rooted in historical trauma (Mongol yoke, Napoleonic invasion, WWII, 1990s collapse). Passionarity expresses through civilizational revanchism and irredentism, producing resilience but also escalation beyond material logic.

4) The Fault Lines

12-Month Watchpoints

• War-industry production versus battlefield demand
• Energy-revenue stability under shipping, insurance, and price volatility
• RMB-settlement uptake and Chinese dual-use technology flows
• Fiscal sustainability under prolonged mobilization
• Macroeconomic drag: consumption slowdown and investment freeze as defense spending crowds out growth

Primary Internal Risk — Migration and Social Friction
Mass Central Asian migration - indispensable for Russia’s labor market yet poorly integrated - is becoming the state’s most corrosive internal variable.

In major cities, inter-migrant violence and assaults on locals occur with rising frequency. Police responses are often hesitant or corrupted: some officers are intimidated or paid by diaspora intermediaries, allowing offenders to escape with lenient penalties or none at all until Bastrykin’s Investigative Committee intervenes from above. The result is a public sense of unequal justice - a perception that migrants operate under informal immunity while locals face impunity’s inverse.

Meanwhile, new school textbooks in Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan recast Russia’s imperial and Soviet eras as episodes of colonization, erasing the period’s industrial, educational, and gender-equality gains. Many migrants now arrive economically dependent but culturally alienated. Among ethnic Russians, resentment hardens into neighborhood patrols and nationalist rhetoric. The Kremlin is trapped between economic dependence and social backlash.

This is Russia’s slow-burning fault line: a demographic reliance colliding with eroding institutional authority.

Primary External Risk — Technological Degradation
War mobilization and sanctions divert capital from innovation. Russia remains capable of mass production but is sliding behind in AI, semiconductors, and precision manufacturing.
China supplies critical components selectively, ensuring Moscow’s dependence without enabling parity. Each additional war year compounds the gap between Russian industrial capacity and global technological frontiers.

Black Swan — Calibrated Nuclear Demonstration
A NATO-enabled deep strike on Moscow or critical command sites could provoke a limited nuclear response against a frontline NATO state—likely Poland or the Baltics—to restore deterrence credibility below strategic threshold. Such an act would test Article 5 cohesion under nuclear ambiguity, aiming to re-introduce fear rather than initiate full exchange.

5) The Long View (Existential Outlook)

• 100-Year Forecast: Russia will endure as a civilizational state, but with fluctuating borders and deepened dependency on Asian corridors.
• Rationale: A strong identity and coercive depth ensure state survival; but demographics, technology gaps, and sanction-era re-wiring limit sovereign freedom, pushing Russia into asymmetric partnerships.