There has been a visible spike in Russian doomsday stories met with exaggerated excitement by the hardcore Ukraine war cheerleaders and with a measure of disdain by the actual Russia experts.

The news pegs in question included a sudden outburst of political critique by the elite beauty influencer Viktoria Bonya, the Kremlin’s ongoing attempts to clamp down on popular internet messaging services, an increase in Ukrainian attacks on Russian oil facilities and a relatively slow pace of Russian advance on the frontline which some sources even attempted to frame as a retreat.

Stories predicting an imminent crisis in Russia have popped up every now and then ever since the collapse of the USSR. They are best encapsulated by the infamous Atlantic magazine “Russia is finished” cover printed in 2001, one year into Vladimir Putin’s presidency.

Russia experienced a massive economic boom in the following years, yet the perception of Russia publications like that helped to spread informed ill-fated decisions such as the invitation of Ukraine and Georgia into Nato at the alliance’s Bucharest summit in 2008.

The current wave of apocalyptic predictions comes on the heels of the EU untying its €90bn loan to Ukraine, previously blocked by Hungary’s ex-premier Viktor Orban. The loan allows the country to sustain its war effort until the end of 2027, but it comes at a time when the EU is facing an unprecedented energy crisis caused by the US war on Iran. 

A simultaneous crisis of trust in the political mainstream in leading EU countries, spurred by strong Ukraine fatigue, makes one wonder whether the union will be able or willing to pay the loan in full until the end of the two-year period. 

Shoygu the Rebel

The latest doomsday story, broken by a co-op of major Western media and one Russian emigre outlet, paints the picture of a fearful Putin hiding in bunkers from Ukrainian drone strikes and scared that his entourage might stage a coup. The articles named former defence minister Sergey Shoygu as a person associated with an anti-Putin plot.

The story is based on a “report” provided by an unnamed source “close to” an intelligence agency of an unnamed European country. The reader is left to wonder whether the said agency represents a major European power like France or a dwarf state like San Marino. Notably, IStories published another, unrelated investigation focused on Russia a few days later in which it identified Estonian intelligence service as its primary source. 

The idea that Shoygu might be plotting a coup is not new. It was aired on March 9 by the anonymous Telegram channel VChK-OGPU named after the predecessors of the KGB. The unverifiable and sensationalist information the channel publishes typically proceeds to be circulated by similarly anonymous pro-Ukrainian infowar accounts on X (formerly Twitter) as well as by hawkish commentators who campaign for prolonging the war in Ukraine.

To its credit, VChK-OGPU candidly characterised its piece as “conspiracy theory” in the very first paragraph. The channel, however, proceeded to link mobile internet outages in the centre of Moscow, commonly associated with the threat of Ukrainian drone attacks, with the possibility of a coup attempt. Given the Kremlin’s extreme non-transparency, murky Telegram channels often become the only source of information about its inner workings for intelligence agencies and journalists alike. Telegram is also a battlefield of psy-ops units fighting on the cognitive front of the Russo-Ukrainian conflict.

The non-imaginary element in this conspiracy theory is the recent history of Shoygu’s removal from the defence minister post and the arrests of his subordinates in the ministry on corruption charges. Shoygu was the target of sharp criticism by various elements in the Russian military propaganda ecosystem, particularly by Wagner Group founder Yevgeny Prigozhin and his associates. 

Prigozhin’s conflict with Shoygu culminated in the summer of 2023 with the Wagner Group staging what looked like a coup attempt. But it was aimed against Shoygu, not against Putin, to whom the plotters pledged their loyalty. In the aftermath of the events, Prigozhin died in a suspicious air crash while Shoygu was moved from his ministerial fiefdom to a much less influential position in the Security Council.

Leading Russian opposition commentators Leonid Volkov, Fyodor Krasheninnikov and Yevgeny Chichvarkin described the idea of Shoygu as a potential plotter as preposterous. That, of course, doesn’t preclude Shoygu from being arrested on corruption charges at a later point, but that will hardly manifest a crack in the regime. It will be a victory for the group of military professionals associated with Putin’s aide Aleksey Dyumin and little else.

Territory lost and found

Other stories at the heart of the seemingly orchestrated Russia doomsday campaign are similarly dubious. Bonya generated a number of excited headlines in the Western media, which claimed it was a sign of rising discontent in Russia. Her emotional outburst, however, explicitly didn’t target Putin and ended up with her being invited onto Russian TV’s top political debate show with Vladimir Solovyev, something that wouldn’t have happened without the Kremlin’s consent.

Putin’s administration often invests in controlled quasi-opposition projects that help to gauge and vent public tiredness or anger. But it used the war as an excuse to eliminate the real political opposition making the political regime more impregnable than ever since the beginning of Putin era.

Narratives suggesting a “turning point” on the battlefield don’t hold water either. The Institute of War Studies (ISW), a think-tank linked to the US defence industry and former undersecretary of state Victoria Victoria Nuland’s family, insisted that Russia was losing more territory than it was gaining in April. However Ukraine’s most reliable war mapping service cooperating with the defence ministry, the Deep State, showed no recently liberated areas in April whatsoever. Ukraine lost 141 sq. km of its territory in April, according to Deep State. 

A comparison of the two war maps reveals that Ukrainian “gains” on the ISW map (particularly at the junction of the Dnipropetrovsk, Donetsk and Zaporizhznya regions) often correspond to areas which Deep State never claimed to have been occupied. Deep State relies in its methodology on meticulous OSINT as well as direct contacts with soldiers on the frontline, whereas ISW often cites Telegram milbloggers, such as Kostiantyn Mashovets, as a source proving Ukrainian advances. 

Incidentally, Mashovets himself pointed out in a recent post that there was no turning point on the frontline and that the steady Russian advance was proceeding largely as before. Deep State analysts expressed their disdain at ISW’s war coverage in previous years, jokingly calling it the “Institute of Telegram Studies”.

Meanwhile, attacks on Russian oil facilities produce powerful visuals, but they fail to cripple Russia’s war economy despite claims to the contrary by war propaganda. Despite regular drone strikes on Russian oil depots and key ports, Russia’s oil exports have reached the highest level since the start of Putin’s all-out invasion, according to Bloomberg.

That’s not to say that the Russian economy is not feeling the burden of war and unprecedented Western sanctions. It is getting sluggish, with a 1.1% growth in 2026 predicted by IMF. The government is slashing non-essential expenditure and some businesses which benefited from the wartime boom, fuelled by the expanding defence industry in previous years, are closing.

But that’s hardly different from countries that are bankrolling Ukraine’s war effort now that the US under Donald Trump is out of the game. Germany, most notably, is now eyeing a 0.5% growth in 2026 as a result of the Iran crisis. Meanwhile Ukraine’s State Statistical Service showed GDP declining by 0.5% in the first quarter of 2026, the nuance being that in Ukraine’s case we are talking about an economy on life support in the form Western funding which goes dead the moment the artificial ventilation is turned off.

The elephant in the room war cheerleaders are ignoring is that whatever economic or political troubles Russia might be experiencing, they are entirely incomparable to the plight of Ukraine. The victim of Russian aggression is suffering a demographic and infrastructural catastrophe of epic dimensions.

Meanwhile Russians are experiencing living standards on par with poorer EU countries (as the IMF’s GDP PPP per capita charts suggest), while Putin has so far avoided Ukraine-style mass forced mobilisation with press gangs hunting for men in the streets, and otherwise shielded most of the Russian population from any major impact of the war. 

This is not a kind of status quo Russian elites or Russians at large will swap for civil war that could — as the Ukraine war cheerleaders in the West hope — precipitate military defeat in Ukraine along the lines of Russia’s WWI collapse in 1918. 

The easiest way to assess the resilience of Russian society is to compare it with that of a very similar post-Soviet society in Ukraine. If anything, the war minimises the chance of political change, ensuring popular consolidation under the flag as well as free rein for the apparatus of repression that clamps down on political dissent.

Although hardly unprecedented, the current Russian doomsday campaign is uniquely ungrounded in political, economic and battlefield reality, which betrays either a deep intellectual crisis or desperation among those who are pushing it to the media and on social networks.

It is also a manifestation of under-the-carpet battles between those who want to turn the page on Ukraine war and those who want to proceed with it no matter how catastrophic this trajectory is for Ukraine’s society and statehood. 

The Iran war is a major factor in the calculation. The looming energy crisis in Europe jeopardises Ukraine’s hard-earned €90bn loan borrowed from increasingly vulnerable European economies. But even with that money available, the EU and Ukraine may not be able to procure sufficient amounts of weapons and ammunition from their key supplier, the United States, whose arsenals are badly depleted by hostilities in the Gulf, according to mainstream US media reports. This kind of considerations explain a change of tack displayed by such stalwarts of unquestioning support to Ukraine, such as German Chancellor Friedrich Merz. He recently said that Ukraine will have to lose territory in order to attain peace.

Magical scenarios pushed by lobbyist groups that benefit from the war in Ukraine primarily serve as a opium for audiences that prefer to be deceived rather than face the unsavoury outcome of this conflict. Collective irresponsibility and the fear of being scapegoated for the Ukraine debacle stand in the way of a peace settlement. But it all comes at the expense of Ukraine’s territorial integrity, its economic and demographic future, as well as many Ukrainian lives.