Societies are most noticeably disrupted when the regime collapses in a violent coup, a revolution, or is defeated in war. Great empires fall prey to calamity when they run out of the energy that once fueled the dynamism of their origin and sewed the fabric of their society. The insidious process that seems often to lead to these outcomes may be recognized when authoritarian rulers, with their own self-interests in mind, undertake efforts to monopolize power by denying citizens their rights. They do so by undermining independent media, exerting control over the legislative powers meant to directly serve the people, populating the judiciary with justices aligned more with the goals of the executive than the Constitution and by growing a powerful upper class of wealth that facilitates the necessary control of society. After some time has passed, patriotic songs lose their ardor against the backdrop of repression, corruption, disinformation, a massively disproportionate wealth gap, and a decaying social infrastructure. Financial ruin, economic despair, and a failing war effort will accelerate the decline, leaving society in search of hope for a better future that now appears beyond reach.
This is the state of Vladimir Putin’s Russia in which control has been ceded to an individual whose energies are committed to sowing hatred of the West and creating an authoritarian regime supportive of a maniacal scheme to recover a past imperial glory. In doing so, Putin is seemingly unaware that history has moved on. A multi-generational exposure of Russian society to state propaganda unfortunately has primed a reflexive adversarial posture among its citizens toward the West. It has become more prone to violence that has been fueled by an odd mix of Putin-instilled nationalist fervor and religious spiritualism. When does a society then come to grips with failure and what elements are there that identify the loss of direction and sense of community? Can the illusion of promised security ever be enough in a repressed society to overcome individual self-expression and opportunity? Have the protracted past efforts of the old Soviet regime’s propaganda, followed by a return of the same with the current one, obscured the reality of a different existence or even the desire to explore one? The nature of the current state-of-mind in Russia may be recognized in the behavior of a society itself and the circumstances within which it chooses to exist. This, in turn, reflects upon what Russia’s government has come to be and why the military is as it is.
The Russian Military
The conduct of the Russian military, particularly its lack of discipline and utter disregard for the rules pertaining to humanitarian concerns provides some insight into what can be described as an extreme expression of the ethos of Russian society. It is seen both in the individual actions of combatants and in the actions of the military at large.
On August 4, 2026, a Russian First-Person View (FPV) drone operator chased down and seriously injured a solitary street vendor selling vegetables in Kherson, Ukraine. It was sport with the intent of instilling terror among the civilians of a major city. The incident was merely one of a number of similarly documented instances dating back well over a year. On August 10-11, ballistic missile assaults harboring considerable explosive power and capable of breaching available air defense systems, fell upon Kyiv and Zaporizhia killing 12 civilians and wounding dozens more. Cluster munitions, a shortened version of latter-day carpet-bombing missions, often follow soon after with the intent of killing first responders to the scene. Less than a week earlier, a similar attack upon Kyiv killed 17 people and injured at least 44 others. Such attacks have occurred throughout the course of the war but have escalated dramatically when Ukraine no longer could protect its civilian population against this aerial threat.
Another relic of past military barbarity involves the use of banned chemical weapons upon both military personnel and civilians. It was reintroduced by Russia in violation of the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) for the same purpose of instilling terror. Despite declarations of having destroyed its Soviet-era chemical weapons, suspicions resurfaced that, in fact, Russia retained at least some of these agents. Chloropicrin, a choking agent, which may cause fatal fluid overload in the lungs has been in use to clear fortified positions on the front. White phosphorus is an incendiary chemical that ignites spontaneously in air, burns at a temperature of 800°C, and sticks to the skin producing a full-thickness burn. It can be absorbed within the body to cause system-wide organ failure. This agent, in particular, has been used repeatedly in civilian-populated areas since the beginning of the war.
Killing at a distance seemingly reached a peak in the 20th century and there were hopes that moral constraint would prevail, that national and international agencies would impose rules of conduct that would mitigate against such atrocities. Universal agreements addressing the atrocities of war were indeed established in international humanitarian law, the present cornerstone of which are the 1949 Geneva Conventions to which Russia was a signatory. The latter were adopted on August 12, 1949, actuated on October 21, 1950, and ultimately ratified by 196 nations. Protocols I and II were added in 1977, specifying protections for civilians, injured combatants, and medical personnel, avoidance of destruction of cultural artifacts and critical infrastructure such as dams and nuclear facilities. Moreover, clarification was added regarding the basics of humane treatment of interned individuals and the rights of civilian populations. These have all been violated by Russia’s military during the past 4.5 years of war in Ukraine.
In late 2019, Putin rescinded a key element (i.e., Article 90) of Protocol I which authorized investigations into alleged war crimes against civilians stating that “exceptional circumstances” affected the interests of the Russian Federation. In essence, his justification amounted to complaining about the lack of Russian representation and the potential for political influences by “unfriendly nations” to be exerted upon accusations of wrongdoing. In the absence, therefore, of witnessed accounts by neutral observers, Russia would deny any occurrences of such violations as is normally the case, but if faced with incontrovertible evidence, could, at the least, claim it was no longer a signatory to the stipulation. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was undoubtedly in its planning stages when he revoked the protocol and brings more into focus his intentions to commit whatever crimes were necessary to attain what he wanted.
Numerous examples of Russian savagery directed expressly at Ukrainian citizens have been documented since the beginning of the war for the purpose of prosecution of war crimes. As of May 6, 2024, Ukraine’s Office of the Prosecutor General (OPG) had already identified more than 125,000 suspected war crimes from the torture and summary executions of captives and civilians; sexual violence upon children, women and men; child abduction; and adult deportations to the aforementioned indiscriminate bombardment of civilian infrastructure including elementary schools, hospitals, cultural institutions, power plants and thermal substations. The number of war crimes has grown to 225,000 as of May 8, 2026. Ukraine’s Center for Civil Liberties and the OPG continue the task of documentation alongside several national and international agencies including the International Criminal Court (ICC), and the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine.
The Russian military has not only perpetrated its atrocities upon Ukrainians but has directed its own particular brand of brutality upon itself. Reports have surfaced that Russians deploy select “barrier troops” to shoot those retreating from battle. The practice was in response to the low morale that has crept into infantry units and contributed to a reluctance to fight. It revives a Stalinist-era method used in World War II of responding to retreating troops. Russian commanders have even executed their troops for refusing to follow orders only to further encourage desertion that has continued to escalate in the current year. The once prominent Wagner paramilitary group that has now been formally integrated into Russia’s military introduced the use of the sledgehammer as a means of extrajudicial execution of deserters. The weapon was intentionally embraced by the group’s leadership to dissuade attempts at defection and has been further encouraged by some Russian politicians.
The Regime
Has Russian society created an environment that condones the existence of an authoritarian regime simply because it is the life that has been lived under such circumstances for so long? The aura of the strongman at the top has often been raised as a sort of ideal among Russians born out of a long history of empire under tsarist rule followed by the authoritarian leadership of Soviet Russia and now the protracted autocracy of Putin. The illusion of a dominant leader providing the security, order, safety and stability needed to avoid the social collapse and chaos seen elsewhere, should have been dispelled by what was witnessed by Russian society in the last century. And yet, a copy of what existed then has been resurrected now in the likes of Putin. And again, domestic chaos has ensued, this time brought on by an ill-conceived war with the sort of unintended consequences typical of a Middle East conflict.
The current Kremlin regime was given birth in the setting of the Second Chechen War (1999-2009). This war was launched under suspicious circumstances that implicated Putin’s involvement in a false flag operation masqueraded in the form of a Chechen terrorist operation. The criminal brutality of Russian military operations in the Chechen war is now witnessed in Ukraine. The destruction of the Chechen capital of Grozny was a first look into Russia’s rekindled savagery under Putin. It was later demonstrated in Syria’s civil war when East Aleppo was indiscriminately bombarded by Russian aircraft with specific strikes targeting humanitarian aid convoys.
There is no reason here to question how this regime chooses to conduct its affairs abroad just as there is no reason to question its behavior domestically where it has been described as a full-scale kleptocracy under Putin’s watch. The level of corruption in Russia has brought it the distinction of ranking 157 out of 182 countries on the Corruption Perceptions Index put out by Transparency International, identifying it as one of the most corrupted public sectors in the world. The permissive environment allowed graft at all levels of government and has led to shortages in funding for public welfare including maintenance of civilian infrastructure while prioritizing regime security and military objectives. Under the present circumstances of Putin’s war the Kremlin’s allocations for defense and security amount to about 40% of the federal budget and 7.5% of GDP while public welfare allotment, including infrastructure, has been cannibalized for the sake of the former and made even worse by inflation. Local infrastructure in several regions is seriously degraded as a result of deferred maintenance.
The most recent example of Russia’s inability to provide adequate support of domestic needs has been the catastrophic failure of public waterlines in Tyumen, a city of almost 900,000 in southwestern Siberia. Flooding of the Tura River in June overwhelmed aging municipal intake infrastructure contaminating the water. Dead fish and other animal carcasses amassed along the river shoreline. A delayed response to the mounting disaster has protracted the crisis for a city left without sufficient potable water.
There is widespread contamination of Russia’s waterways that dates back to the Soviet era and is attributable to the unchecked discharge of industrial chemicals and wastewater, a habit that has continued under the current regime. In 2018, Moscow, a city of some 12 million people, showed both surface and groundwater pollution with 56% of its water supply falling below safety standards already. A July 2013 Greenpeace Russia study of the Moskva River identified mercury exceeding safe levels by 20 times and manganese by 120 times among other pollutants such as heavy metals, aluminum, sulfur and oil. These levels pose a risk to several downstream communities including major cities such as Samara, Astrakhan, Nizhny Novgorod, Volgograd and Ryazan among others. A similar study carried out in St. Petersburg along the Neva River in 2012 showed even greater amounts of toxic pollutants.
Contaminated water accounted for 2.6M reported illnesses and about 21,600 deaths in 2025. In 2022, the first year of Russia’s war in Ukraine, 2,471 cases of high or extremely high pollution were reported in its bodies of water. This increased to 3,095 cases in 2024 with those involving “extremely high” levels nearly doubling during the same interval from 544 to 985. An estimated 20% of the population has no access to centralized or local water purification systems while only 1 – 2% of communal infrastructure is updated annually.
After years of underfunding of medical services amounting to an annual average of 5-6% of GDP, and creating significant disparities among major cities and rural communities, the Kremlin recently cut hospital funding further to divert finances to the military. This has accelerated the reduction of beds and overall access to healthcare despite the crush of military casualties returning from the front. Of the latter, an estimated 100,000 veterans will require treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in a country woefully lacking in qualified psychiatrists and other mental health resources, a problem already recognized in the first year of the war.
A resurgence of violent crimes in Russian society reached 15-year highs in 2024 and 2025 with the return of former prisoners now set free after fulfilling their military contracts, veterans suffering from PTSD and unable to assimilate within society, and still others hardened by military service recruited into organized crime syndicates. Their return has been accompanied by an influx of illegal firearms and other military hardware from the front, escalating the lethality of civilian crimes. Serious offences had already amounted to 617,301 cases in 2024 alone, the highest since 2010. A coincident rise in alcoholism has added fuel to the spike in violence and further raised resentment in society over its criminalization. The crime problem has been exacerbated by significant shortages in Russia’s police force resulting not only from low salaries but also the diversion of responsibilities toward state security including the enforcement of political compliance over issues related to the war.
In short, the regime has not been responsive to domestic concerns in a manner expected given the resources it has had at its disposal, resources that have been squandered in blind pursuit of an imperial legacy by a singular individual ill-suited to be an appropriate steward of the people.
Epilogue
This narrative creates a dark picture. Russian society has been broken by a long history of repression and decades of state propaganda serving the purpose of a regime hierarchy that has not provided it the support needed to evolve uniformly over the wide expanse of the Russian Federation. Rather, the present regime, in particular, has created a system to advantage itself at the expense of its people and, in doing so, impoverished the nation as it instilled hatred toward an imagined enemy. And for what purpose? It has failed in the process to provide security and, far worse, has denied its society a future. The sad outcome of this all may be the realization that Russian society may never see another choice than to repeat the mistake after this Putin experiment has failed.
Copyright @Kost Elisevich, MD, PhD 2026. All rights reserved. Any illegal reproduction of this content will result in immediate legal action.
