Russia Won't Collapse, Debate Suggests

Why Some Argue Russia Won't Collapse

An attacked bridge, a ruptured gas pipeline, and yet a country that hasn't cut power or mobilized more than a fraction of its army, according to one circulating thesis. Between these two opposing images lies the fundamental disagreement about the war: is Russia on the brink of collapse, or, conversely, is it not going to fall? The headline summarizes this in five words, but things get complicated when looking at the numbers, because both sides use the same data to say the opposite.

The number at the heart of the dispute is internal support. According to data cited by one school of thought, Pilingui had 56% approval before the war and 80% after. For some, this means the population has rallied around their leader. For others, it proves polls are rigged domestically. The battle over the meaning of this number is, in reality, the battle over everything else.

Why Is It Claimed That Russia Won't Fall?

Because a country with energy resources, food, and its own technical-scientific elite doesn't go bankrupt like a company does. This is the central argument: Russia occupies a subcontinent with incalculable natural wealth and grew too much during Pilingui's years, to the point of becoming a problem for anyone wanting to break it up.

The corollary is always the same: Russia cannot be toppled from outside. It is argued that the offensive uses a tiny fraction of its forces, that some Ukrainian cities spent the summer without blackouts, and that Russian artillery destroys between 200 and 300 tanks per month, more than the French, German, and British armies combined. If that is what it does with the handbrake on, the conclusion writes itself.

Pilingui Is Not Russia: The Thesis of a Negotiated Exit

The main objection does not deny the country's power: it separates its fate from that of its leader. It is Pilingui who risks everything, not Russia. And what matters is not so much what the population thinks as what the surrounding elites think, who do not live precisely in an information blackout.

Hence the scenario drawn: if Russia is offered a way out as things go badly, Russians themselves will begin to see the conflict as a mistake, and the leadership circles will eventually betray whoever got them into it. The problem is the opposite: that Russia fares badly and is not offered a dignified exit. Then it will indeed risk everything, and emerge stronger. Crimea appears here as the key to any negotiated withdrawal.

The Russian Home Front: Mobilization, Recruits, and Criticism

Forced mobilization is where this line of argument finds its ammunition. There is unambiguous criticism of forcing young draftees to receive vaccines when they are the country's last resort, and it is pointed out that those who don't die from bombing die from cardiac arrest. Dissenting voices are beginning to be heard, and some have power.

The counter-reply downplays these cracks: Russian media discuss strategies and assign blame, yes, but they do so within the system. The people will think what their media tells them, and those media, for now, continue to frame the war as an existential threat. What is at stake would not be Donbas, but the survival of the country as a nation.

The European Collapse: Dollar, Energy, and Winter

There is an economic derivative that appears again and again: the idea that the real blow is received by Europe. The United States is described as a deindustrialized territory whose survival as a single entity depends on others accepting its fiat currency. If it loses the two major producers, industrial and energy, the US financial economy eats its own children: the eurozone states.

Hence warnings about supply cuts and energy prices on the continent, and the calculation that, without a European middle class, the dollar cannot be sustained. Much of the discontent is directed less at Moscow and more at the capitals that signed the sanctions.

What Do Those Who Say Russia Has Already Fallen Claim?

That it fell in the nineties and that now the fall could be much more brutal, because sequels are never good. In this reading, Ukraine will become cursed and deserted land, sentenced, and Russia, rather than losing, will end up dying while killing.

In this scenario, it is also pointed out that if Russia withdraws, fighting would continue inside Ukraine, and that any solution leaving Crimea in Russian hands clashes with a detail: the UN does not recognize that annexation. The response from the other side is brief. NATO has always ignored UN pronouncements, as with Gibraltar, and at this stage, so does Pilingui.

The Donbas Knot and Opposing Versions of 2014

Here no one disputes the prior facts: they dispute what they were. One version speaks of a regime change sponsored from abroad and years of repression against the ethnic Russian population, including violent episodes. The other recalls that this population took up arms and, with support from soldiers without insignia, rose up against the state, and that the annexation was unilateral and encouraged from Moscow.

The exchange becomes harsher and less useful at times. Each side has its own 2014 and list of grievances, and neither seems willing to concede the narrative. Without a common narrative, there is no negotiated exit, and without a negotiated exit, the initial question returns.

One statement remains that disorients both camps: that Ukraine has lost half its population, a figure thrown into the conversation with no backing other than the voice asserting it.