As the war in Ukraine drags on and Vladimir Putin presents himself as the architect of a “new world order” alongside Xi Jinping and Kim Jong-un, Reset DOC spoke with Stephen Hanson, a leading American political scientist and expert on Russia and authoritarian regimes. Hanson is Professor of Government at the College of William & Mary and has previously served as director of Harvard’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies and of the Reves Center for International Studies. His latest book, The Assault on the State: How the Global Attack on Modern Government Endangers Our Future (co-authored with Jeffrey Kopstein), dissects attacks on the mechanisms of modern governance—from post-Soviet Russia to Western democracies— with particular attention to the resurgence of patrimonialism, where power is based on personal loyalty and emotional ties rather than legal structures.
Over the past few years—starting with Crimea and leading up to the full-scale invasion of Ukraine—how has Putin’s power evolved, both in terms of his leadership at home and his influence abroad?
There’s no denying that Putin has had a lot of victories on the foreign policy front lately: first, Trump’s rolling out the red carpet for him in in Anchorage, followed by a meeting with the leaders of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) in an honored position. At the Chinese military parade, Putin appeared at the very front alongside Xi Jinping and Kim Jong-un, and soon after held a large press conference where he gloated, presenting himself as the architect of the emerging world order. So, from an external point of view, there’s clear progress, but domestically, the Russian situation is far less solid.
How so?
The economy grew at about 4 percent annually over the past two years, driven largely by war expenditures, but now it is stagnant. Inflation remains a threat, which is why interest rates are stuck at 21 percent, and there is growing discontent among Russian industrialists. Just a few days ago, Germán Gref, one of Russia’s most prominent formerly liberal bankers, openly complained that interest rates had to come down or economic activity would grind to a halt. That was striking, because in Putin’s Russia, saying such things publicly is a clear sign of serious problems.
And regionally?
In the so-called “near abroad,” there are also signs of weakness. Russia can no longer directly influence partners like Armenia, which turned against Moscow after the ethnic cleansing of Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh. Even Azerbaijan, despite being the victor in that war, has drifted somewhat out of Putin’s orbit, fueled by resentment over a plane crash that killed many Azerbaijani citizens. Having put all his chips on the Ukraine war, his ability to project power elsewhere has diminished. And it’s a paradox: just as the “collective West,” as he calls it, is fracturing and invitations for Russia to join international fora are multiplying, domestic pressures may be growing stronger.
To what degree do you believe the war has affected Putin’s power?
It’s the usual paradox of a patrimonial, autocratic, personalistic dictatorship. Personally, he’s stronger than ever. It’s an incredibly repressive regime: schoolchildren are now taught to march in step from an early age, to see Ukraine as part of the collective West and therefore the enemy as “Nazified.” His own glorification has reached heights never seen before the full-scale invasion. In that sense, he is much more powerful.
But institutionally, as is always the case with anti-liberal regimes, there is a loss of capacity: the ability to innovate, to direct the economy in ways other than military production. Meanwhile, the brain drain continues, with many people leaving for the Caucasus, the Middle East, or wherever they can find a way out. It’s personal power at the expense of the nation.
To what extent are the changes provoked by the war affecting the “patrimonial” nature of political power in Russia?
He’s doubled down on the patrimonial elements of his rule. There’s been a straight-line increase in the emphasis on tradition, Orthodox religion, anti-liberalism, and opposition to LGBTQ rights—all of those elements central to the patrimonial model are now completely central to Putin’s appeal to the Russian people. It works: Plenty of Putin’s supporters see the West as a hotbed of sin, even as aligned with Satan—as Putin himself has said. Controlled media reinforces the narrative, so I wouldn’t expect immediate change. But patrimonial regimes, even when highly consolidated, tend to become institutionally sclerotic. No one can ever tell Putin he’s wrong. In fact, the full-scale invasion of Ukraine was likely launched because Putin had no one around him willing to say it wouldn’t work.
Where does public opinion stand right now?
Researchers use indirect list techniques for polls. For example, they might ask respondents how many leaders on a given list they approve of. Sometimes Putin’s name is on the list, sometimes it isn’t, and people don’t know whether others are seeing the same list. That can give an indirect measure of his support. My colleagues who use this method estimate that his popularity is still around 60 percent.
What we do know, even from these polls, is that there’s no immediate social revolution on the horizon. Discontent exists at the margins—among families who have lost sons on the battlefield and feel the compensation wasn’t what they expected. People also keep trying to flee, although many of those inclined to leave have already left. It’s a little like Cuba under Castro: the people who might have overthrown him ended up in Florida, so there wasn’t the same ferment among the intelligentsia or young people inside the country.
So, one thing is perception. The other is real power. On the international stage, Putin looks weaker, more dependent on China. Could he really resist for long in Ukraine? Or is he close to a peace deal?
I don’t think his personal power is at immediate risk. There are a few reasons. First, he’s willing to sacrifice a lot of people. He doesn’t care if hundreds of thousands of young Russian men are killed—and that continues to happen. They already emptied the prisons, and many of those conscripts have died. Now recruitment is coming from ethnic regions and poorer parts of Russia, where the wages offered for military service make going to fight in Ukraine a fairly lucrative option for people without other prospects. Second, the propaganda is pervasive. Recruits don’t realize the war is nothing like what the Kremlin describes until they arrive on the battlefield.
And Ukraine?
Ukraine faces the same war of attrition with a limited number of young men too; some are allowed to study abroad because it’s unsustainable to put every male over eighteen on the battlefield. The challenge is keeping the nation alive—families, births—while fighting a war with hundreds of thousands dead or wounded.
At the moment, I don’t see any tipping points. On the battlefield, people keep expecting some kind of breakthrough—by the Russians or by the Ukrainians—but it never happens. It’s just small gains of territory at an incredibly high human cost. The rise of drone warfare makes breakthroughs even harder. The moment troops try to advance across a line; they are swarmed and picked off. It’s incredibly difficult to move the front lines.
So, what would the outcome depend on?
In the long term, the domestic stability of both regimes. A major shift will only come when one of the two begins to break down. From this perspective, I’m more optimistic about Ukraine: the nation is remarkably united, and Russian behavior—bombing civilians, hospitals, schools, abducting children—makes compromise almost impossible. For Ukrainians, it’s an existential struggle, and they will stick with it no matter how hard it gets.
For Russia, there are points where the pressure could become too much. Putin could fall ill—as in patrimonial regimes with aging leaders. Or there could be another Prigozhin-style march; it wasn’t that long ago that a battlefield commander close to Putin moved troops right up to Moscow. I don’t expect a Ruski bunt—a great Russian uprising—but the slow erosion of power in a patrimonial regime does create cracks, and as they widen, others may step in, leading to splits.
What is Putin most afraid of—democracy in Ukraine, or NATO at the border?
He doesn’t distinguish between liberal democracy, NATO membership, or even EU membership. He’ll still occasionally make a rhetorical distinction, saying, “We never opposed Ukraine joining the EU; we only opposed its joining NATO.” But in practice, for him, it all goes together: what we call democracy (which he insists isn’t really democracy), what we call liberalism, what we call collective security—all of it, belongs to the hegemonic, unipolar world he believes is dying. And he also thinks, along with Xi and others in the SCO, that they are winning that battle.
At the end of Communism, people looked at the West with longing. That sense of deprivation was one of reason for the collapse. Do we still see something like that today? Or is ordinary life now relatively comfortable?
That phenomenon is much less pronounced now than it was during the Cold War. Then, the shelves were empty, and the contrast with Western goods was radical. Today, consumer life isn’t dramatically worse than before the full-scale invasion. Over the decades, Russians became very adept at small-scale entrepreneurship, especially in the service sector. Restaurants in Moscow and St. Petersburg are world-class—you could walk into one today and it would rival anything in a European capital. There’s nothing like the Cold War contrast.
That said, among the highly educated, more individualistic Russians—those who traveled frequently before the invasion—there is a great deal of quiet discontent. When Navalny was killed, hundreds of thousands visited his gravesite despite the risks. So, discontent is there, beneath the surface, but it is strongest in the urban, educated population, not in the rural regions.
Can we speak of a shared political language between Trump and Putin based on patrimonial and symbolic ties that transcend institutional boundaries?
Yes. Trump, as Jeffrey Kopstein and I argue, is part of a global patrimonial wave that began with Putin. This is about emulation. It’s not that Putin is a puppet master telling Trump what to do; it’s simply that this style of state-building, which many thought belonged to the past, has come back in force. It’s essentially 19th- or even 18th-century empire-building, often framed with divine-right arguments about religious sanction for the ruler.
In the Trump administration, the state runs like a family business, with friends, relatives, and cronies handed pieces of power as rewards for loyalty. Also, the indiscriminate use of violence against so-called enemies of the state—just as in those earlier empires. When Trump realized he might be able to build such a regime, he immediately wanted to join what I call the “Patrimonial Club.”
Where was this most evident?
In the spectacle of the U.S. president behaving like a supplicant, with the red carpet rolled out for Putin in Anchorage. As the SCO met in Beijing, Trump sent a snarky message saying he hoped the leaders gathered there weren’t “conspiring too much against the United States.” Putin replied in kind, remarking that none of the leaders he met in Beijing had “a negative thing to say about the current U.S. administration.” It was a low blow, essentially putting Trump in his place: no, you’re not here among the real leaders—like me, Xi, Kim Jong-un, and Modi—but at least no one badmouthed you.
Here’s the paradox: the one group still willing to treat Trump as a “big boss” is the European leadership. But they do it for purely instrumental reasons: they know that if they don’t, they risk losing NATO cohesion, U.S. support for Ukraine, and the transatlantic alliance more generally. As a result, when they visit Washington, they behave almost as supplicants.
What do you think of the so-called willing countries?
Macron announced that twenty-six countries are ready to offer some security commitment to Ukraine in the event of a peace treaty. Putin immediately rejected it, warning that any Western troops on Ukrainian soil would be legitimate targets for the Russian military. So, we’re no closer to a settlement. But the move sharpened European leaders’ minds—they know they must hold together in this precarious moment.
The larger questions remain unresolved: will civil society in the U.S. resist a patrimonial Trump regime strongly enough to restore some form of liberal order? Can the European Union develop a real defense capacity, functioning independently of NATO and the United States? And will widening cracks in the Russian regime, combined with a stalling economy, shift the global balance of power in Ukraine and beyond? For now, the answer remains uncertain.
How far off is a compromise on Ukraine?
I’m not optimistic at all about any legal settlement. Putin hasn’t changed his position. He insists on resolving the “root causes” of the war: in his view, the West tried to include Ukraine in its orbit instead of recognizing it as part of Russia’s, of what he imagines as the old Kievan roots. Within that framework, there’s no possible negotiation, because no borders can be drawn that would satisfy his ambitions. He says so himself: it’s not about territory, it’s about the very idea that Ukraine is an independent country, which he claims is an artificial creation.
With that framing, as Zelensky keeps telling us, there is no deal to be had as long as Putin is in charge. The sooner Trump realizes that—or Steve Witkoff, or someone else in the U.S.—the sooner Washington will align with the Europeans, who already understand it. Leaders like Starmer, Scholz, Macron, and Meloni all grasp the situation clearly, with the exceptions of Fico and Vučić, who are enjoying their own patrimonial moment. The good news is that the West can remain united, because there’s widespread recognition of this reality. The bad news is that the U.S. is wavering. A “victory” for the West isn’t coming in the next six months. So, solidarity is essential to endure the next two, three, four—however many—years this war of attrition may last.
Cover photo: Russia’s President Vladimir Putin chairs a Security Council meeting at the Kremlin in Moscow on August 8, 2025. (Photo by Sergei ILYIN / POOL / AFP)
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