Even as Kremlin minions prepare the ground for a post-conflict Russia, there is still a deafening silence from the top

Owen Matthews

Published 18 May 2026

Over the weekend, Kyiv sent a barrage of over 500 drones to Moscow and its environs. Despite new laws restricting the posting of information on drone attacks, residents of Khimki, Mytishchi and Krasnogorsk flooded social media with footage of plumes of smoke rising and drones manoeuvring in the skies over the capital’s suburbs. The attacks – which killed three civilians and left dozens injured – were the first sustained Ukrainian attack on Moscow since the beginning of the war.

By any rational measure, Ukraine’s new-found ability to hit the most heavily defended city in Russia – plus dozens of recent strikes on oil refineries, pipelines and export terminals thousands of kilometres inside Russia – should be a major wake-up call for the Kremlin. All the more so because Ukraine’s long-range strike capabilities, soon to include domestically produced cruise missiles with a longer range than Tomahawks at a tenth of the cost, will only increase.

“Their numbers will grow, and their routes and tactics will evolve,” posted Dmitry Rogozin, a senator representing the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia province in the aftermath of the Moscow attacks. The Ukrainians “will probe for gaps and vulnerabilities in our defences”.

Yet there has been little sign that Vladimir Putin is getting the message. True, in the aftermath of his May 9 Victory Day parade – humiliatingly scaled-down due to the threat of Ukrainian attack – Putin did hint for the first time that the war was nearing its conclusion. “The matter is coming to an end”, he told reporters, but added that “a great deal of preparatory work still needs to be done”.

Does that mean Putin is ready to do a peace deal as soon as Trump’s attention turns away from the Iran war and shuttle diplomacy resumes? Or does it mean that Putin is preparing one last summer offensive to take the as-yet unconquered 20 per cent of Donbas in a final bloodbath?

The inner workings of the Kremlin remain as opaque today as they were when Winston Churchill described Russia as “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma”. But one important thing may have changed. “The key is Russian national interest,” Churchill told the BBC on October 1, 1939. Today, however, it’s hard to see what national interest there can be in continuing Putin’s pointless and evidently un-winnable war in Ukraine. Instead, the sole driver appears to be the obsession and stubbornness of one man who set out to fight a short, victorious war which has become a catastrophic mistake.

The war has not delivered the expected victory. Relations with the West have not normalised. And the Trump administration – widely hoped in Moscow to deliver a face-saving deal – has failed to produce one. The result is a system radiating “irritation and dissatisfaction” even from loyalist circles, but entirely unable to act on it. So says Boris Bondarev, a senior Russian diplomat who resigned in protest at the invasion.

According to Bondarev, the Russian elite is now caught in “a peculiar trap of its own making”. The FSB’s surveillance apparatus has destroyed trust within the elite itself. Without trust, no conspiracy is possible. And without any institutional power structures – unlike the Soviet or Chinese Communist parties, which survived their dictators through collective governance – removing Putin simply means collapse. As Bondarev puts it, the Russian system now more closely resembles Nazi Germany than the USSR: the entire legitimacy of the political order flows from a single person. Remove it, and everything falls apart.

But there’s little comfort in this picture of dysfunction and paralysis for those who hope that the war will end if only the West applies more sanctions and supplies more weapons and Kyiv sends more drone strikes. Economic pain has consolidated rather than fractured the ruling class, argues Bondarev. And, crucially, the fear of a systemic collapse actually protects Putin against a revolt from inside his elites, who fear chaos more than they fear the slow pain of a forever war.

A rare high-level insight into the inner workings of the Kremlin emerged last week with the leak of a working paper on plans for a post-war Russia. A team of apparatchiks under deputy presidential administration head Sergei Kiriyenko were, the leak revealed, busy drafting detailed propaganda lines for state media on how to spin a “non-victorious” war without conceding that none of the Kremlin’s war aims have really been fulfilled. They are also laying plans for re-programming and, if necessary, forcibly neutralising elements of self-proclaimed “patriotic” society who are likely to decry defeat and betrayal.

But even as Kremlin minions are actively preparing the ground for a post-war Russia, there is still a deafening silence from the top. Putin is so ideologically committed and personally invested in the war that he is motivated not by reasonable cost-benefit analysis but by a fateful combination of stubbornness and paralysis. Worse, Putin and his inner circle appear insulated not just from the people but from their own elite. Putin doesn’t seem to have a plan to end the war. But neither do his underlings have any means to influence or replace him, even as Moscow itself comes under attack.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/05/18/what-will-it-take-for-putin-to-end-the-war/