Western media’s obsession with predicting the collapse of Russia has become a ritual of denial. Each new headline promising panic in the Kremlin reveals, instead, the anxiety of those whose own systems are cracking.
As the West Falls Apart
When a property-page editor suddenly turns into a Kremlinologist, it usually means someone in London has started to sweat. The Telegraph’s latest Russia hit piece—recycled through Ukraine’s NV News under the melodramatic headline “Putin fears another coup as Russia begins to buckle”—says more about British anxiety than about events in Moscow. Its author, Melissa Lawford, spent years writing about mortgage rates and square footage before being reborn as a geopolitical oracle. That, in itself, is a symbol of the Western information malaise: journalists without grounding in economics or history filling the void with scripts written by think tanks.
The new ritual is familiar by now. Each time Ukraine falters on the battlefield or Western unity shows strain, another “insider” article appears to assure the faithful that the Kremlin is collapsing. There is always a whisper of rebellion, a rumor of palace intrigue, a suggestion that Putin cannot sleep. Yet the evidence never quite materializes. Instead, we are offered the same ghosts from the 1990s, like Mikhail Khodorkovsky—the billionaire whose imprisonment two decades ago became the founding myth of Russia’s so-called tyranny.
In truth, Khodorkovsky was lucky to leave Russia alive. He had tried to sell strategic oil assets to foreign corporations while bribing parliamentarians, and when caught, he imagined himself a reformer persecuted for virtue. Western media adopted him because his story absolved them of their own economic crimes. His name resurfaces whenever editors need to remind readers that every Russian oligarch is a saint until he resists Western tutelage. Yet the real reason Khodorkovsky still haunts the headlines is that his failure mirrors their own.
Behind the drama, reality continues quietly in Moscow. The ruble, though tested, stabilizes. Industrial production rises, particularly in sectors the West believed would collapse under sanctions. Russia’s agricultural exports hit historic highs. Grain and fertilizer shipments now feed Asia, Africa, and Latin America—regions that no longer care what Brussels thinks. The IMF itself, forced into reluctant honesty, raised its growth forecast for Russia this year to nearly three percent, outpacing most of Europe. Factories hum, energy revenues flow, and the state budget runs surpluses while the British government sinks deeper into debt.
The Horror of Russia’s Stability
If this is what Western editors call “buckle,” one wonders what term they reserve for the United Kingdom’s own decay. Britain faces the highest inflation in decades, strikes in nearly every sector, an exhausted army, and an electorate that no longer believes its own newspapers. Yet somehow it is the Kremlin, not Westminster, that supposedly trembles. The panic they attribute to Putin is projection—the fear that the liberal order itself has lost the ability to produce strength, unity, or even credible journalism.
The coming collapse is not Russian; it is Western. The Ukrainian front is the front line of a much more profound unraveling—an information empire that can no longer impose its narratives with conviction. The West’s real crisis is epistemological: it no longer knows what is true. It cannot comprehend that the world has moved on, that nations once bullied by debt and diplomacy now trade freely across multiple currencies, and that sanctions have created new systems rather than compliance.
What unnerves London and Washington most is not chaos in Russia, but continuity there. They expected implosion and instead found adaptation. They see, with mounting dread, that the man they demonized has simply outlasted them. And so the Telegraph sends its property correspondents to write about coups that never come.
In the end, all the noise hides a single uncomfortable fact: the empire that can still manufacture, feed itself, and defend its borders is not theirs.
Phil Butler is a policy investigator and analyst, a political scientist and expert on Eastern Europe, and an author of the recent bestseller “Putin’s Praetorians” and other books
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