No End in Sight to ‘Beginning of Putin’s End’

When scanning commentaries on post-Soviet Eurasia from English- and Russian-language sources, certain words or phrases stand out as fads that later fade away. So when RFE/RL described on July 30, 2022, a “bold prediction” by Russia expert Iver Neumann that we are witnessing “the beginning of the end” of Vladimir Putin’s regime, it seemed like one of the newest fads that have emerged after Putin’s decision to (re-)invade Ukraine in February. We decided to reaffirm that hunch as Neumann’s prediction began to gain traction in other media. With no skills or means immediately available for meta-analysis, we searched in Factiva, Google, Yandex and other open sources for “beginning of the end”+ “Putin” and “начало+конца”+ Путин.

The search revealed that proclaiming the beginning of Putin’s end was a trend long before his troops marched into Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022. In fact, the earliest such proclamation we found was made on Oct. 26, 2002: a column by Moscow-based sociologist Boris Kagarlitsky that asks in its headline whether the Russian authorities’ mishandling of the deadly hostage crisis at Moscow’s Dubrovka theater during the second full year of Putin’s presidency meant the beginning of his political end. 

In total, we have found 38 predictions of the beginning of Putin’s end made from Dec. 31, 1999, (Putin’s ascent to the presidency) to July 30, 2022, including 22 made before the invasion of Ukraine (Table 1) and 16 made after the invasion (Table 2).

Many of the pre-invasion predictions that we found in texts and/or their headlines¹ were made during federal electoral campaigns in Russia or in the aftermath of these elections. Their authors typically accused Putin and whichever party he supported of either campaigning unfairly or winning illegally (or both) when explaining why the beginning of Putin’s end was near. But it wasn’t all about elections. The beginning of Putin’s end was also forecast over his government’s handling of hostage crises (2002 and 2004), the conviction of Mikhail Khodorkovsky (2005), the decline in Russians’ living standards (2011), a faltering economy (2012), Russia’s intervention in Syria (2015) and even Putin’s mysterious disappearance for several days in March 2015. 

As for the post-invasion predictions, all 17 that we found pointed to the invasion as the primary reason behind the beginning of Putin’s end (interestingly, the first was made only hours after Putin announced the launch of his “special military operation” shortly before 6:00am Moscow time on Feb. 24).