Russia is "Toast": Why Putin Has Already Lost (It’s Not The War) | SARAH PAINE скачать в хорошем качестве

Russia is "Toast": Why Putin Has Already Lost (It’s Not The War) | SARAH PAINE

This script argues that Russia is already strategically “finished” regardless of what happens on the Ukrainian frontline—because the war has destroyed Russia’s long-term future. Using Sarah Paine’s framework, it explains that Putin is playing a 19th-century “Continental” land-grab game in a 21st-century “Maritime” world where real power comes from institutions, rule of law, trade, and compounding wealth. In the early 2000s, Russia hit a jackpot with soaring oil revenues and had a rare chance to modernize, reform its courts, and diversify beyond raw materials. Instead, Putin built legitimacy on a “diet of wars” (Chechnya, Georgia, Ukraine), burning national capital on conflict while cutting Russia off from Western technology, investment, and markets. The result is a permanent strategic trap: Russia becomes a resource supplier with shrinking leverage, increasingly dependent on a far richer China—at the very moment China is pushing a green transition that could strand Russia’s oil-and-gas economy. The final warning is biological and political: a system built around one man has an expiration date. When Putin exits, succession is likely to trigger a brutal elite “free-for-all,” leaving a weaker, poorer, more China-dependent Russia—and a world facing higher risks from miscalculation and instability. #professoralpha #Russia #UkraineWar #Geopolitics #Putin #China #WorldPolitics