The 2026 Russian legislative election to select all 450 seats of the State Duma (the lower house of parliament) ended on 20 September with President Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party securing 57.83% of the vote. Given the State apparatus to ensure a positive result for Putin, the number might look on the lower side than many would expect, but it translates into a record-breaking 355 out of 450 seats in the Duma in an election that was framed largely as a referendum on Russia’s ‘Special Military Operation’ in Ukraine. That operation -- which was meant to last 10 days in total when it was launched on 24 February 2022 (three days to seize Kyiv and another seven to secure the entire country) -- is now in its 1,675th day at the time of writing. Despite enormous casualties, severe economic damage, and drone and missile attacks now reaching deep into Moscow, conquering Ukraine remains a core part of Putin’s overarching vision for a resuscitation of the Greater Russian Empire founded by Tsar Peter the Great. So, what is the new Tsar going to do next?
Putin’s key problem, having been in power for effectively 26 years, is the ‘Tiger-Rider Paradox’ (‘He who rides a tiger can never dismount’), which explains that an autocrat accumulates so many enemies, commits so many atrocities, and strips away so many legal protections during their rule that the act of stepping down is a death sentence for him. The Russian president’s most immediate problem is that his armed forces reached the critical negative replacement rate -- meaning that there are more dead and wounded per month than can be replaced through recruitment -- back at the beginning of the year. As it stands now, Russia is suffering roughly 34,000 casualties a month, while its aggressive volunteer recruitment programs are only pulling in roughly 27,000 new recruits a month. Moreover, there are now 8 Russian casualties for every 1 Ukrainian casualty, up from a ratio of roughly 3:1 earlier in the conflict. At least as bad from the public morale perspective for Putin is that Ukraine’s extraordinary development of its own drone and missile capabilities means that it is now able to keep hitting any target it wants inside Russia up to 1,200 miles, putting over 70% of the Russian population within Ukraine’s crosshairs. Perhaps most notably here, Kyiv has launched dozens of targeted long-range drone attacks against Russia’s largest e–commerce giant, Wildberries, since mid–July 2026, in an economic and logistical campaign to dismantle the supply chains supporting the Russian military and its civilian population. Moreover, the last day of the 2026 election saw 450 drones targeted directly at Moscow and its immediate surroundings. Related: BP Eyes Bigger U.S. Shale Footprint After Devon Deal Talks
Given the personally existential ramifications of ending the Ukraine War without a victory, Putin has been weighing up the consequences of expanding mobilisation, a senior source who works closely with the European Union’s (E.U.) energy security complex exclusively told OilPrice.com last week. “He’d previously focused mobilisation away from the middle and higher classes, especially in Moscow and St Petersburg, as they are the ones that can create the most trouble politically and economically,” he said. “But with less than 80% of the soldiers killed in Ukraine now able to be replaced by recruits, the net will have to be widened, and it will have to be widened by more than North Korea can send,” he added. “We [at the EU] have heard that the next mobilisation will be for anywhere from 300,000 to 600,000 in the first wave, and then around 300,000 or so a year after that, at least,” he underlined. Fuelling a growing belief in Russia that mobilisation is indeed set to be dramatically widened is that the Kremlin has seamlessly linked its automated digital military registry to its border security apparatus. This means that the second an electronic draft notice is uploaded to the register, the individual is legally barred from leaving Russia. Last week -- crucially, after voting had ended in the 2026 election -- the Kremlin began legally forcing the private sector into the mobilisation machine, with municipal administrations issuing official directives to local businesses to sign formal agreements to execute specific mobilisation tasks. Again last week, the government initiated covert, mandatory administrative training sessions for regional government officials across several federal republics to prepare for the specific administrative and economic shocks of a mass mobilisation intake.
Another move available to Putin is to increase ‘grey zone’ operations through hybrid attacks that sit just below the bar that would trigger a collective military response by NATO under its Article 5. A notable example occurred in December 2024 when Russian shadow fleet vessel Eagle S was apprehended by Finnish authorities after severing EstLink 2, a critical electricity interconnector linking Finland and Estonia. Similarly, on 6 October last year, the Russian vessel the Scanlark was detained by authorities after being caught launching surveillance drones and carrying spying equipment near the Olkiluoto Nuclear Power Station in Finland. Moreover, an attempted dual-nature energy-telecommunications hit by Russia was reported by the British Ministry of Defence on 9 April this year. Three Russian submarines were mapping and surveying vital gas pipelines in the North Sea, and undersea electricity interconnectors vital to trading power with mainland Europe. Most recently, German authorities formally attributed a failed explosive drone attack at Leipzig/Halle Airport to Russian intelligence services on 1 September. The incident, which involved a drone rigged with Semtex parked near a fuelled Ukrainian cargo plane, was averted only due to a faulty detonator.
While all these measures are carefully designed to fall under the level likely to trigger NATO’s Article 5, Putin is also likely to re–test where precisely that level is, thinks the EU source. “We’ve seen Russia increasingly flying drones into NATO airspace for months now, which the Kremlin has either denied or said was a mistake, and it’s seen that this hasn’t triggered Article 5, so we [EU] think it possible now that we could see this on a higher scale,” he said. “So, a Russian–sent missile or drone strike directly at or close to a key piece of NATO infrastructure or even Russian troops entering a border area, both by ‘accident’, with Russia waiting to see the response -- an ideal place for this to be tried from Russia’s perspective would be the Suwalki Gap or Gotland,” he added. The Suwalki Gap is just a 65–mile-long strip of land that runs directly along the Poland–Lithuania border and is widely considered by military planners to be NATO’s Achilles’ heel. The reason is that it is sandwiched between two hostile territories -- Russia’s heavily militarised exclave of Kaliningrad to the northwest, and Kremlin–aligned Belarus to the southeast. Occupying it would cut off all three Baltic countries from the rest of the European mainland. Just last week, Belarusian tank and mechanised battalions deployed directly to the borders of the Gap for sudden, unannounced military drills. Another potential target for such an attack would be Sweden’s largest island, Gotland, which sits directly in the centre of the Baltic Sea just 190 miles from Kaliningrad. Effectively acting as an unsinkable aircraft carrier for the country that occupies it, Gotland would allow occupying forces total control over the sea lanes and airspace of the entire Baltic region. Again, this would cut off the three Baltic countries from any maritime reinforcement or air support from the rest of NATO. Also, very neatly for Putin’s own vision of himself as the new Peter the Great, when Peter secured the Gulf of Finland, those exact Baltic territories were the first pieces he absorbed into the brand-new Russian Empire. In fact, Putin has specifically stated that when Peter the Great fought Sweden and took Baltic lands (including Narva in modern-day Estonia and the swamps where Putin’s hometown of St Petersburg was built), he “seized nothing -- he reclaimed it!”
That said, the U.S. has tightened the economic screw again on Russia, with 18 September seeing Donald Trump sign the toughest sweeping sanctions package yet -- formally titled the ‘Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026’. This law hits Russia with tariffs of up to 500% and, crucially for global markets, it also empowers the White House to impose secondary tariffs of up to 100% on goods imported from the top five buyers of Russian crude oil and natural gas -- most notably impacting nations like China and India. Only recently, the Central Bank of Russia slashed its 2026 GDP growth forecast down to 0-1% (with the Ministry of Economic Development projecting just 0.4%). Official data from Rosstat revealed the economy contracted by 0.2% in the first part of the year, breaking a multi-quarter streak of wartime growth. Meanwhile, Russia’s National Wealth Fund (its sovereign rainy-day cushion) has seen its liquid assets plummet from 6.5% of GDP down to just 1.8%.
By Simon Watkins for Oilprice.com
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