Talk of Coup Attempts in Russia Only Prove That Putin Will Burn the Place to the Ground Before He Accepts That His War Is Lost
- john raymond
- Aug 22
- 2 min read
The rumors of a coup inside Russia — surfacing now not just in exile circles but within Russian Telegram and semi-public channels — are not noise, nor are they signs of imminent rebellion.
They are the exhaust of a system under extreme pressure.
The real insight is that Vladimir Putin, confronted with the exhaustion of Russia’s National Wealth Fund and the attrition of his war machine, is now willing to burn everyone and steal everything from the oligarchs to preserve his regime.
This is not speculative; it is the logical culmination of a mafia state whose survival strategy has reached its final stage.
The fact that Russian elites whisper of plots, purges, and windows suddenly opening has less to do with their appetite for rebellion than with their own sense of vulnerability.
For years they accepted Putin’s rule as a guarantee of their wealth and security. That compact is now broken. The confiscations, arrests, and public executions of standing ministers are not the accidental byproducts of paranoia — they are the proof that Putin will strip his allies to the bone if doing so buys him one more year, one more month, one more day atop the throne.
This dynamic must be read through the prime directive of regime security. Putin understands that if the war is lost, he is finished — not simply as a ruler, but as a man.
Thus, his willingness to risk backlash from his own elite class is not evidence of desperation alone; it is evidence of how central the continuation of the Ukraine war has become to his survival equation. If he wins, he can rebuild a new elite atop the ruins. If he loses, he cannot rebuild himself.
The implications therefore are stark…
First, coup chatter in Russia is both a measure of his fear and of the elites’ crumbling faith in his stewardship.
Second, every purge reinforces his paranoia but also raises the odds of rebellion, since each elite knows they could be next.
Third, Putin’s strategy now binds him irrevocably to the war’s outcome: victory or death.
What Western audiences must grasp is that this means there is no “off-ramp.” There is no negotiated settlement Putin will honor. There is no version of events where he hands Ukraine back its territory and accepts humiliation in exchange for stability.
Instead, the war must go on, because only through its continuation can Putin feed his regime’s survival machine, even at the expense of the very oligarchs who sustain it.
Thus, every oligarch falling out a window, every fortune seized, every regional strongman carving his fiefdom, is not a sign of chaos alone — it is a sign of Putin’s resolve.
The man is more than prepared to destroy Russia’s elite class in order to keep himself alive.
And it is precisely because he is willing to do this that the war will not end until he is defeated.
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