War as a Survival Mechanism for the Putin Regime: From Statehood to a Mafia System of Power

There has been a merger of three concepts: «Putin», «regime» and «Russia». For propaganda, they become synonymous. Then the protection of power can be presented as the protection of the state, and the protection of the state as the protection of power. This is the highest form of political usurpation.

Putin’s regime is a typical mafia. A clear example of how the state power structure becomes an absolute mafia power that has replaced the duties of the state and subordinated it to its own interests. Propaganda, lies, fear and violence are the established narratives, the false attitudes imposed on society. The current Russian ruling elite has completely usurped official structures, adapting the governing bodies solely for the purpose of capitalizing on their own environment and maintaining political control over the Russian Federation, which has been privatized in their favor.

To better understand the motives of Muscovy’s invasion of Ukraine, it is necessary to take into account that Putin’s Russia is not just a totalitarian state that pursues an aggressive foreign policy.

After all, its political nature is much more complex and dangerous: it is about transforming state institutions into instruments for preserving the personalist power of the dictator Putin. Power, where the line between the state interest, the interest of the ruling elite and the private interests of groups associated with it is increasingly blurred.

The Russian political system has become completely personalist, and power in it is concentrated around the Kremlin Fuhrer. And the courts, security structures, media and electoral mechanisms are completely subordinate to the Kremlin.

In such a system, the main issue becomes not what the state does for the citizen, but what the state does to preserve the system of power itself. And this is a fundamental change in political logic, when public interests are completely subordinated to the survival of the ruling regime.

Since in a democratic state, power is an instrument of society and is limited by law. In a totalitarian state, the government has complete control over society. In a personalist dictatorship, the next step is for the state itself to function as an extension of the will of the ruler and his inner circle.

The Russian case demonstrates just such a transformation. Therefore, the question of the reasons for the war against Ukraine cannot be reduced to geopolitics, NATO, imperial historical consciousness, or the desire to restore Russia’s sphere of influence.

All of these factors are important. But they do not provide a complete answer to the fundamental question: why, under Putin, at this very moment, and in the form of a full-scale invasion, did Russia go to an extremely risky war that jeopardized its economic stability, international standing, and even the political system itself.

One of the most convincing answers is that external war became a way to solve the regime’s internal problem – the problem of its legitimacy and long-term self-preservation.

This does not mean that Putin literally sat in the Kremlin and formulated the task of the war in one sentence: «start a war in order to stay in power». Political decisions of dictatorships rarely work so mechanically. Instead, it is about the structural logic of the regime. When personalist power is increasingly locked into a single figure, any serious social change becomes a threat not just to government policy, but to the ruler himself.

Accordingly, external conflict can perform an internal function: create an image of the enemy, mobilize the population, justify repression, eliminate the remnants of political competition, and switch society from the tasks of internal modernization to the survival agenda. It is this logic that explains the special role of Ukraine for Putin.

For the Kremlin, Ukraine was not only a geopolitical problem. It was a political contrast. After 2014, Ukrainian society, despite all its internal problems, continued to move along the path of competitive politics, change of power through elections, and increasing integration with the European political space.

For the Russian personalist system, the very possibility of such development next to Russia created a dangerous example. Which directly connects the Kremlin’s decision on a large-scale invasion with the internal totalitarian transformation of the Russian Federation and the fear of a possible «democratic threat» – the spread of the example of Ukrainian political modernization to the Russian population.

And this is a fundamentally important point. Totalitarian regimes are not afraid of a military threat. They are afraid of an example. For despotism, it is not the army of a neighboring state that is dangerous, but the society of a neighboring state that demonstrates that power can be changed, that the president is not the lifelong owner of the state, that political competition is possible, and citizens can demand responsibility from the government.

In this sense, Ukraine has become more than just a neighbor for Putin’s system. It became an alternative political model. Because of this, the Kremlin spent years trying to erase Ukrainian subjectivity from the political map of the world.

Ukrainians were presented not as a separate nation capable of independently determining their own future, but as a population that had allegedly fallen victim to external control. Such rhetoric served two functions simultaneously. Externally, it justified Moscow’s imperial right to interfere in Ukrainian affairs. Internally, it convinced citizens that the Ukrainian choice was not a real choice and that any attempt to abandon the Russian model was the result of a conspiracy by external forces.

Thus, the war with Ukraine was presented to Russian society not as aggression, but as «defense». And it is here that the foreign policy conflict is transformed into a domestic political resource.

For Putin’s personalist regime, war is extremely convenient because it allows us to change the very question that society must answer. In peacetime, a citizen can ask: why hasn’t corruption been overcome? Why aren’t the courts independent? Why isn’t the government changing? Why is the economy dependent on raw material exports? Why are officials getting rich? Why are political rivals being persecuted? Why are state resources being distributed in favor of a narrow circle of individuals?

During the declared «war on the enemy», the Putin regime defines these questions as seditious, anti-state, destabilizing, and destructive. They are replaced by another question: «Whose side are you on?» This is precisely the political essence of the mobilization dictatorship.

War turns political loyalty into patriotism, and criticism of the government into suspicion of disloyalty. Disagreement with the dictator begins to be interpreted as helping the enemy. Independent journalism becomes a «foreign influence». The anti-war position is declared subversive. Political competition is supposedly a threat to the unity of the state. That is why, after the start of the full-scale invasion, Russia’s repressive apparatus was sharply strengthened.

War thus does not simply accompany totalitarianism. It becomes a mechanism for its deepening. This is one of the most important features of the Putin system: repression, propaganda, and war are not three independent phenomena. They form a single political mechanism.

War creates a need for propaganda. Propaganda creates the image of an internal and external enemy. The image of the enemy justifies repression. Repression eliminates alternative sources of information. The lack of alternative information facilitates the mobilization of the population in support of the war. And the war itself, in turn, justifies an even greater concentration of power. And then a vicious circle is formed.

The phenomenon of circular responsibility arises. The more people within the system become accomplices in its criminal actions, the more difficult it is for them to abandon it. An official who supported repression cannot become an oppositionist. A television propagandist who has justified the war for years cannot, without political cost, recognize it as a criminal mistake. A security guard who participated in the persecution of opponents is interested in preserving the system that guarantees him impunity. A businessman whose access to state resources depends on the Kremlin is interested in the stability of the political center.

This is how not just a vertical of power is formed, but a vertical of mutual dependence. And this is what makes the system stable. Its participants may not like Putin personally, may not believe primitive television propaganda, and may even understand the irrationality of absurd Kremlin decisions.

But they continue to support the system because the fall of this system means for many of them the loss of status, property, security, or even freedom. A personalist regime in such a situation is based not only on persuasion, but on mutual fear of the consequences of its dismantling.

Therefore, the question «do all Russians believe Putin?» is secondary. For a dictatorship to function, it is not necessary for everyone to believe. It is necessary that enough people are afraid, enough people are dependent, enough people benefit, and an alternative political organization is practically impossible.

Putin’s regime operates like a mafia and a personalist dictatorship, and the Russian state has become a criminal group. Although it has an army, diplomacy, bureaucracy, courts, tax system, legislation and a degrading economy.

But the logic of the functioning of power is mafia-like: the concentration of resources in a narrow circle of individuals, the dependence of access to opportunities on personal loyalty, the use of security structures to protect the political elite, the mutual responsibility of the elites for preserving the system and the actual subordination of formal rules to informal centers of power.

Putin’s Russia is a special form of political oligarchy, personalist dictatorship and a power state, where state institutions are increasingly used for the self-preservation of the regime. And it is here that the war against Ukraine acquires its deepest internal meaning.

If the Russian political system were confident in its own legitimacy, it would not need to constantly create the image of an existential threat. A strong political system can afford competition, criticism, and a change of power. A system that is afraid of losing control needs an enemy.

Putin’s model of power has built its legitimacy over the years on a combination of several basic principles: economic stability, the restoration of state power, patriotism, the image of a «strong hand», and the assertion that it was Putin who returned Russia to the status of a «great power». But such a model has a fundamental weakness – it depends on the personal image of an indispensable leader.

As long as Putin was associated with stability and strength, the system worked. If he begins to be associated with decline, corruption, stagnation, and hopelessness, the question arises of an alternative.

That is why external confrontation is useful for a personalist regime. It allows replacing the criterion of efficiency with the criterion of loyalty. The government no longer has to prove that it is running the country well. It has to prove that it is “protecting the country.” And this is a fundamentally different model of legitimation.

The impact of war on the internal stability of the regime directly points to this mechanism: an external war can give the totalitarian the opportunity to create an image of an existential threat, increase public mobilization, and suppress alternative narratives.

This does not mean that Russian society was unanimous or that all support for the war is the result of propaganda. Russian society is heterogeneous. Part of the Russian population supports the war out of imperial, chauvinistic, or revanchist beliefs; part – because of information isolation; part – because of fear; part – because of material dependence; part – because of conformism.

A totalitarian system is effective precisely because it does not need to convert all citizens into sincere supporters of the regime. It only needs to make resistance more expensive than submission. This is the true political function of fear.

Propaganda without repression has limited power. Repression without propaganda generates fear, but not necessarily loyalty. Together they create a much more powerful mechanism: the state determines the permitted picture of the world, and the security apparatus punishes those who refuse to accept it. War provides this structure with a constant source of extraordinariness. That is why war becomes not only a foreign policy project for the regime, but also an internal mechanism for maintaining power.

However, there is another important circumstance. In a personalist system, defeat becomes especially dangerous for the leader himself. Collective leadership can shift responsibility to the government, generals, parliament, and predecessors. A personalist ruler does not have this opportunity.

For decades, Putin has concentrated around himself the symbolic capital of a «strong Russia». Because of this, military failure automatically becomes a matter of his personal competence. That is why Putin’s war, launched as a tool for political consolidation, can turn into a trap.

And when there is no victory, the regime cannot simply admit that the strategy was wrong, because such an admission undermines the very principle of its legitimacy. If Putin admits that the war was a mistake, the following question arises: who is responsible for the hundreds of thousands of deaths, economic losses, international isolation, and the destruction of relations with the West? But if the answer leads to the dictator himself, the entire personalist construct is under threat.

Therefore, Russia’s war in Ukraine inevitably generates the effect of «dependence on a previous decision». Because the longer it lasts, the more expensive it is for the regime to end it without a result that can somehow be passed off as a victory.

Putin does not so much rule the state for the sake of realizing an abstract «national interest», but increasingly defines the national interest through the needs of preserving his own system of power. The state becomes a means of the regime, and the regime – a means of preserving a personal center of power. Accordingly, what is useful for the regime is declared useful for the state, and what threatens the regime is declared a threat to the state.

This is a fundamental substitution, but that is why criticism of Putin is automatically presented as criticism of Russia. Resistance to the regime is called treason. Independent journalism is work for foreign forces. An anti-war position is helping the enemy. Political competition is an attempt to destroy the state.

As a result, three concepts have merged: «Putin», «regime» and «Russia». For propaganda, they become synonyms. Then the protection of power can be presented as the protection of the state, and the protection of the state is the protection of power. This is the highest form of political usurpation. The state ceases to be an instrument that society can change. It becomes the property of the political system.

The mafia nature of Putin’s power is not simply corruption or criminal connections. Its essence lies in replacing the public interest with the interest of a closed group and in creating a system where members of this group have a mutual interest in preserving power, resources, and impunity.

In such a system, the law is not the supreme rule. It becomes one of the tools that is applied selectively. The court is not an independent arbitrator and turns into a mechanism for sanctioning necessary political decisions. Parliament ceases to be a place of real competition of programs and becomes a mechanism for legalizing already formed decisions. The media does not control the government and begins to impose a picture of the world necessary for the regime. And the power structures, instead of being neutral guarantors of the state’s security, become guarantors of the regime’s security.

That is why it is more correct to consider modern Russia not as a state in which «democratic institutions simply work poorly», but as a political system in which institutions are systematically reconfigured to the needs of personalist power.

The war was the culmination of this process. It allowed the Kremlin to translate the internal political crisis into an external confrontation, and the struggle to preserve the regime into a struggle supposedly for the survival of the state. It gave the authorities a universal explanation for economic problems, international isolation, repression, and restrictions on freedoms. It allowed society to demand not the responsibility of the authorities, but the sacrifice of the population.

And this is where the main evidence of the internal political nature of the war lies: since the full-scale invasion, Putin’s regime has not simply continued the war against Ukraine, it has rebuilt its own state for war.

The economy has been reoriented to military needs, the information space to mobilization, the legislation to persecution of opponents of the war, the political system to the maximum elimination of alternatives, and public discourse to opposing Russia to the «external enemy». Thus, the war has become one of the main mechanisms for the functioning of the regime itself.

This allows us to formulate a key conclusion: Putin’s war against Ukraine cannot be adequately explained only by the desire for territorial expansion. Territories are important, imperial ideology is important, geopolitical ambitions are important. But all of this must be placed in a broader construct. A personalist regime, increasingly dependent on the constructed image of irreplaceable power, is looking for ways to continue its legitimization and neutralize domestic alternatives.

Ukraine in this construct has become both a foreign policy object and a domestic political challenge. Therefore, for the Kremlin, the war against Ukraine has become not only a war for Ukraine. In a much deeper sense, it is a war for the political model of Russia itself – for the right of the Putin system to monopolize the decision of what Russia is, who its enemy is, what its future should be, and who has the right to rule it.

That is why the Ukrainian resistance is so dangerous for this system. If Ukraine proves that the imperial dictate can be stopped and society can choose a different political path, it will not only destroy Russia’s foreign policy plans. It will undermine the very political mythology on which Putin’s legitimacy rests.

This leads to the ultimate paradox of Putin’s rule: the regime started a war that was supposed to demonstrate its strength, but as a result of the war itself, it became even more dependent on repression, propaganda, mobilization, and the constant existence of the enemy.

In other words, the war that was supposed to strengthen the system gradually became a condition for its existence. And that is why its completion is not just a military-diplomatic issue for the Putin regime. It is a question of political legitimacy.

Therefore, the large-scale confrontation goes far beyond the purely Russian-Ukrainian conflict. It also takes place within the Russian political system itself – between the state as a public institution and the ruling elite that has monopolized the governance of the country. As long as these concepts remain fused, Putin can speak on behalf of Russia.

But the political essence of the Ukrainian resistance lies, among other things, in the fact that it denies this very right. The right of one ruler to determine the fate of an entire state, the right of an imperial center to determine the future of another nation, and the right of the political elite to substitute their own survival for national interest.

In this sense, Ukraine’s struggle against Russian aggression is simultaneously a struggle against a political system in which the Russian state was gradually subordinated to the regime, the regime to a personal leader, and society was asked to accept this substitution as the natural order of things.

That is why the Russian-Ukrainian war should be viewed not only as the aggression of one state against another, but as a manifestation of a deep internal crisis of the personalist Russian system. The war became a way to export to the outside the problem that Putin’s regime could not or did not want to solve internally: the problem of its own historical, political, and moral legitimacy.

And this is the main tragedy of modern Russia: the state, which should exist for the security of its citizens, has been put at the service of preserving the political system, and the system at the service of the power of one ruler.

And when this happens, war ceases to be a deviation from the usual life of the state. It becomes a way of its functioning, and peace begins to be perceived as a threat to its very existence.