Geopolitical thinker Robert Kaplan has argued that Russia is one of three great powers currently in decline - and the Ukraine war is accelerating the process. The longer the conflict continues, Kaplan said, "the weaker Russia becomes in the Caucasus, Central Asia, Siberia, and the Russian Far East."
As "Hvylya" reports, the assessment came during Kaplan's conversation with Ryan Murdock about his new book "Waste Land," which examines why the modern world is trapped in permanent crisis.
Kaplan placed Russia's decline alongside that of the United States and China, arguing that all three superpowers are weakening simultaneously. But Russia's trajectory is distinct: its institutional fragility makes it uniquely vulnerable. Unlike China, which has a standing committee capable of managing leadership transitions, Russia "has always been weakly institutionalized throughout its history." Even the czars had little real control over the hinterlands.
Putin, Kaplan said, governs not through institutions but through "concentric circles of oligarchs and crime figures and intelligence figures." He described Putin's invasion of Ukraine as "a great blunder" - one that is steadily draining Russia's capacity to project power across its vast periphery. As economist Oleh Ustenko has warned, however, expecting Russia's imminent collapse would be a dangerous mistake - the short-term picture is far more complex. Yet paradoxically, nobody can replace Putin, "perhaps because nobody wants his job."
When Putin eventually leaves the scene, Kaplan warned, the result could be a "low-calorie version of the former Yugoslavia" - a fragmentation driven not by separatist ambitions alone, but by the absence of any institutional framework capable of holding the country together.