What’s Putin’s Secret Post-Election Strategy To Test NATO?
LNG Toward Europe Simon Watkins is a former senior FX trader and salesman, financial journalist, and best-selling author.
He was Head of Forex Institutional Sales and Trading for… 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 1,675thday 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.
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