(From the series “Lessons of Unpredictable Wars”)

Part 1

The War of the Dragon

The 12-day war between Israel and Iran was conceived and started as a hybrid war in the form of a special operation by Israel and the United States to destroy Iran’s nuclear program and military and political leadership, and the main result of the war was to be the overthrow of the anti-Israeli and anti-Western regime in Teheran. This war was stopped as soon as it became clear that the goals could not be achieved. Israel was not ready to wage a short but intense modern war, and Israel’s losses were becoming unacceptable. The United States was unable to provide the necessary support to Israel’s air defence to protect Israeli military facilities and cities from Iranian missile attacks.

A truce was concluded, and each side declared its “relative victory.” At the same time, preparations began for a new stage of the war with the same goals, but with an expansion of tasks. At the new stage, the war will inevitably be for control over the Middle East macro-region, where Israel and Iran, as well as Turkey, claim the role of the leader and the dominant civilization.

Many leaders in the West are confident that the war in Ukraine can also be stopped, and all sides will have a chance to present its end as their “relative victory.” This is the version of ending the war that Donald Trump is trying to achieve.

Vladimir Putin played four hands with Trump, but for Putin the end of the war was possible only through achieving the goals declared in 2022. Putin played along with Trump because, on the one hand, he understood that the war was making the rift between Russia and Ukraine, their peoples, deeper and more irreconcilable, and was creating huge problems for the future, and on the other hand, he hoped that in the current situation, a temporary truce would unleash a struggle for power, conflicts within Ukraine, and give rise to a modern version of Makhnovshchina (“Makhno movement”, a mass movement of socialist revolutionaries and Ukrainian nationalists during the civil war in 1918-1920, whose goal was to create a separate Ukrainian state, that escalated into civil strife and guerrilla warfare, and resulted in disappointment and losing the will of the Ukrainians to fight  – VM). That would allow Russia to achieve its goals without military action.

But in early July 2025, the chess game was interrupted, the board was overturned, and the chess pieces got mixed up.

Zelensky tried to seize files and records of compromising information on him and his inner circle, to gain full control over National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) that was created by the West in Ukraine in 2015, that was financed by the US, controlled by Europeans and the CIA, and was conducting independent anti-corruption investigations, providing the collected evidence to Western embassies and intelligence agencies, but not to Zelensky. And the war entered a stage with results very difficult to predict.

What is happening in Ukraine now has some similarities with what happened in Moscow before Putin decided to invade Ukraine.

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The Kremlin has long understood that the invasion of Ukraine and the direct participation of Russian troops in a conflict that for many years was internal Ukrainian conflict, although it affected Russia and its people, was a strategic mistake.

The division of Ukraine in 2014, and the internal conflicts were the result not so much of the intrigues and subversive actions of the West, as it was perceived in Moscow, but of contradictions within Ukrainian society and political elites, and of the general crisis in the post-Soviet space generated by the common problems of Russia, Ukraine and all other states of the former USSR.

Without resolving internal contradictions and problems in Ukraine, division and conflicts could not be avoided. The West only used in its geostrategic interests those contradictions and inability of the ruling elites in the post-Soviet space to resolve the systemic problems in their states caused by the collapse of the USSR.

The Kremlin has long understood that the decision to send troops was the result of the failure of Russia’s foreign policy, both in the Western and Ukrainian directions, intelligence miscalculations and counterintelligence ineffectiveness, the deliberate betrayal of Moscow by the Ukrainian clans that presented themselves as “pro-Russian” and “pro-Putin”, who for years pumped billions of dollars out of Moscow, promising a pro-Russian turn in Kiev, and brought Putin to believe that the moving Russian troops into Ukraine would be the necessary click, the launch of an anti-Western coup.

The invasion made Putin and Russia an aggressor in the eyes of the peoples of the world. This is what put Russia in opposition to the entire West. Russia was left alone for the first time in history, as Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov noted. “For the first time in history, Russia is fighting alone against the entire West,” Lavrov said, speaking at the Territory of Meanings forum.

In the First and Second World Wars, Russia responded to the enemy’s aggression, and it had allies. Now, Russia has no allies on the battlefield, and, as Lavrov said, Russia is forced to rely only on itself.

This was the main task that those “pro-Russian” clans were solving, and their representatives in Kyiv, by the way, did not hide this since 2016. It is still difficult for me to understand how Moscow and the Russian embassy in Kyiv could not hear these signals, these statements, openly articulated then in Kyiv.

The Kremlin’s decision to send in troops was due to misunderstanding of the processes taking place in the post-Soviet space, to systemic corruption, inefficiency and pro-Western sentiments of the elites, including the generals of the Russian Ministry of Defence, who at the time of the start by Putin of the special military operation were considered by NATO leadership to be “the most reliable partner in the ruling clan of Russia.” With these generals, Putin started a war with Ukraine and the West!

The war clearly showed that the state system created in Russia by Gorbachev’s perestroika and the post-Soviet regimes, could not allow Russia to successfully develop and even exist. Part of the Russian elite came to the realization of this before the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

This understanding led to a conspiracy by that part of the Russian elites who decided that only war and a political crisis, only direct threats to Putin would force him to end the humiliation of the army, the armed forces, their subordination to corrupt clans, non-professionals and corrupt officials, whose main advantage was their inability to threaten the power in the Kremlin and their loyalty, mostly false and ostentatious, personally to Putin and his closest circle.

Those who pushed Putin to start the war well understood that Kyiv and the West were luring Russia into a war in Ukraine. Nevertheless, they supported the decision on a special operation (or allowed it to be made) so that the war would reveal all the flaws of the system and force Putin to change the regime, the system of government, to begin reforming and accelerating the development of the economy, especially the military-industrial complex, including the use of the most advanced technologies, to return authority and respect to the army and the armed forces, and to return the officers to their traditional status as the highest class in the state.

Thus, the introduction of Russian troops into Ukraine and the start of the war was the result of internal systemic problems and contradictions in Russia, and not just the machinations of anti-Russian and anti-Putin forces in the West and nationalist forces in Ukraine.

The system based on clannishness and corruption generates and stimulates problems in politics and economics that threaten Russia.

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The regimes in Russia that existed throughout the post-Soviet period proved incapable of becoming attractive to the elites and peoples of other post-Soviet states. This was inevitable, because in the period from 1988 to 2025, the systems of public administration, economy, business, banking and finances that were created in Russia, as in most other states in the post-Soviet space,  reproduced the most outdated Western forms, often obsolete, rejected in the course of development by corporations, state and public structures and organizations not only in the USA and Europe, but also by advanced states in other regions of the world.

These obsolete forms still exist in the West to this day and even control important spheres of economic and political life, but they survived till now mostly because of the collapse of the USSR and the socialist camp. It was precisely due to their resources and markets opened up to the West that obsolete forms were able to prolong their life.

In the countries of the former USSR, including Russia, the West was perceived and continues to be perceived as a single socio-economic system, the world of capitalism and the free market, without understanding its multi-layeredness and fragmentation, the complexity of the system of Western democracy.

This perception was formed decades ago on the basis of simplified, mummified Marxism, into which ideology turned in the USSR under Stalin, who understood the problem and rightly said: “We need ideology. Without ideology, we are dead.”

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In the countries of the former USSR, after its collapse, the economic planning system was eliminated, but in the leading and most successful manufacturing corporations of the USA and Europe, including transnational corporations, the planning system borrowed from the USSR, but adapted to the tasks of joint-stock business, especially public companies, was introduced back in the 1950s.

Moreover, in the 1960-s, the corporate business planning system was refined in Japan, where it was brought by American corporations in the postwar years, and this corporate management and planning system played a special role in the “Japanese economic miracle” of the 1960-1970s. The Japanese planning system was adopted and modernized by American corporations in the 1980s.

And in the USSR, the planning system, the most advanced in the world, by that time had already experienced degradation from Khrushchev’s stupidity and ignorance of post-Stalin leaders in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and in the late 1970s from bureaucratic stagnation and criminalization, the corruption of the state and party bureaucracy.

In the late 1980s, the Soviet system of economic planning began to be deliberately destroyed by the criminal clans coming to power. In the early 1990s, it was destroyed, and the tragedy caused by stupidity, immorality and greed, the desire to privatize and plunder everything, has not been recognized and acknowledged either in Russia or in the world to this day.

Moreover, the system of managing modern business, including leading corporations of the USA and Europe, their interactions in the financial sphere, remain beyond the understanding by the Russian ruling elites. Their ignorance, as well as the ignorance of their advisers, analysts and political scientists who serve them, is simply astounding.

The Western financial system in the early 1970s was divided into three systems. One was based on gold reserves, another was backed by industrial production, real goods and resources, as well as social capital, and the third was created and developed as a fiat system that provided the population, states and economies of the world with loans, digital currencies, primarily dollars, backed by nothing but trust in the United States, its financial system and faith in the power of the Western economy.

Simultaneously with this process, in 1957, under Khrushchev, the degradation of the financial system in the USSR, independent from the West, began. By end of the 1980s, the Soviet financial system was subordinated and integrated into the Western financial system. The financial systems of post-Soviet Russia, Ukraine and other countries of the former USSR were created as offshoots of the Western fiat system. And the Russian banking system remains a part of this system to this day, despite the war with the West.

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Putin’s problem is not that he doesn’t want to “make Russia great again,” but that he and his entourage don’t know how to do it. They don’t understand what Trump, Vance, Rubio, Musk, Thiel, and others are doing, that they have realized what could happen to the United States if China, India, and perhaps a future post-Putin Russia, were to gain an economic, financial, and technological lead.

Moscow does not understand why Trump is imposing tariffs, why these tariffs protect the interests and increase profits of American transnational corporations, including in those countries against which Trump has imposed new tariffs. And they do not understand how Trump’s new tariffs strengthen the position of transnational corporations registered in the United States.

Moscow does not understand why Trump is passing laws on cryptocurrencies, why he is trying to fire Fed Chairman Powell for refusing to lower the Fed rate from 4% to 1%, when the Bank of Russia rate is 20%. Moscow does not understand that Powell is protecting part of the US and global financial system, namely that part of the system that has an offshoot in Russia and other countries of the former USSR and which forces the countries of the former USSR to live in an outdated banking system, to export goods, raw materials, energy resources for fiat money, and to withdraw gold, energy resources and money from Russia into dollars and finance a long-obsolete part of the global financial and banking system that Trump, his team and transnational corporations want to bring under their control. Those whom Trump represents are now actively creating their new transnational currency and investment world.

The ruling elites in Russia do not understand what is happening in the world, and therefore Russia still cannot offer an idea, a concept for its own development that would be attractive to other peoples and states.

And who will follow Putin and Russia in the absence of idea?! Why should Russians be offended by Ukrainians, Azerbaijanis, Uzbeks and Kazakhs, Armenians and Balts, who are looking for options for their development that are different from modern Russia? This is a misfortune, but not only for Russians, but for all the peoples of the former USSR.

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However, it should be noted that during the war, especially after the “Prigozhin mutiny”, Russia entered its own path of development. This is the path through resistance to growing external and especially internal threats, and in that resistance, in the struggle for its interests as a civilization, by trial and error, a more effective state system is being formed, and, what is especially important, a new social system.

In the conditions of ignorance predominating in the upper echelons of power, in the conditions of the absence of its own idea of development, the ruling group in the Kremlin is forced to form a policy by learning from its own mistakes. A smart person, of course, learns from the mistakes of others, but learning from your own is better than not learning at all.

Since the mid-1990s, a new law for the elites was formulated in the Kremlin: “Do what you want, but don’t create problems for the Kremlin.” This principle has been applied especially strictly since 2000, after Vladimir Putin came to power.

However, dialectic says that this principle can be read and applied differently: “One can control the Kremlin by creating problems for the Kremlin.” It is in accordance with this principle that Russia is now undergoing a transformation: the war creates problems for Putin and the ruling group, and that is how the war forces them to reform the country, making it more efficient and stronger.

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Due to the war and the tough technological, financial and economic confrontation with the West, by mid-2025 the situation in Russia has changed significantly.

The system of public administration in many areas remains backward and ineffective, it is especially ineffective in the parliamentary, financial and banking spheres, in energy, housing and communal services, post-Soviet education, in the information sphere, in the system of domestic political administration, including regional and local self-government, in some areas of diplomatic work (it is enough to recall the failures in Ukraine, Syria and Transcaucasia, Europe as a whole, the growing problems in Central Asia).

However, the processes of reforming the system of public administration, the economy, and above all the military-industrial complex, are gradually but steadily accelerating under the pressure of military necessity and Western sanctions.

Success in modern warfare depends on the ability to generate new ideas, to identify and develop the best ideas, to concentrate financial, scientific, technical, production and human resources, to accelerate serial production and increase the production of necessary weapons and equipment, to modernize, change and develop logistics, communication and interaction systems. All this is impossible without planning, concentration of management and strict control over the results.

Russia has shown that despite the loss of a significant part of the Soviet experience and heritage, unlike Ukraine and other countries of the former USSR, it has retained the ability to quickly concentrate resources, including human, intellectual, financial and technical, and to increase the efficiency of management. Statehood has remained a main feature and characteristic of Russian civilization.

This can be seen in the example of the production of modern types of weapons, for example, the use and development of additive technologies using 3D printers by the Russian military-industrial complex, including in the production of drones, that has not existed in Russia when the war in Ukraine began. Now Russia is becoming a world leader, which will allow Russia to become one of the main exporters of combat drones in the world after the end of the war in Ukraine.

In the conditions of war, the clan system of governance, which is based on corruption as a systemic factor, has become a channel through which corrupt clans are drained and inefficient elites are replaced.

The Kremlin is forced to view those clans, groups, officials and organizations that block, interfere with their corruption and inefficiency, as an integral part of the enemy force and perceive them in war conditions as a threat that must be destroyed. Clans are forced to subordinate their interests to the state, under the threat of falling into open conflict and confrontation with the security forces.

The process of elite change is growing. The most important is the process of creating new forms of economic and socio-political life from “the ground”, the Russian local communities. At the lower level of the social system, networks of initiators of new ideas and movements, volunteers, public organizations, entrepreneurs arise, and they develop the “people’s military-industrial complex”, as well as independent sphere of bloggers, telegram channels, video and information actors.

These new forms of business, social, information and political activity are developing and expanding, turning into a significant public force at the local and regional levels, out of direct control by Moscow. This force is capable of radically changing the political situation in Russia and can complicate the process of transferring state power from Putin to a new ruler.

At the same time, the war makes reforms and modernization too costly and expensive. The threat of drone attacks periodically blocks the work of some important Russian airports, hacker attacks disrupt the work of airlines, losses from sanctions exceed hundreds of billions of dollars annually, and losses from sabotage in the financial sector exceed the losses of all other sectors of the economy combined.

The prolongation of the war intensifies the struggle of clans, increases the threat of political conspiracies and political instability. And all this is happening in the context of rapid and uncontrolled militarization of the consciousness of a significant part of the population, which requires the introduction of the death penalty for criminals and traitors and more severe measures, including military, against countries supporting Ukraine. That brings closer the moment when a direct military conflict between Russia and the West will become inevitable.

Therefore, the Kremlin is interested in ending the war as quickly as possible, and what is happening now in Ukraine gives Moscow a chance to end the war with the least losses, because the fate of the war might be decided in Ukraine without the direct participation of the Kremlin.

(To be continued in the second part of the article – “Enter the War Dragon”)