What has changed for Putin and Russia?

After one year into his third term as President of Russia, Vladimir Putin remains outwardly in command, but the quality of his rule is different from what it used to be: he has lost the support of urbanite intellectuals; the constituency for protests has remained sizeable; there is nervousness among the elites and the country’s economic outlook is far from cloudless.

ECFR has invited two top experts on Russia’s domestic and foreign policy to discuss the internal dynamics and contradictions of the regime and their implications on Russia’s actions and interests in the international arena.

Thomas Graham is Managing Director of Kissinger Associates and former Senior Director for Russia on the U.S. National Security Council staff. From 2001 to 2002, he served as the Associate Director of the Policy Planning Staff of the Department of State. 

Andrei Soldatov is an Investigative Journalist and an Editor of Agentura.ru, an information hub on intelligence agencies. Together with Irina Borogan, he has published a book entitled The New Nobility: The Restoration of Russia’s Security State and the Enduring Legacy of the KGB (Public Affairs, 2010).

Kadri Liik is a Senior Policy Fellow and head of ECFR’s Wider Europe programme. Kadri was director of the International Centre for Defence Studies in Estonia, where she also worked as director of the Centre’s Lennart Meri Conference. Previously, Kadri worked as a Moscow correspondent for several Estonian daily papers.