The rising oil prices that have followed the war in the Middle East may have given Vladimir Putin cause for short-term satisfaction. The cash will help to refill his war chest for Ukraine.
But the current conflict involving Iran may also stir his deepest fears for the longer term, after Israel reportedly accessed Iranian traffic cameras to spy on its targets.
The President appears to have blocked mobile internet for days at a time across major cities, apparently concerned would-be assassins or drones might use Russian networks and CCTV to assist a strike.
Even Moscow — once a super tech savvy capital (just think how many hackers Russia has produced) — has been subject to internet outages.
Russian authorities have also placed restrictions on services such as Telegram and WhatsApp, despite their use by its soldiers on the front line.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the move was “partly related to the fact that a number of foreign companies refuse to comply with the norms of Russian legislation, and partly due to security measures against the threat of Ukrainian drones”.
Putin, always fearful over his safety, has become so paranoid he has been cancelling in-person appointments and public appearances, including one for the 12th anniversary of Russia’s annexation of Crimea last week. He has instead been taking secret meetings while holed up in the Kremlin, where enhanced security measures have been put in place.
Putin has been at the summit of Russian power for 26 years. He was first elected president on 26 March, 2000. Yet even in the early years of his first term — an era when major confrontation with the West of the kind we are living through now was never foreseen — regime change started to emerge as his deepest fear.
Armed officers from the Russian Federal Security Service patrol the bridge over the Moskva River opposite the Kremlin in Moscow in a Tiger armoured vehicle (Photo: Getty Images)Seen from the Kremlin, many major world events of the century so far have had a deeply unsettling side — especially those in which the United States and its western allies have had a hand.
The decapitation of the Iranian regime is just the latest in a line of changes forced by revolution or war which have seen Putin lose allies.
We have to go back as far as the removal of Saddam Hussein in 2003 to understand Putin’s perspective. While Putin may have shed few tears over the Iraqi dictator’s downfall, the way the US, the UK and others went ahead with the invasion was seen as a threat for another reason.
The Kremlin had been counting on the regime’s survival so it would repay debts it owed to Russia. It was bad enough that the West was ignoring Russian interests; what was worse is that, at least as a Russian official claimed at the time, Russian intelligence knew Saddam did not have weapons of mass destruction. They assumed western agencies knew the same. The conclusion in the corridors behind the red brick walls of the Kremlin was that the West had really gone to war for another reason: regime change.
These suspicions only grew as the so-called colour revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine followed soon after. In each case, leaders of parts of the former Soviet Union left power to be replaced by western-looking successors.
Putin could never accept that these changes might be the will of many people in Georgia and Ukraine. In his view, they were a consequence of the West’s desire to replace Russia-friendly leaders.
When, in late 2011, demonstrators took to the streets of Moscow to protest against suspected fraud in parliamentary elections, and at Putin’s plan to return to the presidency despite having served the two terms then permitted by the constitution, Putin was absolutely clear who was to blame: Hillary Clinton.
“She set the tone for some actors in our country and gave them a signal,” Putin said of the US secretary of state. “They heard the signal and with the support of the US State Department began active work.”
His fears had been heightened by the death just weeks before of the Libyan dictator, Muammar Gaddafi.
In his 2023 book. War and Punishment, the Russian journalist Mikhail Zygar wrote of Putin that “the footage of Gaddafi’s death leaves a lasting impression on him. He becomes even more convinced that he must defend his power, or else the same fate beckons.”
The US and Israel’s assassination of Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei will have made that impression even worse — so the internet restrictions make sense. The fears are not baseless. In June 2025, Ukraine’s “Operation Spiderweb” launched drone attacks at airbases deep inside Russia, probably using a satellite or the internet.
In a sense, Russia has been preparing for this for a long time. In 2019, the Russian parliament, the duma, passed legislation authorising stricter control over the internet.
But, as the Russian news outlet The Bell reported last week, the current outages are making even the simplest everyday transactions tricky. This will remind Muscovites that the war is not as far away as they might like to believe.
Putin does not face any immediate internal political threat. Russia’s liberal opposition is, for now, a spent force. Hardline nationalists are kept in check.
But as Russia enjoys an unexpected bonus from a loosening of some restrictions on oil exports, Putin may be tormented by revolutionary scenes of ropes tightening around monuments to leaders whose grip on power, having seemed certain for so long, finally failed.
What Putin’s Kremlin craves most in global affairs is control, and certainty. Today both are in increasingly short supply.
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