Dispatch from Moscow: The Collapse Narrative Keeps Missing the Real Russia

I am back in Moscow for the first time in ten months, and the first thing that strikes you is the distance between the city in front of you and the city as it is described five thousand miles away. Moscow and St. Petersburg are thriving, modern, and — this is the word I keep reaching for — vibrant. The streets are clean and safe. They are not lined with the homeless or the begging. In two weeks I saw exactly one man asking for money, on a stoop in St. Petersburg, and he stood out precisely because he was such a rarity. Set that against New York, Philadelphia, Washington, Atlanta — name any major American city — and the contrast is not marginal. It is an order of magnitude.

I start with the streets because they are the simplest test of the claim the West has been pushing for three years: i.e., that Russia is an economy on the edge, its people pulling their cash out, its cities sliding toward crisis. That story does not survive contact with the pavement.

Vladimir Putin is not paying me to post a sunny story. I am reporting what I see and what I hear from ordinary Russians going about their lives — and what I see is an economy that, sanctions and all, is doing better than the Western economies it is measured against. The shelves are full. The restaurants are full. People are working, spending, building. There is none of the visible distress the West insists is just around the corner. Ask the people who actually live here and you will not find a nation bracing for collapse. You will find one that has absorbed everything the West could throw at it and kept moving.

That is the part the Western press cannot bring itself to say. For three years it has forecast a Russian financial crisis that never arrives, and the reason it never arrives is visible from any café window on Nevsky Prospekt in St. Petersburg or Tverskaya Street in Moscow. There is no bank run here, no ruble in freefall. The sanctions were supposed to break this country. They did not. Compare the mood on these streets to the anxiety in London or the decay in America’s great cities, and the question is not whether Russia is surviving the sanctions. The question is why the West ever assumed it would not.

Dinner with Lavrov

A week ago Monday I had dinner with Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov. I was in the company of John Mearsheimer, Judge Andrew Napolitano, and Alastair Crooke. The dinner was informal and genuinely candid, and Lavrov answered questions directly — and anyone who has sat with Mearsheimer knows he does not ask soft ones.

I came away with two clear impressions.

The first is that Russia’s negotiating position toward the West has not moved an inch since Putin addressed his foreign ministry on June 14, 2024. In that speech he made the terms explicit, and they are the terms still on the table: the West must recognize Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhia, and Kherson, along with Crimea, as permanent Russian territory. These former Ukrainian oblasts are not going back. In Moscow that is treated not as an opening bid but as a settled fact. Beyond it, Russia is building buffer zones through its advances in Sumy, Kharkiv, and Dnipropetrovsk. Those territories could, in time, be incorporated as well — though officials frame that as something that would follow a vote or plebiscite rather than a foregone conclusion. It is not formally on the menu. But it is, in my read, very much in the cards.

The second impression is that the space for a negotiated settlement is extremely narrow — narrower than Western capitals want to admit — because Russia is simply not willing to make the concessions the West requires, and does not believe it has to. My own assessment, after listening to how officials here talk, is that the war effort will not stop until Odessa and Kyiv are firmly under Russian control. I hold that as a judgment, not a certainty. But nothing I heard this week moved me off it.

What “root causes” actually means

Putin talks constantly about the “root causes” of the conflict having to be addressed, and Americans are rarely told what the phrase means. So I asked directly, in a conversation in Moscow with Alexander Babakov, a Duma member and a senior figure in the International Unity Club.

The simplest way to translate it for my fellow citizens is this: the American project of pulling Ukraine into NATO’s orbit and using it as a battering ram against Russia has to end. Not be paused — ended. There will be no more tolerance of NATO activity in Ukraine, and Ukraine’s foreign and military policy has to be severed from that Western embrace for good. From Moscow’s chair, that is the non-negotiable core, and everything else is detail.

It helps to remember how old this really is. Ukraine joined NATO’s Partnership for Peace in 1994, and from that point the Western military relationship with Kyiv grew steadily, whatever the absence of a formal membership card. The Yavoriv military base in western Ukraine became a recurring venue for Western exercises through the 1990s and, from 2015, hosted a standing US-led training mission. Over the years Ukraine became one of the most frequent hosts of NATO exercises of any country outside the alliance — drills whose scenarios never named Russia as the adversary but left no doubt, from their structure, who the target was. By Trump’s first term these were running to several a year, some with a submarine component that had nothing to do with chasing pirates. Through all of it, Moscow’s read is that Putin showed a patience the West mistook for weakness.

You do not have to accept every element of that account to grasp its force. This is the realist reading of the war — the one Mearsheimer has argued about as well as it can be argued — and it is the frame through which the men I dined with see the entire conflict. It is contested in Washington, obviously. But you cannot understand why the Russian position is so immovable unless you understand that in Moscow it is not seen as aggression at all, but as the closing of a wound the West spent thirty years opening.

The view from here

The war is not what occupies the average Russian. It is still, in daily life, a “special military operation,” and the streets of the two great cities carry on as if it were happening on another continent — which, from Moscow, it nearly is. That gap between the fixed, maximalist position of the state and the near-normalcy of civilian life is itself the story: a country settled enough at home to wait, and convinced enough of its terms not to bend.

What the officers told me

I spoke this week with three Russian military men, retired and serving — Colonel Eduard Basurin, retired; General Evgeny Buzhinsky, retired; and, on active duty, Lieutenant General Apti Alaudinov, the commander of the Akhmat special forces. Different men, different vantage points, and one message held across all of them: Russia is not going to attack Europe. It has no military designs on Europe, none, and no intention of starting that fight.

What Russia does see, they told me, is a Europe preparing to attack it — and not merely in the rhetoric coming out of the mouths of leaders like Germany’s Chancellor Merz and the British prime minister, though Moscow takes that rhetoric seriously enough. It is the concrete steps behind the words: the weapons systems, the missiles specifically, being built to be used against Russian territory. The officers were blunt about where that leads. If those activities continue, Russia will have no alternative but to deal with the threat, and the prospect of a war with Europe becomes real. That is not an imaginary danger conjured to frighten anyone. It is how these professionals read the trajectory. Russia is not looking for the fight. But it is neither deaf nor blind to what is being prepared against it.

They also confirmed something I had already sensed on my own: Russia has entered a decisive new phase in the war with Ukraine, a deliberate push to bring it to a faster end than anyone previously anticipated. For the first four years, Russia fought to hold down its own casualties. That is why it did not throw mass formations against fixed positions, where the losses would have been severe, but relied instead on small-unit tactics. That restraint is over. The new phase closes Ukraine’s Black Sea coast to trade in both directions, subjects logistics hubs in Kyiv and other cities — western Ukraine especially — to sustained targeting, and steps up ground advances all along the line of contact. This is a considered shift by the Russian general staff, and it is already paying off: the moves to encircle Sloviansk and Kramatorsk, and key gains in Zaporizhzhia. My own read is that by the end of November, Donetsk will once again be wholly under Russian control, and Zaporizhzhia — a major industrial city and regional capital on the Dnipro — will be under direct threat of occupation.

A vibrant democracy on its own terms

The Russian people go to the polls this Sunday, and I will be there to observe it. There are at least five parties are contesting seats in the Duma. Russia is not the monolith it is made out to be. It is, despite the Western caricature, a vibrant democracy — one built according to Russian culture and Russian ideals rather than a copy of anyone else’s, and it is long past time the West set aside its prejudice and took Russia as it actually is. This is not a regime run by international communists, whatever the popular meme of the 1960s and 1970s held. It is now, deservedly, the fourth-largest economy in the world by purchasing power parity, innovative in its technology and richly endowed with resources.

That is my update for now. I will be back with further insights as my journey continues.

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