Putin Is Losing, and Everybody Around Him Knows It
Inside the collapse
Happy Mother’s Day to every mom and mother figure reading this—and a special thank you to my wife who is an incredible mother, my mom, and the mother figures in my life.
I’ve been investigating Trump and Putin for more than a decade. The week after the 2016 election, I was on Capitol Hill hand-delivering my report on Trump’s Russian business ties to anyone who would take it. If I couldn’t get a meeting—I waited outside their offices and refused to leave until someone took a copy of the report.
Members of Congress learned that week that Trump had done tens of millions of dollars in business with Russians over the decades. I delivered it to the Obama White House too.
For years, I was threatened over that work—there was even a stretch where I had to go into hiding. The Russian Embassy targeted me on social media the year after that. They don’t come after you that hard when you’re wrong.
A decade later, and Putin’s inner circle is fracturing. His own pollsters are hiding the numbers. And Ukraine is taking ground for the first time in two years.
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PUTIN’S CIRCLE TURNS
Ilya Remeslo spent nearly a decade doing some of the Kremlin’s dirtiest work—including helping send opposition leader Alexei Navalny to a remote Arctic prison where he was killed. In March, Remeslo posted publicly that Putin should resign and face justice as “a war criminal and a thief.”
Within days, Russian authorities had him committed to a psychiatric hospital—then released him a month later. Remeslo said what finally broke him was watching Putin disappear into a bunker during a 2023 mutiny inside Russia, and leave everyone else to manage the crisis. “I understood that this is not the president I voted for,” he said.
In his first international interview this week, he vowed to keep fighting: “They snicker at Putin and say he is very primitive and that he is doing everything to lead the country into an abyss.”
He’s not alone. On April 22nd, Deputy Minister Denis Butsayev was dismissed and fled to the United States. It’s the first known case of a sitting deputy-minister level official to defect from Russia.
Mikhail Khodorkovsky—once Russia’s richest man—is now a leading opposition voice in London after Putin imprisoned him for a decade. He laid out the power struggle plainly: “The presidential administration is trying to somehow let Putin know the lid could blow off the can.”
“Putin will be toppled at some moment by his own circle when he stops being convenient for them,” Remeslo said.
THE NUMBERS THEY ARE HIDING
Elvira Nabiullina is the head of Russia’s Central Bank—the person Putin put in charge of the country’s money. This week she admitted: “Never before in the history of modern Russia have we experienced such a labor shortage. We’ve never had anything like this.” Russia’s economy shrank in the first two months of 2026—the first contraction in three years.
Independent polling shows that when Russians are asked which politicians they actually trust—without giving a list—only 29.5% name Putin. That’s down from nearly 49% two years ago. His official approval rating sits at 65.5%—the lowest since before the invasion of Ukraine. In a country where you can get arrested for merely criticizing Putin, that number measures fear as much as support.
The Kremlin’s own polling agency, which releases Putin’s numbers every Friday like clockwork, went silent. No data on May 1st or the next business day. Meduza, Russia’s leading independent news outlet, reported that journalists close to the Kremlin were told to simply stop reporting Putin’s approval numbers altogether.
When you can’t publish your own government’s poll numbers, you’re losing.
UKRAINE TAKES BACK GROUND
Ukrainian flags are going back up over villages that Russian forces have held for years, as families who initially fled are finally able to return home. In April, for the first time since August 2024, Russia lost more ground than it gained. The pace of Russia’s advance has collapsed as well, declining every month since November.
Meanwhile, Ukraine is hitting Russia hard—deep strikes into Russian territory doubled in April compared to March, and quadrupled compared to February. British and French cruise missiles destroyed one of Russia’s largest military microelectronics factories. And a major oil refinery near St. Petersburg burned.
Putin’s army is no longer winning the war he was certain he could finish in three days.
A PARADE WITHOUT TANKS
Russia is running out of missiles. Last month, a Russian air defense commander posted a desperate plea on Telegram—his unit could see Ukrainian drones overhead. They had the equipment to shoot them down. But they had nothing left to fire.
That meant Putin couldn’t defend his Victory Day parade from drones. So in late April, Putin and Trump spoke. Putin floated a ceasefire to protect his parade. Weeks later, Trump announced it publicly and bragged he had “suggested a little bit of a ceasefire.”
But Trump didn’t make the deal. Zelensky did. Zelensky said yes to a ceasefire—on one condition: a prisoner swap. Russia would free 1,000 Ukrainian prisoners of war. Ukraine would free 1,000 Russian ones. Russia agreed. “Red Square is less important to us than the lives of Ukrainian prisoners who can be brought home,” Zelensky said.
Yesterday’s parade was the smallest in nearly two decades. No tanks. No missiles. No military hardware at all. North Korean troops marched through Red Square for the first time—the only foreign troops Putin could find to fill the parade.
Last year, Putin stood with Xi Jinping, Brazil’s Lula, and dozens of other world leaders as nuclear missiles rolled through Red Square. This year, only a few foreign leaders showed up. Dozens of Russian cities canceled Victory Day altogether.
Putin is not winning. He is calling America for help. And the elites who hitched themselves to Trump are about to discover—if Putin falls, Trump will too.
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Onward!
Scott
What’s something you’ve seen change in the people around you—friends, family, neighbors—in how they talk about Trump and Putin? Let me know in the comments!
Who else can’t wait to see both Putin and Trump fall HARD?
Watching bullies get their just desserts is a joy.