Russia is faltering. Five signs of the internal weakening of Putin's empire

First, the governor of St. Petersburg Beglov, and then the leader of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin, announced a horror story for non-citizens - gender-neutral toilets. Beglov stated that Russian soldiers saw them in the conquered areas of Donbass, which is why they are fighting there.

The shocking truth is that in both Ukraine and Russia there really are gender-neutral toilets in schools - for teachers.

Otherwise, it is a crazy game that is being pushed into the air so that the population of the Russian Federation, coming out of the post-holiday hangover, has no time to think about the current situation.

And the situation is as follows.

A wave of failures in the public housing system in dozens of cities. It refreshed the topic of the real state of the industry (worn out, in some places on the verge of collapse). The authorities' attempt to shift the blame to the killers sparked petitions in their defense. Promises to invest in large-scale network renewal have been met with questions - is there money? And in such a situation, is it worth investing in "new territories" at the expense of the murdered "old ones"?

"Incident" with a unique long-range reconnaissance aircraft and a flying command post. Despite the Kremlin's attempts to blame the mistake on Russian air defenses, there are concerns in Russia that the Ukrainian army has again gained opportunities it did not have before. Which leads some of the dissidents to the conclusion: if the Ukrainians seriously pressed the fleet at sea, and now began to blow up aviation in the sky above the Sea of Azov, then in the future there will be a complication of the situation on the ground, too. First in Kherson region, then in Crimea...

The accident at the Lukoil Nizhny Novgorod refinery (which accounts for five percent of Russian oil processing). The company cut gasoline production in half. They promise to fix it by March. A wave of comments was immediately organized that gasoline prices will not rise, that there is room for internal maneuvering and that some exports will be closed. However, an avalanche of other assessments followed in parallel: the refinery became the first major victim of sanctions. In December, one of the installations burned down in the same plant, and it was only possible to restart it with less power. Here's a serious breakdown. In all business publications, one signal is that they will not succeed in replacing the equipment with a Chinese one, there is no option to repair it by hand. And the forecast is only the first swallow and it will get worse.

Mass protests in Bashkiria due to the trial of one of the local activists Fail Alsinov. Allegedly, in one of his speeches in the Bashkir language, he spoke negatively about the inhabitants of the Caucasus, Central Asia and Armenians. For which he received four years in prison, because he "incited enmity between nations" (Alsinov claims that his words were mistranslated). It turns out that storming an airport with a crowd to massacre Jews in Dagestan is a local incident with impunity, and protecting the nature of your native land and speaking your native language in Bashkiria is hostility. As a result, several thousand people (they put the number at 5,000) came to the court to protest, which ended in clashes with the police and detentions. The icing on the cake is that the members of "SVO" from Bashkiria expressed their support for Alsinov. And here it is interesting. According to information from the Information Resistance group, the publicly recorded losses of Bashkortostan during the attack on Ukraine are 30 percent higher than the losses of Tatarstan. With the same population. It is the result of the indomitable zeal of the local Führer Radi Habirov, who actively sends his compatriots to their deaths. After significant losses in Dagestan, dissatisfaction that was compounded by the frustration of the local population due to regular power outages, the Russian government radically reduced sending Dagestanis to the front. This is a bad example for other regions. And at the same time hint to people what they should do. The authorities are afraid of protests, because they will not have enough power to suppress them. That is, their resources for mobilization are not as unlimited as they make everyone believe.

The gradual strengthening of the rhetoric of the wives of mobilized Russian soldiers. Who publicly asks questions: convicts who have been sentenced to multi-year sentences for serious crimes are released after six months of service, and mobilized Russians are taken away for an indefinite period. Women's protests are the worst thing that can happen. For now, they are very local and do not pose a direct threat. The threat is the trend. The Kremlin will need the resources to shut it down.

Together.

This does not mean that the Russian Federation will collapse tomorrow or something like that. This is an indication that the tension within Russia is growing in various spheres. Disruptions and collapses will occur more often.

All together, it creates a poor backdrop for Putin's planned continuation of his mandate after the March elections. No good news. It won't affect the result, but the atmosphere will worsen.

That is why the Kremlin is so strongly promoting the narrative that Russia is terrifyingly strong and that Ukraine will fall apart tomorrow. They must keep this myth alive, or the fermentation will begin.