How old will you be when Vladimir Putin’s next presidential term ends in 2030? Which of today’s world leaders will still be in office? By that time Putin will have been in power for 29 years, and just under half the population of the Earth at that time will have been born during his reign. On current form, Putin is set to see in at least two more US presidents – or more, if he chooses to stay in power until 2036.

Putin has made a fetish of defending a Russian national sovereignty that no one had attempted to destroy

When Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine in 2022 many dared to hope that defeat on the battlefield would force Russians to finally accept that they are no longer a great global superpower and confront their imperialist assumptions. Two years in, and neither the Russian military nor its economy shows any sign of imminent collapse. On the contrary, Putin appears confident, cheerful and even cocky. The depressing reality, as Russia prepares for an election next week that will certainly see him returned for a new six-year-term, is that Putin is not going anywhere. Neither is the Russia that he created.

And yet, as he prepares for his fifth term, the truth is that Putin is a hollow tsar. He invaded Ukraine to assert Russia’s greatness in its backyard as well as on the international stage. Instead, the war showed that Putin’s much-vaunted army is incapable of defeating a far smaller Ukrainian force. Instead of halting Nato expansion, he has massively extended it to formerly neutral Sweden and Finland. The invasion has erased key sectors of the Russian economy (notably gas exports and automotives), brought foreign investment to an abrupt halt and made Russia an economic vassal of China.

The war has forced up to a million of the country’s best educated and brightest into exile and broken the Kremlin’s implicit contract with Russia’s elites that they would be able to enrich themselves and enjoy their earnings unhindered in exchange for political submission.