Yevgeny Prigozhin was arguably a dead man walking since he agreed to the deal brokered by Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko to call off the Wagner march on Moscow in June. His presumed death in a plane crash about two months after that occurrence comes as little surprise. Now that Mr Prigozhin is out of the picture, can Russian president Vladimir Putin look forward with a renewed sense of internal stability?

No. 

Political science tries to develop generalisable models to describe the present and predict the future, so practitioners and decision-makers can plan, prepare and implement without catastrophic miscalculations that trigger cascading chains of unintended consequences. The US-based non-profit, non-governmental research and educational institution Fund for Peace’s (FFP) Fragile States Index (FSI) measures trends in social, economic, political and security pressures on countries that can lead to instability. And according to the FSI, the so-called “Great Powers” are perhaps less invulnerable than many may suppose — especially Russia.

In the calendar year 2022, Russia was the third-most worsened country on the index, after Ukraine and Sri Lanka. This insight, however, is of limited value for the purpose of forecasting. Just because a country worsened on the index in one year, it does not mean it is more likely to worsen the next. Instead, the opposite may be just as likely to occur, if not more so, as countries revert to the mean after a crisis.

Further complicating matters is the fact that each country is different and distinct. Due to history, context, and circumstance, every country is susceptible to some threats and sensitive to others. Susceptibility is obvious enough — a country located in the so-called ‘Ring of Fire’ or Circum-Pacific Belt, is more likely to experience an earthquake or volcanic eruption. But far more challenging to predict is how sensitive a country would be to different threats, should they occur. Here is where a country we imagine to be strong ends up showing itself to be weak. Or a country we presume to be weak is actually resilient. 

To better understand this dilemma, the FFP partnered with the SAS Institute, a software provider, to develop the Crisis Sensitivity Simulator (The CSS), which juxtaposes 18 years of FSI data against FFP’s new State Resilience Index (SRI), which measures countries’ social and institutional capacity, and then posits hypothetical shocks to anticipate how the country will perform under different scenarios. 

Looking through the lens of the CSS, the fundamentals suggest that Russia is now facing a perfect storm that could unfold over the next 12 months.

Based on Russia’s unique history over the past 18 years, the types of shocks that are most likely to trigger a wider crisis of instability are an economic shock (FSI Indicator E1) triggered by sanctions (Indicator X1), combined with a crackdown on political and civil liberties (Indicator P3) — all of which begin to undermine the legitimacy of the state (Indicator P1) and creates deepening fissures among the elites (C2).

These pressures have been rising over the past year. The final remaining piece is a breakdown of command and control in the security apparatus (Indicator C1). This happened in June, as the aggrieved former restaurateur and leader of the Wagner private military company Yevgeny Prigozhin, staged an unprecedented challenge against the Ministry of Defence led by Sergei Shoigu and, by extension, Mr Putin himself. 

In the chart above, the grey box plots show current conditions (as of January 2023). Underneath, the indicators that shift the farthest to the left compared to baseline are the most potentially destabilising. Every single one that the model shows as being potentially destabilising is now happening in real-time.

Nate Haken is the vice president for research and innovation at The Fund For Peace, a Washington DC-based non-profit. He leads the development of the Conflict Assessment System Tool for conflict early warning and prevention in weak and fragile states, and directs the research for the annual Fragile States Index.