The New Yorker reports that Russia's Victory Day parade on May 9th will be stripped of its signature columns of tanks and missile launchers — too vulnerable to Ukrainian drones to risk. That is not a footnote. Every authoritarian state that has unraveled in the modern era did so preceded by exactly this kind of symbolic contraction: the regime that can no longer perform its own mythology.
Said Farida Rustamova, founder of the Russian politics newsletter Vlast: "The old rules are breaking down, and no one knows what the new ones are, or whether they exist at all." Meanwhile, DeepState's 2026 tracking shows Russia advancing at roughly half the rate it achieved in 2025 — and Ukraine has recaptured small patches of previously Russian-held territory.
The long pattern, from Louis XVI's court through the late Soviet period, is not a dramatic coup. It is a widening gap between the performance of control and its reality — until the two can no longer be reconciled.