Next Russia

This foresight report examines an emerging risk to Russia and its neighboring regions across Europe and Central Asia. It outlines plausible future scenarios, advances a case for the most likely trajectory, and introduces a continuous, real-time agentic AI capability designed to monitor how events unfold and assess implications for Russian regime stability and regional security.

We argue that Russia’s large-scale post-war veteran reintegration following the Ukraine conflict is likely to produce organized veteran networks that could reshape regime dynamics and amplify regional and international instability through proxy activity, illicit economies, and other forms of asymmetric influence.

Alternative scenarios include successful reintegration of veterans into civilian life and state security institutions, or a more fragmented outcome in which returnees disperse into everyday life or local criminal groups without forming sustained political influence. These outcomes are assessed as less likely given the scale of demobilization, the intensity and duration of combat experience, and Russia’s limited capacity to absorb and integrate such a large cohort of combat-experienced personnel.

Returning soldiers may pose security risks due to their expertise in organized violence and the socialization they acquire in military environments, which can increase susceptibility to radicalization and mobilization into social movements or insurgent organizations. Since 2022, Russia has deployed hundreds of thousands of troops to Ukraine, suffered at least tens of thousands of fatalities (likely far more), and already demobilized over 100,000 personnel. Hundreds of thousands more are expected to return in the coming years.

These conditions create a large, socially concentrated cohort of combat-experienced individuals entering a constrained labor market, with uneven reintegration pathways and limited institutional absorption capacity.

• Internal cohesion — whether veteran networks remain fragmented or develop durable organizational identity
• Operational autonomy — the degree to which these networks depend on, or are independent from, state security structures
• Ties to regime factions — the extent of integration with competing elite and security blocs

The analysis draws on fieldwork, literature review, and comparative historical analysis. Iran is identified as the closest structural parallel.

We find that the end of high-intensity conflict in Ukraine is likely to generate a comparable postwar dynamic, most notably the emergence of an organization analogous to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Within Russia, such a structure would likely not emerge immediately as a unified institution, but rather through the gradual consolidation of:

• veteran associations and foundations
• security-linked patronage networks
• quasi-public asset distribution bodies
• regional veteran committees and paramilitary-adjacent formations

Over time, these elements could cohere into a hybrid security–economic–political ecosystem.

The post–Iran–Iraq War period provides a close analogue for post-conflict veteran-state relations. Iran exhibited:

• heavy reliance on oil rents and wartime fiscal strain
• inflationary pressures and weakening formal commercial sectors
• international isolation and sanctions pressure
• absence of a coherent demobilization strategy
• rapid ideological mobilization of wartime cohorts

By the late 1980s, returning veterans had become more ideologically radical than segments of the regime itself. Reintegration was not centralized but outsourced to semi-state institutions such as the Basij, while security factions gradually developed parallel economic and coercive structures.

A key dynamic was elite fragmentation:

• reformist factions pushed for state-led economic adjustment
• security factions sought to preserve wartime institutional power
• commercial actors attempted privatization of state assets

This fragmentation created conditions for the emergence of the IRGC as a hybrid actor controlling both coercive capacity and economic networks.

The Iranian case suggests four necessary conditions for IRGC-like consolidation:

• Postwar socioeconomic stress and unrest
• Fragmentation within elite and security structures
• Institutional capture of veteran populations
• Access to and control over external financial flows under isolation

In Russia, these conditions are partially observable:

• macroeconomic pressure (inflation, fiscal strain, credit tightening)
• expansion of veteran nationalism and identity formation
• multiple competing security actors with economic interests (e.g., military intelligence and internal security structures)
• existing but fragmented veteran infrastructure (state foundations, regional committees, asset distribution bodies)

The mechanism of transformation is therefore likely to proceed through coordination rather than design:

1. veterans form dense informal networks after demobilization
2. security actors begin selectively co-opting these networks
3. veteran-linked institutions receive assets, contracts, and patronage
4. these institutions expand into economic and quasi-coercive roles
5. external sanctions and isolation increase the value of parallel financial channels
6. a self-reinforcing hybrid system emerges

At full maturity, such a system would resemble an IRGC-type structure combining:

• coercive capacity
• ideological legitimacy
• economic control
• transnational operational reach

In the Iranian analogue, veteran-linked hybrid institutions are structurally incentivized toward instability rather than containment.

Control over parallel economic channels enables:

• sanctions evasion and arbitrage
• proxy activity and externalized coercion
• expansion of informal security services
• illicit trade and financial flows
• potential proliferation-related risk pathways

For Russia, this would complicate centralized command-and-control over external operations and increase fragmentation in crisis decision-making. The result would likely be:

• higher escalation risk
• weaker deterrence stability
• more unpredictable regional security dynamics across Europe and Eurasia

We evaluate developments inside Russia using an agentic AI system embedded within the scenario framework.

This system continuously tracks indicators derived from the four scenario pathways and updates assessments in real time. Unlike conventional predictive models, this approach embeds human-defined causal structure at the core of the system, allowing large-scale data ingestion while preserving theoretical interpretability.

The AI layer performs:

• continuous monitoring of political, economic, and security indicators
• structured classification of developments into scenario pathways
• iterative updating of risk assessments based on emerging evidence

Human analysis defines the causal architecture; machine systems handle scale, speed, and continuous updating. This hybrid design enables real-time, theory-informed foresight.