Russian President Vladimir Putin’s credibility at home and abroad is crumbling in the eyes of President Donald Trump, Moscow’s key allies and Russia’s pro-war community who are growing more incensed by a seeming forever war in Ukraine, according to analysts.
As leaders of Russia’s allies like Venezuela, Syria and Iran get deposed or targeted, Putin’s international promises ring more hollow than ever, his lies are no longer entertained and many pro-Kremlin hawks are clamoring for more drastic action to regain the country’s standing.
“Russia is obliged to do something horrible to restore her credibility. It is very sad that we have to use such kind of arguments. But we have not choice. Only brutality, force, mass destruction and cruelty matter in Trumplike world,” complained far-right Russian ideologue Alexander Dugin on X, in comments that hinted at pro-regime frustrations.
Though Putin personally signed strategic partnerships agreements with Venezuela and Iran last year, he has remained silent in the wake of Trump’s shock capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and Washington’s promises to help Iranian anti-government protesters. On Thursday he only asked that the United States comply with international law.
Observers say Putin is hobbled by his need to maintain his relationship with Trump, even when U.S. forces seized a Russian oil tanker, and that his incapacity to support allies in their time of need has dealt a serious blow to Russia’s power projection abroad and credibility on the world stage.
Earlier this month, following a week-long chase on high seas in which Russia deployed a nuclear submarine and aircraft, U.S. forces boarded and seized a Russian-flagged oil tanker in the Atlantic Ocean, briefly escalating tensions between Washington and Moscow. The rusting tanker, originally called the Bella 1, had been sanctioned by the United States in 2024 for operating as part of a “shadow fleet” of tankers transporting illicit Iranian oil.
“Putin’s reaction looks strange, but it’s very logical: He doesn’t attack Trump because he hopes for a symmetrical understanding of Russia’s needs. Putin knows that if he overreacts, if he shows that it is painful for him, everyone will see his weakness,” Russian political scientist Vladimir Pastukhov, an honorary professor at University College London, said in an interview.
Trump senses this, and it fits into the two leaders’ mutual understanding of the world and of political leadership. “Trump will continue to play his game without making any special exceptions for Putin if he shows his weakness or stupidity,” said Pastukhov. “When he’s strong he will be engaged with as a strong person, when he’s weak he shall be punished.”
What the seizure of the oil tanker revealed is that Trump does not take Russia’s reach as seriously as Moscow does and that he is not afraid to slap Putin down.
“Dancing with the tanker was a big diplomatic mistake by the Kremlin. This has caused serious reputational damage both externally and internally,” said Putin critic and former oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, adding that ultimately the issue is unlikely to escalate further.
Another key moment that highlighted Putin’s waning credibility in Trump’s eyes was when the Kremlin made wild, easily disprovable claims that Ukraine had attempted to attack Putin’s residence in Valdai. The allegations were clearly an overreach, and after initially considering them, Trump publicly shot them down.
“I am convinced that Trump no longer believes Putin, but this is not a reason for him to abandon his desire for deals, either economic and political,” said Khodorkovsky. “Trump considers such statements a diplomatic game, where it is not profitable for him to give Putin extra points.” In an interview with Reuters on Thursday, Trump once again insisted Putin was ready for a peace deal and it was Ukraine that was the obstacle.
The Russian leadership is well known for denying obvious examples of its culpability — as with the case of the MH-17 disaster, when Russian separatist forces shot down a Malaysian passenger plane over Ukraine in 2014, killing nearly 300 people.
More recently, however, after Russian air defenses mistakenly downed an Azerbaijan Airlines flight, killing 38, Putin was forced to apologize after initially dismissing any role in the incident in the face of Azerbaijani outrage and to shore up Russia’s crumbling status in the Caucasus.
Trump and Putin routinely employ falsehoods to their electorates and bend facts to justify acts of aggression against other countries. But Russia is now dealing with an unpredictable, equally brazen U.S. administration — one that has veered radically away from the norms of its predecessors — and Moscow is struggling to adapt to this new reality.
“The U.S. president was fooled [by the Kremlin] throughout 2025. The situational ‘Putin Doctrine 2025,’ which allowed for continued military action and kept Trump within the Kremlin’s relative sphere of influence, may not work after the New Year,” Moscow-based political analyst Andrei Kolesnikov wrote last week.
An increasingly transactional U.S. administration, more concerned with money and deals than democracy, is causing confusion in Russian foreign policy, which has historically staked its power reactively to what the U.S. stands for.
“All the laws are being broken, and Putin is in a pretty strange position right now,” said a former senior Kremlin official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to more freely discuss sensitive matters. “I wouldn’t say that his relationship with Trump is the priority, he is not ready to sacrifice everything for it, his priority for him is to finish this war with dignity.”
But as more international norms are broken and red lines are crossed, Russia has been left reeling, its capacity as an ally diminished, as the U.S. cozies up to Russian proxies or once Russia-friendly states, such as Belarus, Armenia and Azerbaijan.
“Russia chooses horrible, inefficient partners because nobody else wants to be friends with Russia,” said Alexander Gabuev, director of Carnegie’s Russia Eurasia Center. “And when these regimes collapse, like we saw in Syria, it is beyond Russia’s ability to fix it. … Russia cannot help these regimes to become more efficient or to address the needs of their populations … or help them to meaningfully retaliate against the U.S.”
Russia’s close relationship with Venezuela historically sent an important message to Washington that Moscow has a foothold in America’s backyard, just as the U.S. does in Ukraine, he added. “Venezuela was a symbol of Russia having this global reach. Now all of this rhetoric has been thrown spectacularly in the Kremlin’s face.”
This more diminished international position comes against a backdrop of a population increasingly fed up with a seemingly endless war that has shattered Russia’s myth of strength and invincibility, and risks dragging the country into further economic and social decline.
Russia’s war against Ukraine has now lasted longer than its participation in World War II — a grim milestone that was marked last week and noted by critics in the country’s pro-war community, with many calling it a sign of Russia’s defeat. In the nearly four years that Russia has been bogged down in eastern Ukraine, Nazi forces marched nearly to Moscow before the Red Army drove them back and captured Berlin.
“In that war, the U.S.S.R. was victorious. Modern Russia, after 1,418 days of its war — the so-called ‘special military operation’ — has suffered defeat,” wrote the author of the Telegram channel Our Regnum. “Very few people in Russia are ready to acknowledge defeat, which might have given us at least some chance to change the grim situation that has taken shape.”
Military blogger Maksim Kalashnikov said on Telegram that his “heart feels very heavy” and that “it is already clear that all the benefits of this war will be reaped by the United States and China, while Russians are left with blood, ruins, and losses.”
While it is difficult to assess wider public opinion and Putin’s credibility in an authoritarian environment with strict censorship laws, Berlin-based Russian political scientist Ekaterina Schulmann sees clues in opinion polling, including a recent study that revealed levels of pessimism in Russian society increased sharply last year.
“Peace is now an almost universal desire in Russian society. There was an upsurge of hope with the entrance of the Trump administration: An end of the war was finally in sight, but this hope did not materialize,” Schulmann said, saying that she believes Russian society took a psychological hit.
And as normal political discussion is impossible, Russians are faced with no solution or exit strategy, just discontent, anxiety and frustration.
“President Putin meanwhile is perceived as the embodiment of the status quo. I believe that in 2025, Russian society, and perhaps the elites, have been drifting into a mindset where the president is both the guarantor of their position but also an impediment. He is now potentially being perceived as standing between them and peace,” she said.
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