By Ekaterina Janashia | 2026-06-22

Stop waiting for the war to end. Build a country that can fight one for the next two decades instead.

That was the message a retired Russian spy carried onstage earlier in June, and the chilling part was who delivered it. Andrey Bezrukov spent years living undercover in the United States, a deep-cover career that inspired the TV series "The Americans."

Now a political scientist who advises Rosneft chief Igor Sechin, he told a packed auditorium that Russia should brace for a generational fight. Two full generations, he warned, will grow up knowing nothing but conflict.

Spy predicts decades of war

"We need to learn to live with this war," Bezrukov said.

His stage was the Saint Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF), once Russia's glossy bridge to global capital and a rival to the World Economic Forum in Davos. The setting only sharpened the message.

As Bezrukov spoke, Ukrainian drones were striking the city around him -- and the gathering itself, now stripped of the global investors it once drew, has hardened into propaganda theater staged for a single viewer: Vladimir Putin.

Past participants and analysts say it survives mainly to disguise Russia's isolation, its halls now filled with fringe celebrities, conspiracy theorists and radical politicians.

Bezrukov's forecast came at a panel grimly titled "Russia's Main Threats in the Second Quarter of the 21st Century." While the main exhibition halls hummed with staged optimism about mergers and trade with the Global South, he laid out a militarized vision of the future and rejected the forum's business-as-usual mood. Russia cannot freeze its development while it waits for calm, he argued. The state must build an economy that serves defense as much as growth.

Boiling the frog

Bezrukov described a patient Western strategy aimed at grinding Russia down without triggering a nuclear war. The West, he argued, wants to exhaust Russia's resources and resolve over time. He reached for a vivid metaphor: the enemy is "slowly boiling the frog."

Then he turned to that morning's strikes with rare candor, admitting that modern technology had caught Russia unprepared.

"Even now we understand that a drone using Starlink can fly into any region and hit a specific target," he said. "This is a serious problem for us -- we were not prepared for it." He pushed the anxiety further still, claiming foreign laboratories are engineering powerful viruses designed to wipe out populations.

The fear had a real backdrop. Russian air defenses shot down 376 drones on June 6 across Crimea, Abkhazia and the Azov and Black seas. More than 140 fell over the Leningrad region alone, prompting Saint Petersburg Governor Alexander Beglov to urge residents to stay inside. He reported no major damage to the city. Still, falling debris killed a man in the Tver region, and the strikes set off a large fire at an oil depot in the southern town of Ust-Labinsk.

Titans replaced by influencers

The guest list told its own story of decline. Exiled economist Konstantin Sonin said that 15 years ago, SPIEF worked as a genuine meeting point between Russia and the world. Those peak years produced the 2010 Nord Stream pipeline agreements and a 2011 deal to buy French Mistral helicopter carriers. Speakers included Angela Merkel, Emmanuel Macron and Xi Jinping.

By 2026, those names had vanished. Kremlin aides bragged about hosting the "first official American delegation since 2017." Yet the group answered to Rodney Mims Cook, who leads a minor heritage advisory body. Secretary of State Marco Rubio brushed it aside, saying it carried no official weight.

The most visible American was right-wing commentator Candace Owens, who appeared on a "traditional values" panel. The French presidential couple is suing her for defamation over conspiracy theories about Macron's wife. Owens has also claimed the moon landing was faked and that dinosaurs never existed.

Other Western guests included Scott Ritter, a disgraced former United Nations weapons inspector and regular voice on the state broadcaster RT, and Jörg Urban, a politician from the radical wing of the far-right Alternative for Germany party.

Former business journalist Elizaveta Osetinskaya summed up the shift bluntly. The seats once held by the chief executives of Alphabet and News Corp, she said, now belong to delegates from North Korea and the Taliban.

For Kremlin insiders, analysts say, the forum still serves one reliable purpose: a public relations showcase that doubles as a chance to profit from inflated government contracts.