President Medvedev, the former leader of Russia, fetches up on social media — and in the Russian papers — this week to wish “Season greetings to you all, Anglo-Saxon friends, and their happily oinking piglets,” and therefrom he makes a number of predictions for 2023 that include an elbow-to-the-ribs reference to Ukraine in the past tense. 

This might be passed off as too much tippling save for the fact that when not tweeting, Mr. Medvedev leads Russia’s security council, and he has President Putin’s ear. So some of the former president’s prognostications are newsworthy, nonetheless.

He claims, say, that “the Bretton Woods system of monetary management will collapse, leading to the IMF and World Bank crash,” and that the “euro and dollar will stop circulating as the global reserve currencies.” He  proffers that next year “Poland and Hungary will occupy western regions of the formerly existing Ukraine,” and that “the UK will rejoin the EU.”  

Portions of present-day western Ukraine historically belonged to various political entities, but since the fall of the Roman Empire there has rarely if ever been a time when borders within Europe were not in a state of flux somewhere. However, as if determined to pack as much provocation as possible into a thread of 10 tweets, Mr. Medvedev also states that next year “the Fourth Reich will be created, encompassing the territory of Germany and its satellites, i.e., Poland, the Baltic states, Czechia, Slovakia, the Kiev Republic, and other outcasts.”

Preposterous as it is, that assertion is ripe for unpacking, and not only because of Moscow’s patently absurd insistence that its war on Ukraine is partly a mission to “denazify” the country. For this is also the week that Ukraine is renewing its call for Russia to be removed from the Security Council, not only on the moral grounds of its having invaded a neighbor but on grounds that it was the former Soviet Union and not the rump Russian Federation that earned a seat on the powerful five-member UN body.

That is triggering another indignant reaction in the Russian press to the effect that seats on the Security Council were earned through blood — a pointed and not inaccurate reference to Moscow’s role, albeit as a vanished polity, in defeating Nazi Germany. 

What Mr. Medvedev conveniently excludes from his Twitter prophecies is that in 2023, regardless of whether it keeps its seat on the Security Council, Russia will become a much weakened state. For one thing, a country that cannot capably defend itself is one with diminished credibility among its own citizens. Unless it pulls its troops from Ukraine, more attacks from Ukraine will occur inside Russian territory.

The economic and political fallout of the ongoing but failed attempt to crush Ukraine is huge. True, the Russian economy has not exactly broken under the weight of Western sanctions, but the self-inflicted damage will reverberate well beyond next year. Nobody is much interested in doing business with or even visiting a pariah state: The day after Christmas, the Russian business newspaper Kommersant reports that the “organized tourist flow” to Russia plunged this year by more than 90 percent. 

In 2023 not only will even fewer people see the myriad sights of St. Petersburg but fewer countries within the Kremlin’s traditional political orbit will want to engage with Moscow on a political level. In 2022, off-radar but strategic countries like Kazakhstan already put some distance between themselves and the machinations of Mr. Putin, and as the year comes to a close that trend appears to still be in vogue. For the latest example, look to Armenia.

On Tuesday the head of that country’s security council,  Armen Grigoryan, said that Armenia was “being forced” to join a possible incipient, de facto supranational joining of the states of Russia and Belarus. That prompted a defensive response from the Kremlin, whose spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, reportedly replied that “such statements” fail to “correspond to reality. None of the Russian officials said this and did not bring it to the Armenian side through anyone.”

Armenia questions the role of Russian peacekeepers in the breakaway enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, which is contested between Azerbaijan and Armenia. The only roadway between Armenia and the landlocked region, the Lachin corridor, is currently blocked by Azerbaijani protestors. That creates headaches at Yerevan — but Armenia is now clearly unfazed by asking hard questions of Moscow. 

The reality that the Kremlin reliably obfuscates is that Mr. Putin’s obsession with Ukraine is rending the fabric of Russia today, starting with the hollowing out of political influence. Mr. Medvedev, meantime, says that “civil war will break out in the US, California and Texas becoming independent states as a result.” It seems that nobody has warned the Russian that it is generally unwise to mess with Texas.

Entertainment value aside, however, Moscow’s latest attempt to stir the pot belies the cold headwinds to come: If by the end of 2023 the world starts referring to the Russian Federation in the past tense, nobody in the Kremlin will be laughing.