The Putin Watch Index (PWI) is a weighted 0–100 read on the pressure on Vladimir Putin’s regime. It updates daily. Higher = more instability. It is not a probability, a forecast, or a black box. It is a public editorial score with weights, inputs, and sources you can inspect and dispute.
Seven inputs are each scored 0–10 by a human editor from dated, linked sources. Each input has a fixed weight. The PWI is the weighted average of the seven scores, multiplied by 10.
PWI = ( Σ scorei × weighti ) × 10, where the weights sum to 1.0.
| Input | Weight | What it measures |
|---|---|---|
| Elite attrition | 22% | Dismissals, arrests, resignations, or unexplained deaths at deputy-minister rank and above; reshuffles in Putin’s inner circle; changes at Rosneft, Gazprom, Rostec, FSB, MoD. The Window Index feeds this input. |
| Economic stress | 18% | Ruble, key rate, oil-and-gas revenue, National Wealth Fund draw-down, sanctions bite, refinery outages, fuel supply, inflation, capital controls. |
| War pressure | 18% | Battlefield momentum, casualty tempo, deep strikes on Russian territory, equipment losses, mobilization pressure, force-generation gap. |
| Isolation | 14% | Foreign travel, no-shows at multilateral summits, UN votes, warrants and sanctions coverage, diplomatic expulsions, and Rosaviatsia outbound-flight departure data from Russian airports (Sheremetyevo/Vnukovo YoY vs Turkish/UAE routes). |
| Domestic dissent | 10% | Protests, petitions, soldiers’ mothers activity, detentions, Rosgvardia posture, regional-elite friction, information-space cracks. |
| Succession signals | 8% | Public grooming of successors, changes in Putin’s public schedule, corroborated health rumors, dynastic moves inside the siloviki. The State TV tone tracker and Who Succeeds Putin? board both feed this input. |
| Exit-search index | 10% | Rolling 7-day Google Trends inside Russia for VPN, эмиграция, мобилизация, and как уехать из России. Indexed against a Jan 2026 baseline; higher = more search demand for exit and evasion. |
Counts calendar days since Putin’s last independently verifiable, dated public appearance. Pre-taped Kremlin.ru footage does not count on its own. an outside wire (Reuters/AP/AFP/BBC) or third-party official (foreign head of state, Belarusian, Chinese, or CSTO counterpart) has to place him there. The widget auto-flags at 5+ days.
A running ledger of suspicious falls, defenestrations, and unexplained deaths of Russian elites since 2022-02-24. Each entry carries name, role, date, manner, and a linked source. The count is editorial: a death enters the Index only when independent reporting flags the circumstances, or when the victim was a public critic, insider, or midlevel executive in energy, defense, or finance. The Window Index is a latent pressure signal that feeds the Elite Attrition input; it does not double-count.
Dated entries when top state-TV hosts (Solovyov, Skabeyeva) shift rhetoric. softening on a rival, hardening on a client, or first-time framing of “transition of power.” Feeds the Succession Signals input. On its own, cannot move the PWI more than 1 point per week.
The baseline is a one-time snapshot taken 2026-01-15 and pinned in data/putin_watch.json. It never moves. Every subsequent daily read is compared against it so drift and shock are readable at a glance.
An alert fires. email to the desk, plus a page banner. when:
Six public predictions with dated, falsifiable resolution criteria. Probabilities are editorial. When a call resolves, it moves to the receipts/misses board with the resolution date and outcome. Calls are not markets; they are commitments to be scored.
Errors get fixed on the page and logged in data/putin_watch.json. Send corrections to david@voteroi.com.