The Jamestown Foundation has an excellent article about telling fractures within disparate regions of the Russian Federation. The thesis, put forth by Carnegie Moscow Center scholar Alexei Malashenko, is that some of Russia’s far flung territories are starting to take issue with the Kremlin’s unilateral political appointments, evidence of the “initial stage of a breakup.”

“The first parts to break away, Malashenko believes, will be the Kaliningrad enclave, wedged between Poland, Lithuania, and Belarus and firmly oriented to Europe, and the Far East on the opposite side of this country, firmly locked economically to China, Japan, and South Korea.

“The Kaliningrad region and the Far East have as little in common within the Russian Federation as, say, Estonia and Turkmenistan did in the Soviet Union. No viable economic ties exist between the extremes of this large country. There is nothing like Route 1 from Key West, Florida, to Fort Kent on the Canadian border to link Kaliningrad to Vladivostok. Only centralized control, known as Putin’s vertical of power, has kept Russian regions together like hoops on a cask. As the systemic crisis loosens the hoops, however, the decayed cask will start falling apart.