Earlier this week, I got to moderate a panel on Russia’s future at the Milken Institute conference in Los Angeles, featuring some of the best minds working on Russia today. We had a practitioner: Eric Green, who was the senior director for Russia on the National Security Council during the first half of the Biden administration (and at the beginning of the war). We had two of the best scholars in the business: UCLA’s Daniel Treisman, a political scientist and author of many excellent books on Russia, and C.S.I.S.’s Maria Snegovaya, whose insights on the Russian system have been so trenchant. We also had representatives of the two main wings of the Russian opposition (or what’s left of it): Pavel Khodorkovsky, who heads the U.S. branch of the Khodorkovsky Foundation, and whose father, Mikhail, spent a decade behind bars and now bankrolls a good chunk of the Russian opposition; and Leonid Volkov, the late Alexey Navalny’s right-hand man and the political director of Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation.