Russia

Russia's governance structure is formally federal with 89 subjects, but effective power radiates from the Kremlin through a vertical of command that reduces governors to appointees and legislatures to ratification bodies. The economy depends on hydrocarbon exports for roughly 30-40% of federal budget revenue, creating a petrostate structure where commodity prices determine fiscal capacity more than any domestic policy. Putin's system operates through competing security services (FSB, SVR, GRU) and oligarchic networks whose wealth depends on proximity to state contracts — a patronage ecosystem that biologists would recognise as a dominance hierarchy maintained through resource distribution rather than merit selection. The 2022 invasion of Ukraine revealed the system's informational weakness: intelligence was filtered through layers of subordinates incentivised to report what leadership wanted to hear, producing strategic miscalculation. Russia demonstrates how centralised control creates operational efficiency at the cost of accurate feedback — the same trade-off that makes authoritarian organisms fast but brittle.