What if Putin's sudden death sparks a struggle over Russia's nukes?
Putin's sudden death is a dual vol-plus-oil-supply shock: Brent leads WTI higher on a war/loose-nukes premium, VIX spikes, and energy-driven breakevens lift inflation expectations. Direct analogue is the Feb-2022 Ukraine invasion (Brent through $100, broad risk-off). Transmission: Russia is ~10% of global oil and a key gas supplier to residual buyers (India, China). Forward angle: a chaotic succession over the nuclear arsenal is a fatter geopolitical tail than the invasion itself — the oil premium could persist rather than fade, unlike a contained conflict.
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The butterfly cascade
How this trigger trickles across markets, left → right — the root shock, its first‑order moves, then the ripple effects. Drag any node; tap a market for its real price history.
Resolution timeline — how this probability is moving
Our model's odds (electric blue) over time vs the market's (Polymarket, amber), from the past toward the 1–3 years horizon. Each dot is a real macro event that nudged the probability — green pushed it up, red pushed it down. Tap a dot for the source. Loading the probability audit trail…
What it would mean
If this plays out, it is a risk-off shock. Vladimir Putin suddenly dies, throwing Russia into a power struggle over its nuclear arsenal. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Geopolitical risk ▲ · Oil supply risk ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.