Driven by fear of losing power, Putin is gambling away Russia’s future
With the invasion of Ukraine, the Russian president confirms his increasingly brutal tactics and shows his lack of perspective on the very power system he created.
Markus Ackeret, MoscowMarch 1, 2022
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For President Putin, Russia’s future depends on his hold on power. Everything else is secondary. He is pictured here during the 2011 election campaign together with his confidant, Dimitri Medvedev.
Eduard Korniyenko / Reuters
Vladimir Putin has rarely appeared so hateful, obsessed and in a rage as he has during the past week. Always rational, pragmatic and tactically clever, traits that for years had fascinated his admirers and even won a certain respect from his critics, were absent in his appearance before the Security Council of the Russian Federation and in two of his recent televised speeches. Serious commentators also questioned Putin’s sanity.
Putin’s radical decision to go to war against Ukraine and thus to challenge the West militarily also threatens to destroy much in Russia itself that has been won over many years. But seemingly irrational and radical relentlessness is not exactly a sign of a mental disorder. Various factors over recent years have led up to this moment.
Putin’s brutal debut with the Chechen war
One thing is clear: The image of the meek man with an outstretched hand, which has been cultivated – especially in Germany – since Putin’s speech in the Bundestag in 2001 has always been distorted. The then-slender intelligence officer came to power in 1999 and 2000 with an exceedingly brutal war at home, against breakaway Chechnya, which had been infiltrated by Islamist forces.
The Chechen capital Grozny in February 2000. Putin made his debut as Russia’s president with the brutal war in Chechnya.
Dmitry Belyakov / AP
Today, Chechnya is on Russia’s side in attacking Ukraine: Troops gathered in Grozny. Leader Ramzan Kadyrov declared that he was sending soldiers to support Russia.
Reuters
Putin called for a «dictatorship of law» and he first cleaned up television broadcasting, which was controlled by various magnates. He was unsparing in his dealings with domestic critics. Instead of strengthening the institutions of a democratic state, he hollowed them out and created a system in which he was an indispensable central figure to balance out various centers of power.
On the one hand, he gained increasingly more room to maneuver. On the other hand, however, he was dependent on his entourage – and felt that he and Russia were being treated unfairly in the pan-European and global political context. Like many Russians, he mourns the Soviet Union. The West wants to dictate a role for Russia, but that doesn’t suit Moscow, he said in a film shot shortly before the 2018 presidential election. From his memory of his time in the Leningrad backyards where he grew up, he has told a powerful story of his trial of strength, one that is now often quoted in Russia: It is about a rat that he had cornered and that chased him afterwards. It even tried to jump on his head. By his own admission, that was a lesson to him.
President Vladimir Putin’s speech to the German Bundestag on Sept. 25, 2001.
Deutscher Bundestag
Putin long proved to be a skillful tactician
For a long time, Putin was not necessarily perceived as a brilliant strategist, but as a shrewd tactician with a feeling for «kairos», an ancient Greek word meaning opportune moment when making decisions. He always weighed the risks and only intervened when he was reasonably sure of success. The coup-like annexation of Crimea and Russia’s intervention in Syria are examples of this.
The Kremlin leader cleverly used a window of opportunity for a reasonably limited intervention, and had the advantage over the West of always being ready to use military force. Not everything went smoothly: His attempt to turn resentment in eastern Ukraine over the political upheaval after the 2014 protests that began on Kyiv's Maidan, or Independence Square, into a separatist movement foundered. It succeeded only in parts of the Donbas. Even then it seemed that Putin had miscalculated. Nevertheless, he did not become a broader hazard.
The events of 2014 led to a rift with the West, and a radicalization. Increasingly, it seemed that Putin was indifferent to the consequences that might await him and his country. Occasionally, he toyed with threats of nuclear war. The outcry in the European Union and the United States over the annexation of Crimea and Russian interference in eastern Ukraine, with sometimes painful economic sanctions, only strengthened his perception of himself as an outcast and his resolve to go his own way without considering others.
The democratic revolution at Kyiv Maidan, or Independence Square, in 2014 gave Putin a memorable scare.
Efrem Lukatsky / AP
Putin, shown here in 2019 in a locomotive crossing a newly built bridge from Russia to Crimea, which was annexed in 2014, likes to show he’s in the driver's seat.
Alexei Nikolsky / AP
Return to the Kremlin
But this change in him had already begun with his return to the Kremlin after elections in 2012. The events merely showed how much Putin considered only himself fit to hold the political system together. He thus turned himself and Russia into hostages at the same time. It was now clear that things could not go on without him – and that his position of power had to be defended at all costs. Such a form of rule actually has no future. But in order to secure it nonetheless, and to convince the country’s elites that he was a reliable anchor, ever more radical steps were necessary.
With the constitutional reform of 2020 and the possibility created therein to remain in office for twelve more years, he clumsily tailored an exemption to suit himself that violates the spirit of basic law. This deprived many Russians, who were willing to change their views, of faith in the future – and had consequences at the ballot box. The 2021 elections to the State Duma, the lower house of the Federal Assembly of Russia, like regional elections before them, showed the increasing difficulty of achieving election results favorable to the Kremlin. It could only be done by force and obvious falsification. Accordingly, the influence of those advocating «organs of violence» has become ever greater.
Russia turns into an open dictatorship
While the Kremlin had previously «only» made life difficult for the opposition, civil society and the independent media, it is now ruthlessly interfering with them. For years, it had been considered more effective to rein in anti-corruption campaigner and opposition politician Alexei Navalny and intimidate his supporters. The unprecedented poisoning attack on Navalny in the summer of 2020, performed with the help of an intelligence service hit squad, made it clear that times are different now, and that Russia is turning into an open dictatorship.
The state is now not even trying to maintain a semblance of the rule of law in the criminal proceedings against Navalny and his comrades-in-arms. They are all considered extremists – even retroactively. The wave of repression against protesters, political activists and dissidents in general is taking on unprecedented proportions. It is now a matter of destroying or making everything that is not already politically and socially controlled by the Kremlin compliant. This is why the Kremlin finally shut down the internationally respected civil rights organization Memorial Human Rights Centre last December.
Internal and external enemies are mixed in this campaign, notes sociologist Grigori Judin, of the Moscow School of Social and Economic Science. Anything that disturbs the regime is portrayed as foreign interference. Thus, society's opinion is already decided: The West, specifically the United States, is characterized as an all-powerful opponent in domestic and foreign policy.
The suppression of any dissenters also serves as self-assurance for the Russian elites and as Putin’s reassurance to them. The protests, with subsequent changes of power, in post-Soviet states – especially those in Ukraine in 2004 and 2014, which have been labeled «color revolutions» – have been the bane of Putin and his entourage for almost two decades.
Fear of democratic movements
The protests in Belarus in the summer of 2020, which threatened the ruling regime there and were subsequently brutally quashed with Russia’s backing, and the failed transfer of power in Kazakhstan were signs. Russia’ ruthless reaction to the uprisings is evidence of Putin’s fear that his regime could suffer a similar fate.
Democratic opposition in Russia is consistently suppressed – yet individuals continue to find courage to protest the war on Ukraine. (Feb. 24, 2022)
Evgenia Novozhenina / Reuters
Protests against Putin’s war in Ukraine are met with brutal violence. (Feb. 24, 2022)
Anton Vaganov / Reuters
The concerns of the people do not matter
The president has long since turned his back on the everyday concerns of the population. Nothing has expressed that better in the previous two years than his handling of the pandemic. While Putin lived almost continuously in isolation, taking grotesque precautions and at the same time praising the supposedly successful management of the health crisis, Russians lead largely normal lives with a mixture of carelessness, economic coercion and misery in the health sector.
Putin wants to secure his legacy by restoring Russia’s historical greatness, prestige and assertiveness in the world. Ukraine, to which he obsessively denies statehood and which he views as being on the wrong track, with deadly consequences for Russia, is the linchpin of this notion. The military confrontation is also intended to consolidate society internally and keep the elites happy.
However, with his radical decision to deal with unsatisfactory geopolitics by confronting not only the U.S. and NATO, but also to instigate a real war with neighboring Ukraine, Putin is calling into question everything that he actually wants to realize. Even Russia's elite did not foresee this. Putin’s radical turn is robbing Russia of its future.
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