With Russia possibly on the verge of escalating the Donbas War, it’s worth repudiating Vladimir Putin’s justifications for invading Ukraine.
This summer, Putin explained at length why he believes Russia and Ukraine are inseparable. His is a selective version of history that is illuminating insofar as it reveals Russian attitudes toward Belarusians, Ukrainians and other Slavic peoples in Eastern Europe; it’s not an excuse for denying Ukrainians their right to self-determination. (more…)
Russian president Vladimir Putin has called for a referendum to approve constitutional changes that would nominally hand more power to parliament.
The changes, if approved, might improve Russia’s rating in the Freedom House index, but democracy is probably not on his mind.
Only hours after his yearly address to the combined Federal Assembly, in which he made his proposals, Putin accepted the resignation of Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev and replaced him with the little-known head of the Federal Tax Service, Mikhail Mishustin.
The moves have left both Russians and Russia experts wondering: what’s happening? And what’s next? (more…)
German chancellor Angela Merkel is traveling to Moscow on Saturday, officially to discuss the conflicts in Libya, Syria and Ukraine, as well as the tension between Iran and the United States, with Vladimir Putin.
Hanging over the meeting will their countries’ deteriorating relations with the United States. (more…)
In an interview with the Financial Times, Vladimir Putin claims “the liberal idea” has “outlived its purpose” and puts himself at the head of a global reactionary movement against immigration, open borders and multiculturalism.
The Financial Times knows that Putin’s evisceration of liberalism chimes with anti-establishment leaders like Donald Trump in America, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Matteo Salvini in Italy and even the Brexit insurgency in the UK.
But true believes ought to take a closer look at the Russian leader. He may sound like an ally, but he’s not really interested in your cause. (more…)
2016 was a good year for Vladimir Putin, Russia’s leader. He tightened his grip on the Crimea, the Black Sea peninsula his army snatched from Ukraine in 2014. Ukraine continues to battle a Russian-backed insurgency in its southeastern Donbas region, delaying its Westernization. Russia has made itself indispensable to a resolution of the war in Syria and voters in the Philippines and the United States embraced Putin’s truth-free style of politics to elect strongmen of their own.
But all this has come at a cost: Russia’s economy is now in a precarious state.
Western sanctions — imposed after Russia seized the Crimea — and lower oil prices have pushed the economy to the brink of recession. Oil projects with Western majors like ExxonMobil and Shell are on hold. Russian companies can no longer borrow in the West.
Russian gross domestic product is down from a $2.2-trillion peak in 2013 to $1.3 trillion today. GDP per capita has fallen from $15,000 to $9,000, the same level where it was ten years ago. (more…)
Sergei Ivanov’s dismissal as Vladimir Putin’s chief of staff this week is the most important change in the upper echelon of Russia’s political elite since Putin returned to the presidency four years ago. Ivanov was the longest-serving head of the Presidential Administration in post-Soviet Russia. He has now been appointed to the largely powerless position of presidential representative for ecology and transportation. This is certainly a demotion.
But that does not mean this was an abrupt change or a purge.
Two weeks ago, Putin’s replacement of four governors and several other high-ranking cadres was dubbed an empowerment of people with a background in the security services, the so-called siloviki.
Now Ivanov, the highest-ranking silovik, has been dismissed and replaced by a diplomat. (more…)
Herein may sound like rampant speculation, but I’m not the only one considering it: according to The Economist, high-ranking European diplomats also wonder if Russia will make Libya the next frontier of adventure. There are good reasons to consider why Putin may be doing so. (more…)
Six months ago, Putin stunned just about everyone by sending Russian forces off to a distant war in the Middle East. Folly, cried many, including myself, for the Middle East is an ugly morass of conflict that siphons power and undermines great states.
Now Putin is pulling most of his forces out. Once more, just about no one saw this coming.
Has Putin pulled off yet another geopolitical coup de grâce? Has he outfoxed his Western and Islamist foes once more?
Well yes. But also no.
Let’s get super. (more…)
How annoyed would you feel if you had to make an utter fool of yourself, day after day, for benefits that are gradually decreasing? Probably about as annoyed as Sergei Lavrov, the Russian minister of foreign affairs, did when he recently mumbled expletives into his microphone in the middle of a press conference. Little does it matter if the text that caused Lavrov’s outrage came from an assistant, a family member or Vladimir Putin himself. The head of a country’s diplomatic corps is not supposed to lose it like this.
Or take Vladimir Yakunin, a Putin confidant and former head of Russian Railways who unexpectedly resigned last week to become the representative of Kaliningrad in the Russian parliament’s upper house, the Federation Council, a position that comes with a lot less influence and money. Was he the victim of a struggle inside the elite? Was he replaced, as Leonid Bershidsky suggested, because desperate times call for efficient managers rather than kleptocrats? Has he taken a different career direction?
Again, this is not what really matters. What matters is that visibly, the power engine of the Putin era — material benefits in exchange for unwavering political loyalty — is failing. And not only inside Russia. (more…)
As part of his campaign for the presidency, Vladimir Putin has been publishing a series of articles on various themes. On Tuesday, he turned to national security and specifically the Russian military. Since the full text is available in English, I won’t spend much time describing what is in the article but will just comment on some themes that caught my attention.
I have to say, of all the articles Putin has published as part of his electoral program, this one is one of the best. It’s not a terribly high standard, given that at least one of them was found to have been plagiarized from other sources, but still.
The first part of the article provides one of the best justifications I have seen for the military reform that the government undertook starting back in the fall of 2008. Had this statement been made this clearly and forcefully back then, I think Putin, defense minister Anatoliy Serdyukov and company might have had an easier time convincing the expert community that they knew what they were doing. (Back then, the reform was rolled out without a clear plan or explanation, which generated a lot of criticism.) I’ve been a fan of the main ideas behind the reform effort from the start, so I’m glad to see this all spelled out so clearly by Putin (or, more likely, his ghostwriter). Here are the key points justifying the reform:
Previous experience proved that the potential for developing the military system inherited from the Soviet Union had become depleted…
It was not possible to build up the military simply by adding personnel and equipment partly because it didn’t solve the inefficiency problem and partly because the country lacked both the human and financial resources. Most importantly, that system did not meet contemporary and long-term requirements. We could eventually have lost our entire military potential and we could have lost our armed forces as an efficient mechanism.
There was only one way out. We had to build a new army. We had to establish a modern and mobile army which could maintain permanent combat readiness.
This is followed by an equally clear discussion of accomplishments to date. These primarily have to do with changes in organizational structure, including the transition from brigades to divisions and from military districts to unified strategic commands. (more…)
