The current security crisis in Europe lasts already for almost two months. It was ignited by the Russian government that embarked on an impressive military buildup along the border with Ukraine and supplemented it by a list of demands to NATO and the United States, effectively turning this list into an ultimatum. A host of observers attempting to predict the future events are trying to read the mind of Russian President Vladimir Putin, which is notoriously difficult, given his training in secret services.
It might be useful, however, to zoom out and focus on the structural elements of Putin’s political regime, for they are going to continue influencing his strategy, no matter the immediate outcome of the current escalation. The challenges to the global security presented by Putin’s rule are not going to disappear even if negotiations result in Russian troops returning to their barracks. While the efforts of the Western leaders seem to be aimed at restoring the situation to what it looked like a year ago and simply undoing the escalation, the grim reality is that there is no way back.
Russian political system is unfolding according to its inner logic, and this makes it impossible to simply roll back. Putin’s willingness to start a military escalation is often assessed against the status quo. And since he seems to be in a comfortable position after having crushed domestic opposition and enjoying the rise of oil prices, his decision to start a crisis is interpreted as a drive to fulfill the historical mission of restoring and enhancing the Russian empire. Indeed, the idea of spheres of influence behind Putin’s demands reveals his imperialist vision of the global order as consisting of several superpowers dominating their peripheries. An inherent need to rebuild the empire must be motivating Putin’s resolution to destroy the existing order. He must be hoping to be better off by reclaiming the empire.
However, a desperate wish to avoid ending up worse off is often a stronger motivation for a radical action. One should never corner a rat, because it is most dangerous when it feels cornered – this is perhaps the most well-known piece of political wisdom produced by Vladimir Putin. It tells more about Putin’s view of the situation than his supposed search for historical grandeur. Putin himself has many times stressed that he perceives the current world order as threatening for him.
The political regime Putin has built in Russia can be described as electoral monarchy ruled by a leader who relies on plebiscites to secure his legitimacy in the eyes of the elites, bureaucracy, and the people. Its closest equivalent is the regime of Napoleon III in the nineteenth-century France. While the leader of such state enjoys unlimited power, he is nevertheless dependent on the ability to produce the results of the vote that would keep his authority undisputed. Obviously, the numbers obtained within this system are far away from the standards of free and fair elections, but they still cannot be forged without limits, for that would damage the ruler’s legitimacy.
Vladimir Putin’s track record with elections over the last three years provides grounds for serious concerns about viability of this system. In 2018, presidential elections witnessed an unprecedented rise of pressure to vote, which resulted in Putin obtaining for the first time the vote of 50% of all Russians entitled to vote. Since then, the bar has been rather high for the Russian president, while his support goes south. Already in the fall of 2018 several Russian regions rebelled against Putin’s ruling party and suddenly elected random people as their governors who had been allowed to run as ‘tomato cans’. In 2019, the Moscow city council elections resulted in opposition organizing, uniting, and gaining almost half of the seats – a number that would have been definitely much higher had the Moscow authorities not banned all major opposition candidates from running.
In 2020, Putin rebuked with changing the Constitution further towards monarchy, ordering to kill key opposition figure Alexey Navalny, and imprisoning Sergey Furgal – one those governors suddenly elected in 2018 that later on turned into a quite popular politician in his Khabarovsk region. People in Khabarovsk reacted with a chain of demonstrations that lasted for several months and assembled truly unprecedented crowds. Although the rallies did not affect Furgal’s fate (he is still under arrest awaiting a long prison term), they were indicative of the demand for political change. In 2021, the demonstrations in support of Navalny who was imprisoned, too, after returning to Moscow, were record-breaking in numbers and, even worse for Putin, covered almost all country, including major and minor cities. Several months later, Putin’s party performed poorly at the parliamentary elections and left the Kremlin with no options other than to rig the vote at an unprecedented rate to avoid losing out to the Communist Party which started dissenting with Putin on key issues. This was perhaps the first time since 2011 when major elections were so vastly perceived in the Russian society as a fraud, and therefore, they failed to create legitimacy.
Even more alarming are the cleavages in public attitudes that emerged over this period of time. Putin’s support is now concentrated among the elderly people, while middle-aged and particularly the young people are visibly tired and tend to disagree with him on most issues except for foreign policy (but including his bid to extend his rule for two more terms, which was backed predominantly by the older generation). This difference between the old and the rest is correlated with the divergence between the audience of the state-controlled TV channels and the rest. Over the last two years, online media have for the first time surpassed TV channels as the main source of information. While TV-addiction invariably leads to support of Putin’s policies, the online audience is much more diverse in their preferences and more critical of the Russian leader.
While open disapproval or disaffection with Putin is still a view expressed by only a third of Russian population, the tacit consent to his rule largely relies on total elimination of alternatives of any kind. A demand for political alternative can be easily felt, and there is little doubt it will become apparent in the near future, much like it happened in Belarus. There is no difference in political culture between Belarusians and Russians, which makes some sort of popular movement against Putin imminent. The size of crowds Navalny was able to mobilize in 2021 while being relatively unknown in Russia is indicative of the amount of protest energy accumulated in the Russian society. Time works against Putin, and he now needs to prepare to crush what is to come.
Another important trait of this type of regimes is that they tend to erase the distinction between the internal dissent and the external enemies. The idea of popular uprising is completely alien to Vladimir Putin: his views on revolutionary history both in Russia and elsewhere demonstrate that he simply does not believe that there can be such thing as genuine popular insurrection motivated by internal causes and not staged from abroad. This view got particularly entrenched in Russian elites after the 2004 Maidan revolution in Ukraine and the Arab Spring.
Quite predictably, current decrease in domestic political support is clearly interpreted by Russian leadership as a result of hostile disruptive activities from abroad. The members of the Security Council – the most powerful collective political body in Russia responsible for military strategy – have recently repeatedly stressed the need to confront the foreign influence on Russian politics. One remarkable shift in the power hierarchy of the last two years is that at this point the very same people who control military planning in Russia became responsible for domestic politics under the umbrella concept of ‘security’. Nikolay Patrushev, the second most powerful person in Russia today, is giving multiple interviews emphasizing the need to defend Russian values against the subversive influence from abroad.
The external threats are therefore inseparable for Putin and his inner circle from domestic unrest, and declining support is attributed to the actions of geopolitical opponents, namely, the United States. The struggle over Ukraine is merely another front of a larger confrontation, and there, again, Putin is on the downward track.
The war in Eastern Ukraine in 2014-15 resulted for Putin in installing a hotbed of perpetual instability in Ukraine. The Minsk agreements were supposed to give him a firm grip over Ukraine’s foreign policy. That was meant to serve as a long-term brake on Putin’s opponents’ ability to approach Russia. However, in 2020-21 Volodymyr Zelensky started enhancing military cooperation with NATO, and it suddenly turned out that the brakes are no longer working. The communique distributed by NATO in June 2021 was perceived by the aggressive part of the Russian establishment as a proof of complete failure of the previous policy, and it is very likely that this was the assessment of the Russian Security Council, too. Ukraine appeared to be on its way to join the West and become protected by Western military without even joining NATO formally, which would mean that the country is slipping outside of Russia’s influence forever. This is totally unacceptable for Putin’s Russia, and Putin himself made a public statement on that in his longish paper on the history of Ukraine. While the paper is full of contradictions and ambiguities that leave room for multiple interpretations, the key message is clear: there is no way Russia is going to let Ukraine go – it should be either pressured into becoming Russian protectorate or conquered militarily. While the first option is clearly preferable, the second is always on the table: there is absolutely no way Putin is going to let Ukraine obtain military protection from the West and create a stable political regime independent from Moscow.
It is well known that Putin was deeply shocked by the fate of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi who almost succeeded in crushing his opposition but was deterred by the foreign intervention and later brutally killed by his opponents. President Dmitry Medvedev who did not object against introducing a no-fly zone over Libya, has very likely lost Putin’s confidence over that decision. What if Putin faces at home a strong and perhaps, even armed uprising (allegedly instigated from the West)? Would he have the freedom enjoyed by Aliaksandr Lukashenka when he ordered to shoot at the protesters in Belarus? Would there be a chance of a military intervention from a neighboring country in case the events get particularly ruthless? What if the opposition finds a safe haven to operate from a geographically close, culturally related, and militarily supported by the West country like Ukraine? What if Ukraine turns into an “anti-Russia”, as Putin calls it in his paper – an embodiment of political alternative to his own rule? These are the risks Putin is not going to take.
This combination of domestic and external factors that are most probably indivisible for Putin and members of his Security Council makes subjugation of Ukraine a matter of survival for them, rather than a prize for imperial conquest. Control over Ukraine is an urgent security issue, for it is likely that in a few years the country will obtain enough military presence from the Western partners to leave the Russian orbit for good. The internal support for a possible military action is also likely to decline. In addition to that, Russia currently enjoys a maximum control over energy supplies to Europe, which makes the Europeans less likely to retaliate: the consumption of Russian gas is expected to decrease as Europe switches to renewable energy sources. Russian currency reserves are now at $624 bn, which makes the country resistant to possible sanctions. Finally, Putin has mentioned several times that he believes that at this point Russia possesses a certain military advantage over the West, but the West is likely to catch up in a few years (most probably, he means the hypersonic weapons).
Putin needs to subdue Ukraine, and he’d better do it before it is too late – or at least this is the calculation that his political system makes unavoidable. This doesn’t mean that war is the only possible outcome of the current crisis. But it entails that Putin is unlikely to abandon his plans in the near future, for the perceived costs of delay are unacceptable. Moreover, the military escalation he initiated has already incurred additional costs: Ukraine is now even more likely to accelerate the military cooperation with the West, and Europe is expected to reconsider its dependence on Russian energy. The total cost of inaction is now even higher than it was last year.
There is no doubt that Russia has become a major destabilizing force in the European region. However, this is not going to change as long as Vladimir Putin remains in power. On the contrary, the military risks are rising as Putin feels his rule is less secure. It is more difficult to tell if a military operation will be a success for Putin. After all, Napoleon’s III rule that looked unshakeable in the spring of 1870, ended just in several months with a military catastrophe after he provoked creation of a strong alliance against himself. One can only guess if history repeats itself in the nuclear era.
Greg Yudin, Professor of Political Philosophy, The Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences