Weakness at Home Drives Putin to Invade Ukraine
By David Satter, Feb. 22, 2022, WSJ
Russia’s preparations to invade Ukraine and threats of
nuclear war should come as no surprise. Vladimir Putin is
ready to resort to a level of blackmail not seen since the
days of the Soviet Union because threatening war is the
most effective way for him to consolidate support for his
senescent regime.
The use of foreign aggression to rally support for the regime
is not new in Russia. For many Russians, the idea that they
were citizens of a powerful state was historically a vital
part of their identity. The 2014 annexation of Crimea was
presented as a return to Russian greatness and, in its wake,
Putin’s approval rating rose to 80% from 60%. The annexation
inspired a wave of euphoria and mass celebrations that lasted
five years.
Many believe Putin wants to re-create the Soviet Union, but
it is much more likely that in threatening Kyiv, he wants to
re-create the “Crimea effect,” in which, according to Nikolai
Petrov of Moscow’s Higher School of Economics, Russians “forgot
their worries & felt everything was allowed & anything was possible.”
Consolidating Russians around the regime is almost certainly a
priority because, despite appearances, Putin has created an
unstable structure of power. There are signs that the population’s
patience with massive corruption is waning. On Jan. 23, 2021,
protests broke out all over Russia in reaction to the arrest of
anticorruption blogger Alexei Navalny and the contents of his
film “A Palace for Putin,” which describes the ruler’s 190,000- square-foot residence on the Black Sea, built in part with funds
taken from a $1 billion program to improve Russia’s healthcare system.
Popular discontent with corruption has been building for years.
A 2011 survey by the Russian Academy of Sciences found that 34% of
Russians “always” wished “they could shoot down all bribe-takers
and speculators,” while 38% said they “sometimes” did. Much of
this corruption is associated with Putin. In 2017, after accusations
that the then-Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev had embezzed $1.2 billion, demonstrators in Moscow blamed the president as well, shouting:
“Putin is a thief.”
Besides anger over corruption, there is exhaustion and a sense of
insecurity in Russia generated by the system’s overall lawlessness.
According to Tamara Morshchakova, a former judge of the Russian
Constitutional Court, “Any official can dictate any decision in any case.”
One reflection of the situation is that Russians file more complaints
with the European Court of Human Rights than the citizens of any of
the 46 countries that make up the Council of Europe, 13,645 complaints
in 2020. The figure for the U.K. was 124.
The regime must also deal with its own history, in particular the
bombings of four buildings in Moscow, Buinaksk and Volgodonsk that
killed 300 people in September 1999 and were used to justify the war
in Chechnya that brought Putin to power. When 3 people were arrested
on suspicion of placing a fifth bomb in the basement of a building in
Ryazan, southeast of Moscow, they weren’t Chechen terrorists but agents
of the Federal Security Service, or FSB.
The apartment bombings were followed by other terrorist acts in
which there was evidence of official involvement, including the
2002 Dubrovka Theater siege in which the terrorists’ explosive
devices were prepared by a retired major in Russian military
intelligence and the Beslan school siege, in which the Chechen
terrorists had just been freed from Russian prisons.
The crimes of the post-Soviet era are not the subject of active
attention, but their exposure would threaten the regime. It was the
revelations about the crimes of the Soviet era as a result of glasnost
that brought down the Soviet Union.
During my years of living and writing in Russia, I frequently
encountered the readiness of Russians to identify with the power
of the state. On a spring day in 1980, I was standing in line for
potatoes when a fight broke out in the queue. A man began shouting,
“These lines are a disgrace. How can we live like this?” The crowd
became animated and an old woman said, “Never mind—the whole world
is afraid of us.”
After the fall of the Soviet Union, there were decades in which
it seemed that no one was afraid of Russia any more. This led to
the syndrome of “Weimar Russia,” a longing for past greatness,
which the right demagogue could exploit.
A liberal Russian journalist who reported on organized crime in
the 2000s told me that when Mr. Putin massed troops on the Ukrainian
border, even Russians who had quarrels with the regime were ready
to give it their support. The situation evokes memories of a powerful
past. There is furious diplomatic activity and Russia becomes the
center of attention. The danger for Putin is that, in his drive to
protect his corrupt regime, he will underestimate his opponent and
go too far.
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Mr. Satter is author, most recently, of “Never Speak to Strangers
and Other Writing From Russia and the Soviet Union.”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/weak-approval-putin-force-ukraine-russia-invasion-crimea-greatness-corruption-kremlin-oligarch-civil-unrest-apartment-bombing-dissent-11645541932
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