• Weakness at Home Drives Putin to Invade Ukraine

    From David P@21:1/5 to All on Sun Feb 27 00:09:17 2022
    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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