Putin strengthens his autocracy

Of all the objectives that Vladimir Putin set for himself when he launched his “special military operation”, only one of them – the most important for the survival of his regime – has been fully achieved: the last phase of the capture of the Russian state by the siloviki. The former agents of the KGB, of which Putin was an agent for 16 years, have laminated the opposition –imprisoning it, poisoning it, dismantling it…– and liquidated the residual civil liberties of the Russians.

Since February 24, when the invasion began, the police have detained some 16,000 people applying the new criminal code that punishes with up to 15 years in prison the spread of “false news” about the war. More than 150,000 Russians have preferred exile to ending up in Lefortovo, the Moscow prison that is becoming one more of the islands of the emerging Gulag archipelago that is being built by the FSB, the Russian federal security service that even inherited the old barracks of the KGB in Moscow’s Lubyanka Square.

As William Taubman, biographer of Nikita Khrushchev and Mikhail Gorbachev, writes in Foreign Policy, the former general secretaries of the CPSU would envy the power that Putin has concentrated in their hands. In 1964, in a palace coup, the Supreme Soviet, the Central Committee and the Politburo removed Khrushchev from office. It seems unlikely that something similar will happen to the new master of the Kremlin, who as a spy knows a lot about intrigues and conspiracies and how to abort them.

NKVD, KGB, FSB…

In 1991, as soon as he came to power, Boris Yeltsin removed parliamentary oversight of the intelligence and security services. Now the FSB has taken it upon itself to crack down on the new refuseniks –scientists, military, lawyers, journalists…– and of the operations in the occupied territories in Ukraine, with which their model has ceased to be the KGB, according to what they say in foreign affairs Irina Borogan and Andrei Soldatov. Their new functions, they point out, are more similar to those of the NKVD, Stalin’s secret police, which was in charge of political purges, the nuclear program and foreign espionage, among other missions for which its commanders only responded to Stalin. and Lavrenti Beria, his boss between 1938 and 1953, when he was executed on Khrushchev’s orders.

«The new functions of the FSB are more similar to those of the NKVD, Stalin’s secret police, than to those of the KGB»

According to Moscow’s Levada center, Putin’s current support is around 83%, 10 points higher than before the invasion. It’s explainable. 75% of Russians believe that their country needs a “strong man” in the Kremlin. Mikhail Piotrovsky, director of the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, explains with a mixture of Soviet nostalgia and cultural arrogance, that Russians “are all imperialists and militarists (…) Russia reaffirms itself in war.”

In 2014, the annexation of Crimea rejuvenated Putin’s rule and sustained his popularity for years, until in 2019 it began to fall after the government raised the retirement age. In September 2021, only 46% were willing to re-elect him. In May they were 72%.

Prolonged War of Attrition

According to Taubman, Putin is convinced that a protracted war of attrition will exhaust his enemies before Russia. Despite its difficulties in Ukraine, Russia still has the fifth largest army in the world, with 900,000 troops and two million reservists.

Although British intelligence sources estimate that the Russian army has lost some 25,000 men killed and wounded in Ukraine and a thousand tanks from an invading force of 300,000 troops, including support units, the historical subordination of the military – Russian and Soviet – the civil power guarantees the security of the siloviki on that flank.

“Russian Defense Ministry Websites Offer Salaries Between $2,000 And $6,000 A Month To Anyone Who Knows How To Shoot A Grenade Launcher”

In order not to have to resort to a general mobilization, Moscow is intensifying its recruitment campaigns for members of ethnic minorities – Chechens, Dagestans, Buryats… – for whom the army has always been a source of work. In June, according to Mediazona, 225 Dagestans and 185 Buryats died in Ukraine, compared to only nine Muscovites.

Russian Defense Ministry websites offer salaries of between $2,000 and $6,000 a month to anyone who knows how to fire a grenade launcher. Before the war, the average salary for a private was around $200 a month.

End of the ‘Pax Americana’?

In the end, the winner in a war is not the strongest but the one who is willing to go to the end, Piotrovsky recalls. The great powers – like the US in Vietnam or Afghanistan – are often willing to bear great losses and sacrifices to preserve their prestige. And often rightly so. Moscow perceived the humiliating US withdrawal from Afghanistan as a green light to rebuild military manual in Ukraine its former sphere of influence.

With a population and economy three times the size of Ukraine, even in the worst case scenario for its interests, Russia will set the conditions for an armistice like the one that ended the Korean War in 1953. According to Bloomberg, this year Russia will enter 285,000 million dollars for its gas and oil exports, compared to 236,000 million in 2021. Before the war, the country exported three million barrels a day. Today almost four because China, India and Turkey are massively buying Russian crude at discounts of up to $35 per barrel.

In January, 75 rubles were paid per dollar. In March, 135, and today, 55, due to strict exchange controls. Russian elites and middle classes cannot use their credit cards abroad, their Netflix subscriptions or travel to the EU because they no longer have visas and flights. But for the rest of Russians – living in poor industrial cities and rural villages dependent on state subsidies – the war has changed little.

Due to the sanctions, imports have fallen by one sixth – and those of semiconductors by 74% – according to the Russian bank Sberbank. But Russia, like Iran and Venezuela, know how to use multiple tricks to circumvent Western sanctions. As long as its Russian finances remain stable, Russia will have customers and business partners.

At the recent “Russian Davos” economic forum in St. Petersburg, Putin boasted that fiscal and monetary discipline had stabilized Russia’s financial system and foreign trade. Vladislav Zubok suggests in foreign affairs that if Gorbachev had had Anton Siluanov in the Ministry of Finance and Elvira Nabiullina in the central bank, perhaps the CPSU would still be in power in Moscow today like the PCCh in Beijing.

Narrative Control and the Police State

With its control of the media, the Kremlin controls the “narratives” as well. The 2021 National Security Strategy report mentioned history and memory 30 times. Putin’s 2021 essay asserting that Ukraine on its current borders is an “anti-Russian project” is now required reading in military academies.

«In 2019, a law forced operators to install a system that can monitor, filter, slow down and block access to certain websites»

In December 2021, a court liquidated Memorial International, the most important Russian organization for the defense of human rights. The websites of BBC, Radio Free Europe, Deutsche Welle Y euronews and the Twitter, Instagram and Facebook platforms have been blocked since the end of February. In 2019, a law forced operators to install a system that can monitor, filter, slow down and block access to certain websites.

The list of victims continues to grow. On July 7, Ivan Safronov served two years in prison, who in 2019 revealed a fire aboard the Losharik nuclear submarine in which 14 sailors died. He now faces a 20-year sentence for refusing to reveal his sources. Trials are held behind closed doors. Uncomfortable journalists receive messages from their banks telling them that their accounts have been blocked because of the criminal investigations that have been opened against them.

Following her arrest on July 17, Marina Ovsiannikova, who interrupted a live newscast with an anti-war banner, could lose custody of her children. Late March, Novaya Gazeta – the diary of Anna Politkóvskaya, assassinated in 2006, and whose editor, Dmitri Muratov, received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021 – closed its online and print publications after it published a special issue in Russian and Ukrainian denouncing the invasion.

Countdown

Putin seems convinced that public opinion in Western countries will soon revolt against the deprivation and inconvenience that their governments’ support for kyiv entails and that they will soon demand that they put pressure on him to give in to Moscow’s territorial demands, which wants to cut off Ukraine’s access to the Black Sea shores to suffocate its economy.

“Moscow perceives that its tactics are already bearing fruit, with Boris Johnson and Mario Draghi as its first victims and most visible casualties”

Moscow perceives that its tactics are already bearing fruit, with Boris Johnson and Mario Draghi as its first victims and most visible casualties. And in 2024 the biggest piece – Joe Biden – could be collected if Donald Trump returns to the White House, where one of his first decisions could be to get the US out of NATO.

The first contact announced between the Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, and the Russian Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, is a sign that the realpolitik is making its way into the White House. He does so at a time when the Himars, missile launchers with a range of up to 80 kilometers, that he has sent to Ukraine are balancing the war situation on the ground by compensating for the overwhelming firepower of the Russian artillery.

But the fact that Russia halted its advance in an “operational pause” following the July 2 Ukrainian withdrawal from Lysychansk does not mean that Ukraine is in a position to regain territory, as Gen. Mark Milley, chief of staff, admits. from USA. Thomas Friedman in New York Times and Fareed Zakaria in The Washington Post, They agree that Putin and his military need only get through the winter to impose their demands at the negotiating table.