Kremlin Instability - Nadin Brzezinski (Medium)

Pressões dos ultranacionalistas russos para o aumento da repressão aos dissidentes, e adoção de práticas stalinistas do passado totalitário, são os assuntos tratados nesta matéria, que também se detém sobre eventual doença do tirano de Moscou e do presidente atual da Turquia. Ou seja, mais instabilidade não apenas no Kremlin, mas na região como um todo.

Kremlin Instability

Nadin Brzezinski

Medium, Apr 26

·

https://nadinbrzezinski.medium.com/kremlin-instability-7182b29a4910

Russian Editorial Cartoon via Telegram

This one crossed this morning from the Institute for the Study of War. They have also noticed the same thing I have. There are signals that instability in the Kremlin is increasing. I will quote them directly instead of the noise via Ukrainian channels because it’s significant. It also matches my observations:

Russian ultranationalists are continuing to advocate for the Kremlin to adopt Stalinist repression measures. Russian State Duma Parliamentarian Andrey Gurulyov — a prominent Russian ultranationalist figure within the ruling United Russia Party — stated that Russia needs to reintroduce the concept of the “enemy of the people.”[10] This concept designated all the late Soviet leader Joseph Stalin’s opposition figures as the enemies of society. Gurulyov frequently shares extreme opinions on Russian state television but the rhetoric among the ultranationalists is increasingly emphasizing the need for the targeting and elimination of Russia’s internal enemies. Former Russian officer Igor Girkin and Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin often echo similar calls to prosecute Russian officials who are hoping to end the war via negotiations with the West. Such attitudes indicate that the ultranationalist communities are expecting Russian President Vladimir Putin to expand repression and fully commit to the war.

The Kremlin continues to avoid adopting overtly repressive measures likely out of concern for the stability of Putin’s regime. The Russian government withdrew a bill from the Russian State Duma that would have increased taxes from 13 to 30 percent for Russians who have fled the country.[11] Russian ultranationalists have repeatedly called on the Kremlin to nationalize property belonging to Russians who had “betrayed” the country by fleeing, but the Kremlin appears to remain hesitant to introduce such unpopular measures. Unnamed sources told Russian independent outlet Verska that the Russian presidential administration does not support the return of capital punishments in Russia — another issue that recently reemerged in Russian policy discussions.[12] The Kremlin could use the threat of the death penalty to scare Russians into supporting the war effort (or remaining passively resistant to it), but Putin likely remains hesitant to destroy his image as a diplomatic and tolerant tsar. ISW previously assessed that Putin relies on controlling the information space to safeguard his regime much more than the kind of massive oppression apparatus of the Soviet Union and that Putin has never rebuilt an internal repression apparatus equivalent to the KGB, Interior Ministry forces, and the Red Army.[13]

Realize we are all watching the same channels, I suspect. So we see the same demands for SMERSH and other repressive techniques. This also points to the next point. We seem to be shaping operations before the offensive begins. We have explosions inside Crimea and Russia, near the border regions.

One of our Z Channels is nice to tell us this…and no, there is no precise confirmation of this, except the explosions at this point, for example, on Rostov-on-Don, and Nikolaev on the Ukrainian side.

There is an unprecedented movement on the border in Belgorod and Kursk regions. Drones fly swarms in both directions. The equipment is here, they drag everything and everything. Both ours and the enemy. The Nazis pulled technical means to the border. Our air reconnaissance is being tinguished. We lost a few Maviks this week. But we also do not lag behind, today not without a catch — the Khokhla has minus two drones. Active movement and arrival of new equipment were noticed in Zolochev.

We are seeing those over other channels.

Now on a larger piece, apparently, Vladimir Putin was driven to the Kremlin overnight. There is a lot of speculation as to why. So here are two versions. I will add a third; the front is starting to heat up with shaping operations:

Putin’s cortege raced unscheduledly in the evening towards the Kremlin. The media are building versions of the president’s emergency visit to the workplace: from Erdogan’s disease to confiscation of assets in Poland.

There were rumors that President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan had a heart attack. This is now getting disputed. But what is true is that meetings were indeed canceled.

And a change at the top of the leadership in Turkey will prove democracy works. This is dangerous for Russia. While many have given up on Turkish democracy, perhaps this is too early.

Now, this brings me to General SVR. This is why I suspect they are putting out code for somebody. No, nobody survives pancreatic cancer this long. So if this is what ails Putin, he must donate his body to science.

But I digress.

Every time things go badly for the regime, his cancer issues…this week colon, last week pancreas…whatever, it’s oncology, get worse. His case gets nearly out of control, and boy doubles start to become a thing. The medicine starts to work…being a former medic, hardly a specialist; this smells of creative writing.

Are there doubles? Probably. It’s not unusual for authoritarian leaders to have some. But the story that he is dying from a fast-killing cancer is back again. At this point, I tend to interpret that part of the story as code to the regime's stability. This is one reason I read the channel.

And occasionally, they put out something that does turn out to be right. Should you rely on them, for Putin will die tomorrow? Nope. And if you do, the British Press adds nice embellishments to these stories. Assume there is no cancer. Hell, there is not a cold. What there is, well, paranoia. And as we start to get closer to the end of this, if the Ukrainian offensive goes well, here is why this started, according to MO:

Last drops for Putin. Six personal motives of the dictator that led to the war with Ukraine

Vladimir Putin decided to start a war a year before the invasion, in February-March 2021, Nyurstka found out after talking with sources in the Russian and Ukrainian authorities. Moreover, he was guided, among other things, by personal motives — resentment and the desire to take revenge. Sources told what exactly overwhelmed his “cup of patience”:

💧2004 Orange Revolution
Putin’s attitude towards Ukraine deteriorated along with relations with the West. A major blow to Putin was the 2004 Orange Revolution, which he sees as the work of the United States.
💧Dangerous Philosophy
In 2012, Putin began to spend a lot of time reading ultra-conservative books. His “mentor” was the White Guard philosopher Ivan Ilyin. Modern nationalists also began to influence Putin more.
💧Maidan and the flight of Yanukovych
“Putin said: guys, this is our last chance, there won’t be another chance like this, I take responsibility,” said a close acquaintance of the decision of the owner of the Kremlin to seize Crimea.
💧The impracticability of the Minsk agreements
Putin seriously hoped to outwit the Ukrainian authorities with the help of the Minsk agreements and personally participated in their writing. But he failed in the end to push through either Poroshenko or Zelensky.
💧The closure of Medvedchuk’s media assets
The fact that the Ukrainian authorities began to “nightmare” Putin’s godfather Medvedchuk was the last straw in Putin’s decision to prepare for a military operation.
💧Quarantine in the bunker
During a long isolation, Yuriy Kovalchuk gained a particularly strong influence on his friend, convincing the president that power in Kyiv could be changed quickly and painlessly.

Putin is a typical psychopath, and losing control of himself, says American neuroscientist, professor at the University of California James Fallon. “Putin’s facial expressions also speak of Putin’s failures,” the American professor notes. He became more like a wild animal in a cage. But that only made him more dangerous.”

Some we have heard before, which brings me back to Turkey. If Erdogan loses, this will not be received well by Moscow. It will be another Orange revolution of sorts. I see the influence of the ultranationalist right as well. It is evident in how Putin speaks.

This war is making the regime unstable. A defeat could bring the country to the conditions of the early 1990s. The vertical of power, which also relies on patronage networks, will suffer. It could also go away. The pressure towards disolución is increasing.

Russian Air Force Probes Ukrainian Defense - The West needs to scale up quickly (Medium)

 Russian Air Force Probes Ukrainian Defense

The West needs to scale up quickly
Medium, April 20, 2023

This year, Ukraine intercepted nearly 90% of Russian missiles, up from 50%-60% in June last year. “Over the New Year’s weekend, the Ukrainian military said it downed every single one of the 80-odd exploding drones that Russia sent the country’s way”.

It is a stunning response to a weakness the Russian military had tried to exploit.

However, taking down Russian missiles and drones targeting Ukrainian civilian infrastructure has come at a price. In the absence of a dramatic and rapid change, the cost of keeping Russia’s long-range aerial attacks in check looks like an arduous task.

As an example, the Shahed-136 drones Russia purchased from Iran are very cheap when compared to the weapons Ukraine uses to destroy them.

“The Iranian drones can cost as little as $20,000 to produce, while the cost of firing one of the surface-to-air missiles used by Ukraine can range from $140,000 for a Soviet-era S-300 to $500,000 for a U.S.-made NASAM, or National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile System”.

The Ukrainian government is aware of the problem. President Volodymyr Zelensky said that Russia is betting on the “exhaustion of our people, our air defense, our energy sector.”

Ukraine’s air-defense is running low on ammunition
Since October last year, Russia has repeatedly attacked Ukraine's civilian infrastructure with Iranian drones and missiles. As Russian air-defense missiles were repurposed to attack Ukrainian infrastructure, some experts speculated that Russia’s weapons stockpile has run out.

The lack of precision weapons was often cited as the reason why Russia used a wide array of weapons against the Ukrainian electric grid, heating systems, and water supplies. But the Russian military was also trying to impose heavy costs on Ukraine in order to protect its civilian population.

In order to protect its citizens and soldiers, the Ukrainian government took whatever steps they could to protect them. As a result, Ukraine took down drones worth $20k with +$100k missiles. And those missiles aren’t easy to make.

Russia is well aware of the difficulties associated with manufacturing high-end weapons.

At the start of the invasion, the Russians made a stressful effort to take control of the Ukrainian sky. Ukrainian air defenses and their readiness to face the Russian air force prevented the Russians from enforcing the terms from the skies. Putin ordered the Russian air force to retreat after losing aircrafts at an alarming rate in the first few weeks of the war.

“The Russian Army has been mauled,” Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in an interview with MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” in February. “But the Russian Air Force has not.”

An assessment in the recently leaked Pentagon document puts the number of Russian fighter jets currently deployed in the Ukraine theater at 485 compared with 85 Ukrainian jets.

The Russian air force still remains largely intact. We do not know the status of the ammunition the Russian air force has and the number of experienced pilots who are still available for challenging combat missions. But the sheer size of the Russian air force does offer Putin potential to change things in the battlefield.

As of now, Putin is not sending his air force to even help his ground troops. From his point of view, humans can be recruited, forced into a suicide mission and another guy can be found to replace the dead human. But replacing an air craft needs time and money. The two things Putin does not have.

This also explains why Putin never ordered his air force to work in close co-ordination with his ground troops. He is not going to send his rooks to save his pawns.

But, if the battlefield landscape changes and the Ukrainian army makes a successful charge to hit the rear of the Russian occupation chain in Ukraine, Putin will reach a stage where it makes sense to throw everything in his possession.

The rooks may finally come out in order to protect the king.

Russia is already testing Ukrainian air defenses from the margins
After months of regular attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure targets, the Russian air force is probing to see if there is any weakness in the multi-layered Ukrainian air-defense.

Russian air force is “bombing in Bakhmut, particularly at night so that they can avoid most types of MANPADS. It’s only one particular MANPAD system, I think, that Ukraine has that’s effective at night,” said, Michael Kofman, the director of the Russia Studies Program at the Center for Naval Analyses

“So the Russian Air Force has been making bombing runs, and even while I was there, I could hear sort of the distant echo of Russian jets,” Kofman said noting that Ukrainian jets are also still active but in a limited role.

“It’s clear that they are pushing more airpower into the fight for Bakhmut, and they’re also testing to what extent Ukraine has radar-guided air-defense still up and available,” Kofman said. “Because they know that availability of ammunition, basically missiles, for radar-guided air-defense is a problem for Ukraine and has been since October.”

“You can see that the Russian airpower is kind of playing in the margins but looking for ways to push itself into the fight,” Kofman added.

It is clear that all the parties involved, Ukraine, Russians and the West, are aware of this development. It will depend on what the west is prepared to do from now on as to how serious a threat the Russian air force can pose during the Ukrainian counter-offensive.

Russia has its own problems
Not only Ukraine, but the Russian air force also has some seething troubles that need urgent attention. It’s evident that Putin has a backup plan to counter the Ukrainian offensive, but even this plan has plenty of human sized holes in it.

According to a report by the Royal United Services Institute, a British think tank, the Russian air force lacks fully trained pilots and makes poor use of its few good ones.

“Ukrainian assessments concluded that given limited flight hours and the practice of training being delivered in units, the VKS (Russian air force) entered the conflict with fewer than 100 fully trained and current pilots,” the report said.

Less than 100 fully trained pilots!!

Russian armed forces have repeatedly demonstrated their incompetence to the entire world over and over, so anything is possible. I am not prepared to rule out the possibility that they are running out of experienced pilots. This is an army that assumed it would topple Kyiv in 100 hours but ended up fighting for more than a year.

Ukrainian Air Defense Needs a Serious Upgrade
The western planners have explicitly stated that they are not ready to provide fighter jets to Ukraine. If that decision was made early on, what were they thinking when Russia began attacking civilian infrastructure?

In December, more than 70 countries came together in Paris to raise over a billion dollars to help Ukraine survive the winter. They helped Ukraine rebuild the power grid brought down by Russia but forgot Ukraine will need strong air defense systems to protect the power grid.

The Pentagon leak, assuming its real, shows that the US officials are worried about the effectiveness of the Ukrainian counter-offensive. Of course you should be concerned as the west does not grant Ukraine the long range weapons it needs to make it more difficult for Russia to hide its warehouses.

There is no question that it will be difficult for Ukraine to drive the entire Russian army off its land since the west took forever to supply heavy weapons and engineering equipment to Ukraine.

Every day that passes without Ukraine having the tools to tackle the enemy is another day that the Russians can dig deeper, lay mines, double barbed-wire fences, recruit more soldiers, and exhaust Ukraine’s air defenses.

However, Ukraine has proven time and again that it can make full use of the limited weapons and ammunition supplied by the west. Ukraine asked for 60 plus multiple rocket launchers, but got less than half of that number. They asked for long range missiles, but were given artillery with a maximum range of less than 100 kilometers.

But they still managed to drive the Russians from Kyiv, Kharkiv and Kherson. It is only because of the terrain and the weather, Ukraine had to take the foot of their offensive pedal.

Intelligence agencies never gave Ukraine a chance of winning the war with Russia.

“The initial pessimism about Ukraine’s chances was, however, scarcely unreasonable. Russia had overwhelming superiority in the standard measures of military power, such as the number of soldiers and the quantity and quality of major armaments.

In the event, stronger morale, superior generalship, and Russia’s overconfidence (and consequent expectation of a rapid victory) proved of outsize importance. By now Ukraine has amply demonstrated just how significant these and other, often intangible elements can be”.

And Russia’s many military shortcomings have become evident to the point that even ardent pro-war Russian nationalists openly acknowledge them, recognizing that the winter offensive has failed to push the frontline forward substantially, and questioning the prospects for success. Yet many Western assessments of the war’s likely course and outcome still assume that none of this will matter very much and that Russia will prevail because it will learn from its mistakes and has material resources that far exceed Ukraine’s”.

As long as western intelligence assessments continue to discount the tangibles that heavily favor Ukraine, I refuse to believe them. They were wrong before the war. And they were proved wrong again and again over the last twelve months.

Let them remain pessimistic as long as they like.

Ukraine
Ukraine War

The Empire Strikes Back: Putin’s Drive To Revive Soviet Borders Is Doomed - Barry Gander (Medium)

The Empire Strikes Back: Putin’s Drive To Revive Soviet Borders Is Doomed

 

https://barry-gander.medium.com/the-empire-strikes-back-putins-drive-to-revive-soviet-borders-is-doomed-faf588929d03

 

Barry Gander

Medium, March 26, 2023

 

Thousands flee Putin’s Russia into Georgia as part of a million-person refugee tide.

We have been here before.

History gives us a way to forecast Russia’s future, as the reign of state control again erodes the country’s ability to move forward.

These events have happened back in 1991, when Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev was faced with a coup by Soviet security forces. But the coup’s leaders had no popular support, and the ruling bureaucracy was also split. Boris Yeltsin climbed aboard a tank, the people of Moscow rallied for freedom and democracy, and the coup leaders surrendered within days.

The coup by the security forces actually accelerated the demise of the Soviet Union. It gave the people of the USSR a stark choice. Yes, independence was frightening, but it could not be worse than the totalitarian alternative. In turn, republic after Soviet republic tumbled towards independence. In Moscow a jubilant crowd tore down the statue of “Iron” Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the secret police, right in front of the KGB headquarters.

That revolution for freedom was extinguished in the heartland, a bit at a time, by Putin, through assassination, mass bombings and military occupation.

Now however Putin’s overlay of dictatorship is also fraying, and the pattern of freedom is reasserting itself again. This is “Overthrow 2.0”.

Putin has just been betrayed by China, which is about to tear out Russia’s Asian heartland.

Russia’s other dependencies are attracted to Western values, and are seeking independence — just like 1991.

Once an area has tasted independence from a dominating power, it will not go back into its box.

This is the problem facing Putin as he fumbles to put back the pieces of the old Soviet empire.

He has denied that he has a goal of re-establishing the Soviet Empire. His denials lost credibility after he ordered Russian troops to be sent to eastern Ukraine. We have been here before with this man.

He has continually questioned Ukraine’s sovereignty. In 2008, Russia supported two Georgian separatist regions and has backed a breakaway region of Moldova, Transnistria, since the 1990s. He annexed Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula in 2014. He became the first person to annex sovereign foreign territory by force since Saddam Hussein in Kuwait. He cut off Europe’s energy supplies, threatened the use of nukes, and ran a fascist propaganda campaign around the world.

Last year his militia took over eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk and Lugansk rebel republics and he recognized them as “independent-with-Russian-troops”.

Weeks before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine he was insisting that he had no intention of attacking Ukraine and accused the U.S. and NATO of stoking the tension by refusing to accept Moscow’s demands for “security guarantees” from the Western alliance.

Ukraine wants to be part of Europe. There is no guarantee Putin could get that would change that perspective. It also wants to be part of NATO. Both organizations are voluntary bodies — no one is forced to belong and no “security guarantees” can be part of an equation where the people have picked the path to democracy.

Putin actually wants guarantees against freedom, not NATO.

The desire for freedom is hard to detect in Russia itself, because the people are so muffled.

But it can be seen more clearly in Russia’s fringe of reluctant puppet states, where the control is less. They are able to make the choice that faced the Russians themselves in 1991: do you want freedom or do you want to be ruled by a gong show run by a poisoning dictator and his five gangs of thieves.

It is not really surprising that the West “let” Putin turn Russia into a concentration camp. At any step where a change could be made, it would mean fighting a world war. That is what kept the allies from stopping Hitler when he occupied the Rhineland. In a democracy, could the French President have gone to his people with a motivating rationale for war against Hitler?

Dictatorships have it easy; democratic countermeasures are hard. We need to have some sympathy and understanding for the bewildered democracies in Europe in the 1930s.

But we have learned from that era.

In the build-up to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, to paraphrase Winston Churchill’s definition of appeasement, we are feeding the crocodiles, hoping they will eat us last.

(And I will keep calling this “Putin’s War”, not “Russia’s War”. The Russians were never asked for their approval. That would have meant the need for a reason for the war…beyond ego-driven empire-building)

Instead of standing on our principles about the universal values of human rights and human life, we quibbled with Russia’s propagandists about whether Russia’s feelings were being hurt. Is it uncomfortable for you to have NATO so close? OOPS — our fault!

But it has never been about NATO. Russia has in the past acknowledged Ukraine’s right to join NATO. Taking NATO off the table will not quell his insecurity; what he fears is democracy. In fact, up until Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, NATO had been drawing down resources in Europe, not increasing them.

Our focus therefore has to be the final triumph of Western-style democracy over bygone dictatorships. NO appeasement or apologies will be possible, because this is a binary game: democracy or dictatorship.

And in the process, we cannot promote democracy while treating the leaders of the world’s most repressive regimes as equals, advises Garry Kasparov, former chess champion turned activist. His mother had hung a sign above his bed — a saying of the Soviet dissidents — “If not you, who else?” We are all responsible for seeing that justice is done.

We have a lot on our side.

Almost every nation in the world that matters today is democratic. There was a time in the 1940s when dictators ruled from the English Channel to the Bering Sea. Now there are only TWO meaningful hold-outs: Russia and China.

I may be wrong, but I sense that China can evolve; we don’t need to shake a spear at them. Their biggest existential threat anyway is India, not America: India is poised to take their jobs and industry.

Our goal in Russia would ideally be to provide the citizens with hope and possibilities for a brighter future.

They exist right now in an increasingly fraught environment. The war is going badly. Russia currently controls only 17 percent of Ukrainian territory, which is the least amount of area that its forces have occupied since April. Russian leaders can see that the walls of their tents are coming down, and the light is getting in.

And sadly, Russia will not become a democracy until it falls apart. Russia is not really a nation-state but a premodern multiethnic empire living for 300 years on geographic expansion and resource looting.

Russia’s influence in the region has waned and citizens have repeatedly signaled their desire to escape Moscow’s grasp. Subservience to Putin is now required. If the regions could be free, why could not the Russians themselves?

This almost happened, in the elections in 2011. They were the largest protests in Russia since the Soviet collapse. Ordinary Russians showed themselves to have both the will and the capability to threaten his grip on power.

With this fear of democracy as his overriding motive, Putin will remain committed to undermining Georgian, Moldovan, Armenian, etc. democracy and sovereignty.

Russia has gotten so good at quelling regional aspirations that the government of Iran asked Russia for help in suppressing a popular uprising.

The former USSR. All the states not marked “Russia” will become independent as soon as they can. The central Asia group is now being courted by China, in a display of breathtaking hypocrisy by President Xi.

In Kazakhstan, for example, there were nationwide protests against fuel prices last year. The protests morphed into a working-class grievance campaign. The President could not get a response from his own security forces and called on the Russians. The crowds were brutally crushed and 238 people died. The former defence minister has just been jailed for not doing enough to protect the government.

Dagestan is a mountainous republic within the Russian Federation. There have been confrontations between police and crowds of mothers who were infuriated that their sons were being drafted for the war in Ukraine.

Some other ethnic minority parts of the Russian Federation, including its 22 ethnic republics, as well as other far-flung territories, or krais, even majority ethnic Russian ones, have seen anti-mobilization protests in recent weeks — as far afield as the Siberian city of Yakutsk, the capital of the Sakha Republic and Vladivostok in Russia’s far east.

While they have died down for now they have left sullen anger and resentment, which is compounding long-standing economic and local political grievances in the Russian Federation’s periphery.

Russia’s ethnic republics and far-flung territories will not remain quiet and subdued for much longer, suspects Russian-born political scientist Sergej Sumlenny, a former chief editor at Russian business broadcaster RBC-TV.

“The republics have long chafed under Moscow’s imperial rule — so too territories in the far east and parts of remote northern Russia.” The seeds of potential rebellion, especially in the North Caucasus, the Sakha Republic and the Middle Volga, are being sown, he thinks. Increasing economic distress and impoverishment, the exploitation of natural resources only for the benefit of Moscow, the failure to drive development and investment, a reckless attitude to pollution and environmental degradation, and governance swinging from repression to negligence are all stoking simmering grievance.”

What could trigger real revolt? “It could be a small spark,” he says. “Look at what triggered the Arab spring — a Tunisian fruit vendor setting himself on fire over injustice. Or look at Iran now: it can be something [like] … the death of a 22-year-old Kurdish woman because she wasn’t wearing a hijab. Revolt is often be sparked by perceived insult.

Russia’s Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu made a comparison to Yugoslavia, warning external pressures combined with internal threats risk breaking up the Russian Federation along ethnic and religious lines. At the Beijing Xiangshan Forum in 2019, Shoigu said: “Chaos and the collapse of statehood are becoming the norm.”

When the Soviet Union dissolved it wasn’t only the big constituent republics of the Soviet Union — like Ukraine, the Baltic states and Kazakhstan — that sought independence. Many of Russia’s smaller republics and even some far-flung predominantly Russian territories, cities and regions used the political turmoil to claim or to try to grab autonomy.

In 1990, fourteen of the 22 republics of the Russian Federation declared themselves sovereign and when a Federation Treaty was being negotiated the heads of several republics, including Tatarstan, demanded the new post-Communist Russian constitution recognize their “state sovereignty” as well as a right to secede from the Russian Federation. Chechnya refused to sign the Federation Treaty and declared independence, triggering an 18-month war of liberation.

Putin decided that the sovereignty of the Russian Federation would override any declaration of sovereignty by the republics or other federal subjects. Provincial authorities have been weakened.

Any candidate in a regional election who wants to register must have Kremlin backing and Putin can sack and appoint regional heads at will.

In 2021 the Russian justice ministry suspended the activities of Tatarstan’s All-Tatar Public Center “due to its extremist activities.”

Last month, retired U.S. General Ben Hodges, a former commander of the U.S. Army in Europe and a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, said the West should prepare for the Russian Federation breaking up within the next four or five years. “We were not prepared for the collapse of the Soviet Union. We need to be prepared for this possibility,” he told Times Radio.

Regional elites may start calculating that Moscow isn’t able to stop them breaking away, he says. “Once it starts, it could unravel fast.”

Western policymakers seem unnerved by the possibility of a break-up of nuclear-armed Russia,

That was also the case with the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Western leaders preferred the status quo and frowned on Ukraine and others breaking away. “Americans will not support those who seek independence in order to replace a far-off tyranny with a local despotism. They will not aid those who promote a suicidal nationalism based upon ethnic hatred,” President George Bush said in an infamous 1991 speech in Ukraine nicknamed the Chicken Kyiv speech.

Bureaucrats will always prefer the status quo to a social revolution — no matter that it is justified.

Oleksiy Danilov, Secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, said in September that the process of Russian dissolution “has already begun and will accelerate.” He said he obtained and analyzed the results of a social survey conducted in Russia. Danilov said the focus was on separatism in the central Russian Republic of Tatarstan and the southern Chechen Republic.

Tatarstan and Chechnya have large Muslim populations, and had declared their independence at the end of the Soviet Union. Chechnya fought two wars with Russia. Failure in a war of aggression without cause could spur the fires of separatism throughout the Russian Federation.

Moldova is a tiny nation of just 2.6 million people that borders Ukraine to the southwest. Russia has 1,500 troops there supporting separatists, just as it did in Ukraine. Moldova’s government has opposed the Russian presence since it gained independence in the Soviet breakup in 1991, but has no way of forcing the Russians to leave.

Georgia, on Russia’s southwestern frontier, remains in a state of dispute. If Russian occupation forces left, there is no doubt it would swing West.

At the United Nations in March of 2022, six former republics voted in favor of a resolution condemning Russia and calling for its immediate withdrawal from Ukraine. Seven more abstained or were conveniently absent. The only country to take Russia’s side, aside from Russia itself, was Belarus. Which has Russian troops on the ground.

It is not only a geographic fragmentation that Russia is facing, but a horizontal war-of-the-dukedoms. Different factions within the government have their own armies. They could fight for power because they have their own supplies of weapons. Even criminals have weapons. Chechens have weapons. The Internal Ministry has weapons. The Defence Ministry has weapons. The security forces — KGB/FSB — have weapons. Everybody has weapons. It could be chaos in the streets. It will be the same situation as 1917–18.

Political scientist Ekaterina Schulmann told The Economist that “the Russian Federation as we know it is self-liquidating and passing into a failed-state phase.” Its administration, she continued, is unable to carry out its basic functions:

“This includes the most basic mandate of any government, which is the protection of its citizenry. But Putin’s regime now presents the greatest threat to that citizenry by threatening to forcibly conscript them in the hundreds of thousands and send them into battle with almost no proper equipment and even less training.”

The Kremlin’s decision to build its army by having each region of Russia create battalions of soldiers is unbelievably stupid. At least eight regions have created such units. Leaders of these regions have ready-made battalions under their command to enforce a separation.

Western governments should prepare a response to this rule of disorder.

It was to Russia’s extreme misfortune that Yeltsin handed over power to Putin.

It was Russia’s misfortune before that, to have Stalin take power from Lenin.

And before that, to have Lenin take power from the Tsar.

If Russia were a car on a highway, it would be veering off-course every few hours, pulled to the right or left. Anywhere there is a sign that says “Higher Power Here”.

I would feel sorry for them, but I’m impatient to see what a democratic Russia — stripped of the trappings of empire — could do for the world.

They deserve better than they’ve got, for sure.

Barry Gander

A Canadian from Connecticut: 2 strikes against me! I'm a top writer, looking for the Meaning under the headlines. Follow me on Mastodon @Barry

 

 

Russia: não mais um império, nem um Estado nacional - Barry Gander (Medium)

 The Empire Strikes Back: Putin’s Drive To Revive Soviet Borders Is Doomed

Barry Gander

Medium, March 31. 2023

Thousands flee Putin’s Russia into Georgia as part of a million-person refugee tide.

We have been here before.

History gives us a way to forecast Russia’s future, as the reign of state control again erodes the country’s ability to move forward.

These events have happened back in 1991, when Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev was faced with a coup by Soviet security forces. But the coup’s leaders had no popular support, and the ruling bureaucracy was also split. Boris Yeltsin climbed aboard a tank, the people of Moscow rallied for freedom and democracy, and the coup leaders surrendered within days.

The coup by the security forces actually accelerated the demise of the Soviet Union. It gave the people of the USSR a stark choice. Yes, independence was frightening, but it could not be worse than the totalitarian alternative. In turn, republic after Soviet republic tumbled towards independence. In Moscow a jubilant crowd tore down the statue of “Iron” Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the secret police, right in front of the KGB headquarters.

That revolution for freedom was extinguished in the heartland, a bit at a time, by Putin, through assassination, mass bombings and military occupation.

Now however Putin’s overlay of dictatorship is also fraying, and the pattern of freedom is reasserting itself again. This is “Overthrow 2.0”.

Putin has just been betrayed by China, which is about to tear out Russia’s Asian heartland.

Russia’s other dependencies are attracted to Western values, and are seeking independence — just like 1991.

Once an area has tasted independence from a dominating power, it will not go back into its box.

This is the problem facing Putin as he fumbles to put back the pieces of the old Soviet empire.

He has denied that he has a goal of re-establishing the Soviet Empire. His denials lost credibility after he ordered Russian troops to be sent to eastern Ukraine. We have been here before with this man.

He has continually questioned Ukraine’s sovereignty. In 2008, Russia supported two Georgian separatist regions and has backed a breakaway region of Moldova, Transnistria, since the 1990s. He annexed Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula in 2014. He became the first person to annex sovereign foreign territory by force since Saddam Hussein in Kuwait. He cut off Europe’s energy supplies, threatened the use of nukes, and ran a fascist propaganda campaign around the world.

Last year his militia took over eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk and Lugansk rebel republics and he recognized them as “independent-with-Russian-troops”.

Weeks before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine he was insisting that he had no intention of attacking Ukraine and accused the U.S. and NATO of stoking the tension by refusing to accept Moscow’s demands for “security guarantees” from the Western alliance.

Ukraine wants to be part of Europe. There is no guarantee Putin could get that would change that perspective. It also wants to be part of NATO. Both organizations are voluntary bodies — no one is forced to belong and no “security guarantees” can be part of an equation where the people have picked the path to democracy.

Putin actually wants guarantees against freedom, not NATO.

The desire for freedom is hard to detect in Russia itself, because the people are so muffled.

But it can be seen more clearly in Russia’s fringe of reluctant puppet states, where the control is less. They are able to make the choice that faced the Russians themselves in 1991: do you want freedom or do you want to be ruled by a gong show run by a poisoning dictator and his five gangs of thieves.

It is not really surprising that the West “let” Putin turn Russia into a concentration camp. At any step where a change could be made, it would mean fighting a world war. That is what kept the allies from stopping Hitler when he occupied the Rhineland. In a democracy, could the French President have gone to his people with a motivating rationale for war against Hitler?

Dictatorships have it easy; democratic countermeasures are hard. We need to have some sympathy and understanding for the bewildered democracies in Europe in the 1930s.

But we have learned from that era.

In the build-up to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, to paraphrase Winston Churchill’s definition of appeasement, we are feeding the crocodiles, hoping they will eat us last.

(And I will keep calling this “Putin’s War”, not “Russia’s War”. The Russians were never asked for their approval. That would have meant the need for a reason for the war…beyond ego-driven empire-building)

Instead of standing on our principles about the universal values of human rights and human life, we quibbled with Russia’s propagandists about whether Russia’s feelings were being hurt. Is it uncomfortable for you to have NATO so close? OOPS — our fault!

But it has never been about NATO. Russia has in the past acknowledged Ukraine’s right to join NATO. Taking NATO off the table will not quell his insecurity; what he fears is democracy. In fact, up until Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, NATO had been drawing down resources in Europe, not increasing them.

Our focus therefore has to be the final triumph of Western-style democracy over bygone dictatorships. NO appeasement or apologies will be possible, because this is a binary game: democracy or dictatorship.

And in the process, we cannot promote democracy while treating the leaders of the world’s most repressive regimes as equals, advises Garry Kasparov, former chess champion turned activist. His mother had hung a sign above his bed — a saying of the Soviet dissidents — “If not you, who else?” We are all responsible for seeing that justice is done.

We have a lot on our side.

Almost every nation in the world that matters today is democratic. There was a time in the 1940s when dictators ruled from the English Channel to the Bering Sea. Now there are only TWO meaningful hold-outs: Russia and China.

I may be wrong, but I sense that China can evolve; we don’t need to shake a spear at them. Their biggest existential threat anyway is India, not America: India is poised to take their jobs and industry.

Our goal in Russia would ideally be to provide the citizens with hope and possibilities for a brighter future.

They exist right now in an increasingly fraught environment. The war is going badly. Russia currently controls only 17 percent of Ukrainian territory, which is the least amount of area that its forces have occupied since April. Russian leaders can see that the walls of their tents are coming down, and the light is getting in.

And sadly, Russia will not become a democracy until it falls apart. Russia is not really a nation-state but a premodern multiethnic empire living for 300 years on geographic expansion and resource looting.

Russia’s influence in the region has waned and citizens have repeatedly signaled their desire to escape Moscow’s grasp. Subservience to Putin is now required. If the regions could be free, why could not the Russians themselves?

This almost happened, in the elections in 2011. They were the largest protests in Russia since the Soviet collapse. Ordinary Russians showed themselves to have both the will and the capability to threaten his grip on power.

With this fear of democracy as his overriding motive, Putin will remain committed to undermining Georgian, Moldovan, Armenian, etc. democracy and sovereignty.

Russia has gotten so good at quelling regional aspirations that the government of Iran asked Russia for help in suppressing a popular uprising.

The former USSR. All the states not marked “Russia” will become independent as soon as they can. The central Asia group is now being courted by China, in a display of breathtaking hypocrisy by President Xi.

In Kazakhstan, for example, there were nationwide protests against fuel prices last year. The protests morphed into a working-class grievance campaign. The President could not get a response from his own security forces and called on the Russians. The crowds were brutally crushed and 238 people died. The former defence minister has just been jailed for not doing enough to protect the government.

Dagestan is a mountainous republic within the Russian Federation. There have been confrontations between police and crowds of mothers who were infuriated that their sons were being drafted for the war in Ukraine.

Some other ethnic minority parts of the Russian Federation, including its 22 ethnic republics, as well as other far-flung territories, or krais, even majority ethnic Russian ones, have seen anti-mobilization protests in recent weeks — as far afield as the Siberian city of Yakutsk, the capital of the Sakha Republic and Vladivostok in Russia’s far east.

While they have died down for now they have left sullen anger and resentment, which is compounding long-standing economic and local political grievances in the Russian Federation’s periphery.

Russia’s ethnic republics and far-flung territories will not remain quiet and subdued for much longer, suspects Russian-born political scientist Sergej Sumlenny, a former chief editor at Russian business broadcaster RBC-TV.

“The republics have long chafed under Moscow’s imperial rule — so too territories in the far east and parts of remote northern Russia.” The seeds of potential rebellion, especially in the North Caucasus, the Sakha Republic and the Middle Volga, are being sown, he thinks. Increasing economic distress and impoverishment, the exploitation of natural resources only for the benefit of Moscow, the failure to drive development and investment, a reckless attitude to pollution and environmental degradation, and governance swinging from repression to negligence are all stoking simmering grievance.”

What could trigger real revolt? “It could be a small spark,” he says. “Look at what triggered the Arab spring — a Tunisian fruit vendor setting himself on fire over injustice. Or look at Iran now: it can be something [like] … the death of a 22-year-old Kurdish woman because she wasn’t wearing a hijab. Revolt is often be sparked by perceived insult.

Russia’s Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu made a comparison to Yugoslavia, warning external pressures combined with internal threats risk breaking up the Russian Federation along ethnic and religious lines. At the Beijing Xiangshan Forum in 2019, Shoigu said: “Chaos and the collapse of statehood are becoming the norm.”

When the Soviet Union dissolved it wasn’t only the big constituent republics of the Soviet Union — like Ukraine, the Baltic states and Kazakhstan — that sought independence. Many of Russia’s smaller republics and even some far-flung predominantly Russian territories, cities and regions used the political turmoil to claim or to try to grab autonomy.

In 1990, fourteen of the 22 republics of the Russian Federation declared themselves sovereign and when a Federation Treaty was being negotiated the heads of several republics, including Tatarstan, demanded the new post-Communist Russian constitution recognize their “state sovereignty” as well as a right to secede from the Russian Federation. Chechnya refused to sign the Federation Treaty and declared independence, triggering an 18-month war of liberation.

Putin decided that the sovereignty of the Russian Federation would override any declaration of sovereignty by the republics or other federal subjects. Provincial authorities have been weakened.

Any candidate in a regional election who wants to register must have Kremlin backingand Putin can sack and appoint regional heads at will.

In 2021 the Russian justice ministry suspended the activities of Tatarstan’s All-Tatar Public Center “due to its extremist activities.”

Last month, retired U.S. General Ben Hodges, a former commander of the U.S. Army in Europe and a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, said the West should prepare for the Russian Federation breaking up within the next four or five years. “We were not prepared for the collapse of the Soviet Union. We need to be prepared for this possibility,” he told Times Radio.

Regional elites may start calculating that Moscow isn’t able to stop them breaking away, he says. “Once it starts, it could unravel fast.”

Western policymakers seem unnerved by the possibility of a break-up of nuclear-armed Russia,

That was also the case with the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Western leaders preferred the status quo and frowned on Ukraine and others breaking away. “Americans will not support those who seek independence in order to replace a far-off tyranny with a local despotism. They will not aid those who promote a suicidal nationalism based upon ethnic hatred,” President George Bush said in an infamous 1991 speech in Ukraine nicknamed the Chicken Kyiv speech.

Bureaucrats will always prefer the status quo to a social revolution — no matter that it is justified.

Oleksiy Danilov, Secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, said in September that the process of Russian dissolution “has already begun and will accelerate.” He said he obtained and analyzed the results of a social survey conducted in Russia. Danilov said the focus was on separatism in the central Russian Republic of Tatarstan and the southern Chechen Republic.

Tatarstan and Chechnya have large Muslim populations, and had declared their independence at the end of the Soviet Union. Chechnya fought two wars with Russia. Failure in a war of aggression without cause could spur the fires of separatism throughout the Russian Federation.

Moldova is a tiny nation of just 2.6 million people that borders Ukraine to the southwest. Russia has 1,500 troops there supporting separatists, just as it did in Ukraine. Moldova’s government has opposed the Russian presence since it gained independence in the Soviet breakup in 1991, but has no way of forcing the Russians to leave.

Georgia, on Russia’s southwestern frontier, remains in a state of dispute. If Russian occupation forces left, there is no doubt it would swing West.

At the United Nations in March of 2022, six former republics voted in favor of a resolution condemning Russia and calling for its immediate withdrawal from Ukraine. Seven more abstained or were conveniently absent. The only country to take Russia’s side, aside from Russia itself, was Belarus. Which has Russian troops on the ground.

It is not only a geographic fragmentation that Russia is facing, but a horizontal war-of-the-dukedoms. Different factions within the government have their own armies. They could fight for power because they have their own supplies of weapons. Even criminals have weapons. Chechens have weapons. The Internal Ministry has weapons. The Defence Ministry has weapons. The security forces — KGB/FSB — have weapons. Everybody has weapons. It could be chaos in the streets. It will be the same situation as 1917–18.

Political scientist Ekaterina Schulmann told The Economist that “the Russian Federation as we know it is self-liquidating and passing into a failed-state phase.” Its administration, she continued, is unable to carry out its basic functions:

“This includes the most basic mandate of any government, which is the protection of its citizenry. But Putin’s regime now presents the greatest threat to that citizenry by threatening to forcibly conscript them in the hundreds of thousands and send them into battle with almost no proper equipment and even less training.”

The Kremlin’s decision to build its army by having each region of Russia create battalions of soldiers is unbelievably stupid. At least eight regions have created such units. Leaders of these regions have ready-made battalions under their command to enforce a separation.

Western governments should prepare a response to this rule of disorder.

It was to Russia’s extreme misfortune that Yeltsin handed over power to Putin.

It was Russia’s misfortune before that, to have Stalin take power from Lenin.

And before that, to have Lenin take power from the Tsar.

If Russia were a car on a highway, it would be veering off-course every few hours, pulled to the right or left. Anywhere there is a sign that says “Higher Power Here”.

I would feel sorry for them, but I’m impatient to see what a democratic Russia — stripped of the trappings of empire — could do for the world.

They deserve better than they’ve got, for sure.