"What Putin fears"
The title to this piece is also the title to this week's issue of The Economist—"available at newsstands now". The magazine devotes two articles to the crack-up happening in Russia and its erstwhile ally Belarus. Belarussian "president" Aleksandr Lukashenko would have been driven from power were it not for the tacit support he's receiving from Moscow. Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin is facing his own unrest, having arrested a regional governor in Siberia who had the temerity to have been elected without his approval. Protests have been ongoing in Khabarovsk for weeks, protests which opposition leader Alexei Navalny was working to capitalize on in the run-up to local elections later this month.
Normally, Putin's attitude towards Navalny was to nickel and dime him—an arrest here, a prison sentence there, striking him from candidature. As the articles state, this was done both so as to not upset the various factions which Putin relies on for power, but also to show that he was secure in his own power, and didn't need to deal more harshly with an opponent.
That went out the window with the revolution erupting in Minsk. Facing the real possibility of a buffer state falling to the opposition, and not wanting to face a popular uprising led by a charismatic leader, he—allegedly—had Navalny poisoned with Novichok. He went from being fearless to being so fearful as to attempt to murder a possible rival.
However, Belarus isn't his only concern.
"What Putin fears" is the ejection of his cipher, Donald Trump, from the White House, and the election of a man in Joe Biden who was part of the previous administration which worked tirelessly to constrain and punish him for his rogue actions on the international scene.
Putin and his intelligence services are using the same tricks they used in 2016. Disinformation, stoking divisions, and outright lies. Putin knows that if Biden enters the West Wing, his relatively easy days of the past four years are gone. America will once again assert its leadership, will once again rally the West to confront Russia, and even more punishing sanctions aimed at his oligarchs will be enacted. Russians, tired of this quixotic quest for a glorious Russia which never existed, may well decide that Putin's day is done. And while he may have the nerves to order mass killings of protesters, at some point people will weather the bullets and push past their fear, as his friend Lukashenko is finding out.
Putin's Russia isn't quite a dictatorship. It's a precariously-balanced autocracy, a Mafia state where the deal was that the people would stay out of politics, in return for stability and increasing living standards. Putin was able to deliver on this for a while thanks to the price of oil and natural gas. Now that both of those commodities have tumbled in value, and conjoined with the economic hammerblow of COVID-19, that deal is in tatters. The thing people fear more than bullets is an empty belly. Putin is much like Trump right now: cornered, looking for some way to hang on to power, and, literally, his life.
The US has meddled in more than one country's affairs, this is true. But it knew when to leave well enough alone. It never fomented rebellion in the Soviet Union, or in China. Some meals are too big to digest. And, for all the calamities which have befallen us, we are still the world's greatest power. Russia decided to take on America and thrust its nose into its domestic politics by helping Trump win the presidency. Russia, however, is not on the same plane of power as the US. It's a third-rate power with oil and nuclear weapons. It has none of the soft power which America and the West have. And it's about to vomit up the meal it had in 2016.
What Putin fears is all of his house of cards crashing in on him. His only ability to affect the upcoming election is through the same methods he employed four years ago. But such methods lose their efficacy once they've been exposed. Sure, Trump's minions will keep falling for them. But they are not enough to win an election, as the polling is showing. And Trump has made such a disaster of his tenure in office that Americans are ready for a return to normalcy. Putin, hemmed in by Barack Obama and his coalition, rolled the dice on Trump. He won some breathing room for a few years. But the gamble is about to come up craps, and he has no one to blame but himself. He fancied himself Tsar Vladimir I; now he'll be lucky to escape the coming storm.
When aiming for the king, you'd better not miss. Putin has damaged us. But we're alive, we'll heal, and we'll be itching for payback.