Oct 27

BRT has managed to publish some extracts from an interesting article in The Economist, which is behind a paywall.

The Economist, excerpts:

“There is a lot of swearing and angry talk in Moscow restaurants and kitchens,” one member of the elite says. “Everyone has realised that Putin has blundered and is losing.”

This does not mean that Mr Putin is about to bow out, be overthrown or fire a nuclear weapon. It does mean that those who run the country and own assets there are losing confidence. Russia’s political system appears to be entering the most turbulent period of its post-Soviet history. Western governments, too, are starting to worry that Russia could become ungovernable.

The invasion of Ukraine on February 24th was a shock to the Russian establishment, which had persuaded itself that Mr Putin would not risk full-scale war. But the mixture of his initial, if limited, military advances, the absence of an economic collapse in Russia, and early attempts at peace negotiations calmed nerves. (Heavy drinking may also have helped; it became so acute that Mr Putin started to complain in public about alcoholism.) Some members of the elite even, for a while, persuaded themselves that Mr Putin could not lose.

This view has been shattered by Mr Putin’s “partial” mobilisation. It showed that his “special military operation” was faltering; and, by drafting more troops, he was seen to be dragging the country deeper into the conflict. And as a mass exodus and extensive draft-dodging have shown, his attempt to turn his venture into a new “Great Patriotic War” has so far failed. The mobilisation has broken the basic premise of the public’s acquiescence to the war: that it would not demand its active participation. In Moscow, Russia’s richest city, where men were being press-ganged in the streets, the mayor, Sergei Sobyanin, felt compelled on October 17th to announce that conscription was over. Other regions, with less lobbying power, will have to make up the shortfall.

Mr Putin cannot win his war, for from the very start it had no clear goals; and, having lost so much, he cannot end it without being deeply humiliated. Even if the fighting in Ukraine were to cease, a returning to peaceful pre-war life is all but impossible under his belligerent presidency. Meanwhile, the economy is starting to show the effects of sanctions and of the exodus of the most skilled and educated members of the workforce; consumer confidence is on the slide.

Yet, as Alexei Navalny, Russia’s jailed opposition leader, argued in a recent article in the Washington Post, the hope that “Mr Putin’s replacement by another member of his elite will fundamentally change this view on war, and especially war over the ‘legacy of the USSR’, is naive at the very least.” The only way to stop the endless cycle of imperial nationalism, Mr Navalny argued, is for Russia to decentralise power and turn itself into a parliamentary republic. In what looked like an appeal to the Russian elite, Mr Navalny argued that parliamentary democracy is also a rational and desirable choice for many of the political factions around Mr Putin. “It gives them an opportunity to maintain influence and fight for power while ensuring that they are not destroyed by a more aggressive group.”

This “more aggressive group” has already started to emerge into the public domain. It includes Yevgeny Prigozhin, a former criminal known as “Putin’s chef”, who runs a group of mercenaries called the Wagner group, and Ramzan Kadyrov, the strongman of Chechnya, who has his own private army. Both men are seen as personally loyal to Mr Putin. Ekaterina Schulmann, a political scientist, has likened Mr Prigozhin’s men to oprichniki—a corps of bodyguards established by Ivan the Terrible—who have plunged the country into chaos. Russia’s dictator started his war with the intention of turning Ukraine into a failed state. Instead, he is fast turning Russia into one.

https://www.economist.com/europe/2022/10/26/russias-elite-begins-to-ponder-a-putinless-future