This year should have ushered in Russia’s return to greatness and Putin’s assumption of ‘great statesman’ status. Instead it has been marked by trouble for the man who would be czar.
THIS WAS SUPPOSED TO BE Vladmir Putin’s year. At the beginning of 2020, the Russian president appeared to have it all figured out.
In January, the 67-year-old announced sweeping constitutional reforms that after two decades in power would in practice allow him to remain indefinitely. A perfunctory referendum on the changes, originally scheduled for April, would secure a public endorsement of his tenure as the longest serving ruler in Russia since Joseph Stalin.
Days later, widespread celebrations and parades marking the 75th anniversary of the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany would serve as a coming out party for Putin’s new tenure as a global elder statesman, seemingly endorsed by the presence by the other world leaders who had confirmed they would attend.
President Donald Trump had signaled his interest in Russia returning to the Group of Eight industrialized nations, reversing its exile amid international condemnation for Moscow’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine.
And on Tuesday, he would have been addressing the United Nations General Assembly from a newly secured position of power and prominence. Russia would surely solidify its position of international influence.
“It was an excellent plan,” says Ivan Kurilla, a professor at the European University at St. Petersburg. “Then everything went sour.”
The coronavirus delayed the referendum – ultimately dismissed across the world as a charade – along with the Victory Day commemorations that were broadly curtailed. The virus has devastated Russia, and Putin’s hurried announcement in August of the first vaccine was met with near universal skepticism of its effectiveness and safety, including from the Russian people.
More recently, civil unrest sprang up in Belarus at the appearance of a rigged election early last month and has persisted, amplifying perceptions of corruption within a former Soviet state that serve as a template for the potential of unrest in the streets of Moscow itself.
World leaders normally enjoy their turn at the General Assembly podium to outline their country’s accomplishments and aspirations, though a cloud hung over Putin at this year’s largely remote gathering amid new sanctions – including from the Trump administration – for its meddling in the domestic affairs of other nations.
And earlier this month, Germany hinted at the possibility of sanctioning Russia over the apparent poisoning of political dissident Alexei Navalny – what his staff considers an assassination attempt.
The unusually overt alarm from Europe’s chief economic power serves as one of the latest forms of criticism against the Russian leader. And despite his heavy-handed responses to all of these issues – the virus, as well dissent at home and nearby – Putin’s problems have only compounded.
Taken in combination, the crises now threaten his hold on power as he knows it.
Most pressing for the Russian leader is Belarus. And his next moves will likely determine the extent to which Putin can salvage the glory he envisioned in 2020.
“Whether this will be Putin’s banner year, or failure year, may well depend on how things turn out in Belarus,” Agnia Grigas, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and author of “Beyond Crimea: The New Russian Empire and The New Geopolitics of Natural Gas.”
The Kremlin has increasingly bristled at the political protests in Belarus following the disputed reelection of its president, Alexander Lukashenko, after a quarter century in power. Though Lukashenko has hinted at wanting to secure stronger ties with Western countries in Europe, he remains one of Putin’s staunchest allies – “a trusted sidekick at various Russian-led Eurasian Economic Union integration projects and Moscow parades that most former Soviet republic leaders seek to avoid,” Grigas says.
Belarus remains Russia’s remaining foothold in Europe, and the last of the Slavic countries it can count as an ally. Putin has capitalized on this status to declare openly that Russian intervention may be necessary into a country that is already a union state with Russia. The declaration differs sharply, for example, from Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, which was masked as the work of rebel militants and a political movement in Crimea that supposedly voted for independence without any interference from the Kremlin.
Putin has threatened to take immediate action in Belarus, describing a more overt version of the kind of initially covert militarized response Russia employed in Ukraine. Some analysts believe Russia may have already dispatched unmarked troops and intelligence operatives to prop up their loyal ally in Minsk, or at least prevent further fallout.
Last week, Moscow dispatched to annual military exercises in Belarus elements of the 76th Guards Air Assault Division – shock troops based on the border with Estonia and Latvia which have previously attended similar exercises. Analysts see the ostensibly benign deployment as a stark warning to Lukanshenko of the consequences of not quelling the civil unrest among his countrymen.
“The Kremlin likely conducted the short-notice deployment to remind Lukashenko that Russia can deploy forces into Belarus rapidly if Lukashenko does not follow through on the concessions he likely made during talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Sochi on September,” the Institute for the Study of War concluded in an analysis note last week.
The State Department has expressed concern about the potential for Russia to invade Belarus.
“There is a need for every nation – especially Russia – to respect the sovereignty of Belarus,” spokeswoman Morgan Ortagus tells U.S. News in an emailed statement when asked about the troop deployments. The U.S. military’s European Command deferred to the State Department following a similar query.
The overarching fear for Putin, however, appears to be the spread of the unrest at home, where even protests in Russia’s far east over a provincial political dispute that have raged for months have, too, been fueled by elements of the anger associated with the uprising in Belarus.
“There’s a popular saying for the last couple days: Belarus in 2020 is what Russia will be in 2024, the next presidential elections in Russia,” Kurilla says. “We thought that Belarusians are so politically inactive, accustomed to tyranny, accustomed to totalitarian rule. They will never protest against Lukashenko. That proved to be wrong.”
“This is a model. This is inspiring things,” he adds. “And it may hit Russia.”
Indeed, analysts speculate that Navalny’s poisoning serves as a sign that Putin has already taken provocative steps to ensure his enemies cannot take advantage of any perceived weakness in his rule.
The German government has confirmed Navalny was poisoned with a Russian military-grade nerve agent from a family of chemical weapons known as Novichok – the same used in the 2018 assassination attempt against another noted enemy of the Putin administration, former Russian spy Sergei Skripal in Salisbury, England.
Navalny emerged from his coma last week remains in a hospital in Berlin, where officials say they plan to inform the EU and NATO of their findings, as well as the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. Chancellor Angela Merkel has also faced stepped up pressure from the German people to kill construction of Nord Stream 2, the nearly completed $11 billion pipeline project that not only gives Russia a direct outlet for natural gas in Western Europe but also created a wedge between America and its close ally in Berlin.
The uproar surrounding the attack on Navalny, however, has not distracted domestic attention from the very real public health concerns that continue to plague the Russian people.
Even facing accusations of underreporting, Russia has the fourth-highest number of cases globally as the death toll there mounts and this week became the fourth country to reach 1 million cases.
The Kremlin conspicuously named the vaccine it touted last month “Sputnik 5” after one of the Soviet Union’s most notable scientific milestones of becoming the first country to put a satellite into orbit, clearly designed to evoke the so-called glory days of Russian scientific and technological power. Instead it was panned by leading U.S. epidemiologist Anthony Fauci as “bogus,” and researchers in the journal Nature highlighted what they saw as “questionable” claims about its effectiveness.
Despite the pandemic and global economic downturn, Putin has scored some notable wins this year, combined with political and social divisions in the U.S. that have created a useful distraction to some of his domestic problems.
“Russia’s war in Ukraine and annexation of Crimea since 2014 has been largely forgotten in Washington as seen from Trump’s oneness to invite Russia to rejoin G7. Likewise Putin’s successful referendum allowing him to stay in power until 2036 has been largely unquestioned internationally and domestically amidst the covid chaos,” Grigas says. “With neighboring China’s President Xi Jinping also having solidified his position as president for life in 2018, Putin is squarely in a strong camp of authoritarian states posing a viable alternative to liberal democracies.”
Yet the manner in which Putin has executed these achievements leaves many critics with experience in Russia questioning the longevity of his rule.
“A country that tries to control its population without having all the means of control, where the economic situation is not so good, where dependency on oil and natural gas is certainly coming down, particularly during this period of time,” says Melvyn Levitsky, a former top State Department official for U.S.-Soviet Relations, now a professor at the University of Michigan’s Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy.
Pointing to a series of factors that, taken together, serve as a troubling combination for any leader, he adds, “There is something brewing that could create problems for Putin.”