Vladimir Putin is increasingly fighting two wars: one in Ukraine, and one at home.
A week in, neither is going terribly well.
(A 🧵, in case that wasn't obvious.)
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Sam Greene
@samagreene
Director of Democratic Resilience . Professor . Political sociologist. Progressive. Co-author, Putin v the People, . 
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My main thought, as Prigozhin sends his men back to base, is that this isn’t over yet.
I’m not suggesting that Prigozhin will try again. But my strong sense is that Putin’s challenges are only beginning.
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Note to journalists and pundits: Whatever Putin might like you to believe, it was the Soviet Union that defeated Nazi Germany, not Russia.
So please stop saying that 9 May commemorates Russia's victory in WWII.
Time for a reminder that there's about 50 years of research showing a clear correlation between a background in engineering and support for authoritarianism.
So, I'm increasingly seeing stories like this one, together with takes from foreign policy analysts along the lines of "the West lacks a strategy for deterring Russia." (You know who you are.)
And it's going to make my head explode.
(An annoyed 🧵)
Putin's Donbas address is unbelievably dark and aggressive.
I've watched a lot of Putin speeches, and I don't think I've ever seen one quite like this.
Ukraine's counter-offensive in the northeast – liberating in a day territory that took Russia a month or more to conquer – is breathtaking. Inspiring, even.
But it should also be sobering. Apart from anything else, it reveals just how much we struggle to analyze this war.
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One more thread today, and then I'm going to take a break and decompress for a while. This one's about protests and Russian public opinion.
As Russia's military commissariats begin rounding up reservists for the front, we're seeing fairly clear -- if inevitably anecdotal -- evidence that the call-up is falling hardest on the communities already hardest hit by the war, particularly ethnic minorities.
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So, I wrote last week that Putin is fighting two wars: one in Ukraine, and another against his own public.
Scratch that: he's fighting four. The other two are a political battle with his own elite, and a geo-economic war on some of Russia’s closest allies.
(Another 🧵)
Let me explain how this works: If Shoigu is preparing a coup, we will find out about it when Putin is in a box or in a cage, and not a moment sooner.
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BREAKING: US officials suggest Putin fears Sergey Shoygu will attempt coup next week. Growing distancing between the individuals and closed-doors conversations suggest a replacement is being architected.
It is deemed probable that Shoygu will be tried for corruption and treason.
As best I can tell, Putin is declaring war on live TV at 05:45am Moscow time.
If you're looking for the TL;DR on Xi's visit with Putin, it is this: China's domination of Russia is complete.
(a 🧵)
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First of all, Russia's economy is NOT back on its feet. The ruble is back on its feet, yes. But the ruble isn't the economy -- and the ruble is only back on its feet because it's being propped up by massive capital controls and $50.1 billion of reserves spent since the war began.
The inconvenient truth of the present crisis is that behind all the rhetoric about NATO, Moscow's beef is fundamentally with the EU.
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BREAKING: Russia says security talks will fail if EU gives collective response to proposals
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So, the damage to the Russian economy is real, even if it's not immediately preventing Muscovites from sitting in cafés. Putin has spent 20+ years building sound fiscal and monetary policies. It will take more than a couple of months to undo that. Venezuela wasn't built in a day.
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Indeed, that idea -- that Putin has just robbed Russia of its future -- is one of the most common refrains I'm seeing in anti-war posts on social media.
Because this is Twitter, and nothing here ever really goes without saying:
Evgeny Prigozhin is not a hero. Even if he ends up bringing down Putin. Please don't treat him like one.
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"To anyone who would consider interfering from the outside: if you do, you will face consequences greater than any you have faced in history. All relevant decisions have been taken. I hope you hear me."
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Now, here's what my research suggests about protest in general, and in Russian in particular: People are most likely to turn against the state when it presents an immediate and unavoidable threat to their ability to imagine a future better than the present.
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Clearly, Putin will have thought about this. This was a risk everyone knew about going into this war -- that's why he had the riot police ready to go. Putin will have calculated that he'll survive. He may well be right. He often is.
But not always.
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CBR Chief Nabiullina believes the sh*t will begin to hit the fan towards the third quarter of 2022, and I'm inclined to believe her.
kommersant.ru/doc/5315472
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And if we're honest, then we have to acknowledge that these sanctions were meant to cause significant medium and long-term pain, and they're doing that. Calling them a failure because Muscovites can still go out for coffee is just dumb.
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To regain his mojo, Putin needed more than a speech: he needed to dispatch Prigozhin quickly and decisively. He did not do that.
The fact that this was moderated by Lukashenka strikes me as embarrassing in the extreme. Putin needs someone else to solve his problems?
/3
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Per Russia's own border guards, 3.8 million people have left the country since the war began. Now, that's down to Putin as much as it is to sanctions, but that's a hit to productivity right now and growth potential down the line.
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And no, I have nothing better to do on a Friday evening than to tweet about ostensibly smart people being dumb. (Again, you know who you are.)
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Second of all, no Western policymaker or serious analyst expected a massive immediate impact on the economy. We knew that they had reserves (even if we could freeze half of them) and that those reserves would last them some time.
I will admit that I don’t know what Prigozhin is playing at. Honestly. And I won’t guess.
None of the available explanations stand up to the evidence.
(A quick 🧵)
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Indeed, it’s hard to see how anyone wakes up in Moscow tomorrow and pretends that this didn’t just happen. Something will have to give.
/TO BE CONTINUED
So, Putin laid the rhetorical groundwork for war, but didn't declare it.
He laid the foundations for a formal military presence in DPR/LPR, but didn't define the borders.
The practiced strategic ambiguity continues. We still don't know where this is going, and that's the point.
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Putin's Donbas address is unbelievably dark and aggressive.
I've watched a lot of Putin speeches, and I don't think I've ever seen one quite like this.
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Given the level of ambient repression, the fact that anyone is coming out at all is striking.
Striking as well is the fact that the riot police came out before the protesters did -- especially in Moscow and St. Petersburg, but not only, according to reports.
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Third, there have been anti-war protests in dozens of Russian cities every day since this war began. We don’t and can’t know how many people have participated, but we do know that more than 7,600 have been arrested since February 24th.
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Punishment, by contrast, was meant to help Russia lose the war it had chosen to fight, but sapping it of money and morale, but starving the war machine and the economy that feeds that machine. That was always going to be a gradual endeavor, and the verdict is still out.
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Putin tells his people he's fighting for Russia's sovereignty. In truth, he's mortgaged the Kremlin to Beijing.
The question now is one for Xi: What will he do with his newest acquisition?
/END
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From the first hours, Prigozhin’s uprising made Putin look weak, unable to control his own hinterland and the forces fighting his war. As Wagner troops got closer to Moscow, that only deepened.
/2
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Why was punishment the goal, rather than deterrence? Because if Putin was working with any logical cost-benefit framework, this war would never have happened. Ergo, you're not going to get him to back off by increasing the costs.
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By turning around “to avoid bloodshed”, Prigozhin somehow managed to make himself look like the cooler head — and, in fact, the only decisive person on the stage, given Putin’s conspicuous absence.
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We also know that protests are driven by moral shock -- when the state begins to do something that not only offends a person's sense of right and wrong, but that alters their sense of what the state might do in the future. This can cause a panic and a 'now-or-never' response.
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Tens of millions of Russians have Ukrainian heritage or, indeed, were born there. They have family and friends there. The cities they are bombing are cities many of them have visited.
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Racism and classism are absolutely part of this process. Wars are almost always fought by the disenfranchised, marginalized and the poor on behalf of the powerful -- and Russia is no exception in that regard.
/8
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The recognition that this war would be unpopular was the key factor determining Russia’s opening gambit. The only way to mitigate that risk was to win the war as cleanly and quickly as possible. That is now no longer an option.
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And fifth of all -- and this is the part that really bugs me -- these sanctions were never designed to deter Russia. They were designed to punish Russia, but not to deter it.
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In other words, Russia is sustaining itself by impoverishing its closest allies. How sustainable is that?
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Second, sanctions were an inevitable result of this invasion. Putin knew that, and in this case, we don’t have to read his mind: he talked about it in his speeches leading up to the war. Russia, with its vaunted $640 billion in reserves, was prepared, Putin said. He was wrong.
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The question is, what does Putin do next? Unless Prigozhin is arrested and tried, what people will remember is that he could have stormed the capital but thought better of it; the futility of the whole thing will likely be forgotten.
But if he is arrested, he’ll be a martyr.
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As Russia's propagandist-in-chief Margarita Simonyan broaches the idea of ending the war, ostensibly because Ukraine is getting too strong to counter without an attack on the West itself, it's worth taking a moment to reflect on how Russian propaganda works.
(A 🧵)
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Third of all, the long-term damage is even greater. And it's not just about the lack of investment and the fact that Russian companies will have to work with subpar resources at inflated prices.
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The real problem for Putin is that the people who are out on the streets protesting against the war are the usual suspects. It will get worse if — when — the people queueing at the ATM turn the (metaphorical) corner and join the protests.
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More to the point, there have been no pro-war rallies, despite the Kremlin’s usual penchant for astroturf.
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This will also be the conversation topic around tens of millions of kitchen tables, and people will debate whether Putin was right or wrong. Previously unimaginable things, like a change of leadership, may become more plausible.
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Assuming Putin somehow manages to square that circle, this whole episode may have punctured the air of inevitability that has kept him aloft for the past 23 years. Elites will wonder whether he can hold things together, and they may look more urgently for an alternative.
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Per , there have been ~1700 arrests at anti-war protests across Russia today. Given the propensity of these numbers to lag, the actual number is probably higher.
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Or there's the IMF, which is projecting an 8.5% drop in Russian GDP this year.
Because the world clearly needs yet another 🧵 about whether Russians really support the war - and because I'm probably the only one left who hasn't commented on that poll showing 81% support - here's my take: Yes, but.
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Fourth of all, one thing we're not paying attention to is the degree to which Russia has outsourced its pain -- at least in the short-ish run -- to Belarus and Kazakhstan, its two key trading partners in the Eurasian Economic Union.
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Folks, we played this game with the post-Crimea sanctions, the post-MH17 sanctions, the post-Skripal sanctions: they were imposed for specific reasons, about which pundits and others quickly forgot, and then started measuring effectiveness by totally different yardsticks.
When Putin announced the mobilization of 300k reservists — and maybe 1.2 mln — many began asking how long it would take for Russians to rise up in resistance. What Twitter and the commentariat want to know now is why that resistance hasn't come.
A very, very long 🧵.
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While the Russian ruble is up 12% vs the dollar since the start of the war, the Belarusian ruble is down 24% vs USD and an even more massive 32% vs the Russian currency. The IMF is projecting the Belarusian economy to contract by 6.4% this year.
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While Russia has been to war before, Russians are mostly accustomed (like Americans or Brits) to seeing their bombs fall on far off places of which they know little (a category that includes, for most Russians, Chechnya). Ukraine, on the other hand, is both close and familiar.
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When threats are diffuse, people find individualized ways of coping. When they are concentrated, they have no choice but to come together to seek a solution that helps everyone.
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It is early days yet, but it doesn’t feel to me that Putin’s war with Russia is going much better than his war with Ukraine.
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Now, I'm not here to say that sanctions are always or even often effective. They most often aren't, even if there isn't often a better alternative -- and doing nothing is usually worse. I'm just here to call for honest analysis and a bit or memory (or at least Googling).
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Bear in mind that the Russian protest scene has been dormant since riot police more or less wiped the streets with Navalny supporters in the early months of 2021. After that, the opposition called off protests, out of concern for the physical welfare of their supporters.
Fox News live now: "We may be seeing a red mirage" -- explaining to viewers that PA, MI and others count in-person votes first, mail-in votes second. "The voting has stopped. The counting goes on." This is important.
For my friends who care but don’t read Russian: the country’s three best newspapers are running with the same front page tomorrow, in solidarity with Ivan Golunov, the investigative journalist (who works for neither of the three) arrested on fabricated narcotics charges.
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We also know that this war may cause a moral shock. Anecdotal evidence -- and a bit of survey evidence -- suggests that most Russians didn't take the prospect of war seriously, and have thus been caught off guard.
"I'm a citizen of the Russian Federation," says the woman in the red hat. "I lived in Leningrad during the siege. My father died on the front lines. My mother died, and I lay with my dead mother. My older brothers died. What do you want from me?"
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Пожилая женщина в Москве обращается к полицейскому: «Я гражданка Российской Федерации. Я житель блокадного Ленинграда. Мой отец погиб на фронте. Мать умерла, я с мертвой матерью лежала. Братья умерли старшие. Что вы хотите от меня?»
Видео: читатель DOXA
2:05
Do Russians support the war?
Short answer: We don't know.
Longer answer: What you think you know is probably wrong.
(A quick 🧵)
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We know that this war presents a concentrated threat, in the form of the damage it will do to ordinary Russians' livelihoods for decades to come. So it is possible that some protesters are mobilizing to prevent their futures and those of their children from being foreclosed.
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First, as has explained, Russia's invasion isn't going according to plan, and while Russia can still achieve its military objectives, it will come at an increasing cost.
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I'll follow up on various aspects of this in future TL;DRussia posts and threads, but here's the key point for now: Putin is fighting a rear-guard action to prevent the economy and the war from spilling over into the minds of too many ordinary Russians.
EU sanctions to include a block on Russian sovereign debt and NS2 among other things. Assume US will do the same.
This is stronger — much stronger — than I expected.
The focus on Belarus and Russia’s mil presence there is also sharp.
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And the police didn't exactly behave themselves. At least one of my friends in Moscow was delivered to a police station unconscious, with a fractured skull.
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I don't get paid enough to listen to this sh*t.
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The violence in Ukraine coupled with the violence in the streets at home may -- and I emphasize _may_ -- make many Russians very uncomfortable. It may suggest the potential of both sites of violence to escalate. That, too, may be a future many Russians will want to avoid.
I might be wrong, but 26-year incumbents who genuinely got 79.7% in hotly contested elections with massive turnout don't generally need to fill the capital with riot police and block their country's two largest independent news websites right after polls close. #Belarus
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A summary of key points follow below. For the full story in a less cacophonous setting, see the latest TL;DRussia, which dropped yesterday. (And subscribe -- it's free!)
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As has written again and again, war is inherently unpredictable. It is not linear, it's not the arithmetic outcome of an equation involving bullets and bombs. It's an emotional thing, and it's highly contingent.
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As recently as yesterday, the consensus in Western policy circles – among US, UK & EU experts & officials – was that while Russia was not winning this war, neither was Ukraine. It was hard to find anyone who believed that Ukraine could make significant territorial advances.
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Ok. Time for a bit of political analysis.
What happens if Prigozhin’s adventure ends up bringing down Putin? Without trying to predict the future, it is possible to map out some plausible scenarios.
(A 🧵, duh)
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We've all seen pix of queues at ATMs, but the real pain is yet to come. The most ominous sign may be Nabiullina's address to employees, imploring them to stop “bickering about politics” and focus on preventing wholesale economic catastrophe.
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The Kazakh tenge, meanwhile, is down 3% vs the dollar and 13% vs the Russian ruble -- though the IMF is projecting growth there of 2.3% (anemic given where oil prices are right now).
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While media coverage of the war itself appears to be ramping up — after a few days in which it was almost not discussed — Russian media are under strict orders to quote only official sources and to avoid using the words “war” or “invasion”.
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The conversation today, obviously, is quite different: now, no one knows how far Ukrainian forces will be able to push, how much momentum they will be able to generate, and how it will change the nature of the war. But all of a sudden, talk of attrition has evaporated.
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We don't know how many people came out to protest. It may not have been very many, but it will likely have been 10-20 times the number who were arrested, at least.
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If the Kremlin tries to repress ethnic minorities, they will sharpen identities, imbue those identities with a sense of injustice, and swing horizontal social institutions into the fight -- institutions that can be much more legitimate in these communities than Putin is.
/END
This is going to hurt me, more than it hurts you, but here's a deliberately provocative 🧵 on the aftermath of the G7 and NATO summits. TL;DR: The West is at war, but it doesn't really know why.
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My two kopecks on the ICC's indictment of Putin:
For policymakers in Europe, the “global south” and Russia’s own commanding heights, the inescapable new reality is this: there is no future with Putin.
There is absolutely no reasonable excuse for banning any and all Russian citizens from taking TOEFL anywhere in the world -- and yet that is what ETS has done.
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I'm _really_ not sure it's a good idea for him to say so much about oligarchs and corruption and self-interested rulers. This will sound awfully familiar to a lot of people who were right there with him until this part.
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In war – as in politics – what people believe will happen next can be more important than what has actually occurred, and those beliefs can turn on a dime. What's more, in violent conflict those beliefs are imbued with powerful emotions, which can submerge rational thought.
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But there is also a more mundane -- and, for Putin, a more problematic -- reason behind this: Bureaucratic inertia.
Tasked with mobilizing as many men as possible as quickly as possible, the military is going for the easiest targets.
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Russian legislators are reportedly preparing further restrictions, including jail sentences of up to 15 years for distributing whatever the state believes is “fake news” about the war.
Quick reaction: *If* Russia is halting Nord Stream on a more permanent basis as a response to sanctions, this is a strategic blunder.
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Russia says it will not reopen the largest gas pipeline to Europe until western sanctions are lifted ft.com/content/2624cc
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For two months or more, everyone has assumed this to be a war of attrition, rather than of position – and for good reason. The counter-offensive in the south was a slog, and reports were coming in of heavy casualties. Meanwhile, signs of fatigue in the West were mounting.
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Russia’s president once sat atop a system of political and economic governance and a network of diplomatic, trading and investment relationships that, together, transformed Russia’s influence and his own into a truly global phenomenon. All of that is now undone.