More than two decades after coming to power, President Putin’s grip on the Russian people is finally beginning to shake.
The war in Ukraine has created a credibility gap and for the first time many Russians no longer feel they can trust what their leader tells them. Combined with harsh economic sanctions, funds reallocated to the war and conscription tours of the country, the cost of this vain conquest is becoming increasingly difficult to bear.
Even loyal Russians have enough questions for Putin right now. And the Kremlin is running out of ways to handle the pressure. In the past, a scripted performance or half-naked staged photo shoot would be enough to get the domestic media back on the side. Sometimes they even gave independent reporters the chance to ask Putin a sensitive question or two – which he quickly and firmly dismissed.
But any recent attempt to make Putin look like a strong and decisive leader has failed so much — even within Russia — that after nine months of devastating war in Ukraine, the Kremlin is running out of ideas. They even canceled Putin’s big annual press conference for the first time in years.
“Russia, like any other nation, wants to live a stable life without being ashamed of our leadership in Moscow. Before the war, Putin guaranteed us a stable life, but now he tells us that life in Russia will not be good for another ten years,” Vera Aleksandrovna, 57, a lawyer from St Petersburg, told The Daily Beast. “I loved Putin before the war, my son was an IT technician, we loved the IT opportunities in Russia; but now all the brains and talents are fleeing the country, my son is gone too and I can’t afford to wait another ten years for a good life.”
Putin’s rock-solid system is crumbling.
Russian chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov, an outspoken critic of the Kremlin, told The Daily Beast that we are already entering the endgame for Putin. “Russia has clearly lost the war, which will lead to the collapse of the regime, but the question is how many more people will die before that happens,” he told The Daily Beast.
“Putin never played chess, the game of the rules, he played a game of poker,” Kasparov said. “Putin is absolutely evil, he has gone insane after 22 years in power; but in his bones he must understand that he cannot continue to rule Russia, when the war is over and tens of thousands of angry soldiers return home with weapons and feeling robbed.
Tatiana Yashina, 62, the mother of imprisoned opposition leader Ilya Yashin, said there has been a turning point in Putin’s regime over the past week.
“Putin is falling apart,” she told The Daily Beast. “He’s clearly right in front of the cameras – with no confidence in his voice.”
The ruse that could trick Putin into another crushing ambush
Yashina had particular reason to pay attention to Putin’s state of mind, as her son was sentenced to eight and a half years in prison last Friday, but the president’s handling of the fallout from his unpopular incarceration – for telling the truth about the war in Ukraine – has broken through to the wider population.
Andrei Kolesnikov, a veteran Kremlin polar reporter, confronted Putin about Yashin’s “beastly” sentencing in a video that went viral. Yashina said: “Shaky Putin… lied that he didn’t know my son, then he lied that he didn’t know about the punishment.”
Putin’s distortions no longer convince his domestic audience.
Hundreds of independent Russian and foreign journalists have left Russia in the past nine months, but some of those who remain, including BBC journalists, continue to spread the news of a commander-in-chief losing thousands of his soldiers, as well as some of his key territories in Ukraine. Last week, the BBC’s Russian service and local publication Mediazona confirmed the names of 10,002 Russian soldiers killed in Ukraine. The real Russian death toll “could be over 20,000 and the total number of irreparable losses could be as high as 90,000,” according to the BBC.
Both independent and Kremlin-controlled polls show that Putin has lost support for his war, with less than 30 percent of the country wanting it to continue. “Putin could have ruled longer had he not started this war, but now his days are really numbered, he is falling apart and he is clearly aware of it,” Yulia Galiamina, a Moscow-based opposition politician, told The Daily Beast . Galiamina has been a victim of police brutality and arrest several times, but she refuses to leave Russia, instead encouraging more people to revolt against Putin.
Galiamina leads a movement of over 150 Russian women called Soft Power. “Most of our women are mothers, who see the problems from the point of view of our children’s future without Putin, in Russia, which will eventually be free.” Galiamina and Soft Power activists have collected signatures from people speaking out against Putin’s mobilization of Russians. “We have collected more than 500,000 signatures that we are going to send to the Kremlin, we understand our collective responsibility,” she added.
Putin is still supported by about 79 percent of Russians, according to recent polls, but that confidence is weakening. Research by Levada, an independent Russian think tank, shows that the number of Russians who believe their country is moving in the right direction has already fallen from 64 percent in October to 61 percent in November.
Any attempt by the Kremlin to rebuild Putin’s superman image seems to provoke another avalanche of jokes online.
Putin shot one of his Action Man clips on location earlier this month, showing him driving across the bomb-damaged bridge into Crimea. It was supposed to show how fit and healthy he still is at 70 years old, but online commentators were more obsessed with the car he was driving. It wasn’t one of the Russian-made Ladas he’s promoted before – which motorists curse for “breaking down more often than even the cheapest foreign brands” – but a German-designed Mercedes.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov had to officially state that the Mercedes happened to be on hand and that it was not indicative of Putin’s vehicle preferences.
Kremlin TV stars ignite as Russians admit war is aimless
Even more damaging was his foray into internationally recognized Ukrainian territory, now annexed by Russia, in the same week that three explosions hit strategic airfields in the metropolitan country, one of them just 150 miles from Moscow. The drone strikes made the Russian air defense and its commander-in-chief look pathetic, even in the domestic media.
Last week, the Kremlin published an image of Putin with a glass of champagne in his hand, which immediately prompted many anecdotes about ‘drunken Putin’.
The prevailing mood is becoming very difficult for the Kremlin to navigate.
“The Kremlin canceling Putin’s big press conference is a sign: they realize how hopeless their situation is – this is a dead end, his plan failed in Ukraine,” noted Kremlin observer Olga Bychkova told The Daily Beast. “They are still with him because without Putin they are done; but now they can’t even write a script, come up with questions and answers for him.”
The latest debate among Putin’s critics is whether the catastrophe in Ukraine is the fault of one man or of all of Russian society. Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a former oligarch now imprisoned and now exiled in London, suggested to Radio Liberty last week that while Putin took the whole country with him during the 2014 annexation of Crimea, he is now on his own. “The 2020 war is purely a Putin invention; Russian society received a shock on February 23,” he said.
The question now is how much worse will the situation get?
Kasparov, an ally of Khodorkovsky, thinks there is now also an opportunity for the US to drive a wedge between the president and his senior lieutenants, such as Kremlin Security Council secretary Nikolai Patrushev. He says the US should spell out what would happen if they ever allowed Putin to push the nuclear button. Kasparov said he hoped CIA director William Burns “whispered something in Patrushev’s ear” during the meeting between security chiefs in Moscow last month.
After years of admiration across the country, Putin is becoming more isolated by the day.
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