Russia after 2020

This book presents a comprehensive survey of the current state of Russia and
how Russia is likely to develop in the immediate future. Not always sticking
to the mainstream narrative, it covers political events including Putin’s con-
stitutional reforms of January 2020 and their likely consequences, economic
developments, Russia’s international relations and military activities, and
changes and issues in Russian society, including in education, the place of
women, health care and religion. Special attention is paid to manifestations
of the COVID-19 pandemic. The book’s overall conclusion is that events of
2020 may compel Putin to ‘think again’ before he decides whether to run for
office in 2024.

J. L. Black is an Emeritus and Distinguished Research Professor at Carleton

University, Canada, and an Adjunct Professor at Laurentian University,
Canada.
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Russia after 2020

Looking Ahead after Two Decades of Putin
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Russia after 2020
Looking Ahead after Two Decades
of Putin

J. L. Black
First published 2022
by Routledge
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© 2022 J. L. Black
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been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
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DOI: 10.4324/9781003158646
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Contents

List of figures viii

List of tables ix
Preface x
Transliteration, spelling, punctuation and sources xii
Abbreviations and key terms xiv
About the author xix

Introduction 1

1 The presidency, the executive and the Constitution 6

Introduction 6
The president’s mandate 8
Street protests 19
Inauguration promises, 2018 20
Coping with domestic non-political problems 26
Constitutional amendments, 2020 27
Administrative reset 33
Working with the pandemic 35
The All-Russia Vote and beyond 39
Notes 42

2 The Russian Federation: Internal strengths and strains 52

Introduction 52
General structure 53
Crimea 60
Siberia and Russia’s Far East 64
The North Caucasus 66
The Islamicist cancer: Terrorism 71
Notes 77
vi Contents
3 The political arena 84
Introduction 84
Post-presidential election political scene, 2018 86
The State Duma 86
The extra-systemic opposition 88
The politics of pension reform 94
Moscow’s Mayoralty race, 2018 96
2019–20 – turning points? 98
Nationalists – riding high 106
Constitutional amendments and the political arena 108
Back to work – Pandemic, Khabarovsk and Navalny variables 110
Notes 117

4 Economic patterns and the sanctions saga 129

Introduction 129
Sanctions and the oligarchs 131
Domestic issues 139
Economic integration 142
Industry, trade and development 144
Energy 151
Down on the farm: The agricultural sector 163
Back to work 165
Notes 166

5 Russia in the world: Changing patterns 178

Introduction 178
Ukraine 182
South Caucasus 190
The Middle East 193
Europe and the EU 199
Eastern Europe 200
Western Europe 206
Latin America 211
Pivot to the East: Central Asia, Southeast Asia, Far East 213
Coronavirus: manifestations for the world order 222
Notes 223

6 New Cold War: The Russian Federation, the

United States – and China 239
Introduction 239
Moscow and Washington face off in 2018 241
International interaction 246
Manipulating public opinion 256
 Contents vii
Russia and the US presidential election, 2020 265
China matters 267
Final straws? 268
Notes 270

7 The re-militarization of Russia, and the end of arms control? 284

Introduction 284
Strategic issues 289
Arms race and arms sales 294
The CSTO 302
NATO 303
Notes 308

8 Quality of life: Media, mind and behaviour 317

Introduction 317
Media 317
Education, science and the arts 325
Human & civil rights 329
The dilemma of crime and corruption 334
Notes 342

9 Quality of life: Pandemic, body & soul 351

Introduction 351
Coronavirus pandemic and its over-arching implications 352
Quality of life 362
General healthcare 368
Religion 374
Demographics, immigration & the work force 377
Back to work 380
Notes 380

Closing remarks: what’s left after 2020? 391

Stability anyone? 391
The Domestic political scene 393
The international arena 394
The economy 396
Quality of life 397
Government and society going into 2021 398
A second ‘January Revolution,’ 2021 399
Notes 402

Bibliography 405
Index 413
Figures

2.1 Components (subjects) of the Russian Federation 55

2.2 Russia’s North Caucasus 69
4.1 Northern Sea Route 148
4.2 Power of Siberia pipeline, 2019 152
4.3 Nord Streams 1 & 2 154
5.1 Nagorno-Karabakh 192
5.2 Central Asia 215
5.3 Russia’s Far Eastern Neighbourhood 220
7.1 Sea of Azov, strategic site 293
Tables

1.1 Presidential Election, Official Results, 18 March 2018 12

1.2 The New Russian Government, 18 May 2018 22
1.3 Survey: ‘Which politicians do you trust the most?’ 23
1.4 VTsIOM weekly surveys on trust in Putin, November 2018
to January 2019 24
1.5 Survey: ‘Which politicians do you trust the most?’
September–October 2019 26
1.6 The New Russian Cabinet, 20 January 2020 34
3.1 Duma Election Results. Parties in order as they appeared
on ballot, September 2016 87
3.2 Survey: ‘Which politicians do you trust the most?’, 2020 89
3.3 VTsIOM polls post- retirement age bill, 2018 95
3.4 Results of Moscow mayoralty election, 9 September 2018 97
6.1 Register of foreign mass media functioning as a foreign agent,
December 2020 251
6.2 Gallup Poll on American attitudes towards Russia February 2019 256
6.3 Levada Poll results on Russian attitudes towards
the US January 2020 258
7.1 Global Military Spending 2019 286
9.1 Q: Would You Limit those who come to live in
Russia …, Percentage? 379
Preface

Although Vladimir Putin is everywhere in this book, this is a story about

Russia, a country that is far more than just its leader. To get a proper perspec-
tive, we need to see the world, abroad and at home, through a Russian prism,
and take note of what Russia actually does, not merely what we assume it will
do, or has done. This approach may not provide us with what is correct from
our perspective; rather, it will reflect what most Russians believe to be
correct.
In contrast to the old Soviet days, sources used here will demonstrate that,
even if the state is the main player in the Russian media, especially on TV,
Russian citizens are able to find all sides of political, economic and social
arguments in their own print media, blogs, tweets and Internet.
Both ‘sides’ of controversial issues will be on display and, though it will
not seem so to those whose minds are already made up, no ‘side’ will be
taken.
Like its predecessors in chronological accounts, The Russian Presidency of
Dmitry Medvedev, 2008–12 (2015) and Putin’s Third Term as Russia’s
President, 2012–18 (2019), this book focusses on a short but crucial period in
Russia’s very recent past and present. Indeed, together they form a trilogy of
detail on Russian affairs since at least 2008. The multi-subject approach also
echoes chapters in the edited volume, Russia After 2012 (2013), which
included essays by a dozen scholars, from four countries.
Using the year 2020 as a make-or-break year in Putin’s fourth and once-
presumed final presidential term, and collating events and developments in a
three-year period (2018–20) with earlier ones, the book demonstrates how far
Russia has come in its still short post-Soviet history and provides a glimpse
of what may come next.
No recent book deals with as many facets of Russian life as this one does.
Details included here should cause readers to think harder about generally
accepted narratives related to the Russian economy and the consequences of
economic sanctions, the Kremlin’s relations with Ukraine, Syria, China and
the United States, and the attitudes of citizens towards their government and
president. It is hoped that an understanding of reality will emerge somewhere
between the rosy optimism presented by Russia’s officialdom and the gloom
and doom presented by Western Russophobes and Russian dissenters.
 Preface xi
The coincidence of political turning points in 2020, such as the ‘January
Revolution’, constitutional reset and pandemic, all complicated further by a
temporary oil price collapse, pipeline wars, devastating climate change, the
Navalny phenomenon and accelerated Western-imposed sanctions, ensures
that 2020 will be marked as a pivotal one for Russia and its people.
Transliteration, spelling, punctuation and
sources

Russian transliteration here is based on a modified Library of Congress sys-

tem, with common-use applications for names and places. Most diacritical
marks have been deleted in the main text. Although they both use the Cyrillic
alphabet, the Russian and Ukrainian languages have different spelling for the
same names and places, such as Kyiv (Ukrainian) and Kiev (Russian). Some
of these spelling have political implications, such as Donbass (Russian) and
Donbas (Ukrainian). As much as possible, the spelling used most commonly
by inhabitants of the area/town/region is adopted here.
British spelling and punctuation are used throughout except for personal
and textual titles where other spelling systems are appropriate; for example,
an American Secretary of Defense and Russian Minister of Defence, or in
quotes where the original is maintained.
To avoid confusion over acronyms such as ISIL (Islamic State of Iraq and
the Levant), ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) and Daesh (Arabic acro-
nym for ISIL), either ISIS or Islamic State are used throughout.
Note on Sources
Russian-language sources, such as independent and government newspapers,
blogs, party agendas, and public opinion surveys, and both Russian and for-
eign government documentation are widely used. Multiple English-language
books, articles and media are cited as well. Although all major references are
authenticated in the usual way and Russian-language sources dominate, the
endnotes include a large number of general, often journalistic essays in
English. These are for quick first-start guides for readers who do not have
Russian and want to pursue a particular subject further. Government and
private wire service notations (e.g. AP, AFP, Reuters, Interfax, TASS, RIA
Novosti, RBC, Sputnik, UNIAN) are not intended as analytical or evidential
sources; rather, they provide exact dates of information releases, context and
sequence for the topic at hand. Government press releases present us with
what officialdom said, and what it wants readers to believe. Journalistic
accounts and blogs are used to inform readers of public knowledge and,
often, political agendas.
Readers will also find data from surveys conducted by Russian pollsters
such as the independent Levada Centre and state-funded All-Russian Public
 Transliteration, spelling, punctuation and sources xiii
Opinion Research Centre (VTsIOM) and the Public Opinion Foundation
(FOM). These polls almost always engage a sampling of 1,600 respondents
over the age of 18, spread over most of the components of the Russian
Federation, rural and urban sites and across generations. Doubtless such
polls should not be taken as absolute. Since a majority of Russians still obtain
their news from state television, ‘public opinion’ often mirrors the narrative
provided by that venue. Still, a very large percentage of Russians use the
Internet regularly and can therefore access whatever sources they wish.
Important sectors of the print media are relatively independent. The polls
provide a reasonable measure of popular thinking, societal trends and,
indeed, often reveal a distrust of government and reflect serious concerns on
specific issues. They are also all we have.
Abbreviations and key terms

ABM Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (1972)

ADC Anti-Discrimination Centre, Memorial
AES Atomic (Nuclear) Energy Station
AIIB Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank
APEC Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation
Apparatchiki Russian officials
ASEAN Association of Southeast Asian Nations
BAM Baikal–Amur Mainline RR
BelTA Belarus News Agency
BMD Ballistic Missile Defence
BRI Belt and Road project (China)
CAATSA Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act
CAR Central African Republic
CB Central Bank
CEC Central Electoral Commission
CIS Commonwealth of Independent States
CNSA China’s national space agency
CP Communist Party
CPRF Communist Party of the Russian Federation
CPSU Communist Party of the Soviet Union
CSTO Collective Security Treaty Organization
CTBT Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty
Daesh Arabic acronym for ISIL
DASKA Defending American Security from the Kremlin Aggression
Act of 2019 Bill
DCFTA Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Association (with EU)
DMZ Demilitarized Zone (Korea)
DNC Democratic National Convention
DPR Donetsk People’s Republic
EBRD European Bank for Research and Development
ECFR European Council for Foreign Relations
ECHR European Court of Human Rights
EDM Eurasia Daily Monitor (USA)
EEC Eurasian Economic Community
 Abbreviations and key terms xv
EEU Eurasian Economic Union
EU European Union
EurAsEC Eurasian Economic Community (EEC)
FBK Anti-Corruption Foundation (Navalny)
FCIN Federal Penitentiary Services
FDI Foreign Direct Investment
FEC fuel and energy complex
FIFA Fédération Internationale de Football Associations
FMS Federal Migration Service
FSB Federal Security Service
FSKN Federal Drug Control Service
Gazprom energy behemoth in Russia
GCC Gulf Cooperation Council
GECF Gas Exporting Countries Forum
Glasnost ‘publicity’, often translated as ‘openness’ under Gorbachev
GLCM Ground Launched Cruise Missile
GLONASS Global Navigation Satellite System
GMO Genetically Modified Organism (food products)
GNA Government of National Accord (Libya)
GRU Main Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed
Forces (RF)
HRC Human Rights Council
HSE Higher School of Economics, Moscow
IAEA International Atomic Energy Agency
IC Investigative Committee
ICAO International Civil Aviation Organization (UN)
ILO International Labour Organization
IMF International Monetary Fund
INF Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty
ISAF International Security Assistance Force (NATO in Afghanistan)
ISIL Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant
ISS International Space Station
ITLOS International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea
JRL Johnson’s Russia List
KGB Committee of State Security (USSR)
Kontraktiki contract, professional soldiers
LDPR Liberal Democratic Party of Russia
LGBT lesbian, gay, bi- and trans- community
LNA Libyan National Army
LPR Lugansk (Luhansk) Peoples Republic
MANPAD shoulder-launched surface-to-air defence system
MAP Membership Action Plan (NATO)
MBKh media site funded by Khodorkovsky
MENA Middle East and North Africa, a journal
MERCOSUR regional bloc (Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay,
Uruguay, Venezuela)
xvi Abbreviations and key terms
MFA Ministry of Foreign Affairs (see MID)
MID Ministry of Foreign Affairs
MoD Ministry of Defence
MOU Memorandum of Understanding
MVD Ministry of Internal Affairs
NASA National Aeronautics and Space Administration (US)
NATO North Atlantic Treaty Organization
NDB New Development Bank (BRICS)
NDN National Distribution Network (in Russia, for NATO’s
Afghanistan war)
NED National Endowment for Democracy
NGAO Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast
NMD National Missile Defence System
NOTAM flight operations notice
NPP nuclear power plant
NRA National Rifle Association (USA)
NSA National Security Agency (USA)
NSR northern sea route
NTBT Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty
OAO Unlimited Joint Stock Company (Russian)
OBOR One Belt, One Road project (see BRI)
OCCRP Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project
ODIHR Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (OSCE)
OECD Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development
OHCHR Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (UN)
Oligarchs Russia’s nouveau riche billionaires
OMON special forces within MVD
ONF All-Russia People’s Front
OPCW Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons
OPEC Organization of the Oil Exporting Countries
OSCE Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe
OUN Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists
OVD-info independent Russian human rights media project
PACE Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe
PARNAS Republican Party of Russia-People’s Freedom Party
PDVSA Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A. (Petroleum of Venezuela)
Perestroika ‘reconstruction’ (under Gorbachev)
PGNIG Polskie Gornictwo Naftowe i Gasownictwo S.A.
PGO Prosecutor General’s Office
PKK Kurdistan Workers’ Party
PNG persona non grata
PPE personal protective equipment
PYD Partiya Yekitiya Demokrat (Democratic Union Party,
Kurdish, in Syria)
QUAD Quadrilateral Security Dialogue
 Abbreviations and key terms xvii
RANEPA Presidential Academy of National Economy and
Public Administration
RAPSI private Russian agency for legal and human rights
notices
RBC (RBK) Russian News Service
RBTH Russia Behind the Headlines
RCEP Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership
RDIF Russian Direct Investment Fund
REDA Russia & Eurasia Documents Annual (see Bibliography)
RF Russian Federation
RFE/RL Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
RIM Russian Imperial Movement
ROC Russian Orthodox Church
Rosatom Russian State Atomic Energy Corporation
Rosaviatsia Russian Federal Air Transport Agency
Rosdravnadzor Federal Service for Monitoring Health Care
Rosgvardii Russian national guardsmen
Roskomnadzor Federal Service for Supervision in the Sphere of
Telecom, Information Technologies and Mass
Communications
Rosmolodezh Federal Agency for Youth Affairs
Rosobrnador Federal Service for Supervision in Education and
Science
Rosoboronexport Russian Arms Export Agency
Rospotrebnadzor Russian Federal Service for Monitoring Consumer
Rights Protection and Human Wellbeing
Rosprirodnadzor Federal Service for Supervision of the Use of Nature
Resources
Rosselkhozbank Russian Agricultural Bank
Rosselkhoznadzor Federal Service for Veterinary and Phytosanitary
Monitoring
Rossotrudnichestvo Federal Agency on CIS Affairs, Compatriots and
International Humanitarian Cooperation
Rosstat Russian Bureau of Statistics
Rostrud Russian Labour
Rosrybolovtsa Russian Federal Fisheries Agency
Rostekhnadzor Federal Service for Ecological, Technological and
Nuclear Supervision
RPR-PARNAS (see PARNAS)
RT Russia Today
RUSADA Russian Anti-Doping Agency
RZD Russian Railways
SBU Security Services of Ukraine
SCO Shanghai Cooperation Organization (sometimes
ShCO)
xviii Abbreviations and key terms
Siloviki Russia’s power brokers
SOBR Special Rapid Response Unit (CSTO)
SORT Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty
SOVA private Moscow NGO that monitors racism and extremism in
Russia
SPIEF St. Petersburg International Economic Forum
START Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty
SVR Russian Foreign Intelligence Service
TPP Trans-Pacific Partnership
TsEPR Centre for Economic and Political Reform
UN United Nations
UNCTAD UN Conference on Trade and Development
UNESCO UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization
UNSC United Nations Security Council
UR United Russia Party
USSR Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
US United States
USE Unified State Examinations
VOA Voice of America
VTsIOM All-Russia Centre for the Study of Public Opinion
WADA World Anti-Doping Agency
WHO World Health Organization
WTO World Trade Organization
YPG People’s Protection Units (Kurds)
Xinhua Chinese English-language news service
About the author

Joseph Laurence (Larry) Black grew up in a small village in the province of

New Brunswick, Canada. He has degrees from three universities, culminating
in a doctorate awarded by McGill University, Montreal. He has been a sec-
ondary schoolteacher, rugby player, football and basketball player and coach,
and for many years served as a professor of history and international affairs
at Laurentian University (9 yrs), and Carleton University (30 yrs), both in
Ontario. At Laurentian, in Sudbury, he chaired the History Department and
sat on the academic Senate. At Carleton, in Ottawa, he was director of the
Institute for Soviet & East European Studies for a decade, founding director
of the Centre for Research on Canadian–Russian Relations (CRCR), and
was the first faculty member to be elected directly to the University’s Board
of Governors. He is now Professor Emeritus, and was re-designated
Distinguished Research Professor by Carleton in 2017.

Black has served as a researcher for NATO, an instructor for recruits to the
Canadian Security and Intelligence Service (CSIS), and consultant with
Canada’s Immigration & Refugee Board. He is the author, co-author or edi-
tor of over 50 books on the USSR, Russia and Russian–Canadian relations.
Introduction

In August 2019, Vladimir Putin marked his twentieth year as the most power-
ful man in Russia, from his appointment as prime minister in August 1999 to
four elections as president and one more as prime minister. His two decades
in high office have been assessed at length by members of the chattering
classes. Russian pundits tended to compare their country’s circumstances in
1999 to those of the present, and emphasize how far Russia had come, at
home and in foreign affairs.1 Western pundits tended to focus on the present
and employ such terms as ‘autocrat’, ‘emperor’ or ‘tsar’ for the presidency,
with no consideration whatsoever of how present-day Russia differed from
its Soviet predecessor, and the turbulent Yeltsin years.2
As Putin’s fourth term progressed, guesses proliferated on what he would
do after his constitutionally prescribed turns in office ended in 2024. No one
believed that he would simply fade away to rest on his laurels, or wealth, and
no one outside his very inner circle foresaw the proposals for constitutional
changes set out in his Address to the Federal Assembly in January 2020, that
is, the ‘January Revolution’.
Startled as they may have been by the proposal to revise rules for terms in
the presidential office, most Russians were more concerned by deteriorating
economic conditions caused by a damaging oil price war with Saudi Arabia
and were seized with fear and anxiety generated by the global pandemic.
How and in what form they and their state emerged from these history-shap-
ing parallel crises is the story documented here.
Events of January 2020 caused Putin to be reviled by many in the West and
by Russian dissidents as a man set on retaining power at all costs. The major-
ity of Russians thought otherwise. This gaping divergence of opinion was
nothing new, for Western media and politicians had long since labelled the
Russian president a ‘thug’, a ‘murderer’ and even a ‘dangerous psychopath’
whose ambition was power for power’s sake. Western foreign policy pundits
habitually referred to Russia as ‘aggressive’, or even ‘imperialistic’.3
Predictions of the imminent collapse of Russia and Putin’s regime also
have been part of the literature from the onset of his first term, yet both have

DOI: 10.4324/9781003158646-1
2 Introduction
survived and, one could say fairly, have flourished.4 Forecasts about Russia’s
future without Putin multiplied as his ‘final’ term opened. Some writers saw
the entire Putinist edifice tumbling down; others assumed that it had a resil-
ient life of its own that would enable it to function without the man who had
been its leader for a quarter century.5 Potential successors to Putin have been
named regularly, only to slip into the background.6
Russia is no innocent caught in the headlights, as the occupation of Crimea
and interventions in foreign election campaigns attest. It has not achieved
political democracy at home, nor does it provide any serious safeguards for
human rights. In both spheres, however, Russia has come an enormous dis-
tance from Soviet days. In fact, a preponderance of citizens remains true to
their country and approve the conduct of their president. So how to explain
the level of anti-Russian venom flowing from politicians and media that
became so toxic by 2018 that some Western analysts began to see greater
danger in demonization than in attempts to normalize relations?
Nobel Peace Prize winner Mairead Corrigan Maguire wrote in September
2018 that ‘the demonization of Russia is, I believe, one of the most dangerous
things that is happening on our world today’. Without excusing Russia’s
action in Ukraine, she worried that NATO’s military apparatus was exploit-
ing and exaggerating that situation solely for the purpose of expanding their
budgets in a new, unnecessary, arms race.7
One observer described the mainstream narrative about Russia as ‘narrow
[and] simplistic’, replete with clichés and therefore counterproductive;
another scholar wrote that we tend to judge Russia by ‘unique standards’,
creating unnecessary anxieties that prompt excessive responses to its real and
alleged actions. Even a self-described critic of Putin, Robert Service, acknowl-
edged that Russians believe he ‘restored dignity and authority’ to the country
and that Western critics judge Russia by standards they don’t apply to them-
selves.8 Political campaigning in the USA during 2020 and President Trump’s
wild assault on American democratic institutions added credence to that
assumption. Too many Western judgements assume that, to be ‘normal’,
Russia must be like ‘us’ – or at least like our self-image – and thereby shrug
off Russia’s legitimate international interests or home-grown practices
because they differ from, or compete with, ours.9
***
As his current presidential term opened in 2018, the country occupied a far
less comfortable place on the international chessboard than it had in 2012,
the first year of Putin’s third term. Since that time, the Kremlin’s absorption
of Crimea, support for separatists in eastern Ukraine, ‘meddling’ in a US
presidential election, and perceived culpability for murders of a Russian citi-
zens in London and political opponents at home, has turned Moscow and
Putin into pariahs in Europe and North America. Waves of retaliatory eco-
nomic sanctions hammered the Russian economy and the blackballing of
Putin in the West reached feverish extremes.10 The fact that since 2015 power-
ful armed forces from Russia, NATO and the US face off against each other
 Introduction 3
across North, East and East Central Europe for the first time since the dis-
solution of the Warsaw Pact in 1990, rendered the rhetoric of war danger-
ously close to reality.
The global scene has also changed dramatically. Talk of a new Cold War
and a new world order became a standard part of the international affairs
discourse. Whereas the old Cold War was rooted in competing ideological
frameworks and had a set of tacit conventions that helped keep the peace, the
new version is almost strictly geopolitical and has no rules. There is now also
a third A-team player in the new Great Game, China, and Russia is plainly
the weaker of the three.
Unfortunately, the new world order is more of a world disorder. Populism,
racism and nationalism are taking over domestic agendas, hot and cold local
conflicts are conducted as proxies for major powers, separatist movements
and the ravages of climate change raise anxieties and impose severe hardships
around the globe to the extent that still viral international terrorism is almost
forgotten. Before the pandemic closed borders down, refugees and asylum
seekers crossed them by the hundreds of thousands. Thus, Russian and other
world leaders have to take many subtexts into consideration when they deal
with each other – or at least they should.11

***
Russia is a huge, complicated, diverse and, as Winston Churchill once
famously said, an enigmatic country. The habit of attributing everything that
occurs there to the president – for better or worse – inevitably misses the for-
est for the trees.12 These pages include sides of Russia not often heard or seen
in Western publications, media headlines and government press releases. It
describes, during a defined period, what went on in the political ring, the
economic sector and society at large, and demonstrates that Russians often
take care of their own destinies, not waiting for Putin to do it for them.
The book represents an attempt to break from the clichéd version of
Russia as a simple country ruled by a ‘tsar’, aggressive towards its neighbours
and oppressively governed at home. Without ruling any of these character-
izations out, I provide a broader than usual overview of Russia in motion. It
is hoped that materials presented here will counter the more common dooms-
day (demonization) or rosy (hagiographic) approaches to Russia and its
president.
That said, this book is not an apologia. Ponderous analyses, profound
interpretation and active side taking are purposely avoided. This is an account
of what has gone on in Russia, and is going on now, in the hope that it will
provide fodder for more analytic studies by future researchers.
Each chapter will begin with a look back tracing 20-year patterns in the
relevant topic, featuring a ‘how did we get here from there’ approach.

JLB
Barrie, ON, Canada
March 2021
4 Introduction
Notes
1 See, for example, a series of essays carried in Vedomosti, ‘Putin 20 let u vlasti’,
August 2019; and Sergei Guriyev, ‘20 Years of Vladimir Putin: The Transformation
of the Economy’, The Moscow Times, 17 August 2019.
2 For a small sampling, Susan B. Glasser, ‘Putin the Great. Russia’s Imperial
Imposter’, Foreign Affairs, September/October 2019, pp. 10–16; Nathan Hodge,
‘Vladimir Putin has dominated Russia for 20 years. Will he ever step down?’,
CNN.com, 10 August 2019; ‘Teflon Putin? Over 20 Years In Power, Scandals
Don’t Seem To Stick To The Russian President’, RFE/RL, 8 August 2019; Anton
Troianovski, ‘A New “Emperor”: Russia Girds for 16 More years of Putin’, New
York Times, 12 March 2020.
3 Joan Smith, ‘President Putin is a dangerous psychopath – reason is not going to
work with him’, Independent (UK, digital news), 1 February 2015. Among the
many hostile books with flowery demonizations, are Joel M. Ostrow, Georgiy A.
Satarov, Irina M. Khakamada, The Consolidation of Dictatorship in Russia.
Westport, CT: Praeger, 2007; David Satter, a journalist expelled from Russia, The
Less You Know, The Better You Sleep: Russia’s Road to Terror and Dictatorship
Under Yeltsin and Putin. New Haven: Yale UP, 2016, and S.L. Myers, The New
Tsar: The Rise and Reign of Vladimir Putin. London: Simon & Schuster, 2015. As
recently as July 2020, American conservative George Will penned an article titled
‘The Thugocracy of Vladimir Putin’, The Washington Post, 17 July 2020.
4 See, e.g. Paul Klebnikov, Godfather of the Kremlin: The Decline of Russia in the
Age of Gangster Capitalism. Eugene: Harvest, 2001; Ben Judah, Fragile Empire:
How Russia Fell in and Out of Love with Vladimir Putin. New Haven: Yale UP,
2013; Ilan Berman, Implosion: Russia’s Imminent Collapse and Its Threat to
America. Washington, DC: Regnery, 2013; Richard Laurie, Putin: His Downfall
and Russia’s Coming Crash. New York: St. Martin’s, 2017; on this phenomenon,
see Paul Robinson, ‘Crisis? What Crisis?’, Irrussianility, 29 April 2020, and an
early attempt at balance by Daniel Treisman, The Return. Russia’s Journey from
Gorbachev to Medvedev, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011, see esp. Chapter 10,
‘The Russia That Has Returned’, pp. 340–90.
5 For the most balanced, Richard Sakwa, Russia’s Futures. Cambridge, UK: Polity,
2019. See also Tony Wood, Russia Without Putin: Money, Power and the Myths of
the New Cold War. Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2018.
6 See, e.g. Sir Andrew Wood, ‘The Rocky Road to Replacing Vladimir Putin’,
Chatham House (RIIA), 16 April 2019; Gordon Hahn, ‘Explaining the Failed
Expectations of Regime Change’, Russian and Eurasian Politics, 11 October 2017;
K. Bennett, ‘Is Putin’s Russia Headed for a Systemic Collapse?’ The American
Interest, 26 August 2016; N. Ferguson, ‘In decline, Russia is on its way to global
irrelevance’, Newsweek, 12 December 2011.
7 Mairead Maguire, ‘Demonization of Russia in a New Cold War Era’, Common
Dreams, 14 September 2018.
8 Robert Service, Kremlin Winter. Russia and the Second Coming of Vladimir Putin.
London: Picador, 2019, pp. xvi, 322–3. See also Lyle Jeremy Rubin, ‘It’s Time for
a Little Perspective on Russia’, Current Affairs, 20 July 2018, and Diana Johnstone,
‘Mass Dementia in the Western Establishment’, The Unz Review, 20 July 2018.
9 On this, see Keir Giles, Moscow Rules: What Drives Russia to Confront the West.
London: Chatham House (RIIA), 2019, and Arkady Ostrovsky, The Invention of
Russia: The Rise of Putin and the Age of Fake News. London: Penguin Books,
2017. See also Mark B. Smith, The Russia Anxiety: And How History Can Resolve
It. London: Allen Lane (Penguin), 2019; Andrew Monaghan, Dealing with the
Russians. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2019.
10 For analyses of where the ‘demonizing’ came from and what it has led to, see
Patrick Lawrence, ‘Discerning Vladimir Putin’, Raritan (Rutgers), Vol. 38, No. 1
 Introduction 5
(Summer 2018), pp. 1–15, and David S. Foglesong, ‘Putin: From Soulmate to
Archenemy’, ibid., pp. 18–41. See also the ‘other side’ of demonization discourse,
e.g., Mark Galeotti, We Need to Talk About Putin. How the West Gets Him Wrong.
London: Ebury Press, 2019; Stephen F. Cohen, War with Russia? From Putin &
Ukraine to Trump & Russiagate. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2019; Guy Mettan,
Creating Russophobia: From the Great Religious Schism to Anti-Putin Hysteria.
Atlanta: Clarity, 2017.
11 See, e.g. Richard Haas, ‘How a World Order Ends. And What Comes in Its Wake’,
Foreign Affairs, Comment, January/February 2019; J.L. Black, Michael Johns,
Alanda Theriault, eds., The New World Disorder. Challenges and Threats in an
Uncertain World Lanham, MD: Lexington Press, 2019.
12 On this, Tony Wood, Russia Without Putin: Money, Power and the Myths of the
New Cold War. Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2018. See also Samuel A. Greene, Graeme
B. Robertson, Putin v. the People: The Perilous Politics of a Divided Russia. New
Haven: Yale UP, 2019; Ani Kokobobo, Colleen Lucey, ‘If You Thought US–
Russian Relations Were Bad Now, Wait Another Ten Years’, The Russia File
(Wilson Center), 23 July 2020.
1 The presidency, the executive and the
Constitution

Introduction
When, on 26 March 2018, Russians elected Vladimir Putin to his fourth term
as president of the Russian Federation, he began his 19th year as the most
powerful and most popular political individual in the country. According to
the Constitution (Basic Law) under which he first came to power, he would
have been compelled to step down in 2024, the end of the current term. As of
2020, however, Putin has the right, if re-elected, to serve for a dozen more
years after that. An entire generation of Russians has grown up knowing only
Putin as their leader; a second such generation is in the making. Writing in
late 2019, two senior researchers at the Russian Higher School of Economics
(HSE) understood that a majority of the first ‘Putin Generation’ personalizes
politics and still see him as the ideal political leader for the Russian state, the
very future of which depends on who is president.1 The second generation
may not share those presumptions.
The first two decades of the 21st century have not been easy ones for
Russia. The already weakened economy had been shattered by radical reforms
initiated by Mikhail Gorbachev’s ‘restructuring’ (perestroika) policies in the
1980s and the disastrous ‘shock therapy’ forced on Russians by Yeltsin in the
1990s. Part of that latter regimen featured the privatization of state assets,
which in practice meant selling off valuable state properties cheaply to a class
of corrupt businesspeople, who came to be known as oligarchs. These assets
included valuable natural resource enterprises. Making matters worse, in
1999, the year Putin was named prime minister, the country was at war in
Chechnya for the second time, relying on an underfunded, poorly trained and
shoddily equipped military.
Putin won his first presidential election handily, taking 53 per cent of a
nearly 70 per cent turnout. The Communist Party’s Gennady Zyuganov was
well behind at just under 30 per cent and none of the other ten candidates
came close to double figures. During the campaign, Putin called on Russians
to be patriotic and promised to restore Russian domestic immunity and
international prestige. Emphasizing that Russians need to take care of their
own business, he failed to invite any foreign leaders other than Ukraine’s
Leonid Kuchma and Belarus’s Alyaksandr Lukashenka (Lukashenko) to the

DOI: 10.4324/9781003158646-2
 The presidency 7
inauguration. Putin’s approval rating hovered between 65 and 73 per cent
over the late summer and fall of that year and, except for a few brief higher
and lower peaks, rarely fell much below that until 2019.
The turn to patriotism came as no surprise. In a paper published in
December 1999 and titled ‘Russia at the Turn of the Millennium’, Putin
called attention to the ‘Russia idea’, that is, the notion that there is a uniquely
Russia way of doing things.2 While opposing the ‘restoration of an official
state ideology’, he made it plain that the way to achieve ‘social accord’ was
through ‘traditional Russian values’ and patriotism. Citizens must believe ‘in
the greatness of Russia’ and the ‘exceptionally important role of the state’.
The paper came to be known as the ‘Putin Manifesto’. Notions in it may not
have represented another type of ideology per se, yet they provided catch
words for the next two decades of Putin’s foreign and domestic policies.3
In foreign affairs, he has had to deal with an expanding NATO and
European Union (EU), both of which exclude Russia. NATO was then and
still is perceived as a strategic threat. A brief war with Georgia in 2008,
Russia’s annexation/reintegration of Crimea in 2014 and its involvement in
the on-going fratricidal conflict in eastern Ukraine, resulted in Russia’s
isolation from the West. These consequences were mostly self-inflicted, to be
sure, but also a consequence of the West’s inability, or unwillingness, to
accept that Russia has legitimate national security interests in the
neighbourhood that surrounds it.
In addition to the problems it faced in the international arena, the Russian
government had to find ways to help its failed economy recover from the
disasters of the 1990s, survive the global recession of 2008–9 and, after 2014,
counter the repeated imposition of economic sanctions by North American
and European states. Whereas Putin proclaimed the need to integrate ‘the
Russian economy into world economic structures’ in his Manifesto, the
Kremlin eventually had to alter its traditional trading patterns by ‘pivoting’
to the East to find new commercial partners and political allies.
Ameliorating the disastrous economic consequences of the dozen or so
years prior to 2000, while at the same time muting disruptive dissent in the
name of social order, has been a constant struggle. In these matters, the
Russian state has been unexpectedly successful – so far.
Putin has not acted outside the powers granted him by Russia’s Constitution,
though his government sometimes bypasses it by means of legislative acts.
Before 2020, the first amendments made to the 1993 document were
introduced in 2008 by President Medvedev. Instead of four-year terms for
both the president and deputies in the Lower House of parliament, the State
Duma, he raised the presidential term to six years and to five for the deputies.
Medvedev argued that more time in office was necessary because Russia was
still in a state of transition and needed consistency and stability.4 That argu-
ment was delivered again in 2020. Other changes came in 2014, when several
articles were modified to abolish the Supreme Arbitration Court, increase the
number of members of the Supreme Court and clarify procedures for nam-
ing prosecutors. Later in that year two articles were altered to provide
8 The presidency
a presidential quota in the Federation Council, or Upper House of p
­ arliament
(see Chapter 2). These changes were all minor compared to the dramatic
amendments of 2020.

The president’s mandate

According to the 1993 Constitution, the president is the head of state, guar-
antor of the Constitution and of state sovereignty. He or she determines the
direction of both internal and foreign policy and is the Supreme Commander
of the Armed Forces.5 That Constitution granted the president the right to
select the prime minister, the head of the Central Bank, government minis-
ters, judges, regional governors, plenipotentiary representatives, and chiefs
of security and the Armed Forces. Faced in 1993 with uncertainties gener-
ated by a near civil war between still sitting communist and nationalist
deputies elected in 1989 to the RSFSR (Russian) legislature and the post-
Soviet executive headed by Yeltsin, most Russians welcomed a Constitution
that allocated centralizing authority to a head of state. On a referendum
coinciding with a general election, 12 December 1993, 58.4 per cent of the
53.2 per cent of registered voters who turned out approved Russia’s new
Constitution.6
Russia does not have a vice president. That office was not included in the
1993 Constitution, presumably because Vice President Aleksandr Rutskoi
orchestrated a revolt against Yeltsin earlier that year. In fact, the USSR’s only
vice president, Gennady Yanaev, had been part of a coup attempt against
Gorbachev in 1991, so the position had a bad track record. If a president dies
in office, his powers are transferred temporarily to the prime minister, who
will then also chair the Security Council. An election for a new president
must be held within 90 days. Already faced twice with attempts by what was
then the Congress of People’s Deputies to impeach him, Yeltsin made certain
that articles related to impeaching the president were greatly reduced from
earlier draft constitutions.
On taking office the president swears an oath to ‘respect and safeguard the
rights and freedoms of man and citizen’ and ‘to faithfully serve the people’.7
It is here that presidential obligations become less clear in practice. Yet, if the
description of a younger Putin presented ahead is accurate, it is likely that he
assumes that he has been serving the Russian people faithfully. Moreover, it
would seem that most, if certainly not all, Russian citizens have believed that
as well.

The government before 2020

The government wields executive power in Russia (Arts. 110–117). It is
comprised of the prime minister who, before 2020, was appointed directly by
the president. Until 2020, the State Duma had the right to ‘consider’ the
president’s nominee and, if it rejected the candidate three times, could force
another election. That never happened. According to the 1993 Constitution,
 The presidency 9
the prime minister then recommended cabinet members to the president. In
practice, the proposals were made the other way around. The government
prepares the federal budget and ensures it is implemented if adopted by the
Duma. It manages federal properties, oversees the implementation of state
policies through the offices of its various ministries and committees, and
enforces the country’s laws and decrees.
Prime ministers serving Putin were Mikhail Kasyanov (2000–04), who is
now in the liberal opposition, Mikhail Fradkov (2004–07), Viktor Zubkov
(2007–08), Dmitry Medvedev (2012–20) and, from January 2020, Mikhail
Mishustin.

Who is Vladimir Putin?

There is a large literature on Vladimir Putin. For this study, it is enough to
recall that, prior to becoming prime minister in 1999, he had been a KGB
agent posted in East Germany. He resigned from the KGB in 1991 and
joined the staff of the mayor of St. Petersburg, the famous democrat
Anatoly Sobchak. In 1996, Yeltsin appointed him director of the FSB
(Federal Security Service), successor to the KGB. That KGB background
gets by far the most attention from those who seek deep-rooted motivations
for Putin’s behaviour as Russia’s president. John Evans, the US Consul gen-
eral in St. Petersburg from 1994 to 1997, was one eye-witness who was not
overwhelmed by the easy KGB label. Putin was a ‘gosudarstvennik’, he
wrote, a man of the state, one of the very few Russian bureaucrats of that
time who seemed not interested in wealth and would not take a bribe. Evans
went on to say:

I am not going to attempt to prove it, but I assure you that Putin 1) was not
anti-American (although he felt more comfortable with Germans); 2) was
not a communist (at least by that time) or hostile to private business; 3)
was not anti-Semitic; 4) and was not intolerant of gay people. I have
already noted that he had a legal bent. You may take my word for these
assertions or not. I have concrete examples to back each of them.8

With the exception of the first of Evans’ first-hand presumptions it is proba-

ble that these character traits remained true for the next quarter-century, and
Putin’s anti-American sentiments were by-products of events and pressures
over that time. Indeed, from the moment Yeltsin named him acting president
on New Year’s Day 2000, and charged him with ending the debilitating
Chechen war, curbing the unchallenged power of the oligarchs and putting
the Russian economy in order, Putin was caught between either fulfilling his
mandate or alienating the West. His choice was clear – he fulfilled his mandate.
If he was not what the West wanted in the Kremlin, he was exactly what
Russians wanted at that time.
In 2019, while musing on Putin’s first two decades in office, Fred Weir, a
Canadian journalist who married a Russian, has lived for decades in Russia
10 The presidency
and writes about Russia regularly for the Christian Science Monitor, put it
differently:

Putin is popular because of the things he does. He stays in power because

Russians don’t see any alternative, and they’re reasonably satisfied with
what he does. And that’s a hard thing sometimes for Americans to get their
minds around.9

Writing at the same time, former president of the USSR and chief architect
of the end of the first Cold War, Gorbachev, concurred:

When Vladimir Putin became president, he inherited chaos. … I can’t

imagine how one could act under the ‘textbook of democracy’ in these
conditions to find a way out of an almost catastrophic situation. … The
president of the country had no other choice but to take decisive actions.
Some of his actions were interpreted as authoritarian and part of society
was critical toward them. … If the aim of authority is to create conditions
for developing a strong modern democracy, then I’m ready to support the
president even if I disagree with some of his individual actions and
decisions.10

What did Putin do that we in the West so disliked, so soon, and Russians
liked? In the first instance, he took the war to the Chechens, brutally, and
eventually forced them into accepting peace, of sorts. We saw the ferocious
side of that conflict, Russians saw it differently. Chechens had won the first
war, 1994–96, and signed a peace treaty that called for a five-year truce, the
withdrawal of all federal troops from Chechnya, and financial help from
Moscow for reconstruction. Most Russians were relieved and no longer cared
if Chechnya seceded.
It was a Chechen act that launched the second war in 1999, well before the
period of truce was over. On 7 August 1999, Chechen field commander
Shamil Basaev and radical Islamicist Ibn al-Khattab (Samir Saleh Abdullah)
led a 2,000-man Chechen army into Russia’s Dagestan and called for an
Islamic uprising. The second war was on, and Putin was appointed prime
minister two days later. Weeks later, explosions rocked apartment blocks in
Moscow and two other Russian cities (31 August–16 September), killing over
300 people. Yeltsin responded by launching a ‘counter-terrorist operation’ in
the North Caucasus and, the next day, Putin delivered an aggressive message:
‘we will pursue the terrorists everywhere. If they are in the airport, we will
pursue them in the airport. And if we catch them, forgive me, in the toilet,
we’ll whack them in the outhouse.’ An Islamicist group claimed credit for the
apartment bombings. The already furious Russian population raged against
Chechens and cheered Putin’s efforts on. 11
One study showed that 70 per cent of the Russian population saw the first
Chechen war as a tragedy, and 70 per cent approved of the second war.12 As
a sign of things to come, a conspiracy theory blaming the FSB and Putin for
 The presidency 11
the apartment bombings emerged, and remains virulent to this day.13
Whatever the source of the explosions, the second Chechen war provided
Putin with the aura of a ‘White Knight’ who salvaged the national pride and
protected Russian territorial integrity.
Another important task set for Putin in 2000 was to curb the power of the
oligarchs, the wealthy businessmen who enriched themselves by exploiting
the almost regulation-free privatization of state assets in the 1990s. As a first
step, Putin gathered 21 of the country’s leading oligarchs for a roundtable
discussion and, after appealing to their national consciousness, told them
that he would not reverse the privatizing process that had made them wealthy
so long as they paid their taxes and kept out of politics. They agreed, in
essence giving Putin a ‘go-ahead’ to conduct a campaign against recalcitrant
tycoons, such as media mogul Vladimir Gusinsky, media and business baron
Boris Berezovsky (Aeroflot) and Mikhail Khodorkovsky (Yukos), three of
Russia’s richest men. Berezovsky and Gusinsky were living in exile before the
year was out and Khodorkovsky was arrested in 2003. In these and other
such cases, the actual charges were very likely true, the Russian business
world being notoriously venal, so it was the politically-determined selection
of targets that served as a lesson to other oligarchs. This approach, too, was
popular at the time.14
As the years passed, Putin was held responsible personally for the murders
of journalist Anna Politkovskaia (2006), former FSB agent and security man
for Berezovsky, Aleksandr Litvinenko (2006) and liberal politician Boris
Nemtsov (2015), and the attempted murders of exiled spy Sergei Skripal
(2018) and oppositionist Aleksei Navalny (2020). Western governments and
media interpreted Russia’s military interventions in Georgia (2008), Ukraine
(2014) and Syria (2015) as parts of an imperialistic continuum, and saw
Putin’s hand as decisive behind the MH17 tragedy, Brexit, Donald Trump’s
victory in America’s presidential election, France’s gilets jaunes (yellow vests)
turmoil, Catalonian separatism in Spain and, indeed, every major crisis
threatening the internal unity of the EU.15 It became de rigueur for American
politicians to taint opponents simply by accusing them of acting on Russia’s
behalf.16 If these, and other, crises could all be attributed unequivocally to
Putin’s ‘malign’ intentions then he would deserve to be classified a villain of
the highest order. Yet, with the important exception of the invasion and
subsequent annexation of Crimea, none of the above should be accepted
without question or context.
In the background, always, were allusions to Putin as a modern-day Stalin
who hoped to resurrect the influence and territory of the Soviet Union.
Advocates of this scenario continue to misuse Putin’s remark in 2005 that the
break-up of the USSR ‘was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe’ of the 20th
century as evidence that he planned to resurrect the Soviet empire under
another name. In fact, the same paragraph in a three-hour address to the
Federal Assembly made it clear that he was referencing the disruptive social
and national consequences of the break-up: the poverty, lawlessness,
economic chaos of the 1990s, plus the relocation of millions of ethnic
12 The presidency
Russians into other, newly created or resurrected states. The ‘catastrophe’
reference had nothing whatsoever to do with reviving the USSR, yet
Putinophobes still cite it as evidence that Putin wants to do precisely that.17
That said, it is also clear that Putin wanted to restore Russia’s major power
status. He said so himself, often. It is not a secret. Nor is it surprising or, in
itself, a wrong ambition. Certainly, the Russian people saw it as a natural and
proper restorative.
Commentators who equate Putin with Stalin ignore the many times he has
openly condemned the Stalinist repressions, forget that he launched with
Patriarch Kirill a ‘Wall of Grief’ (2017) as a monument to all victims of
repression in Russian history and that he always commemorates the Day of
Remembrance for Victims of Political Repression. That day, 30 October, was
designated in 1991 and is still marked by state-funded ceremonies and exhibits
in museums and schools. Statues erected by human rights groups to honour
the victims of Stalinism abound around the country. It is true that Putin, and
millions of Russians, credit Stalin for the USSR’s defeat of Nazi Germany in
what they call the Great Patriotic War, 1941–45, but that can hardly be reason
to deem him, and them, Stalinist.
These perceptions of Putin’s agenda and both Russian and Western
reactions to them will be ever present here as we attempt to judge what
progress Russia has made since its rebirth in January 1992, and what is to
come after 2020.
***
Putin’s victory in the March 2018 Russian presidential election was expected.
The extent of that victory was not. Gathering nearly 77 per cent of votes
from a 68 per cent turnout was an overwhelming success, made sweeter for
his supporters by the fact that Western pundits habitually predicted his politi-
cal demise and prominent domestic opponents, such as Aleksei Navalny, had
called for boycotts of the election itself (Table 1.1).

Table 1.1 Presidential Election, Official Results, 18 March 2018

Eligible voters = 109,008,428 Turnout = 67.74 per cent

% Votes

Vladimir Putin, Independent 76.69 56,430,712

Pavel Grudinin, CPRF 11.77 8,659,206
Vladimir Zhirinovsky, LDPR 5.65 4,154,985
Ksenia Sobchak, Civic Initiative 1.68 1,238,031
Grigorii Yavlinsky, Yabloko. 1.05 769,644
Boris Titov, Party of Growth 0.76 556,801
Maxim Suraykin, Communists of Russia 0.68 499,342
Sergei Baburin, Russian All-People's Union 0.65 479,013

Source: Central Electoral Commission of the Russian Federation. http://www.cikrf.ru/eng/

information-center/results-of-russian-presidential-elections-2018.php
 The presidency 13
The question of succession looms early
As Putin prepared for the inauguration set for 7 May 2018, Western analysts
were already forecasting Russia’s stagnation and decline, as they had been
doing for most of the 21st century, and mooting the question of whether he
might try for a fifth term. At that time, the Kremlin rejected a proposal from
Chechnya’s Ramzan Kadyrov that the Constitution be amended so Putin
could run again in 2024. Although he told reporters at the international
economic conference in St. Petersburg (SPIEF) that he would not campaign
again, because the Russian Constitution forbade it, Putin grew cagier as the
weeks went by. He ducked a direct question in June about preparing a ‘suc-
cessor’ by saying that the next president would be chosen by the Russian
people.18 The subject came up again as the year wound down, this time
introduced by speaker of the State Duma, Vyacheslav Volodin, who thought
that Constitutional Court judges and legal experts should be looking into
the question of succession. The Constitution ‘isn’t dogma’, he continued,
and should be changed if the change was good for public order. The ques-
tion, ‘Who, if not Putin?’ (Kto, esli ne Putin?), was back in play for Putin
supporters.19
Volodin argued again, in July 2019, that the Constitution should be
amended to allow the legislative branch to participate in choosing the prime
minister and cabinet ministers. If that happened, Putin could step down as
president in 2024 and retain considerable power as head of United Russia
(UR), the dominant political party.20 There was no outward sign that Putin
believed it a good idea.
Still, individuals within Putin’s inner circles, potential candidates to replace
him as president or Dmitry Medvedev as prime minister, began setting out
personal agendas that included criticisms of current policy. Sberbank
president German Gref and the head of the Accounting Chamber, Aleksei
Kudrin, both called Putin’s plans to modernize Russia’s education, housing,
healthcare and demographic spheres, too costly and unproductive. These
National Projects had been high on Putin’s list of priorities since 2005, with
Medvedev in charge of their development. The reproaches were directed at
Medvedev, not Putin.
Public disputes between Volodin on the one hand and the minister of
economic development, Maksim Oreshkin, and the chair of the Central
Bank, Elvira Nabiullina, on the other, all had the appearance of position-
ing for post-Putin standing. Disagreements among senior law-enforcement
officials about how best to deal with massive protests in Moscow in 2019
(see Chapter 3) also represented a challenge to the top-down power verti-
kal that was central to Putin’s regime. The vertikal features a chain of
authority that relies on unconditional ‘party’ discipline and loyalty to the
leader.21
Putin avoided any direct personal involvement in these spats. By staying
aloof, it may have seemed to some that he was not fully in charge. They would
have been wrong.
14 The presidency
Journalists got excited again in December 2019 when Putin, asked in his
annual press conference about modifying the Constitution, hinted that it
would be easy to change the restriction of two consecutive terms for a presi-
dent.22 He noted too that parts of the Constitution could, and perhaps
should, be altered so that the State Duma could participate more fully in
forming the government.23 Few observers realized that these conversations
would soon represent reality.

Putinism
Although there was a post-election dip in his popularity, a poll conducted by
the independent Levada Centre in May 2018 showed that 51 per cent of
Russians wanted Putin to stay on as president after 2024 and 27 per cent did
not. The same poll revealed that 57 per cent of respondents wanted large-
scale changes in the country, above all improvements in the quality of life and
more stringent efforts to curb corruption. Russian analysts treated the
numbers as pragmatic support of Putin; Western analysts treated the ‘narrow
majority’ as a sign that support for Putin in Russia was slipping.24
A similar poll conducted a year later found that a few more Russians
wanted him to stay in office after 2024 (54%), and quite a few more did not
(38%). The undecided category had dropped significantly.25 This survey was
conducted before an electoral crisis burst out over the slate of candidates for
the Moscow City Duma. What is it that the people like?
‘Putinism’ as a system of governance has been scrutinized from the
beginning of Putin’s first term. As early as January 2001, a Western scholar
wrote that decentralization resulting from the inability of Yeltsin’s government
to subsidize the regions forced Putin to make substantial adjustments to
centralize the economy and strengthen the political centre. These included
the re-introduction of the federal presence to the regions (envoys, see ahead)
and restraints on regional foreign economic policy initiatives. As his years in
office multiplied, other analysts added to the contours of Putinism, calling it
conservative, populist and personal. 26
Even in the Yeltsin years it was doubtful that Russia had ever set out on a
path leading directly to what we in the West define as ‘democracy’. Humiliated
and infuriated by Western triumphalism and the economic ‘shock therapy’
American advisers (e.g. Jeffrey Sachs) urged Yeltsin to adopt in the 1990s,
most Russians welcomed an authoritative central government. An author
comparing the Putin era with the Yeltsin decade concluded that Putin’s
persistently high approval rating was precisely the result of his fostering a
‘positive national self-esteem’, a mindset entirely absent during Yeltsin’s time
in office.27 In the words of another Western analyst in 2020, since the collapse
of the USSR ‘what Russians want more than a liberal country – a goal that
galvanizes relatively few outside Moscow and St. Petersburg – is an autono-
mous state’.28 This is what Putin gave them.
To ensure a wider and more compliant home-grown understanding, long-
time close associate of the president, Vladislav Surkov, introduced an on-line
 The presidency 15
column under the caption ‘Putinism’, which he termed a ‘well-functioning
method of rule’. From October 2019, the column appeared as a weekly
addition to the news site, Actual Comments (Aktual’nye kommentarii). The
presidential press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, assisted Surkov. The column
purported to ‘analyse different aspects of the Putin agenda, evaluating his
historical significance for Russia and the world’.29 In practice, it represents
propaganda on behalf of presidential authority.
The opening piece summarized articles on Putin and Putinism carried in
Western periodicals and blogs, including Foreign Affairs, Politico, and Foreign
Policy, picking out the paragraphs that describe the system of government in
Russia without casting judgement. For example, Susan Glasser’s remark in
‘Putin the Great’ (see Intro) that the 19th-century ideology of ‘Orthodoxy,
Autocracy, Nationality’ was close to modern Putinism was taken as a given;
other Western definitions, such as ‘Putinism … is a personalized process
intended to enforce the unity of the Russian state and the obligation of its
citizens to obey its requirements’, were cited to confirm the fundamental
importance of state unity. Other citations from Western literature stressed
that territorial integrity was a permanent and overarching characteristic of
Putinism.30
More than one author cited the philosopher of Eurasianism, Aleksandr
Dugin, as Putin’s indirect mentor.31 Putin encapsulated his own sense of
Russian uniqueness most clearly himself when he told an interviewer in May
2020 that ‘Russia is not just a country, it’s really a distinct civilization’. This
notion was not new. In 2016, Russian-born international affairs expert now
teaching in the US, Andre Tsygankov, had described ways in which the
language of a ‘distinct civilization’ was already used widely by officials in
Russia, and how that believe system was shaped by history and politics.32
***
The president’s administrative staff changed very little as his third term
morphed into a fourth term. Deputy Chief-of-Staff Sergei Kiriyenko
acquired greater influence over the agenda of the State Council, an advi-
sory board Putin created in 2000, by naming his associate, Aleksandr
Kharichev, head of the Directorate for Supporting the Activities of the
State Council.33 As former prime minister (1998), head of Rosatom for 15
years and in his present office since 2016, Kiriyenko already had wide-rang-
ing influence. The appointment suggested that Putin was more willing to
delegate responsibility to accountable government agencies than he was in
earlier terms.34
The election honeymoon didn’t last long. Executive confidence was shaken
by popular reactions to a government decision to raise the obligatory pen-
sionable age. Moreover, in October 2018 the Finance Ministry proposed an
increase in money allocated to the presidential administration in the 2018
budget by some ₽1.7 billion ($26 million). Further funds, over $20 billion,
were set aside as well for an upgrade of the presidential fleet of aircraft. News
like this fuelled social unrest.35
16 The presidency
The backlash originated as early as June 2018, when the government
announced changes in retirement ages for men (60 to 65) and women (55 to
63), meaning that planned-for pensions were to come much later than
expected. The substantial increase in retirement age from its decades-old
status had been discussed for years because Russians were living much lon-
ger, the workforce was diminishing and pensions were a huge drain on the
federal budget. Few economists doubted that a restructuring was long
overdue.
But the citizenry did. According to a poll conducted by state-funded
Fond Obshchestvennoe Mnenie (FOM), the decision was opposed by a
whopping 82 per cent of the population. A month later a Levada poll
revealed that popular ‘trust’ in Putin had fallen below 50 per cent (48%) for
the first time in five years, a 12-point drop in trust levels since January.36
Even a state-sponsored pollster, the All-Russian Public Opinion Research
Centre (VTsIOM), reported a 10-point drop for Putin, to 38.3 per cent.
Almost all Russian senior politicians suffered losses in credibility.37 Whereas
the pension reform triggered a sudden collapse in support for authorities,
continuing tensions in international relations and domestic economic
strains lurking beneath a veneer of calm also contributed to outbursts of
protest.
At first, Putin made a point of keeping out of the debate over raising the
pensionable age, letting the outrage target Medvedev and the Cabinet. Indeed,
he had spoken publicly against the reform since 2005 and hedged again in his
annual call-in show in 2018, saying that he had ‘always taken a highly cautious
and careful attitude toward it’, going on to stress that he wanted to raise
pensioner incomes. If, as is often assumed, Putin’s power relied on his ideas
and emotions coinciding with current popular values, then the pension crisis
represented a sudden turning point against him.38
He avoided disaster by joining the fray in late August, shortly before a
scheduled anti-pension reform demonstration. Facing the population in a
special TV presentation, Putin outlined the economic necessity of change for
the benefit of the entire country, and then proposed a compromise that would
lower the planned pension age for women to 60, rather than the 63 set out in
the draft law. This concession was in support of domestic households, he
said, freeing up female pensioners to help their sons and daughters raise
families and still go to work.39 Taking back the issue and presenting moderate
‘fixes’ slowed the decline in his approval rating, which dropped from the 80s
in March-April to the upper 60s in August.40
Hoping to recover popular confidence, the presidential team went on a
public relations binge in August, playing up a nature hike in the Tuva region
with multiple photos of the president, aged 65, showing off his physical
fitness and communing with nature – keeping his shirt on this time. Head of
the FSB Aleksandr Bortnikov joined him in the venture. Shortly thereafter,
Russian state TV launched a new programme dedicated solely to Putin. Titled
‘Moskva.Kreml.Putin’, Rossiia 1 aired the first show on 3 September, featur-
ing interviews with Peskov and Kremlin reporters.41
 The presidency 17
Putin continued to cater to Russian sensibilities, playing in public hockey
matches (scoring more goals than he deserved to), and joining in the annual
‘Immortal Regiment’ parades carrying a photo of his father.42 Popular opin-
ion was an important source of presidential influence, and an especially valu-
able legitimizing one, and those were to be badly jolted in 2020.

Siloviki, oligarchs and cronyism

Along with his administrative team, Putin governs Russia by manipulating
the siloviki, leaders in the various security services. These individuals dominate
the power ministries and are often influential in state-owned energy
companies, such as Gazprom and Rosneft. The siloviki are especially
important in the regions, where they can shape voting patterns, sway the
choice of candidates and protect the interests of Moscow.43 Gazprom, the
largest publicly-listed natural gas company in the world and the sole exporter
of Russian gas to Europe, provides us with a perfect example of how a
primarily state-owned enterprise (51%) can act in the interests of Russia’s
foreign policy when needed, and remain powerful enough to lobby successfully
on behalf of its own commercial interests and its billionaire shareholders.44
As we have seen, Putin also stage-manages the oligarchs by coercion and
favour granting, allowing them to oversee state-owned and private mega-
companies that pour tax monies into governmental coffers. He is helped in
this approach by the fact that they compete among themselves for power and
wealth, which means that currying favour with the president is essential.
Assertions are made that Putin is the wealthiest of the oligarchs himself. It
would not be surprising that the president enriched himself further than his
limited disclosure suggests: an apartment in St. Petersburg and a larger flat in
Moscow, two vintage cars and a Lada, and an annual salary the equivalent of
$135,000.45 The source of many such claims are well-known Putinophobes,
such as Nemtsov as early as in 2012, followed by Navalny, William Browder
and Anders Åslund. Åslund, for instance, estimates Putin’s wealth at $160
billion, which would make him the world’s richest man.46 That seems a
stretch. Challengers to these allegations insist that the numbers include items
that actually belong to the state and not to Putin.
Whatever the case may be, the majority of Russians seem not to be
concerned about it.

Presidential envoys
One of Putin’s first centralizing acts in 2000 was to create a completely new
level of territorial administration, called Federal Districts. Each district
encompasses several of the component subjects of the Federation and are
monitored by a special envoy (officially, Plenipotentiary Representative)
named by the president. The relationship of the envoys to the governors, or
official heads, of the subjects, is ambiguous. Their official role is to watch
over federal agencies in the region, guarantee that federal funds are spent
18 The presidency
appropriately and ensure that local laws conform to federal laws. As infor-
mal liaison between governors and the president, the envoy can wield consid-
erable influence. As of March 2014, the nine Federal Districts were: Central,
Southern, North Western, Far Eastern, Siberian, Ural, Volga, North
Caucasian and Crimean.
The president also appoints delegates (envoys) to the Federal Assembly,
the Federation Council, the State Duma and the Constitutional Court. These
agents of the president help consolidate the centralized chain of command
from Moscow, the vertikal. Edicts excluding governors from the Federation
Council (see Chapter 2) strengthen the presidency as well.

Public chamber
The Public or Civic Chamber was created in 2005 to examine draft laws and
oversee the activities of the Duma and other governing bodies in the Russian
Federation. It began with 42 members named by the president, those members
then added another 42 from All-Russia public associations and, finally, the 84
elected 42 more members from regional and inter-regional public associations.
The Chamber met in 2006 for the first of its three-year terms. In a strictly
advisory role, its chartered purpose is to serve as liaison between citizens and
governing circles at all levels and express opinions on legislation, and even
foreign affairs. Its 18 commissions hold public hearings and community
workshops, and it reports on a quarterly basis to the Duma and the president.
The Chamber may field appeals directly from citizens, so it serves as an
important sounding board for the president.
The Public Chamber’s membership was broadened in 2013, so that, by
2020, it consisted of 168 members: 40 citizens approved by presidential
decree; 85 representatives of public chambers of the Federation’s subject
components; and 43 representatives of nation-wide public associations and
NGOs. A new final 43 members were selected in June, 2020.47

National security agencies

Whereas Putin’s third term featured the creation of a Russian National
Guard (Rosgvardia), his fourth term opened with the creation of a special
police force to assist operations for events making up the 2018 FIFA World
Cup. According to Minister of the Interior Vladimir Kolokoltsev, mem-
bers of the ‘Tourist Police’ unit patrolled seven Russian cities. They were
expected to speak three foreign language and be ‘tourist friendly’.48
Announced as a temporary organization, the Tourist Police were still in
place in 2020.
The much more significant National Guard was created by a transfer of
troops from the Ministry of the Interior (MVD) and included special purpose
forces (OMON), riot troops, rapid response units and security guards,
altogether about 340,000 law enforcement personnel. Headed by Army
General Viktor Zolotov, it is responsible directly to the president. In February
 The presidency 19
2016, the Federal Drug Control Service and Federal Migration Services were
placed under the MVD.
Like the MVD, the FSB (Federal’naia sluzhba bezopasnosti) is a service
with military ranks. Its 65,000 personnel include some 5,000 special forces
troops. In its charge are approximately 200,000 border guards. The FSB
director, currently Bortnikov, reports directly to the president, sits as an ex
officio member of the National Security Council and chairs the national anti-
terrorism committee. The July–August 2020 clampdown against protesters
was preceded by a ‘cleansing’ of the FSB and MVD in April–May. Senior
and junior officers were arrested for bribery, intimidation and fraud after
several years of investigation (see Chapter 8). Head of the FSB Investigative
Department, Lt. Gen. Mikhail Shishov, was forced into early retirement, as
were several other senior officials in the service.49
Shuffling ranks among the siloviki is a time-tested mechanism used by
Putin, and his predecessors, to ensure the stability needed to preserve his
legacy.

Street protests
Whereas there appear to be enough representative bodies in Russia for public
opinions to be heard, the forums most utilized for public opinion are street
protests (see Chapter 3). Although demonstrations take place for a wide
variety of reasons, anti-government and anti-Putin assemblies attract the
most media attention. They also provide opportunities for activists to vie for
the popular ear. For instance, protests during and after Putin’s inauguration
on 7 May 2018 featured left-wing militant Sergei Udaltsov and Navalny
competing for headlines. Municipal authorities granted Udaltsov’s
application for a pre-inauguration demonstration and denied a similar bid by
Navalny. The Mayor’s office explained that Navalny’s proposed site was
already committed to rehearsals for Victory Day (9 May). The city offered
two alternate locations and Navalny, who undoubtedly knew that his choice
was inappropriate, feigned outrage and called on his devotees to rally on that
location anyway, tweeting grandiosely that ‘We are not slaves’.50
Gathering under the slogan ‘He’s not our tsar’ (On nam ne tsar’), Navalny-
led demonstrators purported to be against the ‘establishment of the monarchy,
against corruption, against inequality, censorship and lawlessness’. About
1,600 people were detained, briefly, around the country on the day of the
protests, among them Navalny, whose message on social media called the
government ‘swindlers and thieves’. Almost all the demonstrations were
declared illegal because neither their time nor place were approved.51
A little over a year later a political storm erupted in Moscow after the
municipal electoral commission disqualified dozens of potential candidates
for City Council, alleging irregularities in the list of signatures of support
they were required to compile. At least seven of these people were well-
known oppositionists. There followed weeks of large anti-Putin, anti-gov-
ernment rallies, with over 1,000 demonstrators and leaders detained. Chants
20 The presidency
of ‘Putin is a thief!’ (Putin – Vory!), a rallying cry during the mass rallies
against vote rigging in 2011–12, were heard again. Fearing a coloured revolu-
tion, the Kremlin gave up on its previous concession-granting policy (see
also Chapter 3).52
Whereas anti-Putin placards were seen in many of the street demonstra-
tions, protesters also called upon the president to side with citizens against
local officials, as he did in response to public actions against dumping
Moscow’s waste in the North, unwanted construction projects and ineffective
responses to natural disasters (floods and wildfires). Demonstrators some-
times held signs that called on municipal bureaucrats to fulfil Putin’s direct
requests that they had ignored. Putin often came to the aid of provincial
complainants, thereby ensuring his popularity in the regions, temporarily at
least.53 During major outbursts of public wrath, however, he tended to remain
aloof, a habit that began to go sour by 2020.
UR deputies introduced a law in 2019 to protect Putin’s image. Part of the
Administrative Offenses Code, the law proposed to curb intentionally
‘inaccurate information’ (fake news) and ‘indecent behaviour’. According to
SOVA, a Moscow-based NGO dedicated to research on racism and human
rights, its practical purpose was to restrict freedom of speech.54 The law pro-
vided for financial penalties graded according to the number of offences and
even to the ‘severity’ of the insult. Overall, it probably did Putin’s image more
harm than good, and was very difficult to enforce at the local and regional
levels.
The move against public ‘disrespect’ shielded everyone, at least theoreti-
cally. The Code already included a provision (Art. 5.61) that protected the
right of all citizens to ‘honour and dignity’ when dealing with state or munic-
ipal officials. This was amended in 2020 to include individuals who were
acting in place of a state official, such as judges, law enforcement, and even
school principals. Insults were defined in the amended code as ‘a humiliation
of the honour and dignity of another person, expressed in indecent form’
and clear instructions were provided on how to pursue a case in the
workplace.55

Inauguration promises, 2018

By the time of the electoral crisis in Moscow, Putin was already struggling to
keep promises made during his 2018 inauguration. Faced with polls that
showed Russians were least satisfied with his failure to curtail the rapidly
growing wealth disparity in the country, Putin’s new May Decree had included
plans to kick-start the economy with an allocation of the ruble equivalent of
over $150 billion for societal needs.56 The purpose of the decree was to
improve the quality of life for Russians generally, and cut the poverty level in
half by 2024. Development programmes included the healthcare, education,
demography, housing and urban development, international cooperation
and exports, labour productivity, roads and infrastructure, ecology, digital
economy, science and culture sectors. One demographic goal was to raise the
 The presidency 21
life expectancy of Russians to 78 by 2024 and 80 by 2030.57 Reiterating much
of what were encompassed in the National Projects, these undertakings
complemented the slogan Putin adopted for his new term, ‘Russia is for the
People’. Projections on their cost made the agenda somewhat fanciful. In
fact, Kudrin told Putin in December 2019 that only about two-thirds of the
planned 2019 funding for the projects had been spent, mainly because bureau-
crats were too cautious to distribute it.58 Kudrin may have unwittingly pro-
vided him with a rationale for staying on.

Forming a government
One day after the inauguration, Putin named Medvedev prime minister –
again. The Communist Party and A Just Russia opposed the nomination.
United Russia, with support from Liberal Democratic Party of Russia
(LDPR), pushed it through easily, 374–56.
Other than shifting responsibilities among long-standing members, very
few changes were made to Cabinet. Within a few weeks, Putin signed orders
to: a) create a new Ministry of Science and Higher Education, separate from
the Ministry of Education; b) expand the Ministry of Communications and
Mass Communications into a Ministry of Digital Development; and c)
transfer trade missions from the Ministry of Economic Development to the
Ministry of Industry.59 Medvedev called on former Deputy Prime Minister
Arkady Dvorkovich to co-chair the Skolkovo Foundation, Russia’s leading
technological and innovation research centre.
Perhaps the most significant move came when Kudrin agreed to head up
the Accounting Chamber. Already director of the Centre for Strategic
Research and often rumoured a prime ministerial candidate, Kudrin
brought a wealth of economic experience to the post. The position also kept
him apart from Medvedev, who had fired him as finance minister in 2011
(Table 1.2).60

Presidential staff
The president’s own staff remained intact. Anton Vaino kept his post as
chief-of-staff, along with his deputies Aleksei Gromov and Kiriyenko. Peskov
retained his jobs as press secretary and deputy chief-of-staff. Three new
names appeared on the list of nine presidential aides. One of these was
Dmitry Shalkov, who is also deputy head of the FSB.

Outlining the future

Within weeks of the inauguration, Putin gave two lengthy public presentations
in which he answered questions on a broad range of subjects. The first of
these was a long and testy televised interview in Vienna and the second came
two days later in Moscow at his annual televised ‘Direct Line’. In the latter
case, staff sifted through over a million questions submitted by telephone,
22 The presidency

Table 1.2 The New Russian Government, 18 May 2018

Age included
Prime Minister
Dmitry Medvedev - 52.
Deputy Prime Ministers
Konstantin Chuyuchenko - 52, Government Chief of Staff and Deputy Prime
Minister.
Anton Siluanov - 55, First Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister.
Dmitry Kobak - 59, Deputy Prime Minister responsible for energy and industry
sectors.
Vitaly Mutko - 59, Deputy Prime Minister responsible for construction and
regional development.
Yuri Borisov - 61, Deputy Prime Minister responsible for defence industry
complex. Was Deputy Defence Minister since 2012.
Maksim Akimov - 48, Deputy Prime Minister responsible for transport and
communications.
Aleksei Gordeev - 63, Deputy Prime Minister responsible for agro-industrial
complex.
Tatiana Golikova - 52, Deputy Prime Minister responsible for welfare.
Olga Golodets - 56, Deputy Prime Minister responsible for culture and sport.
Oleg Trutnev - 62, Deputy Prime Minister responsible for Russian Far East
development.
Ministers

Finance Minister - Anton Siluanov, 55.

Energy Minister - Aleksandr Novak, 46.
Foreign Minister - Sergei Lavrov, 68.
Defence Minister - Sergei Shoigu, 62.
Economy Minister - Maksim Oreshkin, 35.
Industry and Trade Minister - Denis Manturov, 49.
Agriculture Minister - Dmitry Patrushev, 40.
Sport Minister - Pavel Kolobkov, 48.
Minister of Internal Affairs - Vladimir Kolokoltsev, 57.
Emergencies Minister - Yevgeny Zinichev, 51.
Transport Minister - Yevgeny Ditrikh, 45.
Education Minister - Olga Vasilieva, 58.
Science and Higher Education Minister - Mikhail Kotukov, 41.
Minister of Natural Resources and Ecology - Dmitry Kobylkin, 46.
Minister of Health - Veronika Skvortsova, 57.
Minister of Labour and Social Development - Maxim Topilin, 51.
Justice Minister - Alexander Konovalov, 49.
Culture Minister - Vladimir Medinsky, 48.
Minister of Construction - Vladimir Yakushev, 49.
Minister of Communications - Konstantin Noskov, 39.
Minister for development of the Far East - Alexander Kozlov, 36.
Minister for development of the North Caucasus - Sergey Chebotarev
Source: TASS, 18 May 2018, https://tass.com/politics/1005075. Ages added by author.
 The presidency 23
social media, e-mail or video. He answered pointed queries about the econ-
omy, the Skripal affair, Syria, Ukraine, sanctions, household matters, such as
the high price of fuel, and the ban on the Russian messenger service, Telegram.
All of these issues will be discussed in later chapters.

Trust in president fades

Faith in the president plummeted when the pension reform bill was finally
signed into law on 3 October 2018. Unexpected losses on the part of several
Kremlin-favoured candidates in September’s regional elections were signals
of a trend confirmed in a poll conducted by the Levada Centre towards the
end of that month. Putin’s trust rating (58%) fell below what it had been prior
to the annexation of Crimea. Trust in the army (66%) was now at the top of
the list, with the FSB, the Church and charitable organizations following
close behind. Government at all levels, banks and unions ranked much lower,
and political parties rested at the bottom of the pile.61 Another Levada sur-
vey asked respondents to list politicians whom they trusted the most. Putin
suffered a twenty-point drop from the previous year, to 39 per cent. Medvedev
topped a roster of the least-trusted politicians, at 31 per cent, which suggested
he was taking the heat for much of the pension protest. Navalny appeared on
both lists, with 3 per cent trusting him the most and another 3 per cent trust-
ing him the least (Table 1.3).62

Table 1.3 Survey: ‘Which politicians do you trust the most?’

Nov. 2017 June 2018 Sept. 2018

Putin, V. 59 48 39
Zhirinovsky, V 14 14 15
Shoigu, S. 23 19 15
Lavrov, S. 19 14 10
Medvedev, D. 11 9 10
Zyuganov, G. 10 7 8
Sobyanin, S. 3 4 4
Navalny, A. 2 2 3

“Which politicians do you trust the least?

Medvedev, D. 19 30 31
Zhirinovsky, V. 18 18 20
Putin, V. 7 11 13
Zyuganov, G. 11 8 11
Yavlinsky, G. 11 9 4
Sobchak, K. 14 15 4
Navalny, A. 10 6 3

Source: Summarized by the author from ‘Doverie politikam’, Levada-tsentr, www.levada.

ru/2018/10/08/doverie-politikam-2/. These were open-ended questions, ranked in descending
order. There were many more names on the list, though these were all in top ten.
24 The presidency
Respect for Putin had deteriorated so that in November a clear majority of
respondents (61%) told Levada pollsters that they held the president ‘fully’
responsible for problems confronting the country. Another 22 per cent held
him responsible ‘to some extent’. Only 40 per cent said they would vote for
him again if an election was called within the week. The only encouraging
news for Putin was still the lack of an alternative. The next name on the list
of potential candidates was Zhirinovsky, with 4 per cent. Navalny received
only 1 per cent.63
The trend downward continued into 2019. In January, a poll conducted by
VTsIOM saw trust in Putin slipping to 33 per cent, his lowest rating since
2006. Oddly, his general approval rating fell only slightly, hovering around 62
per cent. The government itself was very unpopular, with about half the
population preferring its resignation. This last finding appeared to be based
on both the retirement laws passed in 2018 and the first rise in direct taxes
since Putin began his presidency (Table 1.4).64
Various surveys and articles suggested that perhaps ‘Putin-fatigue’ had
started to set in. As public trust in him waned, anger usually directed against
the Duma and local authorities was now more frequently aimed at the
president. Several Russian pundits believed that the downward trend in
Putin’s popularity was irretrievable.65 He was up a few points by the end of
March 2019 (64%), but so was his disapproval rate (35%).66
In February, 2019, and for the first time, less than half (48%) of the voting
population said it would vote for Putin in a new presidential election. This
was an extraordinary drop considering he won the post with 77 per cent of
the vote only a year and a few months earlier. 67 The administrative staff
simply chose not to believe the findings. Peskov claimed that Putin’s popular-
ity was climbing and challenged the pollster’s methodology – in doing so he
unwittingly called attention to the results.68

Table 1.4 VTsIOM weekly surveys on trust in Putin, November 2018 to January 2019

Percentage of Russians who

trust Putin distrust Putin

5 Nov. 2018 36.8 6.6

10 Nov. 2018 36.5 5.9
19 Nov. 2018 35.6 5.9
26 Dec. 2018 35.6 6.7
3 Dec. 2018 37 6.1
16 Dec. 2018 37.3 5.6
23 Dec. 2018 36.7 6.5
29 Dec. 2018 36.5 6.4
5 Jan. 2019 36.5 6.9
13 Jan. 2019 33.4 6.7

Source: Compiled by author from weekly surveys of 1,500-1,600 Russians from 58 to 66 compo-
nents of the Federation, equal-sized and mixed-age groups. VTsIOM is a state-owned polling
agency.
 The presidency 25
The ‘drop’ was relative, of course, because his support among Russians
was still high compared to other domestic and international leaders. In
response to Levada’s annual poll asking for opinions about the ‘Human of
the Year’, Putin was far out in front with 31 per cent, Ukraine’s new president,
Volodymyr Zelenskiy came next with 7 per cent. Trump (3%) and Navalny
(2%) were in a mix with 11 other names.69 Putin’s supporters attributed his
continued popularity to leadership and policy decisions, while his detractors
credited the Putin team with successfully massaging the message. One pair of
analysts dubbed Putin an ‘informational autocrat’ whose team maintained
popularity by non-ideological control of the information flow, and selective
harassment of vocal opponents.70 There was much truth in that, but neither
tactic represented the entire explanation.
No matter his position as the only significantly tolerated Russian politician,
it was plain that Putin would have to improve the economic situation for the
country’s growing middle class if he wanted to retain, or regain, the people’s
confidence. Kudrin continued to recommend that conflict resolution in the
international arena, and not conflict exacerbation, was the logical way to
release funds for the social progress pledged in 2018. The seriousness of that
message may have failed to reach the Kremlin.
The mood began to improve in the spring, perhaps due to promises Putin
made to the Federal Assembly and later during his annual Q&A to energize
the economy and improve living standards. Surveys conducted in June by
the Levada Centre found that 66 per cent of 1,600 respondents now
‘approved’ Putin’s actions as president, the same as it had been in December
2018, and only 32 per cent ‘disapproved’. By that time, VTsIOM’s survey
results were even better: 72.3 per cent trusted the president and only 24 per
cent did not.71 Compared to other Russian politicians and ‘public figures’,
Putin stood alone in the fall of 2019 when the Levada Centre asked another
1,601 people across the country to list in order the politicians they trusted
the most (Table 1.5).
When it came to which institutions were most trusted, the army still led the
way. The president was close behind in October 2019, followed by the FSB,
the Church, charities and police in that order. The State Duma, banks, big
business and political parties were still more distrusted than trusted.72 In late
October 2019, ‘admiration’ of Putin stayed about the same at 32 per cent, but
the dominant attitude was represented by the 61 per cent who said they felt
‘neutral’ or ‘distant’ about the president.73
With these figures on his desk, Putin equivocated when asked in July, 2019,
if he would retire when his current term expired in 2024. He told the Financial
Times that the decision would be made by the Russian people and, a week
later, said to Italy’s Corriere della Sera that it was ‘too early’ to speak about
it: ‘There are still five years of hard work ahead. And with such rapid
dynamics that we are now seeing in the world, it is difficult to make predic-
tions’.74 Some pundits took the ‘hard work’ to include the preparation of
both a successor and a post-presidency position for Putin himself, and every
political analyst was well aware that the oligarchs and siloviki were already
26 The presidency

Table 1.5 Survey: ‘Which politicians do you trust the most?’ September–October 2019

November 2017 to September 2019

Nov. June Sept. Mar. June Sept.

2017 2018 2018 2019 2019 2019
Vladimir Putin 59 48 39 41 40 39
Vladimir Zhirinovsky 14 14 15 16 15 14
Sergei Lavrov 23 18 15 16 17 13
Dmitry Medvedev 11 9 10 13 11 9
Gennady Zyuganov 10 7 8 8 9 6
Pavel Grudinin - 7 4 5 3 3
Aleksei Navalny 2 2 3 3 3 3
Sergei Sobyanin 3 3 4 4 3 2
Valentina Matviyenko 2 2 1 3 3 2
Sergei Mironov 4 2 2 2 3 2
Grigorii Yavlinsky 2 2 1 1 1 1
Not interested in 1 1 1 1 1 1
politicians
Trust none of them 14 21 18 17 18 24
Difficult to answer 11 12 18 16 18 14
Source: Compiled by the author from information provided in Levada Centre surveys, www.
levada.ru/2019/10/17/deverie-politikam-3/

positioning themselves for the post-Putin power arena.75 They were soon all
to be proven wrong.
Putin laid out the ‘hard work’ agenda himself while answering queries
during the 2019 Q&A session: corruption, though declining, was still a major
issue, protection of Russia’s cyber space, healthcare, maternity and child care
issues, labour productivity and continued resistance to the impact of
economic sanctions, were all on his to-do list. He complained that directives
from the centre were too often ignored on the ground. Clearly, foreign policy
issues notwithstanding, these were the matters on which he hoped to focus
for the remainder of the current term.76

Coping with domestic non-political problems

In addition to street protests outlined in Chapter 3 and economic issues
detailed in Chapter 4, crises that should have been dealt with locally kept
crossing Putin’s desk. In the first two years of his fourth term these included
landfill issues in the North and raging wildfires in Siberia. In the latter case,
more than two million hectares were blazing in late July and August, 2019,
with the tundra on fire and permafrost threatened. Smoke from the
uncontrolled fires polluted Krasnoyarsk, Yakutsk, Irkutsk, Novosibirsk and
other major cities, and damaged boreal forests. For the most part, they were
allowed to burn themselves out because of their remoteness, which made
reaching and containing them almost impossible. Protesters demanded the
president do more to slow the flames, and complained also that Moscow was
 The presidency 27
using the North to dump its trash.77 In doing so, they fuelled the general
unrest and targeted Putin at a time when his government was under
tremendous pressure from activists defending voting rights and calling for
the release of political prisoners.
While the energy sector rejoiced that the Arctic seaway was opening up,
climate change had devastating effects on Russia’s North, Siberia and
elsewhere, subjecting the country to record heatwaves and unprecedented
downpours. When fires were not raging, floods devastated parts of southern
Siberia (Irkutsk) and the Krasnodar and Altai regions in 2018–19, causing
multiple deaths and forcing thousands to evacuate (see Chapter 9).78 Damage
control and recovery were very expensive and undermined Putin’s economic
ambitions. Moreover, a deadly nuclear blast in Severodvinsk in August 2019
raised anxieties about radiation and worries about too much haste in Russia’s
military preparedness. For the first time in many years, accountability was
laid at the feet of the president.

Constitutional amendments, 2020

Conjecture about the presidency reached a startling turning point on 15
January 2020. During his annual Address to the Federal Assembly, Putin set
out constitutional amendment proposals that appeared to guarantee that he
could not run again for the presidency in 2024. When the actual proposed
change was formulated officially, it read as follows: ‘Article 81, 3. One and the
same person may not hold the office of the President of the Russian
Federation for more than two terms.’
Emphasizing that, because of its immense size and complicated structure,
Russia ‘must remain a strong presidential republic’ and the president should
still determine the ‘tasks and priorities’ of the government, Putin suggested
that the Duma be granted the right to confirm, not merely ‘consider’, the
candidacy of a prime minister, and the prime minister have the authority to
nominate his own deputies and federal ministers.
The president would not be allowed to reject any candidate confirmed by
the Duma, but would keep control of the Armed Forces and appoint heads
of the ‘so-called power departments’ after consultation with the Federation
Council, and have the right to remove the prime minister and/or his ministers
if they acting improperly. 79
An added bolt from the blue was a recommendation that the State Council
be turned into an official governing agency. With governors, some cabinet
ministers and siloviki on it, that body could wield enormous influence,
especially if Putin chaired it himself after leaving the presidency. The draft
amendment said the Council would ‘ensure the coordinated functioning and
interaction of state authorities, … determine the main directions of the
domestic and foreign policy of the Russian Federation and priority areas of
socio-economic development of the state’. Moreover, Putin advised that the
governors play a greater role ‘in the development and adoption of decisions
at the federal level’.
28 The presidency
Not stopping there, he proposed granting the Federation Council the right
to remove judges from the Constitutional and Supreme Courts, and banning
anyone with foreign citizenship or foreign residence permit from holding
high-level federal positions (Art. 97. 1.). A further amendment would
guarantee that international laws and treaties not restrict the ‘rights and
freedoms’ of Russians or ‘contradict our Constitution’, overriding the
original article that granted precedence to rules agreed in international trea-
ties (Art. 16. 4).80 To be eligible for the presidential post an individual would
have had to live in Russia for 25 years consecutively and never have owned a
foreign passport or residency permit.
The comment in the address most speculated upon was the following:

I also know that our society is discussing the constitutional provision that
the same person should not hold the office of the President of the Russian
Federation for more than two consecutive terms. I do not think that this
issue is fundamental, but I agree with this.

Less than a week later, he told a gathering of World War II veterans that the
Soviet practice of life-long rulers should not be revived.81
Wasting no time, on 16 January Putin established a working group to
prepare proposals for amending the Constitution. With three co-chairs
drawn from legislative committees of both chambers, Andrei Klishas,
Pavel Krasheninnikov and Taliya Khabrieva, and 72 other parliamentari-
ans, scientists and public figures, the working group started the very next
day. It seemed, at that time, that Putin did not intend to run for a third
consecutive term, and the next president would not have the same powers
he had enjoyed.
Western and Russian pundits speculated about the implications of these
proposals, dubbed the ‘January Revolution’ by some media in Russia, many
of them suggesting that Putin planned to govern from the side in a new tan-
democracy.82 Thousands of Russians signed a manifesto published on-line
and in the Novaya gazeta by activists who opposed the changes altogether,
calling them a ‘coup’ intended ‘to keep Vladimir Putin and his corrupt regime
in power for life’. Among their lengthy complaints was the following:

Today, an attempt has been made on the basic principles of the state
structure, on the constitutional rights of Russian citizens. And although
chapters 1 and 2 of the Constitution, where these principles and rights are
fixed, were not changed, the announced amendments not only affect
them, innovations contradict what is written in the first chapters. The
coup organizers remove the priority of Russia’s international obligations,
destroy the autonomy of local self-government, reduce the separation of
powers, primarily the independence of the court, enshrining the constitu-
tional practice of power in the Basic Law. And they also create a new state
governing body that is not under the control of society – the Council of
State.83
 The presidency 29
Little did they know. The notion that Putin planned to weaken the presidency
by strengthening the State Council was contradicted by the fact that the
president would still be able to appoint the chair of that body, no matter how
it was revised. The president retained the right to introduce legislation, was
the commander-in-chief, and could fire the prime minister and cabinet
ministers. The top office was even granted a new right to dismiss Supreme
Court and Constitutional Court judges for ‘misconduct’, and would have a
‘second veto’ over legislation. Heads of the security agencies, whom the presi-
dent names, must report directly to him, or her.84 In the meantime, the ques-
tion of Putin’s successor was energized.85
There was something for everybody in the ‘January Revolution’ package. A
survey conducted by the Levada Centre during the last three days of January
showed that 72 per cent approved recommendations for a mandatory
indexation of pensions, a minimum wage no lower than subsistence level and
a ban on officials having foreign citizenships.86 There were no major street
rallies against changes put forward at that time.87 A Levada survey at the
time, asked ‘In what role would you want to see Vladimir Putin after the end
of his presidential term in 2024?’: 27 per cent wanted him back in office; 25
per cent preferred he retire. Others suggested he become the prime minister
(11%), head of the UR (9%), head of a large corporation (I1%), an
international body (4%) or even the president of a united Russia and Belarus
(4%).88
An ‘All-Russia vote’ on the revised constitution as a whole was scheduled
for 22 April, even though it was not required for the amendments to become
law. The Public Chamber would oversee the vote. The 1993 Constitution
required that amendments could pass if two-thirds of a Constitutional
Assembly, made up of the Federation Council and State Duma, agreed. If a
nation-wide (referendum) vote was held instead, then half the population
must vote and over half must agree, for the amendment(s) to be adopted
(Chapt. 9, Art. 134, Nos 2 & 3). For those reasons, one can assume, the All-
Russia Vote was not deemed a referendum.
After the alterations passed the first reading in the House unanimously,
Putin introduced new proposals ahead of the second reading. These included
‘faith in God’ as one of Russia’s historical traits, a statement to the effect that
marriage is between a man and a woman, a ban on ceding Russian territory
and a provision that allows the central government to create federal
territories.89
Altogether, the modifications affected about 60 per cent of the articles in
the existing Constitution, excluding Chapters 1, 2 and 9 that can be changed
only by convening a Constitutional Assembly.90

More succession speculation

Speculation about Putin’s future continued. In early March, he tried to
squelch any notion that he was trying either to succeed himself as president
or to become a power-broker in some other position. He told an audience at
30 The presidency
a factory in Ivanovo that any kind of ‘dual power’ would be ‘absolutely
destructive for Russia’ and repeated his earlier insistence that Russia needed
a strong presidency:

Without a strong presidential power in our country, it will be bad. We do

not have stable political parties that, say, in Europe, have grown for cen-
turies. But even there, the failures are very large in the parliamentary
system. … But our country is so complicated, it is simply impossible for
us, destructive. Or it is proposed, … to endow the State Council with
some special powers and [I am] to head this State Council. What will that
mean? It will mean a situation of diarchy in the country, for Russia it is
absolutely destructive.91

Half (49%) of the respondents to a survey conducted by the Levada Centre

in February also believed that Russia always needed a ‘strong hand’ and an
additional quarter (26%) believed they need a strong hand sometimes.92 Even
though these statements and the proposed nationwide vote did not quell
widespread suspicion that Putin, somehow, would still hold the reins of
power after 2024, the question of succession took on a new life. The repeatedly
asked ‘who’ was augmented by the questions of ‘how’ and ‘by which clique’
would the successor be chosen.93

Putin, the ‘eternal’ president

The problem of succession was resolved on 10 March 2020. Valentina
Tereshkova, a UR deputy famous as the first woman in space, proposed in
the Duma that all restrictions on presidential terms of office be removed. In
putting her resolution forward, she said:

Why make any artificial construction? Everything must be honestly,

openly, publicly envisioned and [we should cancel] restrictions on the num-
ber of presidential terms in the Constitution [and] if the situation requires
it and if people want it, provide the possibility for incumbent presidents to
be re-elected to this post.94

The suggestion, which came as the second reading was under debate, sparked
a flurry of activity. Duma members rose to their feet and applauded the
resolution and adjourned for nearly two hours so the heads of parties might
discuss it. Volodin left to telephone Putin, who came to speak to the Duma
and announced that, while he preferred that limits to presidential terms be
kept in the Constitution, he agreed that term limits might be nullified if the
Constitutional Court concluded that such a change did not contradict the
basic provisions of the Constitution, and if the people approved.95
Stating that he considered ‘it inappropriate to remove from the
Constitution a restriction on the number of presidential terms’, in part
because they were not trying to replace the Constitution with a new one,
 The presidency 31
rather they were amending the existing Basic Law, Putin added that in times
of emergency, when the state is vulnerable from outside, the people should
be able to decide to lift limits.96 Pointing out how insecure the world was at
the time, with startling new technology, constant threats of war, dramatic
fluctuations in oil prices and currency exchange rates, ‘coronavirus’ and
Western ‘containment policy’, he insisted that Russians must ‘work together’.
In these times of potential instability ‘it is the President who is the guaran-
tor of the Constitution, and, to put it more simply, in another way, is the
guarantor of the security of our state, its internal stability and internal, once
again, evolutionary development … we have had enough revolutions’.97 The
president was also well aware that the current global situation rendered the
fulfilment of inaugural promises made in 2018 increasingly beyond his
grasp. If fulfilling those undertakings were to be his legacy, more time was
needed to achieve them. These circumstances may have decided the issue for
him. In turn, Peskov said that Putin’s decision was driven by ‘extreme turbu-
lence in the world’.98
The Constitutional Court performed its task in Putin’s favour within a
week (18 March), leaving only the All-Russia Vote as a flimsy barrier to the
constitutional changes. The senior judge on the court was Valerii Zorkin,
who held the position since November 1991 and in 1998 had ruled against
Yeltsin running for a third term. The Court’s decision was derided by oppo-
sitionists, including a prominent Russian political scientist, Yekaterina
Schulmann, who told her Facebook followers that the text of the 52-page
decision reflected a ‘spirit of slavery and intellectual cowardice’. Navalny
urged his supporters not to participate in the All-Russia Vote, because it was
not a regulated referendum and had no requirement for a 50 per cent
turnout.99
At the end of May, a new law made it possible for citizens to vote electroni-
cally or by mail-in, even in referenda. Critics complained that the law would
facilitate manipulation by the state; the CEC insisted that it the law was an
attempt to counter the spread of coronavirus. They were probably both right.
One can only assume that Tereshkova’s intervention on 10 March was
carefully rehearsed with a small presidential insider team beforehand, and
the turn to the Federal Assembly, the Constitutional Court and the public for
approval was mostly to provide an aura of legitimacy for a scheme that was
set in advance. Putin’s regular protestations against staying on beyond
existing constitutional limits and the fact that he stepped aside, sort of, in
2008 lulled observers – including this author – into expecting him to do the
same in 2024.100
On 11 March, Duma deputies voted overwhelmingly to reset limits on
presidential terms, 383 in favour, 43 abstentions and no one opposed. The bill
then passed quickly through the Federation Council (160-1), with 3
abstentions. If all other conditions were met, Putin could serve for 12 more
years after 2024. Of the other proposed changes in the bill, the Duma
supported 387 mostly minor adjustments submitted from the floor and
rejected 177 others, including a proposed ban on deputies owning properties
32 The presidency
abroad. By the end of the second reading in March, single-person pickets
against the changes to presidential terms were already forming outside the
Duma and Federation Council buildings, and both Western and Russian
critics railed that Putin planned to rule for life, now tagging him the ‘eternal
president’.
Despite the fact that single-person pickets do not require official permission,
the authorities often find reasons to arrest them. For example, picketers must
keep six feet apart, not wear any kind of mask (though this requirement had
to be waived during the pandemic), carry a ‘weapon’, consume alcohol, or
stand close to a presidential residence, a court or a prison. In practice, police
can find cause to arrest a picketer quite easily, and they do.101
Results of surveys conducted by the Levada Centre and published in the
first week of March now showed that the same number of respondents
wanted him to stay on (45%) as wanted him to leave (44%).102 He still has the
choice of handing off the presidential burden in 2024 if his support sagged,
though that option seemed unlikely early in 2020.103 By the end of May,
Levada Centre’s regular surveys showed Putin’s approval rate (not to be
confused with trust and confidence rates) to be lower than any year since
1999, at 59 per cent.104 The All-Russia Vote would be a test in more ways than
one, perhaps above all a judgement of his handling of the coronavirus
pandemic.
In so far as the amendments were concerned, surveys at the end of March
showed that 58 per cent of responders preferred an age limit for holders of
the presidential office, similar to the age 70 for civil servants, and only 26 per
cent said there should be none. Answers to a question about feelings on the
reset of presidential terms were oddly mixed: Satisfied (12%), Hopeful (19%),
Tired of it (4%), Perplexed (16%), Disturbed (20%), Indifferent (23%).
Clearly, there was no overwhelming support for the amendment that most
affected the presidency.105

Presidential powers
In spite of the ‘limitations’ set out in Putin’s earlier amendment proposals,
which were for the most part agreed upon, the final changes strengthened the
presidential office. The president now has,

1. The right to dismiss judges, including members of the Constitutional

Court (with the approval of the Federation Council).
2. The right to nominate the prime minister, though the Duma has the right
to confirm or deny.
3. The right to dissolve the State Duma if, in the process of forming a
government, deputies do not approve the candidacies of more than one-
third of ministers.
4. An extra legislative veto – ahead of signing laws, the president can send
them for review to the Constitutional Court (which is under his
control).
 The presidency 33
5. The right to name the chairs of federal organs, among them ministers of
security, justice, interior and foreign affairs, i.e. the siloviki, after
‘consultations’ with the Federation Council.
6. An obligation to provide ‘overall leadership to the government’, and the
prime minister must carry out the president’s orders (Arts. 83(b) and 110.1).
Moreover,
7. The Federation Council now can include former presidents, plus 30 addi-
tional representatives nominated by the president, giving the president
much greater influence over that body.
8. Former presidents are granted immunity from prosecution.106

Legislation granting the president and his family immunity from criminal
prosecution was introduced in November, with the provision that two-thirds
of both houses could strip that immunity for matters of treason or other
felonies.107
The question of the State Council was settled finally in October 2020,
when a new law named it as a body under the president that does not duplicate
the function of any other authority and provides ‘for a better dialogue
between levels of government in the development of national decisions’.108 In
short, its functions remained advisory, now with legal standing and with the
president as its chair.

Administrative reset
The new government
A few hours after Putin’s annual Address in January, Medvedev resigned and,
according to constitutional requirements at that time, the entire cabinet
followed suit. Putin nominated Mikhail Mishustin as Medvedev’s replace-
ment.109 An economist and systems engineer, Mishustin had been head of the
Federal Tax Service since 2010 and worked in anti-corruption activity for the
Ministry of Finance. He is a technocrat, has not been involved directly in
politics, and will be focussing on Putin’s domestic agenda. The Duma
approved the appointment overwhelmingly (383-0-41) the next day. Medvedev
took on the job as deputy chair of the Security Council, a newly-created
position.
Within days, Prosecutor General Chaika announced that he would leave
the office he had held since 2006 and Putin named Igor Krasnov, deputy head
of the Investigative Committee, as his replacement. Chaika had been
considered by pundits as a potential successor for the presidency. Putin asked
him to serve as presidential envoy to the North Caucasus Federal District, a
difficult and particularly important plenipotentiary posting.110
Most of the previous ministers were re-named to the new government.
While Maksim Reshetnikov replaced Oreshkin as economics minister, the
ministers of finance, energy, interior, industry and trade, agriculture,
emergency measures, defence and foreign affairs stayed at their desks. New
34 The presidency
ministers were named to telecommunications, education, culture, health,
justice and sport (see Figure 1.2).
Minister of Finance Siluanov lost his second post, as first deputy prime
minister, to Andrei Belousov, who was put in charge of the National
Projects. Eight deputy prime ministers were named, one of them Dmitry
Chernyshenko, who had served as head of the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympic
Games. Another, Marat Khusnullin, had been deputy mayor of Moscow
during that city’s vast construction boom. He and Viktoriia Abramchenko
will assist Belousov with the National Projects. Tatyana Golikova rose to the
deputy prime ministerial rank, to supervise the demographic, healthcare,
education and science portfolios.
Significantly, Putin moved Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Kozak, who
formerly monitored the government’s fuel and energy complex, to deputy
head of the presidential administration, and special envoy in talks with
Ukraine, replacing Vladislav Surkov. Oreshkin and former Minister of
Culture Vladimir Medinsky didn’t go far after leaving their ministerial posts.
They were made aides to the president.111 On the other hand, Putin dismissed
his long-time and effective trouble shooter in the civil service, Surkov, who
had developed the concept of ‘sovereign democracy’ in 2004 and served as
Putin’s point man for Abkhazian, South Ossetian and Ukrainian affairs. His
‘resignation’ had been rumoured for weeks (Table 1.6).112
The new group is younger than its predecessor, average age about 50, with
three members under the age of 40. None of the newbies have experience in
the private sector; rather, they have been public officials or worked in state-
owned enterprises. Khusnullin’s experience in Moscow made him a natural to
oversee construction and regional development for the government.
Lyubimova had been deputy minister of culture with a better record than her
predecessor as minister, and Kravtsov was successful as head of the Federal
Service for Supervision in Education and Science (Rosobrnadzor). These are

Table 1.6 The New Russian Cabinet, 20 January 2020

New appointees
Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin
Culture Minister Olga Lyubimova
Economic Development Minister Maksim Reshetnikov
Sports Minister Oleg Matytsin
Justice Minister Konstantin Chuychenko
Returning Ministers
Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov (since 2004)
Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu (since 2012)
Interior Minister Vladimir Kolokoltsev (since 2012)
Energy Minister Anton Siluanov (since 2011)
Energy Minister Aleksandr Novak (since 2012)
Emergency Situations Minister Yevgeny Zinichev (since 2018)
Source: ‘Who Made It Into Russia’s New Cabinet?’, The Moscow Times, 22 January 2020.
 The presidency 35
trained and experienced technocrats, whose unstated role will be to help
implement the long-delayed National Projects, for which another $400 mil-
lion was allocated in 2019 (see Chapter 9).113 Six of the nine deputy prime
ministers are either former associates or friends of Mishustin.
Prominent journalist Tatyana Stanovaya, who often criticizes Putin
governments, said of this one: ‘Russia’s new cabinet ministers are young,
efficient, non-confrontational, adaptable, and don’t poke their noses into
politics. They live in the digital world that is so difficult for the country’s
aging leadership to understand. With time, the victim of this technocratic
dominance may be that very same leadership.’114 These are words of encour-
agement, with a cautionary note.
With the implementation of the National Projects as his major duty and
waves of economic sanctions and a pandemic as his handicaps, Mishustin has
a hard row to hoe. General approval of the appointment by the public may
well have been rooted in relief that the unpopular Medvedev was gone. The
Levada Centre’s first poll to measure trust in Mishustin found that only 3 per
cent trusted him and 4 per cent did not – he was practically unknown. A
FOM survey asking ‘How do you think Putin is at his job?’, had 64 per cent
answer ‘good’, 24 per cent answer ‘bad’ and 11 per cent had no answer. By the
end of March 2020, a VTsIOM poll showed that trust in Mishustin’s had
risen to 8 per cent.115 The new government faced an uneasy population shaken
by COVID-19, and struggling to make ends meet.

Working with the pandemic

Whether Putin’s inner circle team planned the ‘reset’ over a long period of
time or thought them up at the last moment, remains unknown. The notion
spread by some that he did it for wealth makes little sense; he had that already.
Clearly, Putin wanted to retain power, but there is no evidence that he wants
power for its own sake. Rather, the collapse in oil prices and the coronavirus
confirmed, for him at least, the need for stability and for a strong presidency
to maintain that stability. Russians needed him, whether they knew it or not,
he assumed.116
Not coincidentally, segments of interviews with Putin, conducted by the
state-run TASS news agency over a period that started just prior to the 11
March announcement, re-appeared on television. Titled ‘20 Questions with
Vladimir Putin’ (20 Voprosov Vadimiru Putinu), to commemorate his 20
years in office, the interviews covered a wide variety of subjects. One question
was whether he considered himself a ‘tsar’, a status he denied by saying a tsar
does nothing other than order other people to do things, whereas he works
hard every day. He also insisted that ‘the primary source of power is the
people’.117
At about the same time, Putin held a long meeting with the board of the
Prosecutor General’s Office (PGO), and flew out the next day to Crimea.
While urging the PGO to protect ‘law and order in society [and] rights and
freedoms of citizens’ more efficiently, Putin added that ‘the amendments to
36 The presidency
the Constitution of the Russian Federation, … reinforce and specify our
state’s social orientation. That means that your responsibility for compliance
with citizens’ social rights will grow as well.’ This admonition would have to
be proven in practice, as he also stressed that law, order and societal stability
were the fundamental tasks of the group he addressed.118
In the meantime, the government had to deal with the pandemic (detail in
Chapter 9). In his first direct ‘appeal’ to the Russian people on the crisis, 25
March 2020, Putin contradicted an earlier claim that the government had the
virus under control. He now warned that Russia was by no means immune
and could not ‘insulate itself from the threat’. While outlining all the preven-
tative measures that the state was taking and urging citizens to follow medical
advice, he postponed the All-Russia Vote on constitutional amendments
until 1 July. At that time, he declared a week-long, paid ‘non-working’ week
(28 March to 5 April), leaving all medical support structures, banks and
supermarkets open. This was soon seen as inadequate.
To protect citizens from huge financial losses, the state guaranteed that
social benefits would be renewed automatically for six months, as would pay-
ments to veterans and home front workers in connection with the 75th anni-
versary of the ‘Great Victory’. Extra funds for families with children up to
the ages of seven were guaranteed as well, and increased payments provided
for people with sick leave or lost jobs. Mortgage payments were frozen, and
tax payments deferred for small and medium-sized businesses. The package
of aid included a six-month moratorium on bankruptcy filings and support
for industries so they could keep workers on wages. To help pay for these
additional drains on government revenues, a new tax was levied on interest
and dividend payments paid to foreign accounts, and another was set on
large private accounts. These levies were controversial, and in some instances,
had to be coordinated with foreign governments.119
Eventually, Moscow’s self-isolation restrictions were extended to May
holidays and events. The annual Labour Day (1 May), Victory Day and
Immortal Regiment parades had to be either cancelled or postponed, and the
gala opening of Moscow’s huge new Main Temple of the Armed Forces, set
for 6 May, re-scheduled. These were all events at which Putin would have
been front and centre. Instead, he spoke to the Russian people on television
while sitting alone at a desk with his charisma notably absent.
He tried. The president’s populist approach included a visit to a Moscow
clinic treating coronavirus patients, wearing a hazmat suit. Still, everyone
knew that the Russian government acted slowly in the face of COVID-19,
at first blaming foreign carriers and then broadcasting inconsistent infor-
mation to the population. The central government left it up to the gover-
nors to make decisions for their own regions. Coupled with conspiracy
theories spread by Russian tabloids and blogs, and long-standing scepti-
cism about any information coming from government sources, the mixed
messages help explain a huge spike in cases in April. All in all, Putin’s early
approach to the pandemic was not much different from that of Donald
Trump.
 The presidency 37
In a televised conversation with Sergei Sobyanin, Golikova, Mikhail
Murashko and head of Rospotrebnadzor Anna Popova, in mid-April, Putin
finally acknowledged that the pandemic was not under control; rather, it was
spreading quickly and was likely to worsen. He called on these officials to
provide solutions as soon as possible.120
The campaign against coronavirus infections in Russia was complicated
further in late April when the new prime minister was diagnosed positively,
and was forced to self-isolate in hospital and relinquish his role as a leader in
combatting the pandemic. Everyone with whom he had had direct contact
had to be tested and Belousov took over as acting prime minister.121 Mishustin
was back at work after about three weeks, only to have two other cabinet
ministers, Lyubimova and Yakushev, fall prey to the disease. In May, the
Administration’s spokesperson Dmitry Peskov spent two weeks in hospital
and Deputy Minister Dmitry Volkov tested positive. Chechnya’s Ramzan
Kadyrov was hospitalized in late May, and Energy Minister Novak contracted
the infection in August. These numbers soared when the pandemic’s second
wave hit Russia in the fall. With 46 new cases among deputies in November
alone, the total number of members who suffered from the coronavirus
reached 137 by the end of that month. Kudrin was diagnosed with coronavirus
in December. The lower house of parliament went partially remote in
September, with all high-risk deputies working from home.122
Putin’s popularity continued to sputter. While 65 per cent of respondents
to a Levada Centre survey conducted in March still viewed him positively,
only 6 per cent saw him as supportive of all citizens; rather, they said, he
relied on the siloviki (46%) and oligarchs (37%). The fact that 43 per cent
supported him because they could not yet see any viable alternative was not
a very strong endorsement.123 So, getting back to work meant surviving a
slump in oil price and sales, a weakened ruble and the pandemic, and then
getting the ship back on an even economic keel before the postponed All-
Russia Vote on constitutional changes. Two economic crises at the same time
was a lot for Putinism to bear.124 Afraid that there would be a small turnout
for the vote, Moscow’s mayoralty office offered prizes to voters in the form of
lotteries for food and services vouchers. Thousands of stores across the
country agreed to participate in the programme.
To make participation even easier, on 8 June Sobyanin suddenly announced
the end of Moscow’s lockdown. He was probably under pressure from the
Kremlin, which launched a campaign to get people out and to vote ‘yes’. The
campaign emphasized traditional values, and linked constitutional reforms
to the sacred nature of the victory over Nazism now enshrined in the
Constitution. The ‘reset’ was barely mentioned.125
Earlier, when the presidential administration cancelled several state visits
and multiple large audience events, Russia’s blog world, and the New York
Times, enjoyed a momentary frenzy of conjecture about Putin’s health.126 In
fact, medical experts warned the president not attend large meetings.127
When Victory Day arrived on 9 May, Putin walked alone to place flowers
at the Eternal Flame outside the Kremlin walls, where a small honour guard
38 The presidency
stood. There was no grand parade or fly-past. They were promised for a later
date. His televised speech made no mention of the pandemic; rather, it was
dedicated solely to the fallen soldiers, with only a few sentences for analysts
to underscore, such as praise for the ‘sacrificial feat of the Soviet people,
people of different nationalities, standing shoulder to shoulder at the front
and in the rear’, who ‘saved the Fatherland, the life of future generations,
liberated Europe, defended the world, restored cities and villages, achieved
grandiose achievements’, and ‘we know and firmly believe that we are invin-
cible when we are together’.128 In ten minutes, he referenced multi-national-
ism, the USSR as saviour of Europe from Nazism and the power of national
unity, all key ingredients of Putinism. More than a month later, he announced
that the annual parade would be held on 24 June and the Immortal Regiment
event on 26 July. Rather optimistically, in both cases, he declared that the
daily peak number of infectious cases had been reached and, on 28 May,
began sending out invitations to world leaders to attend the June event.
While Moscow was lifting its restrictions, more than 20 large Russian cities
cancelled plans to hold Victory Day parades, or decided to hold them without
spectators, because, rather than abating, the pandemic was shifting from
Moscow to the regions.129 On 2 June, Defence Minister Shoigu provided a list
of cities in which the parades must take place, including nine ‘hero’ cities, and
about half of those opted to do so without spectators. In Moscow, Sobyanin
suggested that people stay home and watch parades on television.130
The president jumped the gun himself, making his own first public
appearance in a long time on Russia Day, 12 June, celebrating by handing out
awards and raising the Russian flag. Authorities arranged a concert that
evening on Red Square, even though nearly 9,000 new cases were registered
in Moscow that day.131 Thinking of the looming All-Russia Vote on the con-
stitutional amendments, Putin was probably hoping to have his presence felt
more directly than it had been for months.
Not surprisingly, critics looking at Russia during the pandemic again
mused on Putin’s political demise and the break-up of his system. Ever poised
to leap at perceived cracks in Putinism’s Velcro cover, the New York Times
opined that the COVID-19 allowed the oligarchs to stage a comeback by
taking advantage of ‘the weaknesses of the state apparatus’. Tatyana
Stanovaya wrote that Putin’s ‘political reconfiguration of Russia’s political
system’, coupled with the collapse in oil prices and the pandemic, broke the
centralizing core of Putinism. Appearing to disengage and turn management
of the disease over to the new cabinet ministers and regional governors
diffused power and influence across a spectrum of private business figures,
political technocrats, state managers, state oligarchs and remnants of Putin’s
inner core of associates, she opined, suggesting that the power vertikal might
not recover from this disengagement. Mark Galeotti concurred, calling
Putin’s behaviour during the health crisis a ‘political abdication’ and warned
that, by ‘sloughing off’ responsibility to the governors, he set a decentralizing
precedent from which the Kremlin might not recuperate.132
 The presidency 39
Foreign-based Russian oppositionists, such as Lilia Shevtsova, mused that
the pandemic marked Putin’s Waterloo and her message was repeated by
Putinophobes Paul Goble and Garri Kasparov. At home, Navalny warned of
‘public outrage brewing’ among previously quiescent sectors, doctors, small
business and the growing number of unemployed, and predicted that
Communists and the LDPR would benefit from their anger in the September
2020 elections.133 A senior researcher for the Russian Institute of Economics,
Aleksandr Tsipko, put the potential turning point differently: the pandemic
ate away at the Putin mystic, and the ‘deep Russian people’ no longer see him
as the impenetrable, calm, almost ‘sacred’ figure.134 As events were to show,
the hasty and often-gleeful doomsday prognostications may well have been
rooted in wishful thinking. Still, avid proponents of the Putin system didn’t
do much better. For example, a writer for the ‘Putinism’ column in Actual
Comments proclaimed that Russia would recover faster than other countries
and emerge from these crises stronger than ever before.135 That didn’t happen
either.
Princeton University scholar of Russian affairs, Stephen F. Cohen, was
more to the point. He agreed that the pandemic was testing Putin’s leadership
and the ‘efficacy of the political-administrative system he has created since
2000’. He also agreed that responsibilities devolving to regional governors
and mayors threatened the vertikal. Yet, Cohen concluded, since ‘no notable
public figures, including oppositionists’ can ‘imagine an alternative to Putin
at this time’, the devolution may not matter. Perhaps Putin’s final decision
about 2024 will give us an answer to this conundrum.136

The All-Russia Vote and beyond

Polls for the nationwide vote on amendments to the Russian Constitution
opened on 25 June and ran through 1 July. Voting was a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’
to the entire package, with no chance of singling out any particular article of
change for judgement. The final day was declared a national holiday so that
Russians could all get to the polls if they had not done so already. Because it
was not an official referendum, a 50 per cent turnout was not necessary; yet
to succeed, a 51 per cent ‘yes’ on votes cast was required.
Charges of manipulation ran rampant before the vote took place, with
government-sponsored billboards, TV commercials and other forms of
persuasion everywhere. Tales of companies ordering their employees to vote
in favour and other complaints gathered by the independent Movement for
Defence of Voters Rights, Golos (Voice), prompted one of its leaders to call
the All-Russia Vote campaign the ‘most manipulative’ in post-Soviet Russian
history. On the other hand, CEC Commissioner Ella Pamfilova said that her
organization had never received ‘so few complaints’. The opposition fought
back, mostly on social media (see Figure 1.5). The truth was probably some-
where in-between, but the importance of the vote to Putin’s team was per-
haps unparalleled.137
40 The presidency
In a televised speech one day prior to the final voting day, Putin urged citi-
zens to approve the amendments so as to guarantee ‘stability, security, pros-
perity and a decent life for people’, and ‘vote for the country for which we
work and that we want to pass on to our children and grandchildren’. He
called Russia a country of ‘a unique civilization and great culture’.138 Unable
to protest on the streets, opponents used blogs, TikTok videos, Instagrams
and other forms of social media to express their counter-opinions, especially
on the reset of Putin’s presidential terms.
Because of the pandemic, residents of Moscow and Nizhny Novgorod
could vote by Internet if they applied beforehand and received permission.
According to the CEC, about 1.2 million people were declared eligible and,
by the end of 26 June, 700,000 people had done so.139
The results were tabulated very quickly, too quickly in many minds, and
confirmed by 2 July. The size of the turnout (67.9%) and ‘yes’ votes (77.9%)
were higher than expected, and both easily surpassed numbers for the 1993
constitutional referendum. The official response from Peskov, who termed
the event a ‘referendum on trust’, was that it was a great ‘triumph’. Golos
again announced multiple complaints of violations. Activist groups chal-
lenged the legitimacy of early voting, to no avail.140 The Russian opposition,
the US State Department, the EU and Western media headlines emphasized
violations and manipulation, and criticized Putin’s reset. On 2 July, Putin
thanked Russians for their ‘support and trust’, adding from his campaign line
that ‘we need internal stability and time to strengthen the country, all its
institutions’. Pointing out that, in historical terms, ‘very little time has passed’
since the collapse of the Soviet Union and, since Russia was still in a state of
formation, we need these amendments to strengthen our ‘sovereignty, territo-
rial integrity, … spiritual, historical, moral values that hold generations
together’.141 Time will tell.

Post-vote
Within days of the vote, Putin announced that the National Projects would
be revised and a new national development plan introduced. The vast existing
spending project was well behind schedule, with about half of its separate
parts clearly unable to reach their targets by 2024. The new plan would, he
said, be ‘based on the real situation’ and take another six years beyond 2024
to complete. He gave Mishustin and Belousov three months to draw up the
new set of objectives. It seemed, therefore, that he was taking his promises of
2018 and re-fitting them to the circumstances of 2020 and beyond. 142
In November, Mishustin consolidated Russia’s far-too-many development
institutions by placing many of them under one umbrella agency within the
Vnesheconombank. Rusnano, Skolkovo and the Russian Export Centre
were among those incorporated in the new body. Rostec, Rosatom,
Roskosmos, Avtodor and a few others remain independent and eight were
abolished. It was hoped that these efficiencies would make the goals of the
National Projects attainable. In December, the first deputy chair of the state
 The presidency 41
Military-Industrial Commission, Sergei Kulikov, replaced Anatoly Chubais
as head of the state corporation Rusnano (Russian Corporation of
Nanotechologies). His mandate is to create new technologies ‘applicable in
the applied field’, quickly. Chubais had been in charge since 2008. Kulikov
had been executive director of Rostec before joining the Commission. One
analyst called this change part of a ‘professionalization’ programme.143
As of 1 December, previously enacted new laws came into force, making it
easier for Russians to access a State Services portal to find out what benefits
they are entitled to, and for healthcare workers to lodge complaints if they
have not received due wages on time. Citizens may now also purchase train
tickets on-line, thereby avoiding ticket offices and, from 14 December, apply
for sick leave on-line.144
It was clear, too, that much political work needed to be done. As fear of the
pandemic eased too soon, a frustrated citizenry and critical media posed
threats to Putin’s vaunted stability. A flurry of unprecedented political
protests in Russia’s Far East met with the approval of nearly half the Russian
population and polls revealed that in July only 23 per cent of respondents
trusted Putin. Granted, his trust rating was still more than double that of
anyone else (Mishustin, Zhirinovsky, Lavrov all at 10%; Navalny at 2%), and
his ‘approval’ rate grew from 60 to 66 per cent over the summer. The fact that
many local governors now ranked as high or even higher than Putin in some
surveys suggested that his aura of sole saviour was gone.145
***
As if that were not enough, late summer and early fall added a new Navalny
‘poisoning’ case, a dangerous political crisis in Belarus and a short war in the
South Caucasus to the presidential file. That file was left more hazardous by
increasingly undeniable ravages of climate change, spikes in coronavirus
infections and forewarnings of a new executive in Washington that boasts of
its hostility to Russia.
The South Caucasus issue was resolved in November, or so it seemed, and
the Belarusian affair was allowed to take its course (see Chapter 5). Putin and
Mishustin strengthened their political cards that same month by dismissing
four cabinet ministers, energy (Novak), transport (Ditrikh), natural resources
(Kobylkin) and construction (Yakushev) and one presidential envoy. Most
didn’t go far. Yakushev replaced Vladimir Tsukanov, the envoy to the Ural
Federal District, and Kobylkin became acting deputy secretary of the UR.
Novak took a newly-created post as the tenth deputy prime minister and will
monitor the energy sector. Mishustin proposed other replacements: Nikolai
Shulginov, general director of RusHydro, to Energy; Vitaly Savelyev, general
director of Aeroflot, to Transport; First Deputy Minister Irek Fayzullin to
construction; and Aleksandr Kozlov, current head of the Ministry for the
Development of the Far East and the Arctic, to natural resources. The head
of the Far East Development Fund, Aleksei Chekunkov, was proposed as
Kozlov’s replacement. These, too, were seen as attempts to make the govern-
ment more efficient and professional.
42 The presidency
Putin had only recently (6 November) signed into law the constitutional
change granting the State Duma right of approval before the president names
the prime minister and the cabinet, so these moves also marked the first
occasion where the Duma fulfilled its new role as set out in the Constitutional
amendments. 146 Deputies worked out procedures for considering the ministe-
rial candidates that included, for the first time, face-to-face interviews with
each candidate in committee and then at a plenary session of the whole before
the Duma agreed, or disagreed, to send the names forward to Putin for his
signature.147 Other amendments, such as the new status of the State Council,
were made official in December.
It remained to be seen how the presidency, strengthened in 2020 by the
reset, a greater presence in the Federation Council and chairmanship of the
now official State Council, would continue to handle predicaments such as
those noted above and the new political protocols.148 Asked again in December
2020 about his plans for 2024, he replied: ‘I have not yet decided if I will run
again in 2024. To do it or not to do it, I will see. Stable development of the
country is my priority.’149
Recognizing the potential for disorder in his New Year’s message to the
nation, Putin stressed national unity in the struggle against the still-raging
pandemic, which he compared to the battle against Nazis in World War II.
‘Together’, he said, ‘we will overcome everything, establish and ‘restore
normal life’. He knew as well that his popularity was waning, so this “new
dangerous virus” had to be defeated.’150 As we shall see in subsequent
chapters, the Russian people and Putin may have very different criteria on
which to base their presidential electoral decisions in 2024 than they had in
2018.

Notes
1 Anna Sorokhin and Valeria Kasamara, ‘The Putin Generation: Attitudes towards
Political Leadership and Perceptions of Russia’s Future’, Russian Analytical
Digest, No. 245, 24 January 2020, pp. 2–5.
2 Putin, ‘Rossiia na rubezhe tysiacheletii’, Nezavisimaia gazeta, 30 December 1999;
on the ‘Russian idea’, see V.V. Alekseev, ‘The Russian Idea. From Messianism
to Pragmatism’, Anthropology & Archeology of Eurasia, Vol. 51, Issue 4 (2013),
pp. 11–26.
3 On this, see Robert Person, ‘Four Myths about Russian Grand Strategy’, CSIS
(Center for Strategic & International Studies), 22 September 2020.
4 ‘Bill to Extend Russian President’s Term Advances’, New York Times, 14
November 2008; J.L. Black, The Russian Presidency of Dmitry Medvedev, 2008–
12. London: Routledge, 2015, p. 17.
5 ‘Konstitutsiia Rossiiskoi Federatsii’, Chapter 4, Articles 80–93; www.constitu-
tion.ru/index.htm.
6 See J.L. Black, ed. Russia & Eurasia Documents Annual, 1993. Vol. 1. The Russian
Federation. Gulf Breeze, FL: Academic International Press, 1995, pp. 1–3, 21–44
(Hereafter REDA). Until 1999, REDA came out in two volumes, Vol. I for the
Russian Federation, Vol. II for the Central Asian States.
7 ‘Prisiaga Prezidenta Rossii’, kremlin.ru/structure/president.
 The presidency 43
8 John Evans, ‘The Key to Understanding Vladimir Putin’, The National Interest,
21 September 2019. For continued emphasis on his KGB background, see Fiona
Hill, Clifford G. Gaddy, Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin. Washington:
Brookings Institute, 2012; and Catherine Belton, Putin’s People: How the KGB
Took Back Russia and Then Took On the West. London: HarperCollins, 2020.
9 Howard LaFranchi, ‘Who is Putin? Even to Russians, a mystery’, Christian
Science Monitor, 23 October 2019, a videoed interview with Fred Weir.
10 M.S. Gorbachev, Chto postavleno na kartu: bydushcheee global’nogo mira.
Moscow: Ves’ Mir, 2019, passage cited in The Bell (28 October 2019) and The
Moscow Times (29 October 2019).
11 Simon Saradzhan, ‘From Toilet to Airport’, The Moscow Times, 26 January 2011.
The Islamicist group that claimed credit for the bombings was the ‘Liberation
Army of Dagestan’. The bombings took place in Moscow, Buynaksk (Dagestan)
and Volgodonsk (Rostov Oblast).
12 See Walter Laqueur, Putinism: Russia and Its Future with the West. London:
Thomas Dunne, 2015, p. 39.
13 The book usually cited as a reference for these charges is John B. Dunlop, The
Moscow Bombing of September 1999: Examinations of Russian Terrorist Acts at
the Onset of Vladimir Putin’s Rule. Stüttgart: Ibidem-Verlag, 2012.
14 For background, David E. Hoffman, The Oligarchs. Wealth and Power in the New
Russia. Philadelphia: Perseus Books, 2011, and for personal stories, Elizabeth
Schimpfössl, Rich Russians. From Oligarchs to Bourgeoisie. Oxford: OUP, 2018.
See also Treisman, The Return, op. cit., pp. 95–6.
15 For a classic case of over-the-top, undocumented accusations, see Heidi Blake,
From Russia With Blood. The Kremlin’s Ruthless Assassination Program and
Vladimir Putin’s Secret War on the West. Boston: Little, Brown, 2019; for an
opposing view, Mark Galeotti, We Need to Talk About Putin. How the West Gets
Him Wrong. London: Ebury Press (Penguin), 2019, pp. 116–17.
16 Konstantin Kisin, ‘Hysteria about Russian interference is becoming a joke’, The
Spectator, 6 November 2019.
17 The full speech can be found in REDA 2005, Vol. 1 (2006), pp. 9–19; at least one
Western scholar, who is no defender of Putin, debunks the continuum theory;
Robert Service, Kremlin Winter, pp. 33–4. Richard Starr emphasizes the contin-
uum, see Richard S. Starr, Svante E. Cornell, eds. Putin’s Grand Strategy. The
Eurasian Union and Its Discontents. Washington: Central Asia-Caucasus Institute
& Silk Road Studies, 2014, Introduction.
18 ‘Putin Says Will Step Down as President After Term Expires in 2024’, The
Moscow Times, 25 May 2018; ‘Putin is Not Planning a Third Consecutive
Presidential Term, Kremlin Says’, The Moscow Times, 11 May 2018; ‘Priamaia
liniia s Vladimirom Putinym’, kremlin.ru/events/president/news/57692, 7 June
2018.
19 ‘Russia Contemplates Constitution Changes as Putin Faces Term Limits’, The
Moscow Times, 26 December 2018; Ilya Arkhipov, ‘Russia Considers Constitution
Changes as Putin Faces Term Limits’, Bloomberg News, 26 December 2018; Sir
Andrew Wood, ‘The Rocky Road to Replacing Vladimir Putin’, Chatham House
(RIIA), 16 April 2019; and, especially, Samuel A. Greene, Graeme B. Robertson,
Putin v. the People: The Perilous Politics of a Divided Russia. New Haven: Yale
UP, 2019.
20 Viacheslav Volodin, ‘Zhivaia Konstitutsiia razvitiia’, Parlamentskaia gazeta, 12
July 2019; https://www.pnp.ru/politics/zhivaya-konstituciya-razvitiya.html.
21 On the power vertikal, see Andrew Monaghan, ‘The Vertical: Power and Authority
in Russia’, International Affairs, Vol. 88, Issue 1 (2012), pp. 1–16.
22 ‘Bol’shaia press-konferentsiia Vladimira Putina’, Kremlin.ru, 19 December 2019,
kremlin.ru/events/president/news/62366.
44 The presidency
23 Svetlana Bocharova, Yelena Mukhametshina, ‘Putin soglasilsia iz’iat’ iz
Konstitutsii ogovorku, pozvolivshuiu emy vernut’sia na post presidenta’,
Vedomosti, 19 December 2019.
24 ‘Polovina rossiian khochet videt’ Putina presidentom i posle 2024 goda’,
Vedomosti, 19 June 2018; ‘Poll: Half of Russia Wants Putin for President Beyond
2024’, The Moscow Times, 19 June 2018; ‘Poll: Narrow Majority of Russians
Want Putin To Stay Past 2024’, RFE/RL, 19 June 2018.
25 ‘Prezident: doverie i golosovanie’, Levada-tsentr, 30 July 2019, https://www.
levada.ru/2019/07/30/prezident-doverie-i-golosovanie.
26 See, e.g. Graeme P. Herd, ‘Russia and the Politics of “Putinism”’, Journal of Peace
Research, Vol. 38, No. 1 (2001), pp. 107–12; M. Steven Fish, ‘The Kremlin
Emboldened. What is Putinism?’, Journal of Democracy, Vol. 28, No. 4 (October
2017), pp. 61–75. For an analysis of Putin’s public statements, see Brian Taylor,
The Code of Putinism. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2018. An entire edited book on
Putinism was published as early as 2013: Ronald J. Hill, Ottorino Cappelli, eds.
Putin and Putinism. London: Routledge, 2013; and, earlier, ‘Russia under Putin’,
a special issue of Internationale Politik, Vol. 1 (Fall Issue), 2000.
27 Suzanne Loftus, Insecurity & the Rise of Nationalism in Putin’s Russia. Keeper of
Traditional Values. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.
28 See esp. Michael Kimmage, ‘The Wily Country. Understanding Putin’s Russia’,
Foreign Affairs, March/April 2020, a review essay, and Marlene Laruelle, ‘Making
Sense of Russia’s Illiberalism’, Journal of Democracy, Vol. 31, No. 3 (July 2020),
pp. 115–29. See also William Zimmerman, Ruling Russia. Authoritarianism from
the Revolution to Putin. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2014
29 ‘Surkov i Peskov vystupili za izuchenie “putinism”’, Kommersant, 14 October
2019; ‘Putinizm kak politcheskii laifkhak’, Aktual’nye kommentarii, 14 October
2019; ‘Kremlin Aide Surkov Calls Putin’s Form of Rule “Political Life Hack”’,
RFE/RL, 15 October 2019.
30 Areg Galstyan, ‘The Real Code of Putinism’, American Thinker, 2 December
2019; ‘Dostizheniia putinizma’, Aktual’nye kommentarii, 6 December 2019.
31 See esp. Anton Barbashin, Hannah Thorburn, ‘Putin’s Brain: Alexander Dugin
and the Philosophy Behind Putin’s Crimea’, Foreign Affairs, 31 March 2014;
‘“Aktual’nye kommentarii” otkrvaiut rubriku “Putinism”’, Aktual’nye kommen-
tarii, 19 October 2019. Specific references are to Susan Glasser, ‘Putin the Great.
Russia’s Imperial Imposter’, Foreign Affairs, September/October 2019; and
Andrew Wood, ‘Putinist Rule Minus Putin?’ The American Interest, 29 July 2019.
To get a picture of Dugin’s own impression of Putin during his first two terms in
office, see Dugin, Putin vs. Putin. Vladimir Putin Viewed from the Right. London:
Arktos, 2014. Translation of Russian original written in 2012.
32 Andrei Tsygankov, ‘Crafting the State-Civilization. Vladimir Putin’s Turn to
Distinct Values’, Problems of Post Communism, Vol. 63, Issue 3 (2016), pp. 146–
58; ‘Russia Is a “Distinct Civilization”, Putin Says’, The Moscow Times, 18 May
2020.
33 R-politik, Bulletins #’s 8, 9 (2018), rpolitik.com/non-classe/resume-bulletin-782018.
34 Tatyana Stanovaya, ‘Illusory Stability: Putin’s Regime is Readier than Ever for
Change’, Carnegie Moscow Center, 3 July 2018.
35 ‘Dlia prezidentskogo letnogo otriada zakupiat samolety na 20 mlrd rublei’,
Interfax, 23 October 2018; ‘Russia to Allocate $26M More for Putin’s
Administration in 2018, Media Reports’, The Moscow Times, 24 October 2018.
36 See Chart in fom.ru/Politika/10946, 17 June 2018; ‘Kreml’ ob’iasnil reskoe snizhe-
nie reitinga Putina’, Vedomosti, 25 June 2018.
37 ‘Doverie politikam’, Levada-tsentr, 3 July 2018, www.levada.ru/2018/07/03/dov-
erie-politikam/; ‘Doverie politikam’, VtsIOM, 24 June 2018, wciom.ru/news/rat-
ings/doverie_politikam/; Andrei Kolesnikov, ‘Why Putin’s Approval Ratings Are
Declining Sharply’, Foreign Affairs. Snapshot, 15 August 2018.
 The presidency 45
38 Graeme Robertson, Samuel Greene, ‘The Kremlin Emboldened: How Putin Wins
Support’, Journal of Democracy, Vol. 28 (October 2017), pp. 86–100; Putin
‘Priamaia liniia’, Kremlin.ru, 7 June 2018, kremlin.ru/events/president/news/57692.
39 ‘Obrashchenie Prezidenta k grazhdanam Rossii’, Kremlin.ru, 29 August 2018,
kremlin.ru/events/president/news/58405.
40 See ‘Odobrenie deiatel’nosti Vladimira Putina’, www.levada.ru/indikatory/odo-
brenie-organov-vlasti, on-going graph accessed 3 September 2018.
41 ‘Peskov iskliuchil vozmozhnost’ uchastiia Putina v posviashchennoi emu pro-
gramme’, Vedomosti, 3 September 2018; ‘Russian TV has a new show dedicated to
fawning over Putin, and it said even bears are afraid of him’, Business Insider, 3
September 2018.
42 On the importance of the ‘Immortal Regiment’ demonstrations, well beyond
Putin’s participation, see Ivan Kurilla, ‘Memory of the War and Other Memories
in Russia, 2019’, PONARS Eurasia, 8 May 2019.
43 On this, see especially ‘Russian Siloviki’, Russian Analytical Digest, No. 223, 12
September 2018; Peter Reddaway, Russia’s Domestic Security Wars: Putin’s Use of
Divide and Rule Against His Hardline Allies. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2018, and the earlier study by Mikhail Zygar, All the Kremlin’s Men:
Inside the Court of Vladimir Putin. New York: Public Affairs, 2016.
44 See Jack Sharples, Gazprom and the Russian State: The Political Economy of
Russian Gas. London: Routledge, 2018.
45 Kremlin, ‘Information on incomes, expenditure and assets of the President, the
Presidential Executive Office staff, and of their family members has been pub-
lished’, Kremlin.ru, April 12, 2019, en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/60277.
See also Elisabeth Schimpfössl, Rich Russians: From Oligarchs to Bourgeoisie.
London: OUP, 2018.
46 Anders Åslund, Russia’s Crony Capitalism: The Path from Market Economy to
Kleptocracy. New Haven: Yale UP, 2019.
47 ‘Dan start protsedure formirovaniia novogo sostava Obshchestvennoi palaty RF’,
RAPSI, 26 February 2020.
48 ‘Russia Creates New Police Unit to Protect Fans at 2018 FIFAS World Cup’, The
Moscow Times, 2 April 2018; MVD website, ‘Vladimir Kolokol’tsev prinial resh-
enie o sozdanii podrazdelenii turisticheskoi politsii v gorodakh, gde proidut mat-
chi chempionata mira po futbolu’, 2 April 2018, https://xn--b1aew.xn--p1ai/news/
item/12682997/.
49 See, e.g. ‘FSB general, who was involved in espionage and treason cases, resigns’,
Lenta.ru, 5 August 2020; ‘“Generaly nedogliadeli ili v dole vyli”’, Lenta.ru, 20
April 2020; ‘Nastoiashche polkovniki’, Lenta.ru, 27 April 2020.
50 Alexey Navalny tweet @navalny, 8:06 AM – 24 Apr 2018; ‘Moscow Approves
Left-Wing Protest of Presidential Inauguration’, The Moscow Times, 26 April
2018; ‘Navalny soobshchil ob otkaze merii soglasovat’ aktsiiu 5 maia v tsentr
Moskvy’, Vedomosti, 24 April 2018.
51 Navalny site, https://.vk.com/wall-55284725_791667, 4 April 2018; ‘V Mosdve
okolo 300 chelovek zaderzhali na aktsii protesta “On nam ne tsar”’, Vedomosti, 5
May 2018. See also ‘Russian Police Detain More than 1,000 People at Anti-Putin
Protests’, The Moscow Times, 5 May 2018.
52 Elena Mukhametshina, ‘Neskol’ko tysiach moskvichei vyshli na ulitsy iz-za
vyborov v Mosgordum’, Vedomosti, 27 July 2019.
53 For a general discussion of the various streams of protest in Russia, see Mischa
Gabowitsch, Protest in Putin’s Russia. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2017.
54 SOVA, ‘Presledovaniia grazhdamn za oskorblenie gosudarstva i obshchestva v
internete’, 24 March 2019, www.sova-center.ru/misuse/news/persecution/2019/04/
d40942/; Leonid Bershidsky, ‘Want to Insult Putin? It Will Cost You $462’, The
Moscow Times, 1 October 2019; For the law itself, http://publication.pravo.gov.ru/
Document/View/0001201903180022.
46 The presidency
55 ‘Kak borot’sia s oskorbleniiami na rabote?’, Rossiiskaia gazeta, 4 May 2020. This
clarification came as an answer to a query from a reader.
56 Daria Nikolaeva, ‘Maiskie ukazy 2.0’, Kommersant, 7 May 2018. The May Decree
was titled ‘On National Purposes and Strategic Challenges for the Development
of the Russian Federation until 2024’.
57 ‘The President signed Executive Order on National Goals and Strategic Objectives
of the Russian Federation through to 2024’, Kremlin.ru, 7 May 2018, en.kremlin.
ru/events/president/news/57425.
58 Leonid Bershidsky, ‘Why Russia Is Struggling to Build Putin’s Grand Scheme’,
Bloomberg Opinion, 15 November 2019.
59 Putin, ‘Rabochaia vstrecha s Predsedatelem Pravitel’stva Dmitriem Medvedevym’,
Kremlin.ru, 18 May 2018, kremlin.ru/events/president/news/57492.
60 ‘Gosudarstvennaia Duma naznachila Alekseia Kudrina na dolzhnost’
Predsedatelia Schetnoi palaty’, 22 May 2018, duma.gov.ru/news/27032/; ‘Liberal
Economist Kudrin Returns to Russian Government After 7-Year Hiatus’, The
Moscow News, 22 May 2018.
61 “Institutsional’noe doverie’, www.levada.ru/2018/10/04/institutsionalnoe-dov-
erie-4/; ‘Pensionnaia reforma perecherknula Krym. Doverie k prezidentu vernu-
los’ k urovniu 2013 goda’, Kommersant, 4 October 2018; ‘Trust in the Russian
President Drops to 5-Year Low – Poll’, The Moscow Times, 4 October 2018.
62 ‘Doverie politikam’, www.levada.ru/2018/10/08/doverie-politikam-2/.
63 ‘Vozmozhnye rezulty vyborov i otvetstvennost’, www.levada.ru/2018/11/22/19281/;
‘Majority of Russians Hold Putin Responsible for National Woes, Poll Says’, The
Moscow Times, 22 November 2018.
64 ‘Trust in Putin slides to 13-year low of 33.4% in January’, www.intellinews.com/
trust-in-putin-slides-to-13-year-low-of-33-4-in-january-155055/; ‘Odobrenie
deiatel’nosti Vladimira Putina’, www.levada.ru/indikatory, accessed 20 January
2019.
65 For a cross-section of Russian commentary on this, see Elena Mukhametshchina,
‘Reiting Vladimira Putina perestal byt’ neuiazvimym’, Vedomosti, 20 January
2019; Ivan Rodin, ‘Reitingi vlasti nikak ne mogut podniat’cia’, Nezavisimaia
gazeta, 20 January 2019.
66 ‘Odobrenie deiatel’nosti Vladimira Putina’, Levada-tsentr, March 2019, www.
levada.ru/indikatory; Aaron Schwartzbaum, ‘Zastoi Story: Why Putin Remains
Unchallenged’, The Moscow Times, 27 March 2019. ‘Zastoi’ refers to the stagna-
tion under Brezhnev.
67 ‘Chetvertyi krizis reitingov Putina za 20 let: chto delat’ vlasti?’, Levada-tsentr,
www.levada.ru/2019/02/22/chetvertyj-krizis-rejtingov-putina-za-20-let-chto-
delat-vlasti/; ‘Reitingi doveriia politikam, odobreniia raboty gosudarstvennykh
institutov, reitingi partii’, VTsIOM, No. 3964, 24 May 2019, https://wciom.ru/
index.php?id=236&uid=9707; ‘Politicheskie indikatory. Reiting politikov, FOM,
23 May 2019, bd.fom.ru/pdf/d20p12019.pdf. The FOM survey was conducted
18–19 May, in 207 population centres of 73 components of the RF and among
3000 respondents.
68 Alesandra Chunova, ‘Kreml’ poprosil sotsiologov raz’iasnit’ padenie reitinga
doveriia Putinu’, Vedomosti, 30 May 2019.
69 ‘Sobytiia i chelovek goda’, Levada-tsentr, 26 December 2019, https://www.levada.
ru/2019/12/26/sobytiya-i-chelovek-goda/; ‘Putin: reiting, otnoshenie, otsenki
raboty’, FOM, 30 December 20–19, https://fom.ru/Politika/10946.
70 Sergei Guriev, Daniel Treisman, ‘Informational Autocrats’, Journal of Economic
Perspectives, Vol. 33, No. 4 (Fall 2019), pp. 100–27. Scholars have recently ana-
lysed Putin’s political speeches and found consistent patterns revealing his
ideological orientation, see Oksana Drozdova, Paul Robinson, ‘A Study of
 The presidency 47
Vladimir Putin’s Rhetoric’, Europe–Asia Studies, Vol 71, issue 5 (2019), pp.
805–23.
71 ‘Almost 3/4 of Russians trust Putin, 2/3 approved of him as president – poll’,
Interfax, 21 June 2019, http://www.interfax.com/news.asp?pg=3; ‘Putin’s
Approval Rating’, Levada Centre, www.levada.ru/en/rating, accessed 25 June
2019.
72 ‘Institutsional’noe doverie’, Levada-tsentr, 24 October 2019, www.levada.
ru/2019/10/24/institutsionalnoe-doverie-5/; ‘Russians Trust Putin Less Than
Army – Poll’, The Moscow Times, 24 October 2019.
73 ‘Vladimir Putin’, Levada-tsentr, 18 November 2019, https://www.levada.
ru/2019/11/18/vladimir-putin-7/.
74 Putin, ‘Interv’iu gazete “Korr’ere della Sera”’, Kremlin.ru, 4 July 2019, http://
www.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/60912; Putin interview with the Financial
Times, 27 June 2019, http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/60836.
75 See, e.g. Tatyana Stanovaya, ‘Post-Putin Uncertainty Means a Jittery Russian
Elite and Brittle Regime’, Carnegie Moscow Center, 1 November 2019; Andrew
Wood, ‘Putinist Rule Minus Putin?’, The American Interest, 29 July 2019;
Konstantin Remchukov, ‘Who Will Follow Putin? There is no credible successor
to Vladimir Putin’, The National Interest, 4 December 2019.
76 ‘Priamaia liniia s Vladmirom Putinym’, Kremlin.ru, 20 June 2019, kremlin.ru/
events/president/news/60795
77 Anna Liesowska, ‘More than two million hectares on fire in Siberia, with tundra
on fire destroying the permafrost’, The Siberian Times, 26 July 2019; Max Seddon,
‘Russia’s rubbish mountain piles pressure on Putin’, The Financial Times, 1
August 2019.
78 ‘Deadly Floods In Russia Leave Thousand Homeless’, RFE/RL, 2 July 2019;
‘Flash floods in Russia leave more than 170 people dead’, The Telegraph, 12
August 2019.
79 ‘Poslane Prezidenta Federal’nomu Sobraniiu’, Kremlin.ru, 15 January 2020,
kremlin.ru/events/president/news/62582.
80 ‘A modest proposal. Putin has suggested a bunch of Constitutional amendments’,
Meduza, 15 January 2010; Dmitrii Kamyshev, Elena Mukhametshina, Svetlana
Bocharova, ‘Anonsirovannaia prezidentom reforma Konstitutsii daet start tranz-
itu vlasti’, Vedomosti, 15 January 2020.
81 ‘Vstrecha s veteranami Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny i predstaviteliami patri-
oticheskikh ob’edinenii’, Kremlin.ru, 18 January 2020, kremlin.ru/events/presi-
dent/news/62609; Andrew Osborn (for Reuters), ‘Putin Rejects “President For
Life” Model’, The Moscow Times, 19 January 2020.
82 Typical were Andrew Higgins, ‘Russian Premier Abruptly Quits Amid Swirl of
Speculation on Putin. The unexpected move by Prime Minister Dmitri A.
Medvedev fueled speculation that President Vladimir V. Putin is maneuvering to
stay in power when his term ends in 2024’, New York Times, 15 January 2020, and
‘Glued to the throne. How Vladimir Putin is preparing to rule for ever’, The
Economist, 18 January 2020. See also Isaac Chotiner’s interview with Masha
Lipman, ‘How Putin Controls Russia’, The New Yorker, 23 January 2020, and
Sergey Parkhomenko, ‘The Near-Instant Death of Russia’s Constitution’, Wilson
Center (Kennan Institute), 23 January 2020 (translated from the original Russian).
The Moscow Times ran a series of articles for two weeks under the ‘January
Revolution’ heading.
83 ‘Protiv konstitutsionnogo perevorota i uzurpatsii vlasti. Manifest grazhdan
Rossii’, Novaia gazeta, 23 January 2020.
84 On this, see especially Tatyana Stanovaya, ‘The Reality of Russian Politics’, R.
politik, Bulletin No. 2 (42), Special edition, 10 February 2020.
48 The presidency
85 See, e.g. Mark Galeotti, ‘The hunt is on for Putin’s successor’, The Spectator, 16
January 2020; Andrei Kolesnikov, ‘Planning for a (Not-So) Post-Putin Russia’,
Carnegie Moscow Center, 16 January 2020; Alexander Baunov, ‘Putin Is Planning
a Partial Retirement’, FP (Foreign Policy), 17 January 2020; Dmitri Trenin,
Alexander Baunov, Andrei Kolesnikov, Tatyana Stanovaya, ‘Did Putin Just
Appoint Himself President for Life?’, Moscow Carnegie Center, 17 January 2020;
Tatyana Stanovaya, ‘Russia Prepares for a New Tandemocracy’, The Moscow
Times, 20 January 2020.
86 ‘Resul’taty vserossiiskogo oprosa levada-tsentra o popravkakh v konstitutsiiu
RF’, Fond razvitiia grazhdanskogo obshchestva, 9 February 2020. Over 2000
people took part in the survey.
87 For one explanation, see Alexander Baunov, “Why Aren’t Russians Protesting
Putin’s Reforms?’ Moscow Carnegie Center, 30 January 2020.
88 ‘Rol’ Vladimira Putina posle 2024’, Levada-tsentr, 30 January 2020, https://www.
levada.ru/2020/01/30/rol-vladimria-putina-posle-2024.
89 ‘Putin Proposes to Enshrine God, Heterosexual Marriage in Constitution’, The
Moscow Times, 3 March 2020; Tatyana Zamakhina, ‘V Gosdumu vnesena
popravka v Konstitutsiiu o federal’nykh territoriiakh’, Rossiiskaia gazeta,
3 March 2020.
90 For detailed and critical Russian discussions of the amendments and their conse-
quences, Anna Mayorova, ‘Rossiia pri novoi Konstitutsii’, Vedomosti, 22 June
2020; and Andrei Kolesnikov, ‘Konstitutsiia El’tsina protiv Konstitutsii Putina’,
Vedomosti, 19 June 2020.
91 Putin, ‘Vstrecha s predstaviteliami obshchestvennosti Ivanovskoi oblasti’,
Kremlin.ru, 6 March 2020, http://kremlin.ru/events/president/news/62953.
92 ‘Tri chetverti rossiian govoriat a neobkhodimosti sil’noi ruki v rukovodstve
strany’, Levada-tsentr, 25 February 2020, https://www.levada.ru/2020/02/25/
tri-chetverti-rossiyan-govoryat-o-neobhodimosti-silnoj-ruki-v-rukovodstve-
strany/.
93 See, e.g. Stephen Sestanovich, ‘The Day After Putin. Russia’s Deep State Holds
the Key to Succession’, Foreign Affairs, 4 March 2020.
94 Yuri Litvinenko, Elena Mukhametshina, Alena Yakushova, ‘Tereshkova pred-
lozhila obnulit’ prezidentskie sroki Putina’, Vedomosti, 10 March 2020.
95 ‘Putin podderzhal obnulenie prezidentskikh srokov v slychae soglasiia KS’,
Kommersant, 10 March 2020; ‘Russian Lawmakers Back “Reset” of Putin’s
Presidency’, The Moscow Times, 10 March 2020.
96 Galina Mislivskaia, ‘Putin otvetil na predlozhenie Tereshkovoi vnov’ izbirat’sia
na post prezidenta’, Rossiiskaia gazeta, 10 March 2020.
97 Putin, ‘Plenarnoe zasedanie Gosudarstvennoi Dumy’, Kremlin.ru, 10 March
2020, http://kremlin.ru/events/president/news/62964.
98 Tatyana Stanovaya, ‘First Stability, then Interchangeability. Why Putin decided
to stay’, Carnegie Moscow Center, 11 March 2020; ‘The Eternal President.
Constitutional Changes mean Putin can rule through 2036’, The Bell, 14
March 2020.
99 Naval’ny, ‘Putin has reset. What to do with it?’, 19 March 2020, https://navalny.
com/p/6317/; Ekaterina Schul’man, 16 March 2020, https://www.facebook.com/
Ekaterina.Schulmann/posts/10222199435685807.
100 On this, Alexander Baunov, ‘Putin’s Choice: What do Russia’s Latest
Constitutional Maneuvers Mean?’, Carnegie Moscow Center, 11 March 2020.
101 Anastasia Medvedeva, ‘Maski, pesni i kartonnyi deputat: za chto eshche nel’sia
zaderzhivat’ na odinochnykh piketakh’, OVD-Info, 29 July 2020.
102 ‘Chto, uzhe ukhodite? Kak Rossiiane otnosiatsia k otstavke Putina v 2024 godu’,
Levada-tsentr, 5 March 2020, https://www.levada.ru/2020/03/05/chto-uzhe-
uhodite-kak-rossiyane-otnosyatsya-k-otstavke-putina-v-2024-godu/; Evan
Gershkovich, ‘“President for Life”: Putin Opens Door to Extending Rule until
 The presidency 49
2036’, The Moscow Times, 10 March 2020; Joshua Yaffa, ‘Vladimir Putin
Positions Himself to Become Russia’s Eternal Leader’, The New Yorker, 12
March 2020; Anatoly Katlin, ‘PUTLER, President for Life?’, The UNZ Review,
11 March 2020; Anton Troianovski, ‘A New “Emperor”: Russia Girds for 16
More Years of Putin’, New York Times, 12 March 2020; Tatyana Stanovaya,
‘Putin Forever?’ R. Politik, Bulletin No. 7 (47), 12 March 2020.
103 On this, see Henry Hale, ‘Putin’s End Game?’, PONARS Eurasia Policy memo,
11 March 2020, http://www.ponarseurasia.org/memo/putins-end-game.
104 ‘Odobrenie institutov vlasti i doverie politikam’, Levada-tsentr, 6 April 2020,
https://www.levada.ru/2020/05/06/odobrenie-institutov-vlasti-i-doverie-politikam/.
105 ‘Obnulenie prezidentskikh srokov’, Levada-tsentr, 27 March 2020, www.levada.
ru/2020/03/27/obnulenie-prezidentskih-srokov; ‘Smeniaemost’ vlasti’, Levada-
tsentr, 30 March 2020, www.levada.ru/2020/03/30/smenyaemost-vlasti/.
106 Summarized in ‘The Eternal President’, The Bell, 14 March 2020, and in greater
detail in Caroline van Gall, ‘The 2020 Russian Constitutional Reform’, Russian
Analytical Digest, No. 250, 9 April 2020, pp. 2–5.
107 State Duma, ‘On amendments to article 3 of the Federal Law “On guarantees to
the President of the Russian Federation who has terminated the exercise of his
powers, and members of his family”’, No. 1049598-7, 4 November 2020, sozd.
duma.gov.ru/bill/1049598-7.
108 Elena Mukhametshina, ‘Putin vnes v Gosdumu proekt novogo zakona o
Gossovete’, Vedomosti, 14 October 2020; Elena Muskhametshina, ‘Vladimir
Putin budet vosglavliat’ Gossovet v ramkakh zakona’, Vedomosti, 15 October
2020.
109 Putin, ‘Meeting with members of the Government’, Kremlin.ru, 15 January
2020, en.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/62585. For details on Mishustin,
see Ben Aris, ‘Head of Russian tax service Mikhail Mishustin appointed prime
minister’, Intellinews.com, 15 January 2020; Evan Gershkovich, Piotr Sauer, Jake
Cordell, ‘How Mikhail Mishustin Rose to the Top: Old Ties, Savvy and a Knack
for Systems’, The Moscow Times, 27 January 2020.
110 ‘Iurii Chaika pokinet post general’nogo prokurora RF’, Interfax, 20 January
2020; Ekaterina Eremenko, ‘Putin predloshil naznachit’ Chaiku polpredom na
Severnom Kavkaze’, Vedomosti, 21 January 2020;
111 Pavel Aptekar’, ‘Povyshenie iz Belogo doma v Krem’, Vedomosti 26 January
2020.
112 ‘Vladislav Surkov osvobozhden ot dolzhnosti pomoshchnika Prezidenta’,
Kremlin.ru, 18 February 2020, kremlin.ru/events/president/news/62818; ‘Putin
Sacks Prominent Kremlin Ideologue, Ukraine Hardliner’, The Moscow Times, 18
February 2020; ‘Vladislav Surkov Vladimiru Putinu ne pomoshchnik’,
Kommersant, 18 February 2020; Mark Galeotti, ‘Surkov’s End and the KPlocrats’
Triumph’, The Moscow Times, 19 February 2020; Aleksandra Chunova,
Ekaterina Eremenko, ‘Putin naznachil Oreshkina i Medinskogo svoimi
pomoshchnikami’, Vedomosti, 24 January 2020.
113 Andrei Muchnik, ‘Who Is Olga Lyubimova, Russia’s New Culture Minister?’,
The Moscow Times, 22 January 2020; Leonid Bershidsky, ‘Putin Puts Russia Inc.
Under New Management’, Bloomberg Opinion, 23 January 2020.
114 Tatyana Stanovaya, ‘Russia’s New Government is its Least Political Yet’,
Carnegie Moscow Center, 23 January 2020; see also ‘Putin’s Power Games’, spe-
cial issue of the Russian Analytical Digest, No. 46, 7 February 2020.
115 ‘Urven’ doveriia k Vladimiru Putinu za dva goda snizilsia pochti v dva raza’,
Levada-tsentr, 12 February 2020, www.levada.ru/2020/02/12/uroven-doveriya-k-
vladimiau-putinu-za-dva-goda-snizilsya-pochti-v-dva-raza/; FOM, ‘Vladimir
Putin: otsenki raboty, otnoshenie’, 17 February 2020, fom.ru/Politika/10946;
‘Doverie politikam’, VTsIOM, 28 April 2020, https://wciom.ru/news/ratings/
doverie_politikam/.
50 The presidency
116 Andrey Pertsev, ‘Unstable Putin’, Carnegie Moscow Center, 1 April 2020; see also
Tatyana Stanovaya, ‘Keeping His Options Open: Why Putin Decided to Stay
On’, Carnegie Moscow Center, 13 March 2020.
117 ‘Putin rejects “tsar” label’, TASS 19 March 2020.
118 Putin, ‘Meeting of the Prosecutor General’s Office Board’, Kremlin.ru, 17 March
2020, en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/62998.
119 Putin, ‘Obrashchenie k grazhdanam Rossii’, Kremlin.ru, 25 March 2020,
Kremlin.ru/events/president/news/63061.
120 ‘Soveshchanie o sanitarno-epidemiologicheskoi obstanovke v Rossii’, Kremlin.
ru, 13 April 2020, Kremlin.ru/events/president/news/63194.
121 ‘Mikhail Mishustin zarazilsia koronavirusom’, Kommersant, 30 April 2020;
‘Russian PM Mishustin Diagnosed With Coronavirus’, The Moscow Times, 30
April 2020.
122 ‘1 in 5 Russian Lawmakers Have Had Coronavirus – Speaker’, The Moscow
Times, 26 October 2020.
123 ‘Otnoshenie k Vladimiry Putinu’, Levada-tsentr, 14 April 2020, https://www.
levada.ru/2020/04/14/otnoshenie-k-vladimir-putinu-4/. The survey offered a card
with multiple choices, the respondent could choose more than one, ranking them
in order of preference. See also, Andrei Kolesnikov, ‘Are Russians Finally Sick of
Putin?’, Carnegie Moscow Center, 7 April 2020.
124 On this, see Gunter Deuber, ‘Two Economic Crises at the Same Time – Too Much
Even for Russia’, Russian Analytical Digest, No. 251, 20 April 2020, pp. 10–18.
125 Petr Mironenko, Irina Malkova, Sofia Samokhina, ‘Den’ pobedy nad virusom.
Pochemu Moskva sniala karantin’, The Bell, 8 June 2020.
126 Neil MacFarquhar, ‘Putin Has Vanished, but Rumors Are Popping Up
Everywhere’, New York Times, 13 March 2020.
127 Khronika. Pandemiia koronavirusa, ‘V Kremle zaiavili, chto prizyv ostavat’sia
doma na Putina ne rasprostraniaetsia’, Interfax, 23 March 2020.
128 Putin, ‘75-letie Pobedy’, Kremlin.ru, 9 May 2020, Kremlin.ru/events/president/
news/63329.
129 ‘“In order not to risk people’s health”’, ZNAK.com, 11 June 2020; ‘V Penza.
Cheliabinske i Iakutske iz-za koronavirusa otmenili parad Pobedu’, Kommersant,
15 June 2020.
130 ‘Ne menee 30 regionov Rossii otkazalis’ ot parad v Pobedu ili provedut ikh bez
zritelei’, Znak, 16 June 2020.
131 ‘Putin to Mark Russia Day as New Virus Cases Approach 9,000’, The Moscow
Times (APF), 12 June 2020; Alena Yakushova, ‘V Rossii vyiavili pochti 9000
novykh sluchaev zarazheniia koronavirusom’, Vedomosti, 12 June 2020
132 Leon Aron, ‘The Coronavirus Could Imperil Putin’s Presidency’, Wall Street
Journal, 23 April 2020; Anton Troianovski, ‘As Local Health Systems Buckle,
Russia’s Oligarchs Take Charge’, New York Times, 7 May 2020; Tatiana
Stanovaya, ‘The Putin Regime Cracks’, Carnegie Moscow Center, 7 May 2020;
Jake Cordell, ‘Russia’s Economic Woes Continue to Mount During Coronavirus
Outbreak’, The Moscow Times, 7 May 2020; Mark Galeotti, ‘Putin Withdraws
From the Coronavirus Crisis in a Political Abdication’, The Moscow Times, 12
May 2020.
133 ‘“Rage is Brewing”: Navalny Warns of Public Anger Over Russia’s COVID-19
Response’, RFE/RL, 21 May 2020; Paul Goble, ‘2020 Intended to be Putin’s
Triumph Year’, Window on Eurasia – New Series, 15 May 2020; Lilia Shevtsova,
‘How a Wuhan bat undermined a power’, kasparov.ru, 13 May 2020, https://
www.kasparov.ru/material.php?id=5EBBBB4744968.
134 Aleksandr S. Tsipko, ‘Istoki i sud’ba sakralizatsii vlasti Putina’, Nezavisimaia
gazeta, 20 May 2020. ‘Sakralizatsii’ translates as ‘sacrilization’.
 The presidency 51
135 Paul Robinson, ‘Twice Doomed’, Irussianality, 1 May 2020; ‘Rossiia pobetit:
zapadnye SMI o putinizme v period pandemii i slaboi nefti’, Aktual’nye kom-
mentarii, 30 April 2020.
136 Stephen F. Cohen, ‘Testing Putin’s Leadership – and the System He Created’,
The Nation, 9 April 2020. Stephen Cohen died in September 2020.
137 See Golos website, golosinfo.org; ‘“Takogo minimuma u nas nikogda ne bylo”.
Ella Pamfilova – o zhalobakh na prinuzhdenie k golosovaniiu po Konstitutsii’,
Meduza, 23 June 2020; Evan Gershkovich, ‘As Russia’s Constitution Reform
Vote Kicks Off, Election Watchdog Decries “Manipulative” Process’, The
Moscow Times, 26 June 2020.
138 Putin, ‘Obrashchenie k grazhdanam Rossii’, Kremlin.ru, 30 June 2020, Kremlin.
ru/events/president/news/63584.
139 ‘TsIK: V distantsionnom golosovanii priniali uchastie uzhe 700 tysiach che-
lovek’, Rossiiskaia gazeta, 26 June 2020.
140 ‘Human rights activists announced plans to challenge the 58 million votes cast by
early amendments’, Mezhdy strok, 2 July 2020; Ben Aris, ‘Evidence of massive
ballot stuffing emerges in Russia’s referendum on constitutional changes’,
Intellinews, 3 July 2020.
141 There are too many Western examples to even try to list some here; for a few
Russian items: Putin, ‘Zasedanie Rossiiskogo organizatsionnogo komiteta
“Pobeda”’, Kremlin.ru, 2 June 2020, Kremlin.ru/events/president/news/63591;
Jonathan Brown, ‘Result of Vote Extending Putin Rule a “Triumph” – Kremlin’,
The Moscow Times, 2 July 2020; Anastasia Kornya, Elena Mukhametshina,
‘Konstitutsiia-2020 oboshla Konstitutsiiu-1993 po iavke i chislu golosov “za”’,
Vedomosti, 2 July 2020; ‘V Kremle nazvali triumfom itogi golosovaniia po
popravkam v Konstitutsiiu’, Rossiiskaia gazeta, 2 July 2020; GOLOS,
‘Preliminary statement on the basis of public monitoring of the all-Russian Vote
on the amendment of the Constitution’, 2 July 2020, golosinfo.org/arti-
cles/144477; Evan Gershkovich, ‘“All We Have Is Putin”: Russians Vote to Grant
President Ability to Extend Rule Until 2036’, The Moscow Times, 1 July 2020.
142 Putin, ‘Zasedanie Soveta po strategicheskomu razvitiiu i natsional’nym proek-
tam’, Kremlin.ru, 13 July 2020, Kremlin.ru/events/president/news/6363.
143 Foreign Policy Research Institute BMB Russia, ‘Putin shakes up development
agencies’, Intellinews, 25 November 2020; Putin. ‘Vstrecha s Sergeem Kulikovym’,
Kremlin.ru, 2 December, Kremlin.ru/events/president/news/64536.
144 Georgii Panin, ‘Kak oblegchat zhizn’ rossiian zakony dekabria’, Rossiiskaia
gazeta, 11 December 2020.
145 ‘Odobrenie organov vlasti i doverie politikam’, Levada-tsentr, 29 July 2020,
https://www.levada.ru/2020/07/29/odobrenie-organov-vlasti-i-doverie-politi-
kam. The survey was conducted with 1,617 respondents; ‘Odobrenie institutov
vlasti’, Levada-tsentr’, Levada Center, 26 August 2020, https://www.levada.
ru/2020/08/26/odobrenie-institutov-vlasti-25/.
146 ‘Prezident Rossii podpisal zakon “O pravitel’stve RF”’, RAPSI, 6 November
2020.
147 Tatiana Zamakhina, ‘Portfolios await ministers’, Rossiiskaia gazeta, 9 November
2020 (in translation); Tatiana Morozova, ‘Vladimir Putin otpravil v otstavku
srazu trekh ministrov’, Vedomosti, 9 November 2020.
148 ‘Rebooting the State Council Increases Putin’s Power’, Chatham House, Expert
Commentary, 28 October 2020.
149 ‘Ezhegodnaia press-konferentsiia Vladimira Putina’, Kremlin.ru. 17 December
2020, Kremlin.ru/events/president/news/64671.
150 Putin, ‘Novogodnee obrashchenie k grazhdanam Rossii’, 31 December 2020,
Kremlin.ru/events/president/news/64852.
2 The Russian Federation
Internal strengths and strains

Introduction
When they took it upon themselves to dissolve the Union of Soviet Socialist
Republics (USSR) on 8 December 1991, the presidents of the three large
Slavic SSRs, Stanislav Shushkevich (Belarus), Boris Yeltsin (Russia) and
Leonid Kravchuk (Ukraine), declared themselves the founders of a
Commonwealth of Independent States and left its membership open for any
former republic of the USSR. Before the month ended they were joined by
eight others, the Baltic republics and Georgia staying out. The right of all
Union Republics to secede from the USSR had long been part of the Soviet
Constitution, but that right was overridden by constitutional articles and
laws that made secession impossible and by Union and All-Union commu-
nist parties that wielded unchallengeable dictatorial powers. These powers
were finally overruled by far-reaching legislation approved by the Supreme
Soviet in 1990, including a Law on Secession adopted in April that year.1
That law had important manifestations for the Russian Federation well into
the post-Soviet years.
Titled the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) during
the Soviet era, the Russian republic contained 20 constituent autonomous
republics, 8 autonomous oblasts and some 40 other regions (okrugs, krais),
each with its own defined level of autonomy within the RSFSR. The law that
enabled Union Republics to secede granted the same right of secession to
autonomous administrative regions contained in the RSFSR, such as
Chechnya and Tatarstan. Similar territories inside the boundaries of other
former Union Republics, Georgia (Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Ajaria),
Ukraine (Crimea), Moldova (Transdniestria, Gaugazia) and Azerbaijan
(Nagorno-Karabakh), had the same constitutional right to secede. After
much blood-spilling, some of these were successful in choosing their own
status, others were not.
Following dissolution, made official by Soviet president M.S. Gorbachev
on 25 December 1991, and the referendum accepting its new Constitution in
1993, the new Russian Federation had 89 components, officially called ‘sub-
jects’ in the Constitution. This number was reduced to 83 after a few of the
smaller units amalgamated. When the Soviet-era Chechen-Ingush Republic

DOI: 10.4324/9781003158646-3
 The Russian Federation 53
was divided in 1992, the newly created Chechen half proclaimed its indepen-
dence from Russia as the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria. The Kremlin’s
refusal to let it go led to civil war in 1994. Chechnya was the only republic to
try to leave the RF by force.
Under the leadership of President Mintimer Shaymiev, Tatarstan declared
its sovereignty in 1992 and in 1994 signed a power-sharing treaty with Russia.
That treaty expired in July 2017. Until then, Tatarstan had the right to its
own laws and tax regimes, control over its resources and even limited partici-
pation in international affairs. It was the last of the regions to call its elected
head ‘president’, over 40 others having given that label up by 2010 when
Chechnya did so voluntarily.2 A significant difference between Chechnya and
Tatarstan is that Chechnya is on Russia’s border with a foreign country,
Tatarstan is not.

General structure
With the addition of the Republic of Crimea and the City of Sevastopol in
2014, the Russian Federation increased to 85 constituent entities. The new
additions are still recognized as part of Ukraine by most other countries. The
85 subjects, or components, of the Federation include 22 republics, nine
krais, three federal cities (Moscow, St. Petersburg and Sevastopol), 46 oblasts,
one autonomous oblast and four autonomous okrugs. Each component has
its own parliament, head (usually now called governor) and constitutional
court; they are represented equally (two members each) on the Federation
Council, the upper chamber of Russia’s Federal Assembly.3
According to the 1993 Constitution and its 2020 amended version, the sub-
ject components are equal in station and representation, though they vary
tremendously in size, population numbers and wealth. The central govern-
ment has jurisdiction over such matters as defence, foreign economic rela-
tions and judicial systems (Art. 71), and there is joint jurisdiction over the
possession of land, subsoil and natural resources (Art. 72). The Russian lan-
guage is the sole language of state (Art. 68), though the 22 republics have the
right to declare a national language of their own for internal use. The ruble is
the national medium of exchange (Art. 75), the free flow of goods between
subjects is guaranteed (Art. 74) and local laws of the subjects must not con-
tradict federal law (Art. 76). Considerable autonomy is laid out for the sub-
jects in the Constitution, yet autonomous incentives tend to be overwhelmed
by other, more centralizing, articles, and especially by federal purse strings.

Constitutional amendments 2020

Only a few of the ‘January Revolution’ alterations to the Constitution in 2020
were directly relevant to the structure of the Federation. In the first place, an
amendment provides legal mechanisms to create federal territories, and also
‘closed territories, especially protected natural territories and the Arctic’,
plus in such areas as Lake Baikal and the Vostochny Cosmodrome if the
54 The Russian Federation
government so wishes. Secondly, the ban on ceding Russian territory guaran-
tees that Russia will keep Crimea and the Kuril Islands, and ignore land
claims by Estonia or Finland, no matter who is president. The clause that
now gives Russian law precedent over international law also could have sig-
nificance for the Federation (Figure 2.1).

The federal legislature

The 145 million citizens of the Russian Federation are represented in the
country’s national legislature, the Federal Assembly, which is comprised of
an Upper House, the Federation Council (Senate), and a Lower House, the
State Duma. The latter body has 450 members (deputies), half of them taken
from political party lists on the basis of proportional representation (PR). To
share in these seats a party must achieve 5 per cent of the votes cast (there
was a brief period when 7 per cent was required); the other half of the Duma
seats are deputies elected in single constituency ridings, not on the basis of
party affiliation, though party preferences of candidate are often known.
The Federation Council has two representatives (Senators) from each sub-
ject of the Federation. Since the incorporation of Crimea, this means 170
‘senators’, plus 17 more named by the president on the basis of an amend-
ment made to the Constitution in July 2014. As we have seen, more presiden-
tial nominees were added in 2020, bringing their number to 30. All except
seven of these nominees are appointed by decree for six years. The seven,
whom the president can name at any time, will hold the position for life. That
number could include an ex-president.4
Seats on the Federation Council are coveted because they carry parliamen-
tary immunity, a rent-free dwelling in Moscow and other perquisites. The
chairman, or speaker, of the Council is the third-ranked official in the
Federation, behind the president and prime minister.

The governors
The top executive of each federal component is the governor or, in three
cases, mayors who are elected directly by citizens who live in Moscow, St.
Petersburg and Sevastopol. The position is a powerful one, because the gov-
ernor has some control over government budgets and the appointment of
local senior officials. The line of authority between governors and Putin’s
envoys to Federal Districts is loosely defined, though the envoys are appointed
by the president, so are more likely to have his ear than locally elected
governors.
In 2000, the president prevented governors from naming themselves to the
Federation Council, mostly by threatening to open criminal investigations on
some of them. Before that and until 2005, the governors were elected directly
by the people of their region; from 2005 to 2012, they were chosen by mem-
bers of the local legislature from a list presented by the Russian president.
After 2012, the right to choose their own head of regional government
 Chukotka
Arkhangelsk
Murmansk

an
ad

Ka
ia
Kaliningrad St Petersburg

ag
l

m
re

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Ka

at
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ia

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Pskov 7 Arkhangelsk
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Smolensk Tver a d Komi
23
Bryansk 4
1
9 3
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Yamalia
Krasnoyarsk
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Kursk 14 10 Kirov ntia Sakhalin
-
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The Russian Federation

yk

at
6 rg Primorsky
ba

ry
12 7
Altai Za

Bu
5 Dagestan
3 Tuva
Altai
- Oblasts - Autonomous okrugs
- Republics
1 - Astrakhan 9 - Mosoow 17 - Tambov
2 - Chelyabinsk 10 - Nizhny Novgorod 18 - Tula 1 - Adygaya 8 - Kalmykia - Krais
3 - Ivanovo 11 - Novgorod 19 - Ulyanovsk 2 - Bashkortostan 9 - Karachay-Cherkessia 1 - Stavropol
4 - Kaluga 12 - Oryol 20 - Vladimir 3 - Chechnya 10 - Mari EI
5 - Kemerovo 13 - Penza 21 - Volgograd 4 - Chuvashia 11 - Mordovia - Federal cities
6 - Kostroma 14 - Ryazan 22 - Voronezh 5 - Ingushetia 12 - North Ossetia-Alaria 1 - Moscow
7 - Leningrad 15 - Samara 23 - Yaroslavl 6 - Kabardino-Balkaria 13 - Tatarstan - Autonomous oblast
8 - Lipetsk 16 - Sverdlovsk 7 - Khakassia 14 - Udmurtia

55
Figure 2.1 Components (subjects) of the Russian Federation.
Source: Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outline_of_Russia#/media/File:Russian-regions.png.
56 The Russian Federation
reverted to the subjects of the Federation, and representatives to the Upper
House are now selected by local legislatures. These recovered rights were
among several concessions granted after massive political protests over vote
rigging in late 2011 and early 2012. A governor’s term in office is five years
and, as of 2020, they are allowed no more than two consecutive elections.
The president retained the right to dismiss governors after 2012, but only
on the grounds of ‘inadequate performance of duties and loss of confidence’.
This article (No. 19.2) of the law, ‘On the general principles of organization
of legislative (representative) and executive bodies of state power’ (1999) has
been used 12 times, the most recent in July 2020 against Khabarovsk’s Sergei
Furgal shortly after he was arrested for alleged serious crimes.
In some parts of the Caucasus, subjects have decided to leave the selection
of their governor up to the president, otherwise a representative of the largest
of several sizeable ethnic groups would always be elected. Dagestan, for
instance, has twelve official languages after Russian, and eight ethnic groups
with over 100,000 people in a population of about three million. Less than 5
per cent are ethnic Russians.
If the president dismisses a head of a region and fills the vacancy tempo-
rarily, an election must take place within six months. Needless to say, it is
important for Putin to have governors in place who support the policies of
the central government. As of June 2019, 70 of the governors were members
of the UR.
***
As he had done in earlier terms, Putin began nominating new governors
shortly after the inauguration ceremony in 2018. For the most part, these
appointments followed the resignations of incumbents whose electorates pro-
duced low results for United Russia. He dismissed the governor of Magadan
Region, and resignations came from heads of the Sakha, Tyumen, Altai,
Yakutia and Yamal-Nenets republics. The Altai Territory and Yakutia had
the lowest support for Putin among all the regional governorships. Some of
the resigning officials were offered other, presumably pre-arranged, posts in
government.5
One can assume that Putin’s nominees for governorships are people whom
he regards as both loyal and competent, though sometimes these qualities are
not enough. Many of the regions are dominated by local ‘clans’ who manipu-
late local authorities and business combines, making it very difficult for new
governors, especially if they come from the outside, to implement centralized
planning for the national benefit. In theory, governors are supposed to be
from the region in question, or closely associated with it, but that rule does
not always hold up.
During the September 2018 election cycle, most of the Kremlin’s favoured
gubernatorial aspirants did well, although at least four of the UR-sponsored
incumbents failed to reach a majority in the first round and fell to candidates
from the LDRP or the CPRF in a re-run. The anti-pension reform campaign
was a major contributor to this turn of events. After the election, Putin
 The Russian Federation 57
replaced three governors who would have difficulty winning in the next series
of votes and two more resigned on their own.6
The old guard was vulnerable, as Putin looked for younger, administrative-
minded personnel. For example, at age 30 the new acting head of Tyumen
and subsequent electoral victor, Dmitry Artyukhov, was the youngest such
office-holder in post-Soviet history. One of the replaced governors was St.
Petersburg’s Georgy Poltavchenko, who had held the post for seven years.
The Governor of Kursk, Aleksandr Mikhailov, gave up early in October after
13 years in the office. Ten more republic heads were dismissed or quit before
the year was out.7
The UR and the Kremlin launched a second round of pressure against
governors they wanted to move in March 2019, encouraging some to give
notice and dismissing others. Elections in 16 regions were scheduled for that
year. The governors of Chelyabinsk, Altai and Kalmykia resigned. Among
those who fell in disgrace was Mikhail Ignatiev, head of the Chuvash Republic
who was fired in January 2020 for insulting local firefighters and also allow-
ing his local officials to treat regular citizens badly. He was expelled from the
UR party as well.8
In addition to new gubernatorial resignations and nominations, arrests of
several key regional figures for corruption, such as former governor of
Khabarovsk Viktor Ishaev in 2019, prompted some Russian analysts to think
that the Kremlin was losing control over the regions to local clans. Increased
levels of regional protest activity seemed to confirm this notion. Noting that
the UR had lost a few mayoralty and gubernatorial seats to the LDPR and
CPRF, Tatyana Stanovaya foresaw rifts opening up among the siloviki, dis-
rupting the nationwide power vertikal established by Putin and sustained by
them.9 This may have been wishful thinking, for the UR was still an unchal-
lenged political force almost everywhere.
The crises of 2020 were politicized for the fall gubernatorial elections (see
Chapter 3). Communist and LDPR candidates faulted the government for
the extent of the pandemic and its debilitating social consequences, while the
UR declared that electing its nominees was necessary for the post-pandemic
national economic recovery plan.

Language matters
An increasingly important and controversial matter for the Federation is the
issue of language and the right to an education in a mother tongue. Although
the population of the Federation is nearly 80 per cent ethnic Russian and the
sole official language of the state is Russian, there are around 185 different
ethnic groups designated as nationalities and 21 of the 85 components of the
Federation are nominal homelands of peoples other than Russians. The larg-
est minority after Russians is Tatar, with slightly over 10 per cent of the
population, followed distantly by Ukrainians, Bashkirs, Chuvash and
Chechens. Minorities in reasonably large numbers locally have had the right
to be taught at least partially in their native language. Individual republics
58 The Russian Federation
can declare more than one official language. Hundreds of newspapers, maga-
zines, TV channels and radio stations use minority languages, and there are
myriad public organizations and cultural entities whose purpose is to main-
tain local languages and cultures. During Putin’s final half-decade, this phe-
nomenon was strained by the Kremlin’s emphasis on a patriotism that
accentuates Russians and Russian culture.
The issue of language training attracted national attention when, in July
2017, Putin attended a meeting of the Council on Interethnic Relations (est.
2012) in Yoshkar-Ola, the capital of Mari-el. The agenda prioritized the
implementation of the State National Policy in the regions, and ways and
means to preserve ethno-cultural diversity in the Federation. When it came to
language instruction, Putin made his position clear:

in the field of teaching the Russian language and languages of​​ the peo-
ples of Russia in schools. I want to remind you, dear friends, that the
Russian language for us is the state language, the language of interethnic
communication, and it cannot be replaced with anything, it is a natu-
ral spiritual framework of our entire multinational country. Everyone
should know it.10

He added that, while everyone has the right to learn the language of their
forebears, no one should be compelled to do so. He meant, of course, that
ethnic Russians should not be forced to learn a language that was not his or
her native language and was unique to their region. This was the basic tenet
of a new language law passed in 2017 that increased hours allocated for
Russian language and culture, decreased the number of school hours per
week in a native language and made learning it voluntary. The indigenous
language had been compulsory in some republics.
Whereas the Kremlin’s interest in these matters was both to make Russia
more uniform and more efficient, local cultural leaders saw the language law
as a threat to their own cultures. While Putin also assumed that Russian
speaking might generate a greater level of patriotism among non-Russians,
non-Russians worried that the language law might limit their access to gov-
ernment employment. These matters were political ones for activists in
Tatarstan, Chuvashia, Bashkortostan and Yakutia, who protested language
issues regularly, often with one-person pickets. Such concerns prompted the
creation of the Democratic Congress of the Peoples of Russia, which opposed
the language bill because it made the ‘mother tongues and state languages of
the republics … elective subjects [in schools], losing state support’.11 Language
activism burst out again in Tatarstan in February 2020, after school officials
cut optional language instruction in Tatar from four to two hours a week.
Although quiescent in most republics, the language question remained a
source of unrest that could spread.12
The matter of language and ethnicity attracted attention during discussion
of the constitutional amendments in the winter of 2020. By referring to
Russian as the language of the ‘state-forming’ people, rather than merely the
 The Russian Federation 59
national language of the Federation, the amended Constitution (Art. 68)
could alienate up to 20 per cent of the population whose mother tongue is
not Russia. The amendment also undercut the traditional idea of Russia as a
multinational state, a concept confirmed by Putin himself when he wrote in
2012 that ‘inter-ethnic harmony is one of our country’s key requisites’, and
that ‘hundreds of ethnic groups live in their native lands alongside Russians.
The development of vast lands throughout Russia’s history has been a joint
affair between many different peoples.’13
In that paper, titled ‘Russia: The Nationality Question,’ which served as
part of Putin’s campaign for the presidency that year, he spoke of Russia as a
‘multi-ethnic civilization with Russian culture at its core’. His purpose then,
Ulrich Schmid wrote, was in part to mute aggressive Russian nationalism by
presenting ethnic Russians as the ‘link holding together the fragile Russian
(Rossiiskii) multi-ethnic state’. Eight years later, the new constitutional word-
ing represented an official proclamation of Russian dominance of the
Federation. The fact that ethnic Russians do not form a majority in some
republics in the North Caucasus (e.g. Dagestan, Ingushetia, Chechnya) or
elsewhere (e.g. Tatarstan, Sakha), makes the change a potentially explosive
one.14

Coronavirus pandemic and the federation

When Putin handed the management of the coronavirus pandemic off to
regional leaderships, he professed to be doing so because of the vast differ-
ences in size, population numbers and general demography of the Federation’s
components. He assumed, too, that the infection would strike in different
places at different times and with different levels of severity. In these assump-
tions, he was quite right, yet he might also have intended to shift blame if
things went wrong. Unwittingly, by decentralizing responsibility Putin may
also disrupted the power vertikal.
We have seen that the president’s popularity dipped to record depths dur-
ing the pandemic. Left in charge of crisis management within their jurisdic-
tions, regional governors and mayors gained authority and, sometimes,
popularity. Moscow’s Sobyanin was a case in point. Even Putin’s strongman
image slipped and all his hopes for a glorious 2020 faded away.15 As one
Russian pundit put it, ‘the pandemic has weakened Putin’s vertical of power
and intensified conflict within the country’s ruling elite’. While that judge-
ment remains to be seen, there is little doubt that some, perhaps many, gover-
nors gained local public support that they otherwise might not have had.16
COVID-19 divided the components themselves. When some of the subject
republics mooted closing down their internal borders, Prime Minister
Mishustin called the practice illegal. That didn’t prevent Ramzan Kadyrov
from giving people a five-day notice to get out, or back in, before he banned
entry and exit from Chechnya in April.17 Chechnya, where police patrolled
the streets to enforce self-isolation, had the lowest rate of coronavirus of any
republic in the North Caucasus, whereas other republics in the area, such as
60 The Russian Federation
Dagestan, Ingushetia and North Ossetia, had much higher rates per capita
than anywhere else in Russia.
Poverty and distrust of officials were factors in the asymmetrical spread of
the disease.18 As of mid-May, more than 40 of the 700 deaths registered in
Dagestan (most of them officially attributed to ‘community-acquired pneu-
monia’) were healthcare workers. These data came from Dagestan’s health
minister, Dzhamaludin Gadzhiibragimov, whose admission quickly attracted
headlines in Russian and international media. Putin reacted by sending
immediate aid that the republic should have had earlier, and also blaming
Dagestanis for gathering in crowds.19
Religious affiliation opened another crack in the unity of the Federation’s
response to the pandemic. In some areas, for example, Islamic leaders refused
to shut down communal prayers and festivities during Ramadan week even
though Mecca and Medina, two of Islam’s holiest cities, were closed to the
faithful. The Orthodox Church also caused confusion, as some priests refused
to follow the Patriarch’s request to restrict public worship.
Several towns in other components of the Federation, including Crimea,
set up roadblocks, and by early April almost all of the republics and regions
had instituted lockdowns with only essential traffic allowed to enter. Although
Mishustin continued to insist that the federal government was in charge and
that neither municipalities nor subjects could close internal borders unilater-
ally, many areas ignored Moscow in this matter. The de facto delegation of
decision-making authority to regional leaders instilled levels of confusion
about the order of command.20
Whatever the effectiveness of the Duma, it too was decimated by the pan-
demic. Within a few weeks of its return in September 2020, for example, 18
of its members were hospitalized. This brought the total number of deputies
infected over the previous six months to 60. Although they all recovered,
constant disruption of personnel and no-shows slowed the work of commit-
tees, the work of which was done mostly by video conferencing in the autumn.

Crimea
Crimea’s current position as a new component of the Russian Federation
endures as a bitterly controversial issue in the international arena, and a per-
manent bone of contention between Moscow and Kyiv.
The status of Crimea has been a sensitive one since the dissolution of the
USSR. Part of Russia since 1783, when it was taken from the Ottoman
Empire after a series of Russo-Turkish Wars, it became the seat of Russia’s
prestigious Black Sea Fleet. The peninsula persisted as an important strate-
gic part of Imperial Russia, a theatre for war between Russia on the one
hand, Britain and France on the other (Crimean War, 1854–6), and subject
matter for many of Russia’s most famous writers, among them Pushkin and
Tolstoy. Crimea was an Autonomous SSR within the RSFSR from 1921 to
1945, when it was demoted to autonomous oblast ranking. The oblast was
turned over to the Ukrainian SSR in 1954 as a commemorative ‘gift’ from
 The Russian Federation 61
Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. Neither the people nor the administra-
tors of Crimea were consulted. Crimea recovered standing as an autonomous
republic within Ukraine when the UkrSSR became an independent country
in 1991, and renamed itself the Republic of Crimea in 1992. A few months
later, the Crimean parliament proclaimed self-government within Ukraine.
Its relationship with Kyiv was uneasy.21
Yuriy Meshkov established a movement for independence in late 1991 and
registered it the next year as the Republican Party of Crimea. The Crimean
parliament created its own office of president in 1993 and Meshkov, cam-
paigning on an independence platform, won the position in 1994 with over 73
per cent of votes cast. His efforts were stifled by the Ukrainian government,
which abolished the office of Crimean president and replaced it with an envoy
chosen in Kyiv. The point here is that the annexation of 2014 was not some-
thing that the Russian military forced on an unwilling Crimean population,
though it was probably a startled one.
The Ukrainian census tabulated in 2001 concluded that ethnic Russians
made up 60.4 per cent of the people living in Crimea in 2014 and that 77 per
cent of all inhabitants were native Russian-speakers. Only 10.4 per cent spoke
Ukrainian at home. The territory is also the nominal homeland of Crimean
Tatars, who were almost all deported to Siberia by Stalin in 1944. Slowly
trickling back to their homeland from the late 1960s, they returned massively
only by the late 1980s and early 1990s, and their territorial (property) pre-
rogatives are still disputed. The Crimean Tatar Qurultay, or representative
body, has mixed opinions on whether its people would be better off as part of
Ukraine or Russia, neither of which is appealing, or independence, which
they know is an unlikely scenario. In 2001, Tatars made up about 11 per cent
of the Crimean population, and ethnic Ukrainians 24 per cent. After 2014,
Tatar numbers neared those of ethnic Ukrainian Crimeans, whose percent-
age in the population fell.
From the Russian perspective, Crimea was a ‘red line’ at which the expan-
sion of NATO had to be stopped (see Chapter 5). Although Russian organi-
zations and political parties, Zhirinovsky’s LDPR for example, were
constantly meddling in Crimean affairs in the 1990s, the Russian government
was more concerned about reaching agreements with Ukraine on housing the
Black Sea Fleet. This was achieved in 1997, when a Russia–Ukraine Treaty of
Friendship granted Russia a 20-year lease on Sevastopol. In 2010, the recently
elected Yanukovych government extended that lease to 2042 in return for
investments and a 30 per cent cut in natural gas price to the value of about
$40 billion.
Even though Ukraine confirmed its constitutional posture as a neutral
state in the 1990s, and Russia guaranteed Ukrainian territorial integrity, joint
naval exercises with NATO and the Ukrainian navy in 1997 (Sea-Breeze-97)
kept the spectre of Ukraine joining NATO alive in the mind’s eye of the
Kremlin. The possibility in 2014, indeed probability after the Euromaidan
uprising, of Ukraine acceding to NATO and Sevastopol becoming a NATO
base forced Russia’s hand. Putin had already warned a NATO–Russia
62 The Russian Federation
Council in 2008 that if Ukraine was admitted to NATO he would take ‘ade-
quate measures’. NATO paid no attention. He made it clearer in 2014 after
the fact, telling a questioner that

when the infrastructure of a military bloc is moving toward our border, it

causes us some concerns and questions. We needed to take some steps in
response … NATO ships would have ended up in the city of Russian navy
glory – Sevastopol.22

To Western leaders, this was an excuse; to Russians it was a reason.

***
Along with geopolitical complications, Crimea was still the source of multi-
ple economic and legal issues outstanding between Russia and Ukraine in
2018. In May, the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague ruled that
Russia owed 18 Ukrainian businesses and one private entity a total of $159
million for assets seized on the peninsula. Russia’s Ministry of Justice refused
to recognize the Court’s jurisdiction in this case and rejected the idea of pay-
ment.23 Shortly thereafter, Ukraine expanded its sanctions regime against
Russian individuals and entities to include over 1,000 persons and 400 com-
panies altogether, and continued to blockade Crimea by land.24 The inability
of Crimeans to cross easily into Ukraine, trade with Ukraine or access Russia
via Ukraine, and Moscow’s own desire to permanently link Crimea to the
Russian mainland, persuaded Putin to construct a rail and vehicle bridge
across the Kerch Strait, upgrade airports, build thermal power stations and
tie Crimea into the Russian electric grid system. Huge groundwork projects
such as these came at great expense. The Russian military rebuilt defences
and enlarged the Black Sea Fleet at Sevastopol. Five years after the annexa-
tion, it was difficult to imagine how any return of Crimea to Ukraine would
come about without a European war.
The rhetoric of race and name-calling confused relationships as well. For
instance, Crimeans were angered when a member of the Ukrainian neo-Nazi
Svoboda Party and professor of linguistics, Irina Farion, called all Russia-
speaking Ukrainian citizens mentally retarded. Although her reference was to
the people of the Donbas, it had equally poor resonance in Crimea. The fact
that at least 30 per cent of the population throughout Ukraine, let alone
Crimea, spoke Russian at home before the civil war broke out and many still
speak a combination of Ukrainian and Russian (Surzhik), made her com-
ments symptomatic of a divide that may never heal.25 Having lost the promi-
nent place it had held in Ukraine’s interim government in 2014, in a
parliamentary election, Svoboda’s extreme nationalism as defined by PACE
(‘racist, anti-Semitic and xenophobic’) is nonetheless still widely shared.
Farion, who lost her seat by a large margin too, can spread her venom as a
member of the Ukrainian Language Department at Lviv Polytechnic. Instead
of fading into the background after Ukraine gained official association with
the EU in 2015, far-right and anti-democratic nationalists strut with impunity
 The Russian Federation 63
outside the Rada in Ukraine, and inadvertently stoke pro-Russian sentiments
in Crimea.26 It may well be that the extreme nationalists in Ukraine, like
Farion, are more bark than bite, but that does not minimize the perception of
threat among Russian speakers in Ukraine and Crimea.
A VTsIOM poll conducted in March 2019, in Crimea, showed that 60 per
cent of the respondents viewed accession to the Russian Federation as
‘undoubtedly positive’ and another 24 per cent said it was “rather positive’;
83 per cent said they would vote for admission to Russia if a referendum were
held that week.27 Granted, VTsIOM is a Russian state-funded polling institu-
tion, yet the results of its survey coincide with findings obtained by North
American, European and even Ukrainian polling agencies regularly since
2014.28
That did not mean that there were no domestic difficulties in Crimea.
There were plenty. Western and Ukrainian sanctions against Crimean busi-
nesses, and food price inflation were among the difficulties faced by the peo-
ple of the peninsula. Water shortages caused by a semi-drought were
exacerbated when Kyiv ordered the North Crimean Canal blocked. The canal
provides Crimea with 85 per cent of its water, and its failure created political,
health and agricultural problems.29 Political issues, including resistance from
Tatars and political chaos in the city of Sevastopol, disrupted social calm.
The latter problem was symbolized in the fact that, in July 2019, the city
district ‘welcomed’ its third governor in five years. Mikhail Razvozhaev, for-
mer acting head of Khakassia, was entrusted with completing large-scale
development projects left undone by his predecessors, resolve conflicts with
and between local clan bosses and to raise the UR profile in the city. Clarifying
the line of command between civilian and military authorities in Sevastopol
was also on the agenda.30 Russian foreign relations, and its domestic budget,
were consumed by the Ukraine dilemma generally, and Crimea particularly,
for every year since 2014. This unresolved issue may have been another rea-
son why Putin wanted to stay on.
In the midst of the constitutional furore in 2020, Putin flew to Sevastopol
as part of a working trip through the Southern Federal District. He met with
representatives of public organizations en masse and separately with head of
the Crimean Republic, Sergei Aksyonov, and Razvozhaev. The occasion was
the 6th anniversary of the peninsula’s ‘reunification’ with Russia. Putin gave
a rousing patriotic speech in which he presented that event as a ‘fair and, as
time has shown, long-expected event both for Crimeans and for the entire
country’.31 He was speaking to the converted.
At the public meeting, he boasted of the ‘progressive’ development of the
region, including the restoration of energy supply and infrastructure build-
ing, such as the ‘Crimean bridge’. A speaker from the All-Russian Popular
Front (ONF) praised the inclusion of a ban on ‘the alienation of territories’
in the amended constitution, while pointing out that the new rule preventing
anyone who once held a non-Russian citizenship from becoming president
discriminated against Crimeans. Putin replied that exemptions are made in
the document for residents of Crimea and Sevastopol.
64 The Russian Federation
In an extraordinarily wide-ranging session, speakers from the floor asked
about such things as the writing of history, health care and pensions for vet-
erans, hospital services, education, fighting the coronavirus and communicat-
ing accurate information about it. Concerns about protecting archaeological
sites, museum holdings and memorials, and the environment, were raised as
well. There seemed to be no one present from the Tatar cohort. In his turn,
Putin urged everyone to vote for the constitutional amendments in April and
told the pro-Russian audience mostly what they wanted to hear. Although
there were kernels of truth in the rosy picture he and his audience painted,
independent observers were well aware that the place of Crimea as part of
the RF remains a wellspring of international friction that is not going to go
away anytime soon.

Siberia and Russia’s far East

Russia’s Siberia and Far East featured prominently in Putin’s annual address
to the Federal Assembly in 2019, as they had many times in the past. In tout-
ing infrastructure projects, including major extensions of the BAM (Baikal–
Amur) and TransSiberia Railways, he asserted that these regions were central
to his plans for economic development and the state’s ability to raise ‘the
quality of life of people’.32 These too were old stories.
To achieve his ambitions for the huge area, he needed labour. Herein lay
another, unexpected, problem. Large-scale migration fuelled white national-
ism in Russia, characterized by rhetoric about an ‘invasion’ and mythical ris-
ing crime rates (see Chapter 9), just as it did in the US, the UK, Europe,
Australia and New Zealand. Tensions shaped by xenophobia made work in
Russia less attractive to migrant labour and, by 2019–20, economic condi-
tions shaped by sanctions, oil price wars and the pandemic made it even less
so. The necessary labour became difficult to find.

Siberia deals with climate change – or doesn’t

Adjusting to climate change complicated daily life and labour in Siberia and
the Far East still further. While Moscow and St. Petersburg ‘enjoyed’ their
warmest January (2020) in recorded history, dramatic planning modifications
had to be made for Siberia and the Arctic, where historically warm tempera-
tures were also recorded. Scientists in Russia and Finland testified in February
that Russia’s north was heating up more than twice the global average, bring-
ing with it unprecedented problems, such as thawing tundra and Arctic ice,
and massive releases of methane and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
Bearing in mind that about 15 per cent of its oil and 80 per cent of its gas
operations rest on permafrost, global warming has unique implications for
Russia. Among other things, it threatens serious damage to pipelines, roads,
houses and other structures built on permafrost. Russia doesn’t have the
technology or resources to protect this infrastructure. Even cities like Norilsk
are facing major issues as the soil thaws.33
 The Russian Federation 65
In the case of Norilsk these issues came home to roost on 29 May 2020,
when thawing permafrost contributed to the collapse of a huge diesel fuel oil
storage tank close to the city. Over 20,000 tons of toxic fuel spilled into the
surrounding soil and a river that feeds a major lake and other rivers vital to
the Taymyr region. Local authorities reacted slowly, warning Moscow two
full days later. Putin declared a state of emergency and held a video confer-
ence with Emergency Measures Minister Zinichev, head of Rosprirodnadzor
Svetlana Radionova, the governor of Krasnoyarsk Territory and several oth-
ers on 3 June, and demanded immediate action. Zinichev maintained that the
spill was fully contained by 5 June. He erred, or prevaricated. By that time the
fuel had spread about 20 kilometres, seriously tainting water sources and soil,
probably for many years to come. TASS announced that the concentration of
‘harmful substances’ in waters around Norilsk had risen by 200 times, and
Greenpeace Russia termed it the worst spill in the history of the Arctic
Ocean. Clearly, the long-term clean-up will cost billions of rubles for health
care, water and soil clean-up, and general repair.34
The contaminates seeped into Lake Pyasino, an Arctic glacial body of
water that feeds the important Pyasino River that in turn flows into the Kara
Sea and Arctic Ocean. Vladimir Potanin, main shareholder in Norilsk Nickel,
said the company would pay for the clean-up. Four criminal cases related to
it were opened, one of them against the mayor of Norilsk for negligence and
failure to organize containment of the spill quickly enough. In July, the gov-
ernment fined Nornickel ₽148 billion ($2 bln), and in November a report by
an environmental consultancy group listed design flaws in the tank itself and
management failures as part of the problem.35
Unfortunately, the diesel fuel was only one of a series of climate and envi-
ronmental crises that hit Russia’s North in 2020 (see Chapter 9).
Moscow’s first reaction to climate alerts was to move the Arctic up on its
schedule for state investments, both as a military front line and as a source of
wealth. Arctic sea ice shrank so rapidly, from 7.9 million sq. kms. in 1980 to
4.6 million in 2018, that tankers may now carry LNG produced by Novatek’s
Yamal facilities and Gazprom’s Sakhalin-2 project through Russia’s
Northeast Passage to Europe and Asia relatively unimpeded (see Chapter 4).
Russia’s fleet of strengthened tankers has become more active, and the gov-
ernment pledged 11 billion rubles over the period 2019–25 to develop the
route. The rapid warming has left Siberia and the Russian Far East more
vulnerable to fires, drought and floods.36

Northern sea route

New economic opportunities presented by the warming prompted an acceler-
ated militarization of the Russian North, which includes almost half of the
world’s Arctic coastline. The Kremlin ordered the construction of new bases
and stepped up air and naval activity there. In addition to protecting the
untapped resources of the Arctic, Russian military personnel were deployed
to guard the Northern Sea Route, which was expected to be a key component
66 The Russian Federation
of Beijing’s Polar Silk Road connecting China with Europe via the Bering
Sea. The same potential prompted Russia to try to reach accommodation
with Canada in the Arctic, as both countries want to ward off attempts by
the US and China to ‘internationalize’ the Arctic.37
Speaking to an Arctic Forum in St. Petersburg in April 2019, Putin
announced that cargo shipments across the Northern Sea Route were about
to increase dramatically and that three nuclear icebreakers were under con-
struction to add to Russia’s existing fleet of four. He outlined special tax
relief incentives to encourage foreign and domestic investment in the Arctic,
funding for eco-tourism and a new Russian Arctic National Park. Finn,
Danish, Icelandic and Norwegian leaders attended the meeting, along with
some 3,600 businesspeople and officials.38
Putin especially hoped to attract foreign investors in the construction of
port hubs at either end of the Northern Sea Route. To do so, he had to break
through the thick coating of scepticism built up over years of failed grandi-
ose schemes related to development in Russia’s North, and that proved to be
a formidable task.39 Although some of the foundational projects linked to the
Northern Sea Route were already underway, the government approved a vast
15-year undertaking in late 2019 that was signed into law only on 5 March
2020. Titled ‘On the Basics of State Policy of the Russian Federation in the
Arctic for the Period until 2035,’ it included icebreakers, improved port facili-
ties, rail links and mapping projects. 40 Russia will chair the Arctic Council in
2021–23.
The diesel fuel spill was just the latest roadblock thrown in the way of
Moscow’s many years of trying to develop and modernize Russia’s Arctic.
Cost overruns and corrupt officials continue to plague northern projects,
while inland transportation facilities, such as roads, airfields and bridges, are
victims of climate change and permafrost melt. Pride of place in the docu-
ment went to the Northern Sea Route, one of the few projects that delivers a
strategic advantage over China by providing a faster trade route to European
markets than the Suez Canal.41
In 2020, a re-emergence of Siberian regionalism complicated an already
difficult situation for the Kremlin. The region’s vast spaces (two-thirds of the
Federation), home to only about 20 per cent of the country’s population, are
where most of the country’s natural resources are located. Siberiaks believe
they are short-changed in the value of those resources. While traditional irri-
tations have always been easily triggered by unwanted political decisions
made in Moscow, recent land-use concessions to Chinese companies and,
more importantly, the uncontrolled second COVID-19 wave brought unrest
to the boiling-over point late in the year.42 The expression of anger in
Khabarovsk (see Chapter 3) may have been the tip of the iceberg.

The North Caucasus

The North Caucasus posed a quite different challenge for the Russian people
and authorities to deal with in both the short and long terms.
 The Russian Federation 67
Thrust into the prime ministerial office a matter of days after the second
Chechen war broke out, Putin was well aware of the fragility of the
Federation. In addition to fighting a civil war in the North Caucasus, he had
to deal with tens of thousands of refugees flooding into Dagestan and
Ingushetia, where violence and corruption were also endemic. These two
republics plus Chechnya are Islamic, poor and heavily subsidized by
Moscow. Moreover, the border between Chechnya and Ingushetia, constitu-
ents of the Federation in 1992 that existed as one republic in Soviet days,
was not yet settled in 2000. Old territorial disputes still simmered between
Ingushetia and South Ossetia as well. In the former case, the border was not
demarcated finally until 2018 and, in the latter case, the territorial issues
were instrumental in Ingush terrorist participation in the Beslan tragedy
(see ahead).
Within a week of becoming prime minister, Putin introduced a package of
measures to bring ‘order and discipline’ to Dagestan specifically and stabili-
zation to the Caucasus generally. ‘Lawbreaking and manifestations of terror-
ism’ throughout the region had to be dealt with firmly and immediately, Putin
told a meeting of the Russian Security Council and the newly-formed federal
anti-terrorist commission. In the long run, he said, the ‘conditions and causes’
that give rise to the violence must be eradicated so that Russia might find
peace and unity.43 Though sometimes eased, various forms of these ‘condi-
tions and causes’ popped up like ‘whack-a-moles’ for the next two decades no
matter Moscow’s efforts to tame them.
Constant tensions, unemployment, territorial rifts and religious extrem-
ism were still features of Caucasus life as Putin’s fourth term started.
Attempting, again, to resolve such issues, he named Major General Aleksandr
Matovnikov presidential envoy to the North Caucasus Federal District.
Formerly a close associate of Viktor Zolotov, director of the Russian
National Guard, and an agent with Special Operations Forces, Matovnikov’s
experiences fit the region’s needs, or so it seemed.44 Less than a year after that
appointment, the head of the MID’s Anti-Extremist Centre in Ingushetia,
Ibragim Eldzharkiev, and his brother, were murdered in Moscow, reportedly
as a result of a ‘blood feud’. He had been named to the post after his prede-
cessor was imprisoned for torturing prisoners.45 The turnstile search for a
capable presidential representative in the North Caucasus may have been
halted by the appointment of Yuri Chaika as the new envoy to the district in
January 2020.
Changes were made in Dagestan as well. A series of gubernatorial replace-
ments kept Dagestan unsettled at the top. Ramzan Abdulatipov resigned in
2017. After nearly a year of interim leadership, Vladimir Vasiliev took over
in October 2018, only to resign in September 2020. Putin appointed Sergei
Melikov interim head. Vasiliev was named to the group of presidential
advisers.46
Ethnic antagonisms bubbling under the surface burst into the open as eco-
nomic conditions worsened in 2018. The first major ethnic-related incident
that year came in Kabardino-Balkaria where disputes over historical events
68 The Russian Federation
brought widespread fighting between Balkars and Kabardins. Local police
and National Guard troops were called in to maintain order in several vil-
lages.47 Aggravating the situation was the fact that the Caucasus had the
highest unemployment rates in Russia, especially among young males. For
example, while the national average for unemployed was a low 4.4 per cent in
the fall of 2019, two digit numbers were the norm in several of the Caucasus
Republics: Ingushetia (26.2%), Chechnya (13.4%) and Dagestan (11.7%).48
Only Chechnya remained relatively stable, though that was clearly a result
of the strongman tactics applied with impunity by its leader, Ramzan
Kadyrov, and the personalized relationship between Kadyrov and Putin. The
Chechen leader’s aggressive support of Russia as a great power and his anti-
West rhetoric made him an ideal point man for the Kremlin in the North
Caucasus (Figure 2.2).49
Although the number of violent acts in the North Caucasus dropped by
nearly 40 per cent between 2010 and 2017,50 carnage and corruption were
ever present. For instance, two traffic policemen were killed and another was
wounded when their car was fired upon in Dagestan’s Kizilyurt district in
July 2018.51 In the meantime Dagestan’s prime minister, Abdusamad
Gamidov, was under investigation for corruption, as was his minister for
public health. Troubles in the North Caucasus had ripple effects as far away
as Moscow, where anywhere between 20 and 200 students from that area,
mostly Ingush, were arrested at the University of Moscow in December.
Reports were confusing, but it seemed that police and the National Guard
seized drugs and airguns as ‘preventative measures’.52
The North Caucasus was unsettled further when a long-discussed territo-
rial swap between Ingushetia and Chechnya (see ahead) triggered existing
antipathies. Rallies in Ingushetia against the exchange that began in October
2018 and continued off and on for months finally forced the governor, Yunus-
Bek Yevkurov, to call in the militia to re-establish order. He was induced to
resign in June 2019 after the Russian Constitutional Court decided that the
swap was not anti-constitutional.53 Holder of the position since 2008,
Yevkurov had been considered a pro-Kremlin stabilizing force in the region.
Perhaps for that reason, he was the target of at least two assassination
attempts. When the demonstrations morphed into attacks on corruption and
calls for transparency, he was pushed out by Moscow – though not far. Putin
named him a deputy minister of defence.54 Recognizing the futility of his
previous assumption that only outsiders could bring some semblance of calm
to Ingushetia, Putin appointed, a member of a well-connected Ingush family,
Makhmud-Ali Kalimatov, in Yevkurov’s stead.55
Since most of the North Caucasus is subsidized heavily by Moscow, the
pandemic of 2020 exacerbated local government budget shortfalls and caused
a huge share of small businesses in the region that rely on the ‘grey’ market
for profit to fail altogether. The number of actual unemployed, already ele-
vated, soared because many of the employed are not registered as such. The
people of the Caucasus also have the lowest saving rates in Russia.56
More trouble is inevitable.
 The Russian Federation
Figure 2.2 Russia’s North Caucasus.
Source: GPF. Geopolitical Futures. https://geopoliticalfutures.com/north-caucasus-russias-southern-buffer/.

69
Note: Dotted lines in Georgia (South Caucasus) show Abkhazia on left and South Ossetia on right, both self-proclaimed independent republics, recognized as such
by Russia, but few other international states.
70 The Russian Federation
Chechnya
Stability in Chechnya was a product of both a forced calm maintained by
the Kadyrov regime and also a general population that was tired of
mayhem.
Old scores between Russians and Chechens were re-opened in October
when the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) finally made a decision
on the fate of 18 people who ‘disappeared’ during a Russian military raid on
a Chechen village in 2000. Relatives who took their case to the ECHR via a
Dutch-based NGO were awarded €1.5 million in damages. There was no
appeal, and it’s doubtful that Moscow ever paid.57 Given the political ties
between Kadyrov and Putin, it was unlikely that the Chechen government
would push the issue very strongly, if at all. Indeed, Kadyrov could very well
be the subject of such charges himself.
Chechnya returned to international headlines in May 2018 when, in a
bizarre turn of events for the Russian LGBT community, the Russian
Justice Ministry announced that its investigation of accusation of harsh
discrimination against gays in Chechnya had to be aborted because it
could not find any representatives of the gay community to interview.
Stopping short of pretending that there were no gays in Chechnya, as
Kadyrov had alleged, it called for representatives to present themselves to
the investigators.58 Not surprisingly, no one dared do so, and reports of
further anti-gay purges in Chechnya surfaced in January 2019 (see
Chapter 8).59
Stability, or repression, was such in Chechnya that it was one of only two
Federation components (the other was Chukotka) in which mass political
demonstrations were not common in the spring or summer of 2019.60
Moreover, Kadyrov had become a stand-in for Putin in the Middle East. In
August 2019, he welcomed Islamic leaders from Saudi Arabia, Jordan,
Bahrain, the UAE and Kuwait at the grand opening of a huge mosque at
Shali, Chechnya, and paid an official visit to Jordan, the UAE and Bahrain in
October. According to one commentator, Kadyrov began to play the role of
Russia’s unofficial emissary for Islamic affairs.61
Chechnya was also the one republic that declared itself protected from
COVID-19, in part because Kadyrov closed its borders to foreigners and all
but essential traffic – medical personnel and food supplies – from the rest of
Russia early on, and in part because Chechen police were given strict orders
to act against anyone seen to break self-isolation and distancing rules. A gen-
eral lockdown was announced on 28 March.62 Ironically, Kadyrov came
down with the disease himself.
Militants took advantage of the pandemic, especially in Chechnya and
Ingushetia. Counter-terrorist operations were introduced in parts of
Grozny in October 2020, and there were shootouts between extremists and
police in Ingushetia. Kadyrov blamed outsiders coming in from Syria, ana-
lysts suggest that Kadyrov’s own brutal practices generated home-grown
violence.63
 The Russian Federation 71
The Islamicist cancer: Terrorism
The North Caucasus has served as a wellspring for another source of anxiety
on the part of Russian citizens – terrorism.
Although acts of terrorism in Russia decreased in frequency during Putin’s
two final terms, scattered horrendous acts were nonetheless a feature of his
entire tenure in office.64 Indeed, it opened with the previous mentioned apart-
ment bombings in September 1999, killing civilians in Moscow and two
other cities. As we have seen, those acts of terrorism helped persuade the
Russian population to support the brutal bombing campaign in Chechnya.
At the time, Putin rationalized his actions against Chechnya as an ‘anti-ter-
rorist’ operation in a piece written for the New York Times (14 November
1999), where he insisted that Americans would react in the same way under
similar circumstances. ‘Terrorism todays knows no boundaries’, he wrote,
while noting links between Chechnya’s Basaev and Osama bin Laden. The
essay was published in Russia two days later, alongside a piece warning that
Bin Laden was preparing to attack America, and another that described a
public meeting of Islamic fundamentalists in London where a Holy War was
declared against Russia.65 This warning and a later one that Bin Laden was
preparing attacks were ignored until the New York tragedy of 11 September
2001 woke people up. International terrorism became everyone’s bête noire
at that time.
Explosions in Moscow metro stations in 2000, 2001, 2004 and 2010 set a
pattern and confirmed for Russians that the anti-terrorist operation was nec-
essary. Terrorist acts have killed Russians almost every year of the twenty-
first century, in numbers ranging from 1200 in 2004 to 24 in 2015. In 2013,
for instance, Putin declared to a meeting of the Russian Interior Ministry
board that 637 terrorism-related crimes were recorded in Russia in 2012,
including 24 actual acts of terrorism. Prosecutor General Chaika later
reported that 565 of these acts were committed in the North Caucasus,
where over 600 law enforcement officers were killed or wounded.66 This was
not an atypical year.
A much better-trained security force, an alert and fearful public and restric-
tions related to public assemblies, especially around metro and other trans-
port stations, helped curb the number of incidents. Russian opponents of
their government and Western observers treat the strict rules solely as tools
for reducing and controlling public political protest. Russian officialdom
describes them as a means to protect citizens from terrorism, vandalism and
disruption. Whatever the case, the vulnerability of certain sites in Russia and
the frequency of such attacks are legitimate reasons for strict security mea-
sures, which includes the prohibition of rallies and demonstrations at select
historical and collection sites.
Russia’s reminders that the terrorist threat was an international one rang
true when two young brothers originally from the North Caucasus set off a
device that killed three and wounded over 100 people during the Boston
Marathon in April 2013. It was learned later that Russian intelligence
72 The Russian Federation
services had warned the FBI in 2011 that the older brother and his mother
were ‘adherents of radical Islam’. The Russian media again carried ‘we told
you so’ commentary, as it had in 2011.67
Al-Qaeda and ISIS relentlessly called for jihad in Russia and were
responsible for most of the many violent acts, including a 2017 suicide
bomber who killed 15 people and injured dozens more in a St. Petersburg
Metro station. Some of the earlier acts were related directly to the Chechen
war effort; for example, in 2002 Chechen rebels took over 900 hostages in
Moscow’s Dubrovka Theatre where the musical Nord-Ost was playing, and
demanded that Russian forces withdraw from Chechnya. Some hostages
were released, a few escaped and others were shot. After a three-day stand-
off, the authorities released a gas into the building and attacked, over 130
people were killed as a result of both sides firing. Blame-shifting was the
order of the day.
Not long afterward a rock festival in Moscow was terrorized by two female
suicide bombers, who killed 18 and injured many more. Two other female
terrorists were responsible for explosions at two Moscow metro stations in
2010. Other devastated targets included the Domodedovo airport in 2011,
two bus terminals on the same day in Volgograd in 2013, and a domestic
airplane blown up in mid-air in 2015. There were dozens of lesser acts, if
there can be such a thing, and many thwarted attempts reported annually by
security forces.
The terrorist act that left the deepest scars was the seizure of a school in
Beslan, South Ossetia. On opening day in September 2004, over 30 Chechen
and Ingush militants took teachers, parents and children hostage and again
demanded that Russian forces withdraw from Chechnya. Treatment of the
hostages was brutal and, after three days of futile negotiations, authorities
stormed the building. This time, more than 300 people, including 186 school-
children, were killed, and some 800 injured. Once again, the actions of
Russian authorities were questionable and questioned, though not many
viable alternatives have come to light.68
In December 2019, Putin told the Russian Human Rights Council that the
Beslan incident remained an eternal ‘pain’ for him and the country. At that
Council meeting, he included vandalism and hooliganism as acts that needed
to be pre-empted. He outlined how innocent actions like throwing a plastic
bottle during a demonstration could spiral out of control, leading to throw-
ing stones, then ‘shooting and looting stores’. Everyone has the right to pro-
test, he said, but it must be done legally. Putin recognized that there are
injustices in Russia, ‘though you can see injustice everywhere’, in Europe and
the US.69 He was speaking at a time when courts were still sentencing people
for their activities during the electoral rallies in Moscow (see Chapter 3), so
his appeal was a general one for order and stability. A fear of terrorism and
coloured revolution was the sub-text, which meant that suspicion and clamp
downs were too often the first, rather than last, options.
Legislation introduced by Putin during his third term granting broader
powers to the FSB and other law enforcement agencies to combat extremist
 The Russian Federation 73
groups reaped benefits in the spring of 2018. A lengthy investigation into the
2017 bombing at a St. Petersburg metro station resulted in the arrest of 11
suspects identified as members of a radical Islamicist group. Because these
individuals did not know each other, rather they communicated by a popular
messaging service, Telegram, Roskomnadzor ordered the service to turn in its
encryption keys. Telegram appealed; lawsuits ensued; the Kremlin threatened
to ban the mobile application, or app, which had 10 million users in Russia.
The owner, Pavel Durov, who lives abroad, vowed to maintain the fight.
Russia is not alone in this type of effort. The US, the UK and several other
countries have also demanded access to encrypted computer traffic because
of its potential use by terrorists and organized crime.70 Roskomnadzor began
blocking Telegram apps in mid-April and, in a classic Catch-22 situation,
sparked public protests (see Chapter 8).

Terrorism in the North Caucasus

Not surprisingly, the North Caucasus is the most susceptible to terrorism of
all Russian regions. Indeed, Putin’s fourth term was greeted with a shootout
between militants and special forces in Derbent, Dagestan. Nine terrorists
were killed in two separate actions in April 2018. Another militant who,
apparently, was planning to attack regional government buildings, was killed
in Stavropol.71 Chechnya’s calm was broken too, by an assault on an Orthodox
Church that saw two police officers, a member of the church and all four
assailants slain. ISIS took credit for the raid. Kadyrov, as usual, impugned an
unnamed Western country.72 These confrontations served as a preliminary to
a new wave of coordinated strikes against police vehicles and stations across
the republic. In mid-August, for example, one officer was killed and three
others wounded in four separate acts of violence. Four terrorists were ‘neu-
tralized’ and another was captured. ISIS congratulated itself for these attacks
as well.73 In November, a young woman blew herself up as she approached a
police station in Grozny. Identified as Karina Spiridonova from Dagestan,
she was the only victim.74
There were fewer incidents in 2019, but the year ended with an Islamic
State attack on a police post in Magas, capital city of Ingushetia. Another
officer was killed, three more were injured, and one 23-year old terrorist was
arrested. ISIS again claimed responsibility. A year later Karachay-Cherkessia
was hit by a suicide bomber who injured six while blowing himself up near a
FSB office in the village of Uchkeken.75

Terrorist acts elsewhere in Russia

From the Kremlin’s perspective, the greatest danger in 2018 was the threat of
attacks on World Cup events. A massive influx of tourists and games con-
ducted in multiple cities posed a monumental security problem from every-
thing ranging from petty crime to football hooligans, to political terrorists.
Experience in making the Winter Olympic Games safe in Sochi in 2014
74 The Russian Federation
proved helpful. In April, the FSB professed to have forestalled one plan to
conduct a series of raids on World Cup sites by arresting 20 people connected
to an ISIS sleeper cell.76 To counter threats to the games issued by ISIS, and
against Putin himself, Russian authorities spent up to $480 billion, deployed
thousands of police, firefighters and mounted Cossack brigades, drones, anti-
ram barriers, metal detectors on railway and metro lines, and so on (see also
Chapter 9).77
Just as the authorities heaved a sigh of relief because World Cup events
were kept safe, they were jolted by the country’s worst act of violence in
2018. In October, an explosive device filled with shrapnel and one or more
shooters with automatic weapons massacred at least 18 and wounded many
more in the Kerch Polytechnic School. Most of the victims were teenage
pupils. Within hours an 18-year old student at the college, Vladislav
Roslyakov, who apparently took his own life, was named the single guilty
party. The Russian National Anti-Terrorism Committee continued to treat
the event as a terrorist attack and, because the act took place in Crimea’s
port city of Kerch, where Putin had recently opened the bridge connecting
Crimea to mainland Russia, suspicion fell on Ukrainian nationalists – at
least from the Russian side – thereby raising further tensions between
Moscow and Kyiv. Commentators compared the event to the tragedy at
Beslan. Putin promised immediate investigation and compensation for the
victims’ families, neither of which soothed the fear and anxiety generated by
the event.78
A few weeks later the FSB arrested members of an ISIS cell in Tatarstan.
Officers seized weapons and extremist literature and detained 17 people in a
sweep of 18 different addresses. The ISIS branch, the pan-Islamic Hizb ut-
Tahrir, boasted of assaults in several Russian cities, including Moscow, St.
Petersburg and Nizhny Novgorod.79
Even central Siberia was not immune to terrorist activities. In April 2019,
Russian Spetsnaz forces conducted a two-day sweep in parts of Tyumen.
After evacuating about 100 residents, cutting off electricity and streetlight-
ing, two ISIS operatives were killed and two more captured. As an important
Siberian business centre, especially energy firms, and a transport hub border-
ing Kazakhstan, the city is a ready target for Islamicists.80
COVID-19 didn’t stop the terrorist plague. A member of an unnamed
banned group was killed in a gun fight in Murmansk during the first week of
April 2020. Official reports say the man was planning to plant a bomb and
then move to the Middle East.81 At the other end of Russia’s North, FSB
agents masquerading as doctors who needed to test them for COVID-19
arrested a trio of terrorists in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk. The agents searched their
homes and claimed to have found hand grenades and plans to overthrow the
government. The three Russian men were airsoft (pellet gun) enthusiasts, had
no criminal record or strong religious affiliations.82 When the FSB declared
that it had prevented a terrorist plot during a major political protest in
Khabarovsk (see Chapter 3) in July 2020, many observers believed this to be
a cover for a clampdown against political activists.
 The Russian Federation 75
Russian and international anti-terrorism activities
The international counter-terrorism scene was set back in June 2018 when the
US cut its pledge of $2 million for the UN Counter-Terrorism Office. The
fact that the UN decided to exclude NGOs from part of an inaugural confer-
ence in June on counter-terrorism was the expressed reason for the cut; the
fact that the one-year old office was headed by a Russian, Vladimir Voronkov,
was an unstated reason. Even without the US-supported interest groups for
key meetings, the conference attracted national security heads from 120
countries and some 100 civil society agencies.83 Apparently, US intelligence
agencies provided Russia with information that helped thwart several attacks
in Russia. Putin called Trump in December 2019 and thanked him for this
help, prompting another flurry of conspiracy theories in Washington.84
In his turn, Shoigu informed intelligence colleagues from the ASEAN in
October 2018 that Russian forces in Syria had helped ‘neutralize’ over 87,000
‘militants’, mostly from ISIS, and destroyed almost all of their infrastructure,
while only 112 Russian servicemen lost their lives in the three years of their
involvement in the Syria conflict. These numbers are impossible to verify, and
it’s not clear how many non-terrorist Syrian civilians also died. Nevertheless,
Shoigu’s message contained the sub-theme that a certain percentage of the
dead militants were Russian citizens who would not be returning to wreak
havoc at home.85
Speaking to the UNSC’s 18th Meeting of Heads of Special Services,
Security Agencies and Law-Enforcement Organizations, which gathered in
Sochi in late October, 2019, Bortnikov said that law enforcement in Russia
foiled 39 planned acts between January and October, killed 32 terrorists and
detained another 679. On the FSB’s advice, Roskomnadzor blocked over
8,000 internet sources used by subversive organizations. Bortnikov warned
participants that terrorists were increasing their use of drones and hackers,
urged all governments to cooperate on anti-terrorist activities, and calcu-
lated that about 5,500 citizens of Russia had joined various international
organizations. Most of them have had their bank accounts at home frozen
and are subject to arrest when, and if, they return to their homeland. Given
that the international counter-terrorism data bank lists 116 organizations
and over 43,000 names of individuals, he said, the task of countering plots
requires the de-politicization of anti-terrorist efforts.86 That isn’t going to
happen.
In fact, in October 2020 the MVD reported an averted terrorist attack
against an administrative building in Moscow by a man identified only as a
21-year-old ‘from the Central Asian region’. According to the FSB, he had
hidden components of an explosive device and had plans to leave for a com-
bat zone in the Middle East immediately after the device went off. A report
published on the MVD website at about the same time showed that there
was an increase in such activities during the first nine months of 2020. Of
the 1,851 ‘terrorist’ crimes registered between January and September, 651
were ‘extremist’. Though there was no clear definition of what the police
76 The Russian Federation
designated as ‘terrorist’, those numbers still reveal a lot of potential anti-
personnel violence.87
Opponents of ISIS, including Russia, were pleased in October 2019, when
US special forces killed Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Donald
Trump thanked Russia among others for support in that endeavour. In the
meantime, the Russian military deployed S-300s to its ‘permanent’ base
(leased until 2042) in Tajikistan, close to the Afghan border. This was the first
time such weapons were sited that close to Afghanistan and their purpose,
one can only assume, was to caution Taliban forces against threatening
Russia’s allies in the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO).88 This
deployment took on greater importance in November, 2020, when Donald
Trump, now the lame duck president, ordered a further draw down of US
troops in Afghanistan.

Terrorism of another kind

Russians found themselves subject to hundreds of false bomb threats in 2019,
just as they had in 2017. In February alone, over 130 venues were forced to
clear customers and workers because of telephone hoaxes. These continued
into 2020, when over 50,00 Muscovites were evacuated as a result of threats
in January. Warnings came over the telephone to schools, hospitals, court-
rooms, cathedrals, metro stations and airports.89 In March 2020, similar
bomb messages targeted passenger planes while they were in the air on
domestic routes. Several pilots decided not to divert the planes, they all
landed and no bombs were found. Others made emergency landings and no
bombs were found. Authorities linked some of the threats to a scheme in
which blackmailers demanded bitcoin currency, though the disruptions could
also have been purposeful acts of terrorism – or malevolent pranks.90

The future of terrorism in Russia

Headline acts of terrorism aside, their overall numbers decreased dramati-
cally after Putin’s first decade, dropping to nine in 2018. They began rising
again in his fourth term, in part because the label, ‘terrorist’, was applied to
specific groups for political reasons. In that regard, the arrest in 2017 and
2018 of seven members of a group of young people calling themselves Set’
(Network) and their sentencing in 2020 to anywhere between 6 and 18 years
confinement for planning terrorist acts during the 2018 presidential elections
and the World Cup, was particularly controversial. Set’ members referred to
themselves as ‘anti-fascist’ and ‘anarchist’ liberals demonstrating to help free
political prisoners in Russia. Navalny and other liberal groups protested their
arrest. The FSB placed Set’ on a terrorist list in April, 2019, and equated
them with the Taliban, ISIS and al-Qaeda. The investigation was launched
first in 2017, and arrests in the Penza region and St. Petersburg came after
one member collaborated with law enforcement in return for a lesser sen-
tence. Authorities said they found weaponry and explosives in a training
 The Russian Federation 77
camp near Penza; the arrestees said that the munitions were planted and that
an early confession was the result of torture. In this case, and others, both
‘sides’ exploited the situation to further their political agendas.91
Russians have no reason to be complacent about terrorist threats. Even
while the pandemic limits travel opportunities, after Islamicist terrorist
groups are defeated in regions outside Russia, such as the Middle East,
Russian citizens who have fought for al-Qaeda or ISIS still trickle home and
add to turmoil there. At the end of November 2020, the FSB claimed to have
frustrated an ISIS-planned attack in the Moscow region and, in a separate
case, police arrested a departmental head of the MVD in Dagestan for alleged
membership in the banned Imarat Kavkaz (Caucasus Emirate).92
Four other members of ISIL were caught by the FSB in Makhachkala,
Dagestan, a month later. They had planned a bombing in during New Year’s
Eve celebrations. Earlier in December, a shootout in Grozny left two mili-
tants and one policeman dead.93
Summing up the year, the National Anti-Terrorism Committee claimed
that it and the FSB prevented 61 ‘terrorist crimes, including 41 terrorist
attacks’ in 2020. Dozens of militants were killed and hundreds arrested over
the year.94 So, the only outward change was in police efficiency. An outburst
of brutally violent acts in France in late October, early November, served as
a warning to everyone that hydra-headed international terrorism was by no
means dead.
***
The constitutional ‘revolution’ of January 2020 did not alter the basic struc-
ture of the Russian Federation. It did strengthen the executive offices in
Moscow, however, making the country more centralized in terms of presi-
dential authority, and it diluted the regional influence on the Federation
Council by confirming more direct presidential nominees to that body,
including seats for former presidents. For different reasons, the Arctic, the
Far East and the North Caucasus have taken on greater importance for the
centre. Regional governors have therefore been handed more responsibilities,
even if sometimes by default. Frustrations generated by the pandemic, global
warming, eternal corruption and international terrorism, make 2020 a piv-
otal year for the Russian Federation as its leaders search for a glue to keep it
together.

Notes
1 ‘Zakon o poriadke resheniia voprosov sviazannykh s vykhodom soiuznei respub-
liki iz SSSR’, Pravda, 7 April 1990, Article 3. Translation available in USSR
Documents Annual, 1990, Vol. 1. Restructuring Perestroika. Gulf Breeze, FL:
Academic International Press, 1991, pp. 197–201 (hereafter, USSR Documents
Annual; after 1991, REDA). See also J.L. Black, Into the Dustbin of History. The
USSR from Coup to Commonwealth August–December 1991. A Documentary
Narrative. Gulf Breeze, FL: Academic International Press, 1993.
2 ‘Tatarstan, the Last Region to Lose its Special Status Under Putin’, The Moscow
Times, 25 July 2017.
78 The Russian Federation
3 For a detailed map and full list of all the administrative subdivisions of the
Russian Federation, see Russian Analytical Digest, No. 230, 21 December 2018,
p. 11.
4 Zakonoproekt [draft law] No. 1048141-7, ‘O poriadke formirovaniia Soveta
Federatsii Federal’nogo Sobraniia Rossiiskoi Federatsii’, 30 October 2020, https://
sozd.duma.gov.ru/bill/1048141-7; Tatiana Zamakhina, ‘Putin vnes v Gosdumu
proekt zakona o pozhiznennykh senatorakh’, Rossiiskaia gazeta, 31 October
2020.
5 ‘Russia’s Latest Governor Reshuffle’, The Moscow Times, 29 May 2018; ‘Putin
naznachil dvoe gubernatorov Amurskoi oblast i Altaiskogo kraia’, Vedomosti, 30
May 2018.
6 ‘Kokov vmesto Kokova: zachem Kremliu novaia volna ostavok v regionakh’,
RBC.ru, 26 September 2018; ‘Putin otkryl novyi sezon gubernatorskikh otstavok’,
Vedomosti, 26 September 2018.
7 ‘Vtoroi za den’ gubernator ushel v otstavku’, Vedomosti, 11 October 2018;
Administratsiia Kurskoi oblasti. Offitsial’nyi sait, ‘Gubernatoir Kurskoi oblasti
A.N. Mikhailov ob’iavil o dosrochnom slozhenii svoikh polnomochii’, 11 October
2018, adm.rkursk.r_ u/index.php?id=13&mat_id=84241; ‘10th Russian Governor
Replaced Amid Falling Ratings for Ruling Party’, The Moscow Times, 12 October
2018. See also, e.g. BMB Russia, ‘Special Report: Regional Elections
Rundown’,bearmarketbrief.com/2018/09/28/special-report-regional-elections-
rundown/.
8 ‘Komissiia po etike rekomenovala iskliuchit’ glavu Chuvashii iz “Edinoi Rossii”’,
Kommersant, 27 January 2020.
9 Tatyana Stanovaya, ‘The End of Kremlin’s Dominance in the Regions’, The
Moscow Times, 2 April 2019.
10 Putin, ‘Meeting of the Council for Interethnic Relations Presidium’, Kremlin.
ru, 14 September 2017, http://en.kremlin.ru/events/councils/by-council/
28/55633/.
11 ‘Natsional’nye obshchestvenniki ob’ediniaiutsia v kongress’, Kommersant, 22
June 2018.
12 Dmitry Lyubimov, Ramazan Alpaut, Robert Colson, ‘A Common Language:
Russia’s “Ethnic” Republics See Language Bill As Existential Threat’, RFE/RL,
20 June 2018.
13 Putin, ‘Rossiia: natsional’nyi vopros’, Nezavisimaia gazeta, 23 January 2012,
available in English, http://archive.premier.gov.ru/eng/events/news/17831/.
14 Ulrich Schmid, ‘Nationality Policy: Russian Nation vs. Russian People?’ Russian
Analytical Digest, No. 250, 9 April 2020; on Putin’s earlier position, Peter Rutland,
‘Putin’s Nationality Dilemma’, The Moscow Times, 29 January 2012.
15 Felix Light, ‘How COVID-19 is transforming Russia’s power structure’, New
Statesman, 29 May 2020; ‘Pandemiia: mery vlastei i “nerabochie nedeli”’, Levada-
tsentr, 30 April 2020 https://www.levada.ru/2020/04/30/pandemiya-mery-i-nerab-
ochie-nedeli/; Evan Gershkovich, ‘As the Coronavirus Contagion Grows in
Russia, Putin’s Strongman Image Weakens’, The Moscow Times, 14 May 2020;
‘Putin’s Virus Response Earns Lower Marks Than Local Leaders – Poll’, The
Moscow Times, 30 April 2020.
16 Alexander Baunov, ‘Where Is Russia’s Strongman in the Coronavirus Crisis?’,
Foreign Affairs, 27 May 2020.
17 ‘Chechnya polnost’iu zakroet granitsy respubliki’, RIA Novosti, 1 April 2020.
18 Felix Light, ‘Coronavirus Hits hard in Russia’s Volatile Republic of Ingushetia’,
The Moscow Times, 23 April 2020.
19 Ruslan Kurbanov, ‘In Dagestan, COVID-19 and community-acquired pneumo-
nia affected 13 thousand people. 29 died from coronavirus, 657 from pneumonia’,
Meduza, 17 May 2020.
 The Russian Federation 79
20 ‘Chechnya polnost’iu zakroet granitsy respubliki’, RIA Novosti, 1 April 2020;
Putin, ‘Obrashchenie k grazhdanam Rossii’, Kremlin.ru, 2 April 2020, Kremlin.
ru/events/president/news/63133.
21 See Doris Wydra, ‘The Crimea Conundrum: The Tug of War Between Russia and
Ukraine on the Question of Autonomy and Self-Determination’, International
Journal on Minority and Group Rights, Vol. X, Issue 2 (2004), pp. 111–30. For a
timeline of separatist attitudes in Crimea, and documentation, Ivan Kachanovski,
‘Crimea: People and Territory Before and After Annexation’, in Agnieszka
Pikulicka-Wilczewska, Richard Sakwa, eds. Ukraine and Russia: People, Politics,
Propaganda and Perspectives. Bristol, UK: E-International Relations, 2016, pp.
80–9.
22 See J.L. Black, ‘Crisis in Ukraine 2013–2015: A Paradigm for the New World
Disorder’, in Black, Johns and Theriault, eds. The New World Disorder (2019), pp.
11–38, here p. 20.
23 Cour permanent d’arbitrage: Permanent Court of Arbitration, ‘Press Release:
Everest Estate LLC et al. v. The Russian Federation’, PCA Case No. 2015–36, 9
May 2018.
24 Hanna Shteppa, ‘New Ukrainian Sanctions against Russia’, Sanctions & Export
Controls Update, 25 May 2018, sanctionsnews.bakermckenzier.com/new-ukrainian-
sanctions-against-russia/.
25 ‘Irina Farion: “Russian-Speaking People in Ukraine are Mentally retarded!”’,
Stalker Zone, 30 April 2018, translated by Ollie Richardson & Angelina Siard,
https://www.stalkerzone.org/irina-farion-russian-speaking-people-in-ukraine-
are-mentally-retarded/; see also Stephen F. Cohen, ‘America’s Collusion with
Neo-Nazis’, The Nation, 2 May 2018.
26 See, e.g. Josh Cohen, ‘Ukraine’s Got a Real Problem with Far-Right Violence
(And No, RT Didn’t Write This Headline)’, Atlantic Council, 20 June 2018;
Christopher Dickey, ‘Ukraine’s Anti-Russia Azov Battalion: “Minutemen” or
Neo-Nazi Terrorists?’, The Daily Beast, 15 November 2019; Volodymyr Ishchenko,
‘The limits of change and wishful thinking: Lessons from Ukraine’s Euromaidan
uprising’, The Broker Online, 26 July 2017. For PACE’s description of Svoboda,
see European Parliament/Legislative Observatory. Resolution adopted by
Parliament, single reading, No. 2889, 13 December 2012.
27 Ekaterina Grobman, ‘VTsIOM: bol’shinstvo zhitelei Kryma po-prezhnemu pod-
derzhivaiu egoi vkhozhdenie v sostav Rossii’, Kommersant, 14 March 2019.
28 For details on this, see Chris Kaspar de Ploeg, Ukraine in the Crossfire. Atlanta,
GA: Clarity Press, 2017, pp. 117–19; and Black, Putin’s Third Term, pp. 103, 119
(Endnotes #45–47).
29 Ridvan Bari Urcosta, ‘The Geo-Economics of the Water Deficit in Crimea’,
Eurasia Daily Monitor, 26 February 2020; Polina Vynogradova, ‘Backgrounder:
The Water Crisis in Crimea’, Geopolitical Monitor, 24 April 2020.
30 Ridvan Bari Urcosta, ‘Newly Appointed Governor of Sevastopol Faces Looming
Showdown with Local Elites’, Eurasia Daily Monitor, 29 July 2019.
31 ‘Vstrecha s predstaviteliami obshchestvennosti Kryma i Sevastopolia’, Kremlin.
ru, 18 March 2020, kremlin.ru/events/president/news/63021.
32 Putin, ‘Poslanie Prezidenta Federal’nomu Sobraniiu’, Kremlin.ru, 20 February
2019, kremlin.ru/events/president/news/59863.
33 ‘Why the Thawing Arctic Is Full of Opportunity and Danger for Russia and
America’, The National Interest, 13 September 2020; Yuliya Fedorinova, Olga
Tanas, ‘Russia’s Thawing Permafrost May Cost Economy $2.3Bln a Year’, The
Moscow Times (from Bloomberg), 18 October 2019.
34 Putin, ‘Soveshchanie o merakh po likvidatsii razliva dizel’nogo topliva v
Krasnoiarskom krae’, Kremlin.ru, 3 June 2020, Kremlin.ru/events/president/
news/63450; Ariel Cohen, ‘Diesel Spill In Russian Arctic Could be Putin’s Exxon
Valdez’, Forbes, 4 June 2020; ‘Russia Says Has Stopped Spread of Arctic Fuel
80 The Russian Federation
Spill’, The Moscow Times, 5 June 2020; Greenpeace, ‘Mass environmental damage
from the accident in Norilsk amounts to billions of rubles’, 3 June 2020, https://
greenpeace.ru/news/2020/06/03/25629/; ‘TASS: normy vrednykh veshchestv v
zagriaznennnykh vodoemakh v Noril’ske prevysheny v 200 raz;’, Vedomosti,
6 June 2020.
35 ‘Governor Alexander Uss told what is happening in Norilsk’, Enisei News, 8 June
2020, https://www.enisey.tv/news/post-22918/; ‘Russian Mayor Charged Over
Failure to Contain Arctic Spill’, The Moscow News, 11 June 2020; Alex Kimani,
‘Who Will Pay For Russia’s Unprecedented Oil Spill?’, Oilprice.com, 11 June
2020; Independent Environmental Advisory Support to the Nornickel
Environmental Task Team (ETT), ‘Review of May 2020 Catastrophic Tank
Failure, HPP-3, Norilsk’, 25 November 2020, https://www.nornickel.com/files/en/
media-library/presentation/erm-1a-report-for-nornickel-ett-public-issued-
25-11-20-en.pdf.
36 For the overall effect of climate change on Russia, see ‘Climate Change and
Russia’, special issue of Russian Analytical Digest, No. 243, 11 December 2019.
37 Sergey Sukhankin, ‘Russia’s Arctic Agenda and the Role of Canada’, Eurasia
Daily Monitor, 15 April 2020.
38 Zack Budryk, ‘Lavrov defends Russia’s military buildup in the Arctic’, The Hill, 4
April 2019; Putin, ‘Plenarnoe zasedanie Mezhdunarodnogo arkticheskogo
foruma’, Kremlin.ru, 9 April 2019, Kremlin.ru/events/president/news/60250;
‘Highlights From Russia’s International Arctic Forum’, The Moscow Times, 10
April 2019.
39 For background and analysis, see Maria L. Lagutina, Russia’s Arctic Policy in the
Twenty-First Century. National and International Dimensions. Lanham, MD:
Rowman & Littlefield, 2019.
40 ‘Utverzhden plan razvitiia infrastruktury Severnogo morskogo puti do 2035
goda’, 30 December 2019, http://government.ru/docs/38714/; ‘Prezident itverdil
Osnovy gosudarstvennoi politiki v Arktike’, Kremlin.ru, 5 March 2020, Kremlin.
ru/acts/news/62947; Nurlan Aliyev, ‘Development in Difficult Times: Russia’s
Arctic Policy Through 2035’, Russian Analytical Digest, No. 256, 5 September
2020, pp. 2–6.
41 Sergey Sukhankin, ‘Russia’s Arctic strategy melts under scrutiny’, Riddle, 8 May
2020.
42 Paul Goble, ‘Siberian Regionalism a Growing Threat to Moscow’, Eurasia Daily
Monitor, 4 August 2020; Sophie Pinkham. ‘Normal is Over for Russia’s
Hinterland’, FP (Foreign Policy), 7 August 2020; Mikhail Sokolov, Robert
Coalson, ‘An Isolated Case? Observers Doubt Far East Unrest Will Spread Over
Russia’, RFE/RL, 23 July 2020.
43 ‘Kompleks mer po povedeniiu poriadke i distsipliny v Dagestane odobren
Prezidentom Rossii i budet posledovatel’no pretvoriat’sia v zhizn’, zaiavil Vladimir
Putin’, Rossiiskaia gazeta, 11 August 1999.
44 R-Politik, Analytical Bulletin, #8 (9), 2018. See also items in ‘North Caucasus’,
Russian Analytical Digest, No’s. 222 & 238, 18 June 2018, 22 July 2019.
45 ‘Versiia o krovnoi mesti ozvuchena posle ubiistva El’dzharkieva’, Kavkazskii
Uzel, 3 November 2019.
46 Kira Latukhina, ‘Sergei Melikov naznachen vrio glavy respubliki Dagestan’,
Rossiiskaia gazeta, 5 October 2020.
47 ‘V Kabardino-Balkarii iz-za mezhnatsional’nogo konflikta usileny mery bezopas-
nosti’, Kommersant, 20 September 2018; Sledstvennoe upravlenie … po
Kabardino-Balkarskoi Respublike, ‘Sledstvennym upravleniem initsiirovano pro-
vedenie dosledstvennoi proverki po sobytiiam v selenii Kendelen’, 19 September
2018, kbr.sledcom.ru/news/item/1256940/; ‘Reported Ethnic Clashes in Russia’s
Caucasus Prompt Investigation’, The Moscow Times, 20 September 2018.
 The Russian Federation 81
48 ‘Bezrabotitsa v Rossii: v kakikh regionakh slozhnee vsego naiti rabotu’, Aktual’nye
kommentarii, 28 October 2019. See also ‘Countering Violent Extremism’ [in
North Caucasus], special issue of Russian Analytical Digest, No. 255, 14 July
2020.
49 Ekaterina Sokirianskaia, ‘Chechnya under Ramzan Kadyrov’, Russian Analytical
Digest, No. 238, 22 July 2019.
50 ‘In 2018, the count of conflict victims in Northern Caucasus dropped by 38%’,
Caucasian Knot, 13 May 2020. This is the English-language version of Kavkazskii
Uzel.
51 ‘Dvoe politseiskikh pogibli pri napadenii na nariad DPS v Dagestane’, Vedomosti,
20 July 2018.
52 ‘Police Detain Over a Dozen Students in Raid on Moscow University Dorm –
Reports’, The Moscow Times, 17 December 2018.
53 ‘Ingush MPs demand to cancel ratification of agreement on borders with
Chechnya’, Caucasian Knot, 5 October 2018; ‘Shots Fired at Protest in Russia’s
North Caucasus Over Land Swap Deal’, The Moscow Times, 4 October 2018;
‘Magas rally demands Evkurov’s resignation’, Caucasian Knot, 26 March 2019.
54 ‘Head of Russia’s Ingushetia Resigns Following Months of Border Deal Unrest’,
The Moscow Times, 24 June 2019; Aleksandra Chunova, ‘Glava Ingushetii zaiavil
o namerenii dosrochno uiti v otystavku’, Vedomosti, 24 June 2019.
55 Konstantin Kazenin, ‘New Model North Caucasus: Kremlin Tries New Approach
in Ingushetia’, Carnegie Moscow Center, 9 July 2019.
56 Valery Dzutsati, ‘Russian Regions Face High Budget Deficits and Little Support
from the Central Government’, Eurasia Daily Monitor, 12 May 2020.
57 European Court of Human Rights, ‘Case of Bitsayeva and Others v. Russia’,
Application No. 14196/08, https://hudoc.echr.coe.int/eng?i=001-1897240;
‘European Court Orders Russia to Pay 1.5M Euros to Relatives of People
Abducted in Chechnya’, The Moscow Times, 24 October 2018.
58 United Nations Human Rights Council, Universal Periodic Review – Russian
Federation, www.ohcr.org/EN/HRBodies/UPR/Pages/RU/index.aspx, 14 May
2018; ‘Russia Tells UN There Are No Gays in Chechnya’, The Moscow Times, 15
May 2018.
59 Nataliya Vasilyeva, ‘Reports: several gay men and women detained in Chechnya’,
AP, 9 January 2019; ‘Putin Has Given Chechnya Free Rein to Persecute LGBT
People (Op-ed)’, The Moscow Times, 17 January 2019; ‘“They will kill you any-
way, be it family or strangers”: Gay about life in Chechnya and flight from Russia’,
Caucasian Knot, 24 January 2019.
60 ‘Russia’s Protest Movement is Expanding and Becoming Political, Study Says’,
The Moscow Times, 4 October 2019.
61 ’Vizity Kadyrova na Blizhnii Vostok pokazali ego rol’ doverennogo litsa Moskvy’,
Kavkazskii Uzel, 31 October 2019.
62 Valery Dzutsati, ‘The COVID-19 Pandemic Starts to Have Its Toll on the North
Caucasus’, Eurasia Daily Monitor, 2 April 2020.
63 Valery Dzutsati, ‘Chechnya and Ingushetia Exhibit Growing Signs of
Destabilization’, Eurasia Daily Monitor, 26 October 2020.
64 ‘Sovbez otmetil snizhenie kolichestva teraktov v Rossii v desiat’ raz’, RIA Novosti,
12 December 2017.
65 Vladimir Putin, ‘Why We Must Act’, New York Times, 14 November 1999;
‘Pochemu my dolzhny deistovovat”, Rossiiskaia gazeta, 16 November, 1999;
‘Dvoinoi standart. Ben Laden gotovim voinu SShA’, Rossiiskaya gazeta, 16
November 1999; ‘Rossii ob’iavili dzhikhad. V Anglii’, Rossiiskaia gazeta, 16
November 1999.
66 ‘Russian prosecutor-general says terrorism increased in 2012’, RFE/RL, 17 April
2013.
82 The Russian Federation
67 ‘Russia warned U.S. about Boston Marathon bomb suspect Tsarnaev: report’,
Reuters, 25 March 2014.
68 For first-hand journalistic reports, see Anna Politkovskaya, A Russian Diary. New
York: Random House, 2007.
69 Putin, ‘Meeting with regional human rights ombudsmen’, Kremlin.ru, 10
December 2019, en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/62287; ‘Putin Speaks About
Beslan Tragedy – Will Remember Pain From the Attack For rest of Life!’, Vesti.
ru, 12 December 2019.
70 ‘Roskomnadzore ob’iasnil blokirovku ir-adresov Google’, Vedomosti, 21 April
2018; Max Seddon, ‘Russia moves to block messaging app Telegram’, Financial
Times, 20 March 2018; ‘11 Terrorist Suspects in Custody, One Year After St.
Petersburg Metro Bombing’, The Moscow Times, 3 April 2018.
71 ‘Russia Says Nine Militants Plotting Dagestan Attack Killed after Gun Battle’,
The Moscow Times, 21 April 2018.
72 Ivan Nechepurenko, Megan Specia, ‘Gunmen Attack Church in Russia’s
Chechnya Region, Killing Three’, New York Times, 19 May 2018; ‘Three Dead in
Chechnya Church Attack, Police Kill Attackers’, RFE/RL, 19 May 2017; ‘News
From Russia’, The Moscow Times, 21 May 2018.
73 ‘Kadyrov nazval tsel’ napadenii na politseiskikh v Chechne’, Vedomosti, 20
August 2018; ‘IG vzialo otvetstvennost’ za ataki na silovikov v Chechne’,
Kavkazskii Uzel, 20 August 2018.
74 Sledstvennoe upravlenie … Chechenskoi Respublike, ‘Vosbuzhdeno ugolovnoe
delo po faktu posiagatel’stvo na zhizn’ sotrudnikov pravpookhranitel’nykh
organov’, 18 November 2018, chr.sledcom.ru/news/item/1272839/.
75 ‘Attack on police officers became the third armed incident in Ingushetia in a year’,
Caucasian Knot, 31 December 2019; Natsional’nyi antiterroristicheskii komitet,
‘V Karachaevo-Cherkesii pri popytke zaderzhaniia prestupnik osushchestvil
samopodryv’, 11 December 2020, http://nac.gov.ru/hronika-sobytiy/v-kara-
chaevo-cherkesii-pri-popytke-zaderzhaniya-prestupnik.html.
76 ‘Russia’s FSB Says It Thwarted Islamic State Attack in Moscow Ahead of World
Cup’, The Moscow Times, 27 April 2018.
77 ‘Amid Concerns of Terrorism and Hooligans, Russia Puts in Place “Ring of
Steel”’, The Moscow Times, 15 June 2018.
78 For Putin’s initial remarks, ‘Condolences to the families and friends of those
killed in the explosion in Kerch’, 17 October 2020, kremlin.ru/events/president/
news/58840; Kirill Bulanov, ‘Vzryv v kolledzhe v Kerchi priznali teraktom’,
Vedomosti, 17 October 2018; ‘Russia Reacts to Deadly Shooting Spree in Crimean
College’, The Moscow Times, 17 October 2018; ‘Russia Says Bomb Blast Killed 18
at Crimean School, Terrorism Suspected’, RFE/RL, 17 October 2018.
79 Federal’naia sluzhba bezopasnost RF, ‘The FSB, in cooperation with the Ministry
of Internal Affairs and the Russian Guard, carried out a special operation in the
Republic of Tatarstan to curb the activities of the secret ITO “IG”’, 30 October
2018, www.fsb.ru/fsb/press/single.htm%21id%3D10438310%40fsbMessage.html;
‘IS Cell Shut Down in Russia’s Tatarstan, Security Forces Say’, The Moscow
Times, 30 October 2018.
80 ‘V Tiumeni likvidirovali podozrevaemykh v podgotovke terakta’, Vedomosti, 12
April 2019; ‘Alleged Islamic State Members Killed During FSB Raid in Siberia’,
The Moscow Times, 13 April 2019.
81 Svetlana Tsygankova, ‘V Murmanske neytralizovali planirovavshego terakt ban-
dita’, Rossiiskaia gazeta, 4 April 2020.
82 ‘Sakhalin airsoft players suspected of terrorism’, Sakhalin.info, 6 April 2020,
https://sakhalin.info/news/187546; ‘Russian Terrorism Suspects Detained Under
Guise of “Coronavirus Test”’, The Moscow Times, 8 April 2020.
 The Russian Federation 83
83 Eric Rosand, ‘Where is civil society in the U.N.’s counterterrorism efforts?’
Brookings, 15 May 2018; Michelle Nichols, ‘U.S. pulls funding for U.N. counter-
terrorism office headed by Russian’, Reuters. World News, 27 June 2018.
84 Rishika Dugyala, ‘Kremlin: Putin calls to thank Trump for help on terrorism’,
Politico, 29 December 2019; Putin, ‘Telephone conversation with US President
Donald Trump’, Kremlin.ru, 29 December 2019, en.kremlin.ru/events/president/
news/62518.
85 ‘Shoigu otchital’sia ob itogakh operatsii v Sirii’, Vedomosti, 20 April 2018. On this
generally, see essays in Jean-Francois Ratelle, Laurence Broers, eds. Networked
Insurgencies and Foreign Fighters in Eurasia. London: Routledge, 2017.
86 ‘U.S. Helped Moscow Foil Recent Terror Plot With Intel, FSB Says’, The Moscow
Times, 17 October 2019; ‘S nachala 2019 goda v Rossii predotvratili 39 teraktov’,
TASS, 16 October 2019.
87 ‘V Rossii v etom gody uvelichilos’ chislo teraktov’, Rossiiskaia gazeta, 21 October
2020. For the MVD website, MVD.rf; ‘Terrorist attack prevented in Moscow,
FSB reports’, TASS, 22 October 2020.
88 Minoboronu Rossii, Voennye okruga, ‘Sistemy S-300PS vpervye postupili na
vooruzhenie rossiiskoi voennoi bazy v Tadzhikistane’, [MoD], 26 October 2019,
structure.mil.ru/structure/okruga/centre/news/more.htm?id=12258864@egNews;
‘Russia Deploys S-300 Missile System Near Afghanistan for First Time’, The
Moscow Times, 28 October 2019.
89 ‘Moscow’s Record Wave of Bomb Hoaxes Continues Into 2020’, The Moscow
Times, 15 January 2020. For earlier hoaxes, see Black, Putin’s Third Term, p. 53.
90 ‘Russian Planes Targeted in Wave of Bomb Threats’, The Moscow Times, 4 March
2020;
91 ‘“Penzenskoe delo”. Prigovor’, Mediazona, 10 February 2020. https://zona.media/
online/2020/02/10/penza; ‘Russian Anti-Fascists Jailed on Terror Charges Despite
Outcry’, The Moscow Times, 11 February 2020; ‘“No serious evidence” in high-
profile terrorism case against Russian anti-fascists’, OVD-Info, 25 March 2019;
‘Figurantov dela “Seti” v Penze prigovorili s srokam do 18 let kolonii strogogo
rezhima’, OVD-Info, 10 February 2020.
92 Roman Mereliakov, ‘Glava otdela MVD v Dagestane arestovan po podozreniiu v
podgotovke terakta’, Rossiiskaia gazeta, 23 November 2020; ‘FSB: V moskovs-
kom regione predotvrashchen terakt’, Rossiiskaia gazeta, 25 November 2020.
93 ‘At Least 3 People Killed in Chechnya Shootout’, The Moscow Times, 28
December 2020; ‘Alleged militant killed during CTO in Chechnya’, Caucasian
Knot, 16 December 2020; ‘Week in the Caucasus: review of main events of
December 21–27, 2020, Caucasian Knot, 28 December 2020.
94 Peter Nikolaev, ‘Sotni voevikov, desiatki teraktov: NAK I FSWB podveli itogi
goda’, Gazeta.ru, 8 December 2020, www.gazeta.ru/social/2020/12/08/13391245.
shtml.
3 The political arena

Introduction
A few members of Putin’s first government in 2000 were still prominent when
he began his fourth term in 2018. Eighteen years before that, Shoigu was
Minister of Emergency Measures, Gordeev was Minister of Agriculture and
Nikolai Patrushev was head of the FSB. Valentina Matviyenko and Aleksei
Kudrin were two of four deputy prime ministers that first year. Matviyenko
went on to have a distinguished career as mayor of St. Petersburg and then
speaker of the Federation Council. Prime minister in 2000, Mikhail Kasyanov,
followed a different path and became a leader of a liberal-democratic opposi-
tion movement.
Parties elected to the State Duma in 1999 were Gennady Zyuganov’s
Communist Party (24%), followed by Shoigu’s Unity Party (23%) and
Fatherland-All Russia (13%), a bloc headed by former prime minister and
foreign minister, Yevgeny Primakov. Kiriyenko’s Union of Right-Wing
Forces (9%) was aggressively supportive of Putin. Zhirinovsky’s right-wing
LDPR and Yavlinsky’s Yabloko took the remaining party seats. Zhirinovsky
(six times) and Zyuganov (four times) repeatedly ran for the presidency.
Except for Primakov, whose disciples dominated the ministry of foreign
affairs for the rest of the decade, these players were still active on Russia’s
political stage twenty years later. The Unity Party, formed precisely to sup-
port Yeltsin and his clear favourite, Putin, was created only two months prior
to the election in 1999. Its populist message and an expressed aim to make
government accountable to the people were timely mirrors of what voters
wanted. Russians took to its nickname and logo, Medved (Bear). Unity and
Fatherland merged in 2001 to form United Russia, the ‘Putin’ party that
topped every subsequent parliamentary election. Army General Shoigu’s
reward was to remain emergency measures minister for 20 years (1991–2012),
then briefly hold the governorship of Moscow Oblast before Putin named
him minister of defence in November 2012. He has been with Putin every
step of the way.
Altogether, nearly 30 parties were listed on ballots in that 1999 election, a
time when 5 per cent of the votes cast were enough to earn PR seats in the
Duma. When that percentage was changed to 7 per cent for the 2007 election,

DOI: 10.4324/9781003158646-4
 The political arena 85
the number of competitive parties dropped precipitously.1 Restrictions on
political party activity were adopted as early as the spring of 2001 by means
of a law, ‘On Political Parties’, that forced them to adhere to the following
requirements: have 100-member branches in more than half the constituent
entities of the federation and 10,000 members altogether, plus a charter with
clear political goals and a complete list of candidates for state and local
government.2
Party politics were limited further over the next few years by laws outlaw-
ing blocs and exclusively regional parties, and requiring 200,000 signatures
drawn from at least half of the regions before a national party could qualify
for the ballot. Between the elections for 2007 and 2016, all seats in the Duma
had to be filled from party lists. During most of that period, before the politi-
cal crises of 2011–12 inspired change, there were only seven registered politi-
cal parties in Russia. The system reverted to 5 per cent minimum votes for a
share of party seats for the 2016 election, and half the Duma was again
elected from single constituencies. Only 5,000 signatures were needed for
party registration. Although parties still had to have a legitimate platform
and charter, and branches in no less than half of the regions, almost over-
night there were over 170 parties competing to get on the ballot.

Main street politics

Although there have been anywhere from four to seven political parties earn-
ing representation in the Duma and dozens of organized parties and move-
ments outside parliament, the most visible and constant political activity in
Russia is the street demonstration. Research published in 2020 by the Institute
of Modern Russia found that there were about 12,000 street protests during
Putin’s first twenty years in high office, with approximately 2.5 million par-
ticipants and 11,000 detainees.3
The first large events in the Putin years came in 2001 in defence of NTV,
the television channel owned by Gusinsky and taken over by Gazprom, but
it wasn’t until 2004 that mass social protests brought thousands out.
Workers gathered to dispute wage arrears and a bill replacing in-kind ben-
efits, such as free transportation, subsidized medicines and utilities for pen-
sioners, with cash payments. Pensioners formed a political party and
national unions called for a general strike. The result was a 15 per cent
increase in pensions and a compromise that gave pensioners a choice of free
monthly bus passes or the equivalent in cash.4 The population learned the
power of direct action, at least when it came to social issues, and Putin
learned that even when the economy required belt-tightening measures he
could challenge traditional perquisites only with great care. He seemed to
have forgotten that lesson when the government attempted an even greater
pension reform in 2018.
Before that, there were flurries of demonstrations against electoral rig-
ging. The first of these was authorized and took place in Moscow on 5
December 2011, one day after elections to the Duma. Up to 10,000 people
86 The political arena
came out and, when it evolved into a march on government buildings, police
detained about 300 participants. Over the next few weeks tens of thousands
took to the streets across the country waving placards calling for free elec-
tions, some labelling United Russia a party of ‘crooks and thieves’.
Thousands gathered on Bolotnaya Square in Moscow on 10 December and
took the protest beyond electoral grievances to demand the release of politi-
cal prisoners and an annulment of the recent parliamentary election. When
the government ignored these demands, the largest demonstration in post-
Soviet Russia, more than 100,000, turned out. The rallies continued sporadi-
cally through the presidential elections in March 2012, taking on the form of
‘March for Millions’, and including another huge rally on Bolotnaya Square
just prior to Putin’s inauguration in May. On that day, 6 May, activists broke
through police lines, violence ensued, dozens were injured on both sides and
over 600 people were arrested. Some 30 of the detainees were charged with
‘using violence against the authorities’ and given prison sentences. Shortly
thereafter, a harsh anti-protest bill set heavy fines for infringements of rally
protocols.
Even though a few of the demonstrators on Bolotnaya Square remained in
prison, the political concessions forced from the government were important
ones. In addition to the return to a 5 per cent threshold for political parties to
earn seats, the direct election of governors was re-instated. In July 2012,
Duma deputies protected themselves by re-criminalizing libel and slander
(‘defaming the honour and dignity’) of political opponents.5

The post-presidential election political scene, 2018

The State Duma
The 2016 election to the State Duma left the UR with an unexpected super
majority, manufactured by shifts in allegiance of more than half of the
225 technically unaligned deputies. Among other things, the large body of
support in the Duma gave Putin an opportunity to amend Russia’s
Constitution, if he wished, for which a two-thirds majority was necessary
(Table 3.1).
The importance of the Duma had diminished over the years. It became
little more than a rubber stamp for executive policies and its approval rating
dropped, especially after the UR and its allies supported the pension reform
bill in 2018. A poll conducted by VTsIOM in October 2018 recorded a loss of
nearly 15 per cent in appreciation of the Duma (at 36%) and about the same
decline for the Federation Council (41.5%). The top institutional approval
ratings went to the military (85.5%) and the Orthodox Church (69.5%).
Respondents split on endorsing political parties generally, 38.7 per cent for
and 33.2 per cent against. Trade unions were at the bottom of the approval
rate, at 31.1 per cent, with 36.5 per cent disapproval.6 These numbers demon-
strated that polled Russians were not happy with their official political and
union hierarchies.
 The political arena 87

Table 3.1 D
 uma Election Results. Parties in order as they appeared on ballot,
September 2016

Party name Votes (Pty) % Seats* Total

Rodina 783,316 1.51 0/1 1

Communists of Russia 1,187,220 2.27 0/0 0
Russian Party of Pensioners for 905,456 1.73 0/0 0
Justice
United Russia 28,271,600 54.20 140/203 343
Russian Ecological Party, Greens 396,231 0.76 0/0 0
Civic Platform 114,623 0.22 0/1 1
LDPR 6,869,802 13.14 34/5 39
PARNAS 380,351 0.73 0/0 0
Party of Growth 672,149 1.29 0/0 0
Civilian Power 73,408 0.14 0/0 0
Yabloko 1,038,579 1.99 0/0 0
CPRF 6,966,146 13.34 35/7 42
Patriots of Russia 307,316 0.59 0/0 0
A Just Russia 3,242,284 6.22 16/7 23
Party of Rural Revival (only ran 0
in single member constituencies)
Independent 1
Invalid ballots 1.87 NA

* Includes seats by Party and, after slash, commitments from single constituencies.
Source: Central Electoral Commission of the Russian Federation (www.cikrf/ru).

United Russia
Success at the polls compared to other parties in September 2018 did not
forestall a post-election downward slide that persuaded the UR leadership
that the party’s place at the top could be in jeopardy. Only 9 per cent of
respondents to a survey conducted in late November rated UR activities
‘entirely positively’; 38 per cent judged the UR ‘rather positively’; 25 per cent
held ‘rather negative’ opinions; and 19 per cent were ‘entirely negative’ about
the ruling party. These opinions were the result, respondents said, of deterio-
rating economic conditions in the country.7
Putin made his discomfort with the party clear at the XVIIIth UR Party
Congress in December, 2018, telling members that they must learn to ‘show
respect for the people’. He urged them to avoid rudeness and arrogance, and
to act as a team throughout the country. If they did not do so, he said, in
difficult times they and Russia could get ‘left behind forever’. Official party
leader, Medvedev, echoed this warning and made it plain that personnel
changes were in the offing, particularly for unsuccessful candidates and
regional officials deemed incompetent.8
A new code of conduct included an admonition to respond publicly to any
accusation of wrongdoing, or resign from the party. Members should avoid
any action or statement that could infringe on someone’s human rights or
freedoms. The stress on ethics was driven by a series of embarrassments
88 The political arena
involving statements and actions by individual party members. One delegate
summarized this position during a radio interview, saying that all UR mem-
bers, including deputies, had ‘to think, weigh every word, especially in public
spaces.’ To monitor the recommendations, the Party created an in-house
Ethics Commission.9 The jury is still out on its level of success.

The Duma opposition

Opposition parties in the Duma, usually referred to as the ‘systemic’ opposi-
tion, changed very little in the decade prior to the ‘January Revolution’. They
tended to be conservative and opportunistic, rarely offering agendas to sug-
gest that they were trying very hard to take power. This was especially clear
in the opposition’s feeble stabs at winning the presidency. The CPRF’s Pavel
Grudinin came second in the presidential election of 2018, with fewer votes
than Zyuganov took in 2012. It was obvious that the CPRF needed rejuvena-
tion. Leader since 1993, Zyuganov’s image was stale. Grudinin’s status was
controversial.
The CPRF’s decisions on nominees for 2018’s gubernatorial elections,
above all for the Moscow region, were the next big test. A party plenum dis-
cussed ways and means to reach traditional communist sources, such as
labour unions, and to generate an active youth movement. No major changes
in approach were agreed, however. A year after the presidential election, a
FOM poll placed the CPRF support at 13 per cent, which suggested that
inertia had set firmly into place.10 With the UR riding high, the other parties
seemed stuck in a time warp. They weren’t done, though. Polls conducted by
FOM in late September 2018 found that, while the ruling party still held a
substantial lead over the Communists and Liberal Democrats, its lead was
narrowing.11 One Communist deputy warned that Putin should resign before
he was ‘dragged out feet first’.12
The CPRF’s limited surge was fleeting and by 2020 Zhirinovsky kept his
second place standing in general approval ratings while Zyuganov ratings
fell. Asked to rank five or six politicians whom they trusted the most in
September, Zhirinovsky’s name showed in 14 per cent of the responses,
behind only Putin’s 33 per cent, and far ahead of Zyuganov’s 5 per cent.13
Zhirinovsky’s party agenda was closer to Putin’s and benefitted more from
some of the Constitutional amendments (Table 3.2).
Parties with seats in the Duma draw public funds. Based on the number of
seats they hold, the CPRF and LDPR received around a billion rubles ($16
mln) each and A Just Russia about half that in 2018. With over two-thirds of
the seats and votes, the UR took 4.3 billion ($68.7 mln). In all cases, these
monies make up over 75 per cent of a party’s budget.14

The extra-systemic opposition

The wide cross-section of political parties, groups and movements outside
the Duma, usually referred to as the ‘extra-systemic’ opposition, seemed to
 The political arena 89

Table 3.2 Survey: ‘Which politicians do you trust the most?’, 2020

2020 Aug May June July Aug Sept

Vladimir Putin 28 25 26 23 33 33
Vladimir Zhirinovsky 11 10 9 10 12 14
Mikhail Mishustin 13 11 14 10 13 11
Sergei Shoigu 13 14 12 10 9 9
Sergei Lavrov 11 9 8 6 8 8
Gennady Zyuganov 6 4 5 4 4 5
Aleksei Navalny 4 4 3 2 4 3

Source: compiled by the author from a Levada Centre survey. Respondents were asked to name
the 5-6 politicians or social activists they most respected. There were other names with less than 3.

have even less public appeal by the end of Putin’s third term than they did
when it started. Other than their uniform desire to get Putin out of office and
weaken United Russia, they failed to provide any real prospects for the future,
that is, a plan for what they would do when Putin left.15
The extra-Duma opposition also faced dangers beyond public apathy and
regular interventions from various law-enforcement agencies. In 2016,
Chechnya’s Kadyrov posted an Instagram video that showed Mikhail
Kasyanov and Vladimir Kara-Murza – project director for Khodorkovsky’s
Open Russia – in cross hairs. Instagram took it down the next day, but not
before Russia’s human rights leaders called the video an incitement to murder
and foreign ambassadors lodged complaints with Russian authorities.16 The
political atmosphere was charged further when Kasyanov was physically
attacked in a restaurant and Navalny filed separate lawsuits against Putin for
failing to report a conflict of interest, against Chaika for corruption, and
against several media outlets that he claimed were biased against him. As one
Russian liberal joked to this author in 2016, the only person left then for
Navalny to sue was himself.17
Because they tended to rely on highly personalized leaderships, the extra-
systemic opposition suffered a setback when Kara-Murza was hospitalized in
2017. His illness was officially said to be kidney failure. According to his wife,
the problem was ‘acute poisoning with an unknown substance’. He and his
supporters argued that he was poisoned for reasons of politics.18 The case
thus became another headliner for the domestic activist opposition and for-
eign critics of Putin, such as American senators McCain and Rubio who
immediately cast evidence-free blame directly on the Russian president.
Kara-Murza’s wife also told journalists in the US that she had no proof
that Putin was personally responsible and his father acknowledged that his
son suffered from chronic kidney problems. Neither statement slowed the
allegations of purposeful poisoning.19 After hospital treatment in Moscow,
Kara-Murza travelled to the US to recover, and then toured North American
cities touting his film on Nemtsov (see ahead), granting interviews and railing
against Putin. While in Canada, he teamed up with William Browder to lobby
for a Magnitsky law (see Chapter 6). 20
90 The political arena
Navalny to the forefront
While parties in the Duma struggled to find an effective political role, the
foreign and Russian media believed that Navalny and other unrepresented
parties and movements had taken the initiative away from them. Yet, in the
spring of 2018, VTsIOM polls found that Navalny’s following was also wan-
ing and that he was trusted by almost no one.21
If that were true, then the general dissatisfaction had a fuse of its own and
Navalny’s role was to light the match. He opened the political fight for Putin’s
fourth term by calling for a nationwide protest just two days before the inau-
guration ceremonies of 7 May 2018.22 If nothing else, unauthorized rallies set
up by Navalny and his allies provided dissenters with an agenda for the next
few years, for he used social media to set out broad ‘requirements’ for protest-
ers to demand from government, as follows,

− a real fight against bribery and poverty,

− return of elections at all levels of government, ensuring real political
competition,
− full-scale judicial reform,
− release of all political prisoners,
− freedom of the media and the Internet,
− dissolution of Roskomnadzor,
− observance of the rights of Russians to the secrecy of correspondence
and peaceful assembly already guaranteed by the Constitution of the
Russian Federation.23

On his website where these requirements were listed, Navalny added leaflets,
poster layouts and pictures to share on social media. The campaign for hearts
and minds was underway. Pussy Riot joined the demonstrations for what
they posted as a ‘lil anti-putin walk’.24 Well over a thousand marchers in
some 26 cities were held by police, including 700 in Moscow, and Navalny
was carted away by law enforcement.25 This time he spent a month in prison.
The Russian Union of Journalists charged that at least 23 journalists were
beaten or detained during the protests.26 Activism built up over the next two
years until it was stalled by the pandemic.
Navalny was picked up again in August, two weeks before a scheduled pen-
sion protest, and sentenced by a Moscow court to another 30 days for anti-
government rallies organized the previous January. On his release in
September, he was immediately jailed for another 20 days, charged this time
with staging an illegal protest on election day, 9 September.27 He denied any
involvement in that campaign, noting that he was in jail at the time, yet his
never-blocked website, blogs and tweets were clearly instrumental in the out-
burst of demonstrations. It was equally plain that the powers to be were
tightening their watch on Navalny. Released on 15 October, he found himself
facing a slander suit brought by an ex-MVD officer whom he had accused of
corruption.28
 The political arena 91
A month later Navalny was at first prevented and then allowed to leave
the country to attend a ruling on a case before the European Court of
Human Rights (ECHR). As was his wont, Navalny promised to sue the
Federal Bailiffs Service for losses incurred during the one day he was held
at the airport, where he posted photos of himself at passport control and
told followers on Instagram and Facebook that he was not allowed to leave.
The brief detention was justified, the FSB said, because Navalny still owed
money for a fine in Russia.29 The fine was paid and away he went to
Strasbourg, where the court found in his favour, judging that ‘some of the
arrests [in 2012 and 2014] had actually aimed at suppressing political plu-
ralism’, and ‘his allegation of being a particular target’ was correct. The
court imposed a €64,000 ($72,000) fine against the Russian government.
The decision, one of many taken by the court against the Russian judiciary,
prompted calls in Russia for withdrawal from the European Convention on
Human Rights.30
Authorities apprehended an aide to Navalny, Leonid Volkov, in 2019 and
sentenced him to 20 days for his role in organizing a September 2018 protest.
The fact that he was out of the country at the time of the demonstration
made no difference to the court. When his time was up in June the sentence
was extended to September. Volkov’s repeated arrest signalled to the extra-
systemic opposition that the state was in a ‘get-tough’ mode. Many Western
commentators took the clampdown to mean that Putin and his allies saw
their power diminishing and, rather than grant concessions as they had in
2012, instituted a response worthy of a police state.31

Re-modelling political movements outside the Duma

The appeal of street demonstrations for political ends faded for a while after
the 2011–12 massive objections to election rigging. Even as the number of
protest events rose again in 2017, with 1,500 during the year, by the spring of
2018 a large majority of Russians (88%) said they had little interest in politi-
cal activism. They voiced willingness to demonstrate for specific local social
purposes, such as unwanted property developments and dump sites, but not
political ones.32 The hesitation could also have been due to an increase in
physical attacks on protesters and political people. According to Agora, a
human rights monitoring agency in Russia, there were over 80 such incidents
registered in the first two-thirds of 2018, more than took place during each of
2016 and 2017.33
By increasing fines on organizers who violate the rules of public assembly,
the Russian government had a hand in the apparent decline of political pro-
test participation. Organizers may now be fined for giving notice of a public
event with no intention of actually holding one, thereby causing local gov-
ernment to set up police and medical presences, at considerable cost, for
events that are never held.34 Then again, demonstrations for economic rea-
sons were increasing and political parties took advantage of a rising sense of
grievance.
92 The political arena
Although it won no PR seats in the Duma, Yabloko remained the best-
known mainstream liberal democratic party. Meeting in May, 2018, the party
congress extended Sergei Mitrokhin’s leadership for six months, and deter-
mined that he would step down after that. Long dominated by its founder,
Grigorii Yavlinsky, who supported Mitrokhin, the party was aware that it
needed a major shake-up if it was ever to repeat earlier successes. Yabloko’s
St. Petersburg branch resented continued attempts to centralize from the
party’s Moscow HQ to the extent that around 50 members defected and
helped form a new public organization called the Democratic Renewal
Movement. The Yabloko Party Congress revealed that the Moscow branch
itself was sharply divided between proponents of Mitrokhin on the one hand,
Maksim Katz and Dmitry Gudkov on the other.35 Nikolai Rybakov won the
leadership in December 2019 and promised a revitalization. Within a few
years it was obvious that that promise, while probably sincere, was
unfulfilled.
Navalny’s party re-organized too. While its leader was sitting out one of
his 30-day administrative sentences, a scheduled constituent congress met
and settled on a new name, ‘Russia of the Future’ (Rossiia budushchego).
The Ministry of Justice had refused to register it in 2015, when it had only a
‘working name’, because the application lacked proper documentation.36
Navalny’s choice of title, Party of Progress, was ‘stolen’ by a former staff
worker and lawyer for the Anti-Corruption Foundation (Fond bor’by s kor-
ruptsiei, FBK), Vitaliy Serukanov, who registered a new political party of
his own. Confusing the name recognition factor in Russian politics further,
Gudkov’s Civil Initiative party changed its name to the Party of Changes
and created a seven-person political council led by Ksenia Sobchak. They
named Gudkov as their official candidate for mayor of Moscow.37 There was
no love lost among this mixed bag of extra-systemic opponents to the
government.

Searching for a cause via social media

Assertions by pollsters that support for street protests was diminishing did
not mean that they disappeared or that radical activism faded away; nor that
they couldn’t come back in an instant. In fact, during the spring and summer
of 2019 Russians were out on the streets somewhere almost every weekend.
Of the 434 rallies across the country from April to June, 130 were political.
Since these numbers were counted by the Russian Centre for Social-Labour
Rights before electoral rallies burst out in Moscow, they represented a major
shift in an established pattern that had seen social issues dominate protest
movements.38
The struggle for loyalties within Russia’s militant circles began early in the
new term when authorities arrested two demonstrators from the Left
Opposition at a rally labelled ‘For a Free Russia without repression and arbi-
trariness’. One of them, ‘Red Darya’ Polyudova, had been released in October
2017 after two years in a prison colony for posting ‘extremist’ materials on
 The political arena 93
VKontakte.39 A few days later, police raided an office opened by the
Khodorkovsky-funded Open Russia in Vladivostok. They detained five activ-
ists, including the branch’s chairman Andrei Pivovarov, who then tweeted
about the event, while another arrestee reported it on Facebook. Mikhail
Khodorkovsky’s website alleged that the arrestees were beaten.40
Open Russia is one of the organizations officially categorized as ‘undesir-
able’ because it is entirely political and is funded from abroad, so the raid
would hardly have been unexpected. There were also rallies in support of
political prisoners, such as the Ukrainian film-maker Oleg Sentsov, who was
serving a 20 years for alleged terrorist acts in Crimea and who went on a
hunger strike in June, and activist Anastasia Shevchenko, who was placed
under house arrest in January 2019 for supporting Open Russia. She was the
first person to be charged for violating the 2015 law that banned ‘undesirable
organizations’. When Putin’s Human Rights Council called on the Duma to
decriminalize the law, its request was ignored. A month later police raided
Open Russia’s offices in Moscow and put at least one person behind bars for
‘disobeying’ police orders. At the time of the raid, members were hosting a
video conference with Khodorkovsky.41
Shortly thereafter, police took four activists into custody from outside
Moscow State University where they were picketing in support of Azat
Miftakhov, a student who had been imprisoned for allegedly manufacturing
explosives. One of the picketers was said to be a provocateur from a pro-
Kremlin movement. Others represented a movement called Unlimited
Protest, and a Telegram channel titled Protesting Moscow State University
(https://t.me/msuprotest/354).42
Few of the authorized protests in 2018 were exclusively political; rather,
they expressed anger over state control of the Internet (see Chapter 8), labour
grievances, wage arrears, housing closures, pollution, developers’ fraud,
LGBT rights, hospital closings and rising food prices.43 Complaints against
incompetent and illegal waste disposal practices prompted Medvedev to dis-
miss the head of the Federal Service for Supervision of the Use of Natural
Resources (Rosprirodnadzor), Artem Sidorov, who was also deputy minister
of Natural Resources and Environment. Demonstrations against Moscow’s
plans to dump its garbage in Russia’s North continued late into 2019 and
grew increasingly volatile; for instance, police arrested eight leaders of an
unauthorized rally of some 3,000 in Arkhangelsk in April. The proposed
permanent mega dump on marshy land at Shiyes threatened the region’s
water supply. Large groups demanded the resignation of governors in that
region and in the Komi Republic.44
The objectors prevailed, at least temporarily. In May, Moscow suspended
work on a $162 million landfill in northern Russia, and called for public hear-
ings on the matter. Rallies and some violence persisted at the controversial
landfill sites at Shiyes and in Arkhangelsk, while smaller assemblies were held
in several other northern towns. In January 2020, a regional court ruled that
construction of the Shiyes landfill was illegal. In October, a higher court
upheld that decision and ordered the construction company to return the
94 The political arena
land to its original state. This was an important victory for Russian environ-
mental activists.45
Clashes were not limited to the North. Violence broke out after police tried
to move environmentalists protesting proposals to clear parts of a forest in a
suburb of Moscow to construct a garbage processing plant, and thousands
came together in Krasnoyarsk objecting to what they thought was their gov-
ernor’s inaction over raging wildfires.46 Elsewhere, dozens were detained fol-
lowing three days of demonstrations against the construction of an Orthodox
cathedral in the central park of Yekaterinburg. That city’s mayor suspended
the project.47 In the summer of 2020 crowds protested a new law allowing
forestry operations close to Lake Baikal, and thousands of locals gathered to
oppose plans to mine limestone on a protected natural landmark (Kushtau
shihan [hill]) in Bashkortostan. 48
With the dramatic exception of four members of Pussy Riot rushing on to
the field wearing police-style uniforms while the final match was underway,
there were few attempts at political demonstrations during World Cup events.
They were carted off and sentenced to 15 days in jail. At about the same time
a consequence of Russia’s loss of voting rights in the Parliamentary Assembly
of the Council of Europe (PACE) in 2014 became apparent. To wit, Russia
had no say in choosing judges for the ECHR in Strasbourg.49

The politics of pension reform

The usually very mixed extra-systemic opposition found a common cause
briefly in the spring of 2018 when two mainstream parties, Yabloko and the
Communists, joined with Navalny’s group, Udaltsov’s Left Front and various
trade unions to demonstrate against reforms of the pension system that
included raising retirement ages.
Surveys conducted during the wave of rallies against raising the age at
which one could collect a state pension showed that the largest demographic
group ready to attend demonstrations were people aged 46–60; that is, indi-
viduals approaching retirement under the old terms. Overall, however, 80 per
cent of respondents opposed the policy and that number included the age
group 18–30 (77%).50 Because nearly half said the new policy influenced their
opinion of the president opposition in and out of the Duma was energized.
Though it was muted temporarily because of World Cup fever, the wide-
spread negative reaction to the much-discussed policy gave opposition politi-
cians an opportunity to exploit public dissatisfaction.
All but one of the UR’s deputies voted in support of the bill, 51 enabling
the Communists and others to take credit for opposing it in the House and
gain somewhat in popular ratings (Table 3.3).
The bill triggered a new enthusiasm for participation in economic and
political rallies, marking a clear change in attitude from earlier in the year.
Levada Centre surveys conducted in late July saw 28 per cent willing to take
part in protests against a declining quality of life, the highest since 1999;
nearly 40 per cent said they would march against the pension reform, and a
 The political arena 95

Table 3.3 VTsIOM polls post- retirement age bill, 2018

July 1 July 8 July 15 July 22

United Russia 38.1 38.8 38.6 37.1

CPRF 14.5 13.6 14.4 15.5
LDPR 10.5 10.3 10.2 10.7
A Just Russia 5.7 5.9 6.0 5.8
Non-Duma parties 7.6 8.2 7.9 7.6
Will spoil ballot 1.3 1.1 1.1 1.3
Will boycott 8.6 8.6 8.7 8.8
Difficult to answer 13.5 13.5 13.1 13.4

Q: Tell me, please, if the elections to the State Duma of Russia were held next Sunday [29 July],
which of the following parties would you most likely vote for?
Source: compiled by the author from several VTsIOM survey postings

third said they would consider a political protest.52 For the moment, this was
good news for opposition organizations. In August, the CEC approved three
separate initiative group petitions for referenda on raising the retirement age.
These came from the CPRF (its second try), A Just Russia led by its Moscow
mayoralty candidate, Ilya Sviridov, and another Moscow-based group, called
the All-Russia Association of Organization for Large Families, headed by
Marina Semenova and Oksana Sharabokova. The authors then had to collect
at least two million signatures to have their petition move forward, which
none was able to do.53
Changes in the pension bill proposed by Putin in August, about a week
before a planned demonstration against it, muted disapproval slightly by
appealing to pension-age women. A Levada Centre questionnaire at about
that time revealed that up to 77 per cent of the respondents would vote
against the pension age reform if a referendum was held on the question.54
With that kind of resentment, it is no wonder that Putin’s intervention could
not forestall a CPRF rally on 3 September, that brought some 10,000 (offi-
cials said 6,000) out in Moscow carrying anti-Putin signs and pro-Commu-
nist banners. A Just Russia held a smaller march at another location.
Coupled with surveys showing that Russians were more concerned about
price rises, poverty, unemployment, corruption and the widening gulf
between rich and poor than they had been even in the 1990s, angry rallies
posed special problems for United Russia in the upcoming election cycle.
Making matters worse, acts of violence against opposition candidates and
their campaign workers increased in the regions.55
As he watched from a cell on 9 September, Navalny’s team orchestrated
outbursts against the pension reform all across the country. According to
both Western and Russian reports, more than 800 people were jailed during
simultaneous demonstrations in about 80 towns and cities, the largest num-
ber in St. Petersburg. The anti-government marches and anti-Putin political
banners were widely seen on Russian TV and described in print media. The
independent Russian human rights media project, OVD-Info, reported
96 The political arena
incidents of violence on the part of police, and even Kudrin and several other
senior officials criticized unrestrained use of force by law enforcement.56

Searching for a party to support

A study released by the Russian Presidential Academy of the National
Economy and Public Administration in October 2018 showed that as many
as 42 per cent of potential voters thought that none of the mainstream politi-
cal parties represented their interests. Only 23 per cent felt that the UR fit the
bill, while the CPRF (11%), LDPR (10%) and A Just Russia (4%) trailed
behind. Over 70 per cent had negative feelings towards the entire party sys-
tem as it operated in Russia.57
That sentiment helps explain why so many citizens showed up for anti-
pension reform demonstrations on Election Day, while citizens in 80 of
Russia’s regions competed for 22 governorships, plus seats in 16 legislative
assemblies and 12 city councils. There were seven single constituency seats up
for grabs in the State Duma. Competition for those latter vacancies suffered
from manipulative acts from officialdom and litigations launched against
each other by contending parties. For example, the LDPR and Patriots of
Russia took the Republican Party of Russia-People’s Freedom Party
(PARNAS) to court, forcing it to drop out of one race on a technicality. A
requirement that signatures of support must be obtained from sitting depu-
ties in municipal representative bodies, the ‘municipal filter’, made it difficult
for candidates to get enough support to run, and regional elites continued to
dominate the local political process.58
Still, several UR and Putin-favoured candidates did poorly in the guberna-
torial elections and, as we have seen, Putin’s own trust rating fell substan-
tially. More important for the political arena was the fact that the same
Levada Centre poll that showed drops in public confidence in Putin placed
political parties collectively at the very bottom of a long list of entities
judged.59
Soon after the September 2018 elections, seven members of the radical
Other Russia movement were behind bars for throwing smoke bombs outside
the office of a major petro-chemical company, while shouting anti-oligarch
slogans, such as ‘Dekulakization for the Oligarchs!’ (Oligarkhov —
Raskulachit’!).60 This coincided with another CPRF-led rally of some 3,000
against pension reform. As noted in Chapter 2, the elections may have been a
sign that the Kremlin’s hold over the regional political scene was weakening.
This trend, if true, was a consequence of a decline in quality of life in the
regions, for which the pension reform protests were a symptom.

Moscow’s mayoralty race, 2018

The first big post-presidential election political test was the 2018 race for
Moscow’s mayoralty office. Opposition militant and municipal deputy Ilya
Yashin of PARNAS threw his name into the ring in April, irritating Gudkov,
 The political arena 97
who had announced his intention to compete ‘as the only democratic candi-
date’.61 Other liberal-left groups and individuals squabbled, while Yabloko’s
central bureau still argued for and against party centralization. Yabloko’s
poor showing in the presidential election prompted a switch to a more hori-
zontal management. Its earlier leader, Yavlinsky, was given more authority
and his opponents were demoted. 62
Incumbent mayor of Moscow, Sobyanin, announced at the end of May that
he would seek re-election and would run as an independent. Rumours flew in
June that city officials were poised to reject the candidacies of Yashin, Gudkov
and gay rights activist and journalist Anton Krasovsky.63 Yabloko shot itself
in the foot again when the party’s federal executive rejected its Moscow
branch’s nominee for candidate, Mitrokhin, who then sued his own party and
was granted the right to continue campaigning by a Moscow court.64
As the election grew nearer, Putin and Medvedev both voiced indirect sup-
port for Sobyanin, who appeared unaffected by the renewed spread of protest
movements. He won with a little over 70 per cent of the votes cast, in a voter
turnout of only 31 per cent of eligible voters. Communist candidate Vadim
Kumin was a distant second, followed by A Just Russia’s Sviridov and the
LDPR’s Degtyarev. Incumbent governor of the Moscow region, Andrei
Vorobyov, was returned with over 62 per cent. Mitrokhin failed to complete
appropriate documentation and did not get on the ballot (Table 3.4).

Electoral fallout
Public resentment of United Russia and a perception that the CPRF was the
only political party to rally opposition to pension reform, gave the
Communists a new political lease on life. Their numbers rose as the UR’s fell
almost everywhere. Zyuganov tried then to raise the party profile by calling
for Russian annexation of the Donbas to forestall an alleged Ukrainian plan
to launch an offensive against the rebel region.65 A new party, the Communist
Party of Social Justice, won seats in one region, as did the newly formed
Pensioners of Russia. Prominent oppositionists were kept off the ballot in
many of the regions by means of the municipal filter, leaving protest votes to

Table 3.4 Results of Moscow Mayoralty Election, 9 September 2018

Candidate Party Votes Percentage

Sergei Sobyanin Indep. 1,582,762 70.17

Vadim Kumin CPRF 256,717 11.38
Ilya Sviridov A Just Russia 158,106 7.01
Mikhail Degtyarev LDPR 151,642 6.72
Mikhail Balakin Union of Citizens 42,192 1.87

Eligible voters = 7,296,529; Votes cast = 2,255,698 (30.91%); Blank ballot = 64,279; Valid votes
= 2,191,419
Source: Compiled by the author from Moscow’s electoral committee’s website, www.moscow_
city.vybory.izbirkom.ru/region/
98 The political arena
relative unknowns.66 Runoffs were declared in four of the gubernatorial elec-
tions where pro-government candidates failed to win 50 per cent in the first
round.
A close election in the Far East Primorye region was annulled after
Communist Andrei Ishchenko accused supporters of the UR’s Andrei
Tarasenko of election rigging. A spontaneous rally of people called on
Tarasenko to resign, which he did. Head of the CEC, Ella Pamfilova,
demanded a re-run within three months.67 The re-scheduled vote represented
a rare admission of cheating on the part of the UR. In the Siberian republic
of Khakassia, the UR incumbent quit after not receiving a majority in the
first round, leaving a Communist, Valentin Konovalov, to run unopposed. He
won with 57.57 per cent of votes in a ‘for’ or ‘against’ ballot.68
In other second round votes, a 40 per cent turnout gave the Khabarovsk
Krai governorship to LDRP Duma Deputy Sergei Furgal over a UR candi-
date who had held the post for nine years. Another LDPR challenger,
Vladimir Sipyagin, defeated a Kremlin-backed incumbent in the Vladimir
region. The LDPR and the CPRF formed coalition governments in these
regions and Khakassia. In the meantime, the UR launched a purge of its
regional executives, dismissing party leaders in seven regions where their
party fared worse than expected.

2019–20 – turning points?

With support for the central government fading in late 2018, Putin’s approval
rate dropping to the lowest level in five years and real incomes also falling,
Navalny went on the offensive. He launched a nationwide independent trade
union (Profsoyuz Navalnogo) for the purpose of assuring that state-funded
workers actually received wage increases they had been promised. At a packed
meeting in a large conference hall in St. Petersburg, Navalny outlined a politi-
cal agenda for electing supporters in the forthcoming municipal elections in
that city, where 1,570 positions were open for competition. Navalny’s tactics
included cooperation with the Communists and other parties to defeat
United Russia candidates. He rejected the suggestion that he run for the
Governor’s position himself.
This stage of the Navalny saga was marked by a move away from an
emphasis on corruption to focus on working conditions, workers’ rights and
wages. Anti-corruption activism had been his stepping stone into the political
arena, but his leadership of these campaigns was challenged by the All-Russia
People’s Front (Obshcherossiiskii Narodnyi Front – ONF), to which Putin
had assigned the task of battling corruption.69 Navalny’s new catchment was
the working class generally and government employees specifically. In this
sector, he competed with both the Communist Party and the large trade
unions, whose membership for the most part supported pro-government par-
ties. Aleksandr Shershukov, head of the Federation of Independent Trade
Unions of Russian, showed his concern by accusing Navalny of ‘parasitism’,
feeding off other people’s problems.70
 The political arena 99
Navalny wasn’t the only activist looking to benefit from the UR’s alleged
vulnerability, nor was he the only target of the government. Leader of the
movement ‘For Human Rights’ (Za prava cheloveka), Lev Ponomarev, spent
two weeks in jail for an unauthorized protest in support of several teenagers
detained for ‘extremism’. For his pains, the movement was designated a ‘for-
eign agent’ because it engaged in political activities in Russia while receiving
funds from abroad.71 Ponomarev headed two other human rights NGOs,
both of which were also named ‘foreign agents’. A year later, when the PGO
declared the European Endowment for Democracy ‘undesirable’ because its
endeavours ‘constitute a threat to the foundations of the constitutional sys-
tem and security of the Russian Federation’, the number of foreign NGOs so
labelled reached 20.72 These organizations were accused of influencing elec-
tion campaigns, luring minors into riots and ‘creating tolerance for the use of
narcotic drugs.’ 73 Quite a package!
Nemtsov’s name continued to draw crowds as well. Although his very pub-
lic murder was in February 2015, anniversary memorials continued. In 2019
about 6,000 people showed up for a commemorative demonstration in
Moscow, and similar rallies were held in 20 other cities. Dissenters took the
opportunity to wave a wide variety of placards, including some in English
calling Putin a ‘liar’.74 On the fifth anniversary, Nemtsov’s daughter, Zhanna,
called on the government finally to seek out the leading organizer of the kill-
ing, making it plain that she thought Kadyrov responsible.75 The West, of
course, pointed fingers at Putin, and responded oddly. For example, the city
of Prague re-named the square at the Russian Embassy after Nemtsov, Kyiv
designated a city park to him in 2019 and a small square in front of the
Russian Embassy in Washington was transformed into the Boris Nemtsov
Plaza in 2018. A similar name change was enacted in Vilnius. The bridge on
which he was killed in Moscow was informally re-named ‘Nemtsov Bridge’
(Nemtsov Most) by Muscovites. Whatever the merits of Nemtsov’s decade-
long criticism of Putin’s regime, he was much more popular after his murder
than he had been during his lifetime.
May Day 2019 saw an unusual level of political protest. Normally a day of
celebration, with official parades and organized demonstrations saluting
workers, this one saw the arrest of 131 people, half of them in St. Petersburg,
others in Moscow, Tomsk, Kursk, Novosibirsk and elsewhere. Anti-Putin
and anti-UR banners and placards calling for fair elections dotted the politi-
cal landscape. Some leaders were taken in by force, such as the head of
Navalny’s office in St. Petersburg and the chair of Khodorkovsky’s Open
Russia group in that city. They were given 10-day sentences.76 A few weeks
later, a burst of single-picketers and newspaper support for journalist Ivan
Golunov, who was in prison for alleged drug-dealing, churned up the politi-
cal arena again. An on-line petition in his support drew over 100,000 names
before the first week was out, and about 500 people were held briefly during
an unauthorized rally on 12 June, suggesting that there was a lot of dissatis-
faction bubbling beneath the surface.77 Four days after that, a smaller but
authorized gathering in Moscow supporting Golunov and protesting
100 The political arena
ministerial abuse of power proceeded peacefully. The outcry was effective. On
Putin’s recommendation, Minister of the Interior Vladimir Kolokoltsev
ordered Golunov released, two MVD generals dismissed, and several other
officers suspended. This was a major victory for grassroots political activism
in Russia.78
A Levada Centre poll conducted in late May 2019 showed that 27 per cent
of respondents would ‘absolutely’ protest a fall in living standards. Up to 69
per cent said they were ‘less’ likely to do so.79 As we have seen, this new frame
of mind pushed the siloviki towards more stringent regulation against politi-
cal activism. In fact, the Golunov case was followed by an outbreak of dem-
onstrations calling for the release of political prisoners and individuals
imprisoned on charges believed to be trumped up by police. ‘The Public
Demands Justice!’ (Obshchestvo trebuet spravedlivosti!) was a common slo-
gan sponsored by the Libertarian Party of Russia and taken up by others. By
that time, the Moscow-based human rights NGO, Memorial, calculated that
Russian prisons held about 65 political prisoners, 248 religious inmates and
over 200 falsely indicted people.80
According to one report, the Kremlin’s internal political agency, super-
vised by Sergei Kiriyenko, was handed the task of reducing protest potential
by activating patriotic youth groups and presenting a constant optimistic
message. Attracting youth to their political agenda was an ambition of all
parties, and not an easy one. A major study conducted jointly by the Levada
Centre and Germany’s Friedrich Ebert Foundation in 2019 and published in
2020 showed that 57 per cent of ‘young people display no apparent interest in
politics’. The reference was to ‘Generation Z’, ages 14–29. The study also
showed that up to 76 per cent of Russia’s youth held more or less the same
political views as their parents and, in contrast to a widely-held assumption,
this was more the case in Moscow than elsewhere in Russia.81 In terms of
values, two-thirds of the individuals polled put ‘human rights’ at the top,
leaving specific ‘rights’ like freedom of speech (58%), right to own property
(50%), freedom of assembly (40%) or of religion (28%) far behind. Whereas
just under 50 per cent agreed that ‘Democracy is a good form of government
in general’ and 40 per cent disagreed that under some circumstance a dicta-
torship could be preferable, 65 per cent agreed that Russia ‘should have a
leader who rules Russia with a strong hand for the public good’.82

New electoral crisis in Moscow

That study may have come a little too soon. Political demonstrations grew
more frequent and more radicalized as the year went on. Chants against
Putin and Medvedev proliferated. Crowds demanded that governors in
Magas, Arkhangelsk and Yekaterinburg resign.83 Still, these scattered out-
bursts were nothing compared to the uproar in July, when electoral officials
removed some 30 names of mostly opposition candidates from the ballot for
September’s election to the Moscow City Duma. After Moscow’s CEC
claimed that the individuals did not have enough legitimate signatures of
 The political arena 101
support, people began to gather in front of City Hall. The politicians, among
them municipal deputy Ilya Yashin, lawyer for Navalny’s FBK, Lyubov
Sobol, and former Duma deputy Dmitry Gudkov, alleged that the election
commission rigged the ballot. About 40 demonstrators were placed in
detention.84
Moscow has 45 single-member constituencies, and nearly 4,000 polling sta-
tions. If they are not nominated by a political party represented in the munic-
ipal Duma, candidates need voter signatures from 3 per cent of their riding
(circa 4,500–5,000 names). If more than 10 per cent of the signatures are
invalidated, the candidate is disqualified. Herein lay the problem. The CEC
decides which list of signatures to test: 233 candidates were registered; 57
were rejected.
Yashin was declared ineligible for failing to authenticate some 12 per cent
of the signatures on his list. Gudkov, Sobol, Mitrokhin and two of Navalny’s
aides were also among the disqualified candidates.85 As a result, simmering
social unrest took a quick turn to politics, just as it had after the rigged elec-
tions of 2011–12. This fact was brought home on 20 July, when an authorized
demonstration organized by the Libertarian Party in Moscow drew some
20,000 (officialdom said 12,000) carrying posters saying, for example, ‘I have
the right to choose!’, ‘We exist’, ‘Putin – No!’ and banners emblazoned with
the names of Gudkov, Yashin and others. Many waved Russian flags. Some
of the disqualified candidates and Navalny spoke to the crowds from a stage,
and the rally turned from one opposing Sobyanin to a demonstration against
Putin.86 The crowd, which had to pass through metal detectors, gathered
without incident. Navalny, who called for an unauthorized rally to be held in
front of City Hall the following week, was taken into custody on 24 July for
repeated violations of the rules for public assembly and given another 30-day
stretch. Four other candidates were handed shorter sentences, and police
searched the homes of several opposition candidates. This time the CEC
opened up criminal cases, charging some protesters with obstructing the elec-
tor commissions by blocking entrances to commission buildings. Investigators
subsequently (30 July) said they were treating the on-going demonstrations
as civil unrest, whose organizers could be subject to a penalty of 15 years in
prison. For a start, Mikhail Svetov, leader of the Libertarian Party was con-
demned to 30 days.87 Plainly, the state was not going to back off this time.
Few minds were changed when Pamfilova met with the disqualified candi-
dates on 24 July. They demanded that they be allowed to register without a
verifying process; she argued that it was Navalny, not the CEC, who most
wanted them de-registered so he could take political advantage of the crisis.
The city of Moscow had suddenly become a hotbed of discontent, with
groups also protesting the city’s renovation projects in parks and squares, so
Navalny already had a collective anger to exploit.88
Hundreds of riot police and National Guard cordoned off City Hall before
the unauthorized rally was held on 27 July, and over 200 protesters were
detained after they broke through police barricades. Participation numbers
ranged between 3,500 and 6,000, depending on who was asked. Dozhd TV
102 The political arena
streamed live videos of the events. According to one human rights group, by
the end of the next day police had picked over 1,300 individuals, 150 of whom
spent the night in jail. Moscow’s MVD set the number of detainees at 1,074.89
Navalny was hospitalized because of an allergic reaction to something
unknown, and was released back to prison within two days. In a blog sent
from prison, with photos of his swollen face, Navalny said ‘I have never had
an allergy. No food, no pollen, no matter what’, hinting therefore that he
might have been poisoned. His lawyer, personal doctor and supporters spread
the tale, while the chief doctor at the treating hospital said he wasn’t poi-
soned. As in so many other such cases, the perception of the ‘truth’ depended
on where the speaker, and listeners, stood on the political spectrum.90
Sobol, who had been on a hunger strike since 13 July, called for more radi-
cal measures, asking supporters to reject the demonstration site offered by
the municipality and meet instead on Moscow’s central Boulevard Ring.
Sobol’s Facebook pages included a map of her preferred route and suggested
that over 1,300 people planned to attend the rally set for 3 August.91 The
Kremlin had offered major concessions to protesters in 2012. Seven years
later it wasn’t as clear what options the government had, other than to give in
or to clamp down. Doubtless, fear of a coloured revolution shaped govern-
ment responses.92
At first, Russian state-run TV either ignored most of the events or blamed
provocateurs for the violence, while independent TV and press, YouTube,
Twitter, Facebook and other social media ran photos and daily stories of the
chaos in Moscow. In a televised interview, Sobyanin characterized the pro-
tests as ‘riots, pre-planned and well prepared’ and accused the disallowed
candidates of calling for action even before decisions had been made about
their eligibility. He went on,

Anarchy, unrest and permissiveness only exacerbate real problems. And

this ends with tragedy. There are more than enough examples in the
history of our country. I’m sure Muscovites understand this well. This
is not for the good of the people, but for someone’s political and selfish
goals.93

The US Embassy in Moscow, the EU’s press office and the UK’s Foreign
Office all expressed concerns about the police actions in Moscow, calling
them ‘disproportionate’, undermining ‘freedom of expression’ and ‘disre-
garding’ peoples’ rights.94 Russia’s Foreign Ministry took exception to the US
Embassy ‘meddling’ in Russia’s political affairs, and pointed out, rightly, that
much of Western Europe itself was beset with angry demonstrators and
harsh responses. An editorial in one mainstream Russian newspaper noted
that there could be no winners in the situation, upbraided Sobyanin for let-
ting it get out of control and warned that a promised rally set for the follow-
ing weekend could lead to real bloodshed.95
Assuming that Moscow was teetering on the edge of chaos, the municipal
officers acted to curb further political activism. Law enforcement detained
 The political arena 103
Sobol, opened a criminal investigation into Navalny for alleged money laun-
dering by his Foundation and, on rally day, locked up about 1,000 partici-
pants. Most were soon released, and Sobol was fined. Police, National Guard
and OMAN officers set up lines and also wandered among the gathering
people. The Moscow Times and other media carried many videos of the
action, showing hundreds of people, the majority of them young, walking
around central Moscow, taking photos on their phones, and media conduct-
ing interviews. Nothing could be kept from the public eye. Activists quoted
the Constitution, which allows freedom of assembly and speech, while law
enforcement cited laws that require agreement on the timing and location of
all demonstrations in advance. These requirements were not met ahead of the
3 August protest, and staging such events in the city centre is usually forbid-
den – for reasons ranging from worries about congestion, the locations of
government buildings and because that area of the city had been the target of
acts of terrorism.96
Caught in a Catch-22 situation, the Kremlin condemned the ‘absolutely
unacceptably disproportionate use of force’ by police agencies, and at the
same time insisted that firm action to curb unrest was necessary.97 Zyuganov
called for the resignation of the head of Moscow’s CEC, Valentin Gorbunov,
who had been in that position for more than 20 years and had been the sub-
ject of electoral abuse complaints for years.98 Gorbunov resigned in March
2020.
When Sobol’s appeal for reinstatement was turned down, she used Twitter
and Facebook to appeal for another demonstration. On this occasion, 10
August, the fifth week in row, the crowd was much larger, up to 60,000 accord-
ing to OVD-Info, 20,000 according to police sources. Rapper bands per-
formed and other musical celebrities showed up and urged their social media
followers to come out. The gathering was authorized by the city. Over 250
people were detained anyway, especially after participants began moving
toward the presidential administration building chanting ‘Putin is a thief!’
(Putin - Vor!). Rallies in solidarity with the Moscow opposition candidates
were held in St. Petersburg, where about 50 were locked up, as were another
10 in Rostov-on-Don.99
Roskomnadzor demanded that Google and Facebook stop accepting
YouTube advertisements of illegal events. Threatened with a response ‘ade-
quate’ to a foreign agency interfering in the affairs of a sovereign state,
Google responded, somewhat disingenuously, that it obeyed all electoral laws
and supported ‘responsible’ political advertising.100 The Investigative
Committee stepped up its investigation of Navalny’s Anti-Corruption
Foundation by raiding its HQ in Moscow and several branches in the regions.
By that time, the unrest approached a danger point and the state had to find
solutions other than merely arrest people.
As momentum gathered for rallies on behalf of free elections in Moscow
on 17 August, the Communist Party was the only applicant granted permis-
sion to demonstrate. Similar requests by municipal opposition deputies for a
march along the Boulevard Ring and other boulevards were rejected. The
104 The political arena
CPRF rally attracted about 4,000 and proceeded without incident. Other
crowds in Moscow were mostly solo and peaceful, with few opposition lead-
ers in sight. Leaders of unauthorized demonstrations in Moscow and St.
Petersburg were quickly picked up.101 Speaking at a press conference in
Finland, Putin downplayed the protests, saying that there were too many
false signatures (‘dead souls’) on the candidates’ applications and noting
again that recent political protests in Europe were larger, longer and more
violent.102
Sobol became the political face of unrest in Moscow, where she and her
husband were the victim of several physical attacks, and had faeces thrown at
them by government supporters. These acts didn’t prevent her from calling
for another peaceful march for the 31st, again using Twitter and roving a
map.103 The march would coincide with Strategy 31 marches, that is, regular
civic action in support of Article 31 of the Constitution that guarantees
peaceful freedom of assembly.
Leaving street activism to Sobol, Navalny urged Moscow’s electorate to
vote strategically, intimating that rallies were important though not effective.
His ‘Smart Voting’ (Umnoe golosovanie) tactic called on voters to register
their place of voting on a Navalny team website where, on the eve of the elec-
tion, they would receive the name of a candidate of Navalny’s choice.104 The
website included a large photo of Navalny overshadowing one of Putin, with
a caption ‘How we shall defeat United Russia!’105 His bid to control opposi-
tion votes divided the extra-systemic opposition further.106 As it turned out
Sobol’s rally on the 31st was authorized and peaceful. Up to 2,000 people
participated, some chanting ‘Russia without Putin’. Even Sobol took part
without hindrance. Navalny stayed away, and Sobol was arrested a few days
later.
As a result of all the disturbances, several activists were given harsh sen-
tences of up to four years for taking part in illegal protests. Public outcry
helped reduce punishments for some, including that of actor Pavlov Ustinov,
who was found guilty of dislocating a National Guardsman’s shoulder dur-
ing a confrontation at one of the rallies. A Russia court quashed the sentence
after viewing videos showing four guards seizing him while he was scrolling
his phone. Widespread condemnation from celebrities and the general public
prompted his release on bail and a recommendation of leniency.107 Navalny,
Sobol and Ivan Zhdanov were among the speakers in defence of detained
protesters at another rally in Moscow, where 25,000 showed up on 29
September. Also speaking were individuals freed from jail, who stood on a
stage and thanked protesters for helping to secure their release. From their
perspective, the demonstrations were deemed a great success.108
The apparent ease with which such occasions were organized can be
explained in part by the extensive use of foreign sites, Google and Facebook,
and other social media to broadcast time and place of both legal and illegal
demonstrations.109 Russians were aware that the official narrative of foreign
interference was a red herring. Less than a third of respondents to a Levada
Centre survey agreed that Western meddling caused the protests and over 40
 The political arena 105
per cent felt that the police used inappropriate force. Approval and disap-
proval of the protest actions were about equal (23% for, 25% against), and 45
per cent were indifferent to it.110 The latter number was not encouraging for
the opposition.
By the end of the year, 30 people had been prosecuted for their part in the
Moscow affair and about the same number were still under investigation.
Many others had been held briefly and released.111

Regional elections
The 2019 regional elections in September told the tale. United Russia lost
one-third of its seats on the Moscow City Council, cutting its majority to 25
of 45 places. Navalny declared victory for his ‘Smart Voting’ ploy. The CPRF
(13), Yabloko (3) and A Just Russia (3) also took seats in Moscow. Elsewhere,
the UR retained 15 regional governorships and the mayor’s post in St.
Petersburg. The LDPR won a majority of seats in Khabarovsk region, and
the Novosibirsk mayoralty was taken by a Communist. The fact that voter
turnout was only a little over 20 per cent in both Moscow and St. Petersburg
rendered Navalny’s boasts a little overdone. Golos recorded about 2,000
complaints of violations across the country and the police received even
more. St. Petersburg suffered the most infringements of the rules. Eleven
criminal cases were opened in this connection.112
It took a while for the dust to settle. Protesters in Buryatia demanded a
re-run of an election that saw a pro-government candidate narrowly defeat
a Communist Party contender for the mayor’s post in Ulan-Ude. Several of
Navalny’s regional offices were searched by police professing to be investi-
gating a money-laundering scheme operated by the FBK.113 Navalny
insisted that the deed was done because of his ‘smart voting’ approach.114 It
would seem that the state’s tactic now was to bankrupt the Navalny-led
opposition.
In October, a Duma Commission established to investigate foreign media
violations of Russian election law alleged that Deutsche Welle, Meduza, BBC
Russia, MBKh-Media (Khodorkovsky-funded), the RFE/RL, Voice of
America (VOA) and Nastoiashchee vremia (Current Time) had all ‘meddled’
in the elections by promoting protest, taking sides and violating the ‘day-of-
silence’ rule. Nastoiashchee vremia is a Russian-language TV and digital net-
work of the RFE/RL and VOA broadcasting to Russian audiences. Reactions
from deputies ranged from demands that Roskomnadzor ban these outlets
from Russia to fines. No immediate action was taken.115 Later in the year, the
Commission claimed to have discovered ‘training camps’ for protesters in
Russia, funded by foreign NGOs, media and governments. Although the
Commission submitted its findings to federal prosecutors and recommended
legislation restricting such establishments, it was left unclear as to what and
where these sites were; or even if they actually exist.116
Contrary to assertions from Navalny and his supporters in both Russia
and abroad that the popular tide was swinging in his favour, Levada Centre
106 The political arena
polls conducted at the end of October found that only 9 per cent of respon-
dents ‘respected the performance of Navalny’. One quarter of the respon-
dents had a ‘rather negative’ view of the activist, and those who were
‘indifferent’ or knew nothing about him were both at 31 per cent. Nearly 60
per cent knew little or nothing about court proceedings against activists in
the ‘Moscow Affair’ and about half of the respondents had not heard of the
office searches conducted by the FSB. Of those who knew of the searches
their belief was divided almost evenly between respondents who saw them as
a means to suppress opposition (18%), protect the state from the influence of
foreign agents (18%), or curb money laundering (12%).117 If these reactions
represented the norm, then either the state-controlled TV (whence a majority
of Russians still got their news) was doing its job well or the Navalny group
had lost control of the message on social media – or both.
It was also plain that the state had made public political protest riskier, as
the number of arrests and charges levelled against organizers increased expo-
nentially. According to data compiled by OVD-Info in 2019, the number of
protest-related ‘offences’ outlined in Russia’s Administrative Code (Article
20.2) had quadrupled over the previous 15 years, as had the amounts called
for in fines.118

More parties
One consequence of renewed political bustle was the creation of new political
movements, some of which developed into political parties. According to the
Ministry of Justice, some 40 new groups formed in 2019. Critics charged that
some of them were sponsored by the government for the purpose of watering
down the opposition before the 2020 regional elections. Parties that reach the
5 per cent vote minimum in the regionals will be eligible to campaign for the
2021 Duma election without having to collect signatures. Among the new
parties were a Green Alternative, For Truth, Decent Life, Party of Direct
Democracy and many others. To register they needed at least 400 members
and branches in half of the regions. In some cases, funding came from oli-
garchs, who may have been trying to whittle down electoral support for
Navalny or prevent extra-systemic opposition from coalescing around any
one party. By the end of 2019, 59 parties had the right to participate in the
Duma elections and 13 of them could do so without gathering signatures.119

Nationalists – riding high

Right-wing and xenophobic groups have thrived in post-Soviet Russia, draw-
ing international attention first when Zhirinovsky’s LDPR topped all parties
in the 1993 election to the Duma. Neither liberal nor democratic, the LDPR
has earned seats in the House ever since, tending for the most part to support
Putin. Outside the Duma, a wide range of skinheads, neo-fascist movements,
Slavic union groups and patriotic agencies have left their mark. They tend to
act more brazenly than the so-called liberals, and are arrested more often.120
 The political arena 107
In 2018, for instance, a Russian nationalist group ripped to shreds a wreath
laid at Nemtsov’s memorial in October by US National Security Adviser
John Bolton. In Moscow to discuss the INF treaty, Bolton’s rather undiplo-
matic act drew the ire of the South East Radical Bloc (SERB), the extremely
nationalistic anti-Maidan organization blamed in 2017 for throwing green
dye in Navalny’s face, and now called the Russian Liberation Movement
(Russkoe osvobitel’noe dvizhenie).121
Another group is the Russian Imperial Movement (Russkoi Imperskoe
Dvizhenie, RIM), which states that it protects traditional Russian values,
promotes the idea of monarchy and supports Russian territorial expansion.
Headed by Stanislav Vorobev, RIM organizes two paramilitary training
camps in St. Petersburg that attract neo-Nazis from Europe, and has spread
its message to Sweden, Germany and Spain. Russia has proscribed several of
its publications, and the US has declared it a terrorist ‘white supremacist’
organization.122
Since 2014, nationalist movements have played on increased anti-Ukrai-
nian and anti-immigrant sentiments held, according to the Levada Centre, by
up to 20 per cent of the population. On the other hand, anti-Semitism has
decreased and ethnic-centred riots declined.123 Organized annual nationalist
rallies diminished too. A few extremists took advantage of National Unity
Day, 4 November 2018, to parade in several cities. They rallied in the name of
‘Russian march’ (Russkiy marsh), which usually draws a wide range of nation-
alist, patriotic and anti-immigrant groups, and the Right Bloc, whose leaders
were held and released within a day.124 Compared to other kinds of demon-
strations, the extreme right draws smaller, but more aggressive numbers.
Deeply felt nationalist sentiments have spread. Surveys suggested that
about half of Russians approved the notion of ‘Russia for Russians’ in 2018,
and over 70 per cent wanted to limit the influx of foreigners into the country.
Immigrants from the Caucasus and Central Asia were resented the most.
Echoing false generalizations levelled by populists around the world, respon-
dents complained that immigrants bring in crime, take jobs from Russians,
live in ghettos and fail to assimilate.125
Widespread right-wing activity also spawned non-violent, but more con-
servative monarchist movements. One of them, the Double-Headed Eagle
Society (Obshchestvo dvuglavyi orel), hatched about 90 small branches
across the country by 2018. Funded by telecommunications oligarch and
former A Just Russia member, Konstantin Malofeev, it has vocal support
from the Orthodox Church. Its programme includes resurrecting the history
of tsarist Russia and, in current affairs, disparaging United Russia. Criticism
of Putin is ‘absolutely forbidden’ in the Society. In fact, Malofeev insinuated
that if Russia decided to restore the monarchy, Putin might well be a suitable
tsar. Maloveev’s springboard for political activity is a business conglomerate
called Tsargrad, which has had links to Eurasianist Aleksandr Dugin and
the US religious right. Russian authorities have been looking at Malofeev in
connection with tax evasion and fraud, so the future of his movement is
uncertain.126
108 The political arena
Constitutional amendments and the political arena
Some of the constitutional revisions in 2020’s ‘January Revolution’ appealed
particularly to Russian nationalists. One of these was the reference to Russian
as the language of the ‘state-forming’ people. Making criticism of the USSR’s
role in World War II a crime was another overt appeal to nationalist senti-
ments. We have seen that granting Russian law precedence over international
law and banning any attempt to cede existing Russian territories were other
patriotic clauses. 127 Whereas the European Council adopted a resolution urg-
ing Russia to remove the amendment about prioritizing domestic over inter-
national law, one governor epitomized nationalist sentiment by praising the
amendment as a means of taking control of Russian affairs away from ‘Uncle
Sam’.128
The selection of a new prime minister who carried far less political bag-
gage than Medvedev and the introduction of a mixed bag of constitutional
amendments, with something for everyone, left the extra-systemic opposition
with little to say. Before it was clear that there would be a reset of Putin’s
presidential terms, they organized rallies and waved signs calling the amend-
ments a cynical attempt by Putin to retain power by other means, but still had
to join demonstrators with other grievances to boast large turnouts. It took
the reset to bring them out.
In the midst of the confusion, Putin told a TV interviewer that individuals
who participate in unauthorized demonstration should expect to be detained.
The law ‘must be obeyed’, he said, ‘otherwise, the country’s stability will
break down’. He went on to declare that without law, ‘today they throw bot-
tles, tomorrow a chair, and then cars will be smashed. You can’t allow this.’
He recommended that protesters get permission and express their points of
view peacefully, use the internet and media, ‘but why block traffic?’ If groups
break the law collectively, their principals will be arrested and ‘have their
heads shaved’, he joked.129 Plainly, the tightening-up process was not going to
abate.
Putin did not meet with leaders of the four major parties in the Duma until
6 March, after the amendments bill had its first reading. Leader of the UR in
the Duma, Sergei Neverov, Zhirinovsky, Zyuganov and Mironov were joined
by Duma Speaker Volodin and Kiriyenko. Putin chaired the meeting and
told them that many of their proposals had been taken into consideration in
preparation for the second reading and thanked them for their general sup-
port. He asked for solidarity in passing the bill through the next two readings.
They all agreed.130

Political reset
As we have seen, no Duma deputy opposed the clauses that made it possible
for Putin to run again for the presidency, though 43 abstained from the final
vote on the bill. The extra-systemic opposition, however, immediately seized
the moment to organize resistance. Single-person pickets formed outside the
 The political arena 109
Duma and Federation Council buildings and opposition groups applied for
permission to organize demonstrations later in the month.
They were handicapped by the fact that, one day before the Duma vote,
Sobyanin banned all ‘sports, entertainment, public and other mass events’ in
Moscow that might attract over 5,000 participants.131 The fact that he had
warned earlier that shutdowns were expected in order to curb the spread of
the coronavirus and Rospotrebnadzor had already cautioned people to avoid
crowded public spaces, did not prevent critics from accusing Sobyanin of
issuing the ban to limit actions against the constitutional reforms.132
Whether the pandemic was used as an excuse to muzzle activists or not, as
it grew more serious Moscow was locked down and all public meetings were
curtailed. New faces took over the political screen. Sobyanin earned a larger
share of television time than even Mishustin. Putin’s close allies, such as
Volodin, Matviyenko and, to a lesser extent, Lavrov and Shoigu, all appeared
more often during the crisis period than the usually prominently displayed
Zyuganov, Zhirinovsky and Mironov, who practically disappeared from
sight. Whether this was a natural phenomenon because of COVID-19, or
evidence of a power swing bringing the city of Moscow and cabinet more in
line with the presidential administration – or separating from it – remained to
be seen. The old Bolshevik challenge, kto-kogo? (lit. who-whom? Or, who will
win?), was the gist of questions asked by many observers of the Russian
political scene.
Jarred by frequent political outbursts from outside the Duma, Putin co-
opted some of Navalny’s agenda in his proposals for constitutional changes.
In addition to transferring more power to the prime minister’s office and the
Duma, that is, to elected officials, emphasis in his annual address to the
Federal Assembly on a social contract and poverty reduction, while insisting
that Russia needed to be a strong presidential republic, provided talking
points for his political supporters. Whether his appeals to popular sentiment
were responsible or not, reaction on the streets was relatively calm. In addi-
tion to the Manifesto mentioned in Chapter 1, a crowd of 1,500 demonstrated
peacefully in Moscow five days after the address. Ilya Yashin announced an
anti-Putin event to coincide with February’s march in memory of Boris
Nemtsov.133 At that authorized rally of up to 22,000 (city officials said 10,000)
in Moscow with smaller ones in St. Petersburg and Yekaterinburg, the consti-
tutional issue was less prominent than continued anger over Nemtsov’s fate
and other political issues.134 Overall, in fact, the first public reactions to the
proposed amendments were slightly more favourable than unfavourable.
Echo Moscow (Ekho Moskvy) broadcast and then printed another open
letter on 15 March, signed by over 350 scientists, journalists, lawyers and
writers who called the change in presidential terms in office an ‘unlawful anti-
constitutional coup in pseudo-legal form’. Citing articles in the existing
Constitution that rendered, in their opinion, the proposed changes illegal,
they urged all concerned citizens to reject the amendment.135 Neither the let-
ter, the manifesto, nor demonstrations had any influence whatsoever on the
Administration.
110 The political arena
Back to work – Pandemic, Khabarovsk and Navalny variables
Politics and the pandemic
All major parties rallied around the flag during the pandemic. There were
some public complaints against compulsory workplace closings, for which
employees demanded compensation. This was particularly true in the North
Caucasus, where the National Guard detained several leaders in North
Ossetia and forbade video-taking.136 In Chechnya, Kadyrov warned doctors
and journalists not to complain about shortages in medical supplies and in
Moscow, several city councillors called for on-line rallies urging government
to provide more financial aid to people who lost jobs because of self-isolation
restrictions, small businesses that were required to continue paying full sala-
ries after shutdowns, and amnesties for prisoners. Protest placards were
shown on line as well.137
Not to be left out, Navalny launched a campaign on YouTube that he
called the ‘5-steps for Russia’ (5 shagov dlia Rossii). He urged people to join
a public campaign to persuade the government to issue universal coronavirus
payouts of specific amounts to adults and children: ₽20,000 ($260) per adult
and ₽10,000 per child from Russia’s reserve funds. In addition to the indi-
vidual remuneration, he demanded cancellation of utility payments, a gen-
eral relief fund for small and medium-sized businesses and cancellation of all
2020 taxes for them. Navalny drew over two million viewers within hours of
his post appearing.138
In fact, the pandemic period saw Navalny make his greatest inroads on the
public consciousness. Almost always close to the bottom of pollster lists of
personalities whom the public trusted or knew much about, Navalny sud-
denly found himself among the most ‘inspiring’ Russian celebrities in a sur-
vey conducted by the Levada Centre in April 2020. Overall, he placed behind
Putin and ahead of Shoigu, Zhirinovsky, Lavrov and Sobyanin in that order
and ahead of Putin in the 40–54 age group.139 The questionnaire was open-
ended and respondents were asked to list names as they came to mind. This
was not an assessment of trust or confidence; rather, it asked for names of
people who ‘inspired’ by their civic activity. Whatever the reason for this
change in Navalny’s public profile, it was a good sign for the opposition going
forward, and perhaps an ominous one for Putin and United Russia. It may
also have been the trigger for an assassination attempt in August (see ahead),
especially as Navalny took credit for compensation packages that the govern-
ment had been planning well before the ‘5 Steps’ appeared.
Acutely conscious of unrest in Siberia and the North Caucasus, which was
exacerbated by the political tumult in Khabarovsk (see ahead) and a huge
spike in coronavirus cases beginning in October, Putin allocated large sums
of money specifically to the regions to help manage the pandemic (see
Chapter 9) and, though he didn’t say so, to defuse frustrations before they
became too political.
Perhaps the most egregious political exploitation of the pandemic,
however, was the Communist Party’s attempt to take advantage of the
 The political arena 111
anti-vaccination mood (see Chapter 9) by distributing leaflets comparing
the vaccine campaign to a ‘rebirth of fascism’ (vozrozhdeniem fashizma)
and called the vaccine a ‘nanotech product that will radiate an electro-
magnet field’ causing death.140

Back to political theatre

In their turn, political oppositionists tried to harness on-line and social media
to suit their agenda needs. For example, plans were laid for a debate on
Facebook between Navalny and Maria Zakharova, spokesperson for the
Ministry of Foreign Affairs. These plans fell through because of disagree-
ment over the use of a moderator, or so the official version went. Navalny
continued to grant interviews on YouTube and he, and others, kept their blog
sites active.141 The ‘No’ campaign against the constitutional amendments
proceeded on-line, meeting on 28 April with Dmitry Gudkov, publisher Irina
Prokhorova and economist Sergei Guriev among the speakers. They tended
to focus on the pandemic more than the Constitution.142
Scattered protests against the constitutional amendments continued, while
police mostly stood aside. One of them, made up of several hundred people,
came together on Pushkin Square in Moscow on All-Russia Vote day. Not
authorized, it still proceeded peacefully while police wandered among dem-
onstrators warning them of its illegality and handing out protective masks.
Single pickets chanted anti-Putin refrains and carried placards with phrases
such as ‘Down with the Tsar’, ‘Putin forever’, with the ‘forever’ heavily
crossed out, ‘Putin the thief’, and face masks with ‘No’ emblazoned on
them.143 Several municipal deputies and lots of reporters attended. The gath-
ering fell far short of Navalny’s hopes in both numbers and vocalized anger,
but the message was carried in the Russia media.

Unrest in the regions

The first big post-vote rally had nothing to do with the Constitution. It came
in Khabarovsk, the largest city in Russia’s Far East, where over 10,000 chal-
lenged the arrest on 9 July of popular Governor Sergei Furgal. Accused of
murdering business competitors 15 years earlier, the former LDPR deputy
was ordered confined for two months as a ‘preventative measure’ while the
FSB gathered evidence. Whether the charges against Furgal were accurate, or
not, the appearance of a political vendetta was plain – he had defeated a
Kremlin-supported candidate in the gubernatorial race of 2018. Just as
Furgal was taken away, police seized two more LDPR members of the
regional Duma for fraud, and searched the homes of three other party
members.144
Furgal denied the charges. According to Navalny, the street protest was the
largest in the region’s history. Local websites showed marchers shouting
‘Moscow go away’ and shouting ‘Freedom!’ and ‘Furgal is our choice’. The
LDPR organized a petition calling for Furgal’s release.145 Smaller marches
112 The political arena
took place in Khabarovsk and Komsomol-on-Amur the next day, as local
officials complained about ‘provocative slogans’ and warned that all such
gatherings were illegal during the pandemic.146 There was very little reaction
from Moscow even as tens of thousands turned out in Khabarovsk for the
next five Saturdays in a row, most of them in support of Furgal, but increas-
ingly with anti-Kremlin messages. By that time the demonstrators were sup-
ported by similar crowds in Vladivostok.147 Navalny cheered them on by
Instagram. In addition to its obvious political implications this protest was a
further sign of festering hostility in the regions towards Moscow.
The Kremlin was well aware of widespread discontent, and acted to fore-
stall more serious actions. The unauthorized protests were, for the most part,
allowed to proceed by police with only a few detainees, and Putin named
LDPR Duma deputy Mikhail Degtyarev as Furgal’s temporary replacement.
Attempting to mollify the crowds, Degtyarev announced that Mishustin
promised an additional ₽1.3 billion to the territory, purportedly to compen-
sate for lost incomes, though more likely to appease the protesters.148
As the protest rallies continued, Degtyarev stated that he had ‘irrefutable
evidence’ that foreign agents were organizing them, but even Peskov debunked
this old Kremlin-style trick. He allowed, instead, that there might be opposi-
tionist ‘special brawlers’ moving in. Local authorities had everything well in
hand, Peskov continued, and no help from Moscow was necessary.149 No
matter that Degtyarev was a member of the LDPR, he was treated as a car-
petbagger by the local citizenry and even by some local party officials. If his
appointment was part of an attempt by Putin to keep the in-house political
parties on side, it didn’t seem to be working very well.150
The weekly (Saturdays) demonstrations showed no let-up, though police
began arresting leading participants.151 For example, when on 15 August soli-
darity processions were held in 16 regions of Russia, police detained from
one to six individuals in Tver, Chelyabinsk, Novosibirsk, Krasnoyarsk,
Vladivostok and Khabarovsk. OVD-Info published regular lists of detainees
along with the charges laid against them. Most were released within the day;
a few spent a night in jail. Official reaction remained subdued until 10
October, when police beat demonstrators and apprehended over 20 partici-
pants. The unauthorized processions grew smaller and quieter, yet they con-
tinued into December as weekly fare.152 The fact that they were openly
anti-Putin made the rallies unique in Siberian activism and made it unlikely
that the president could come in on his white horse and save the situation.
Siberia was not the only site for post-Vote actions against oppositionists.
Police raided the homes of several Open Russia adherents in Moscow and
Tomsk. These included homes of a Moscow municipal councillor and the
chief editor of the oppositionist MBKh-Media, Sergei Prostakov. The orga-
nization had planned protests against the amended Constitution for 15 July,
when about 1,000 gathered to sign a class action suit against the constitu-
tional revisions.153 In what could only be interpreted as a national crackdown,
Navalny’s Moscow office was raided again and he was prevented from leaving
Moscow because of new criminal investigation opened against him. Police
 The political arena 113
also raided Mediazona, accused a LGBT artist of ‘gay propaganda’, and
searched a Pussy Riot activist’s house. Journalists were charged with abetting
terrorism, or even treason.154 Bystanders caught many of the police actions
against individuals and offices on video and distributed pictures by social
media.

A Navalny riddle, again

A bigger post-Vote shock to Russia’s political world came on 20 August when
Navalny was rushed to a hospital in Siberia. He had gone there to support
independent candidates running for posts in September’s regional elections
and fell seriously ill during a flight from Tomsk to Moscow. The plane made
an emergency landing in Omsk, where he was treated with atropine, intuba-
tion and mechanical ventilation. Russian oppositionists and Western com-
mentators immediately assumed that he was poisoned and denounced Putin
and the Russia state. The Kremlin wished him a ‘speedy recovery’. After 48
hours of mixed messages from doctors, officials and political partisans,
Moscow allowed a chartered medical jet from Germany to fly Navalny to
Berlin for treatment.155 The health ministry in Omsk insisted that no poisons
had been found in Navalny’s system.
After 10 days in Berlin with Navalny in a medically induced coma, the
German government pronounced, ‘unequivocally’, that he had been poi-
soned with a substance from the Novichok (Novice) group, that is, the mili-
tary-grade toxin used in the Skripal affair in 2018. The incident then became
a cause célèbre in the new Cold War. Merkel, Macron, Boris Johnson and
Pompeo demanded that Russia conduct full and transparent investigations,
seek out the guilty parties and hold them accountable. Russian police said
they were conducting a preliminary probe to establish ‘all circumstance of
the incident’.
Shortly after Navalny emerged from the coma, on 15 September, his team
members claimed that they found and preserved three courtesy water bottles
from his hotel room in Tomsk only a few hours after they learned of his ill-
ness. They smuggled the bottles and Navalny’s clothes out of Tomsk to
Germany, where military medics found traces of Novichok on the neck of
one of the bottles. Here’s where the riddles set in.
Several people entered the room without protective gear (a video showed
at least one in bare feet), yet neither they nor anyone else was infected. Labs
in France and Sweden confirmed the German finding. For some inexplicable
reason, they all refused to submit evidence of any kind to Russia.156 One can
only wonder how a ‘full and transparent investigation’ could be possible in
Russia when the crime scene had been tampered with, ‘evidence’ stolen and
all discoveries in Germany remained closed to Russian investigators?157
Similarities to riddles and inconsistencies surrounding the Skripal door knob
case were striking (see Chapter 5).
After a month in hospital, Navalny was released with prospects of full
recovery. Now he had to decide where to go. His flat in Moscow and his
114 The political arena
financial assets had been seized as a result of a lawsuit launched against him
by the Moscow Schoolchild catering company owned by Yevgeny Prigozhin,
an associate of Putin. Navalny and the FBK had circulated a video accusing
the company of responsibility for an outbreak of dysentery in Moscow
schools in 2018. One of the catering companies, Moskovsky Shkolnik
(Moscow School Student), filed a defamation suit in April 2019; a court
ordered Navalny, Sobol and the FBK to pay a large fine. They had not done
so, which is why Navalny needed special permission to leave the country.158
All ‘sides’ read from an old playbook. In October, Navalny told Der Spiegel
that Putin was ‘behind this act’. Peskov continued to complain that the
Kremlin had seen no evidence that he had even been poisoned. He and
Volodin called Navalny a puppet of the West, working with the CIA. Peskov
added that, by allowing him to go to Germany, Putin may have saved his life.
Conspiracy theories proliferated.159
Answering a Levada survey conducted during the last week of September,
only 9 per cent of respondents expressed outrage over Navalny’s fate, 21 per
cent felt sympathy for him and 45 per cent didn’t care. 55 per cent did not
believe that he was ‘intentionally poisoned’, if he was poisoned at all. Queried
about his activities in general, 50 per cent disapproved and 20 per cent
approved. That and other surveys showed that, while his name was now well-
known (82%), support for his politics was still low.160
A questionnaire distributed by Levada a month later asking respondents
to list five or six politicians and public figures whom they trusted saw Putin
again at the top and even improving his numbers, at 34 per cent, Mishustin
came next (13%) and Zhirinovsky third (12%). Zyuganov and Navalny
were tied for 8th with 4 per cent.161 These rankings changed very little in
December when respondents were asked who they would vote for if an
election was held that weekend: Putin (38%), Zhirinovsky (4%), Zyuganov
and Navalny (2%). However closely, or loosely, these numbers represented
public sentiment, one can safely conclude from them that Putin’s star still
rode high among Russians and Navalny’s did not. Several Russian analysts
concluded that reasons for both figures included the reaction of many
Russians to the West’s harsh and immediate criticisms of Putin over the
Navalny case.162
Blaming Putin is too easy, though not necessarily inaccurate. As one
Western author put it, ‘Navalny has assembled no shortage of specific ene-
mies: prosecutors, governors, oligarchs, not to mention shadowy officials
from the powerful security services and the Kremlin’s inner sanctum.’ The
many individuals and organizations that Navalny has taken to court could
also be suspect. Any one of these might have done the deed on their own
recognizance, without Putin’s knowledge, for the Kremlin is acutely aware
that such acts harm the state both at home and abroad. Putinism itself is the
problem, the writer went on, calling it a system that has allowed violence
against opposition figures to become a ‘normal aspect’ of Russian political
life. If this is the reality, then the regime will have an increasingly fraught
lifespan.163
 The political arena 115
Tatiana Stanovaya, a Russian critic of Putin’s regime, also said it was
‘doubtful’ that Putin ordered the assassination attempt, primarily because it
could turn Navalny into a ‘hero’ just as the September elections were coming
up. Instead, she wrote, people who were seeking revenge for his corruption
revelations, or special service personnel who voluntarily thought they were
helping the regime, were more likely suspects.164
Questioned directly about the Navalny case by a German guest at the
Valdai Club in October, Putin asked why, if his government was responsible,
would it send him for treatment to Germany? ‘Immediately, as soon as the
wife of this citizen turned to me, I immediately instructed the prosecutor’s
office to check the possibility of sending him abroad for treatment, … because
he had restrictions related to the judicial investigation and criminal case. … I
immediately asked the General Prosecutor’s Office for permission to do this.’
Putin went on to charge the German establishment with obstructing the
investigation in Russia by refusing to produce any evidence to back up their
accusations.165
The issue came up again, at some length, in a December meeting of the
presidential Council for the Development of Civil Society and Human
Rights. Asked again why there was no criminal investigation underway in the
‘odious’ Navalny matter, Putin replied that no case can be opened without
documentation and, in spite of multiple requests by the PGO, German offi-
cials still had sent none, nor would they agree to offers of Russian scientists
to go abroad for information: ‘Nobody invites us. We invited them, they
won’t come. No official materials are provided. Biological materials are not
provided. What can we do?’166
A few days later a widely-circulated combined CNN–Bellingcat–Der
Spiegel–The Insider report identified an FSB team (with toxin experts among
them) that, they claimed, had been following Navalny since 2017. Although
no one should have been surprised that the FSB was keeping track of
Navalny’s movements, the report took detailed information about the FSB
surveillance as proof that the FSB committed the crime on the Kremlin’s
orders.167 Lavrov and other Russian diplomats scoffed at the report, and
Putin told international journalists that he assumed the report was prepared
by US ‘special services’. Of course, he added, the FSB kept a watch on him,
but Russian agents could not have poisoned him: ‘If they really wanted [to
poison him], they would have finished the job’.168
Absent German evidence, the MVD’s Siberian branch again announced
that the doctors who treated Navalny for two days confirmed the original
diagnosis of ‘disruption of carbohydrate metabolism and chronic pancreati-
tis’.169 They were challenged on 22 December by The Lancet, which published
the German case report confirming the poisoning.170
The real bombshell came the day before that. In a 49-minute YouTube
video, Navalny presented a telephone interview he conducted with one of the
FSB men who had been tailing him. By pretending to be an assistant to
Nikolai Patrushev, Navalny was able to lure the agent, Konstantin
Kudryavtsev, into admitting that poison had been applied to the crotch of
116 The political arena
Navalny’s underwear by men from the toxin team who broke into his room.
Navalny’s video was viewed 12 million times within hours, and the Russian
Internet filled up with memes playing on the underwear theme.171 Caught
with his pants down, the Kremlin’s Peskov accused Navalny of ‘pronounced
delusions of persecution’, megalomania and ‘an obsession with his own cod-
piece zone’. 172
Among many other things, the Navalny and Skripal affairs demonstrate
that the agencies, or individuals, who wanted them dead are staggeringly inef-
fectual. At any rate, after five months Navalny was still in Germany, ponder-
ing a return to Russia where he could face prison terms for a variety of real
or made-up crimes.

First test: Regional elections, September 2020

The first post-poisoning political test for the government came with the
regional elections set for three days, 11–13 September. Twenty-two regions
elected municipal deputies, 18 governors, 11 regional legislatures and four
State Duma deputies in 41 of the 85 regions. A Levada Centre survey con-
ducted in late August showed support for the UR down to 31 per cent. The
LDPR (11%), CPRF (7%) and ten other lesser parties did not fare well either.
Nearly a quarter of the respondents said they would not vote.173 By vote time,
with the Navalny and Furgal issues still making headlines and the spectre of
a second wave in the pandemic looming, government forces were clearly
under enormous pressure.
As results trickled in both the UR and Navalny’s team declared victories,
the UR because its choices won in all 18 contested governorships and it
maintained majorities in the 11 regional legislatures where elections were
held. Navalny’s team boasted that its ‘Smart Voting’ tactic was successful in
several city councils and in one by-election for a Duma seat. Two of Navalny’s
political allies won seats on the Tomsk city council and another took a seat
on the Novosibirsk council. Pamfilova stated that there were no major viola-
tions of election protocols; Golos said it received over a thousand complaints
from 57 regions. The Public Chamber and presidential human rights council
sided with Pamfilova.174 In reality, neither side proved anything. The UR
maintained its leadership role, even as its overall popularity crept lower.
Navalny gained little. All political eyes now are on the general election set for
September 2021.
***
An early sign came just before the end of October. As Table 3.2 demonstrated,
Navalny was still not the answer to the old question, ‘if not Putin, who?’ That
did not mean that the Navalny phenomenon could be shrugged off. His
promise to return to Russia when he recovered was taken as a threat by some
and as a portent for political rejuvenation by others. Russian law enforcement
decided, in November, to investigate an interview granted by Navalny in
April in which he said that the ‘regime should be overthrown right now’ if it
 The political arena 117
didn’t take more steps to counter the effects of COVID-19, and treat it as an
incitement to terrorism.175
The Duma stepped in as well, adopting eight bills in December that restrict
protest activity. Dubbed the ‘Vyatkin Package’ because six of them were
introduced by UR deputy Dmitry Vyatkin, they ban foreign funding for pro-
test organizers and make the areas outside police and security buildings rally-
free zones. Single-pickets may now be labelled as ‘mass rallies’ and municipal
officials can now cancel protest authorization at the last minute. Social media
must now block information about unauthorized assemblies, and authorities
are given more time to respond to applications. Critics saw these bills as a
direct challenge to freedom of assembly in Russia, rightly All three opposi-
tion parties in the Duma voted against, but stood little chance against the
UR majority.176
The Duma enacted legislation providing prison sentences, rather than just
fines, for heads of NGOs that refuse to register as ‘enemy agents’ when
ordered to do so, and taking voting rights away from Russian citizens
employed by ‘foreign agent’ NGOs. Campaigning on the Internet was also
made difficult and fines for libel were increased, and Roskomnadzor gained
more power to block websites and social media if their messages were deemed
to threaten the national interest. More areas, e.g. around the MVD and FSB
buildings, were designated free from political action, including single pick-
ets.177 The state stood ready for any renewed post-Navalny poisoning, post
pandemic political uproar.
Insofar as political parties were concerned, the Navalny affair appeared to
have very little effect on voter preferences. A survey conducted by the Levada
Centre in late November found that the UR still rode far higher than any
other party, at 29 per cent support, with the LDPR the only other entity with
a two-digit following (11%). Three separate communist parties competing
with each other showed that Zyuganov was still incapable of uniting the
Marxist stream, and the fact that 35 per cent would not vote, were uncommit-
ted or would spoil their ballot did not speak well for the Russian party
system.178
***
The constitutional changes of 2020 granted the State Duma a few more
powers, yet it stayed in the hands of the UR, with the CPRF and LDPR
amounting to little more than decoration. Real political activity endured on
the streets and in social media. The degree to which that activity could
change the state of affairs in Russia depended almost entirely on the reset
presidency.

Notes
1 For the 2007 State Duma election, see documentation in REDA, 2007. Vol. 1
(2009), Chapter 3, passim.
2 ‘Federal’nyi zakon ot 11 iulia 2001 g. N 95-F3 “O politicheskikh partiiakh”’,
Rossiiskaia Gazeta, 11 July 2001. See also REDA 2001, Vol. 1, (2002), p. 50.
118 The political arena
3 For an outline, see IMR Institute of Modern Russia Report, ‘Russia Under Putin:
20 Years of Protest’, 26 March 2020, https://putin20.imrussia.org/en/.
4 See items in REDA, Chapter 7, Vol. 1, 2004 & 2005.
5 Rebecca Di Leonardo, ‘Russia President Signs Law Re-Criminalizing Libel and
Slander’, Jurist, 30 July 2012; see also Vedomosti, 6 July 2012, and Black, Putin’s
Third Term, pp. 60–5.
6 ‘Kak rabotaiut glavnye obshchestvennye instituty Rossii’, VTsIOM, 20 November
2018, https://wciom.ru/index.php?id=236&uid=94536,
7 ‘Edinaia Rossiia’, Levada-tsentr, 4 December 2018, www.levada.ru/2018/12/04/
edinaya-rossiya; ‘Chislo rossiian, polozhitel’no i otritsatel’no otnosiashchikhsia k
“Edinoi Rossii” pochti sravnialos’, Vedomosti, 4 December 2018.
8 ‘Putin poruchil edinorossam stat’ partei proryvnogo razvitiia Rossii’, Vedomosti,
8 December 2018; ‘President spoke at the congress of the party “United Russia”’,
Kremlin.ru, 8 December 2018, kremlin.ru/events/president/news/59359.
9 For speeches and resolutions at the Congress, see party website https://er.ru/core/
news/subject/145.html.
10 ‘Politicheskie indicatory. Reitingi politikov’, FOM, 23 May 2019, bd.fom.ru/pdf/
d20p12019.pdf; Olga Churakova, ‘Kak KPRF budet zhit’ posle prezidentskikh
vyborov’, Vedomosti, 27 March 2018.
11 ‘Reiting V. Putina i partii “Edinaia Rossiia”’, FOMinbus, bd.fom.ru/pdf/
d39pi2018.pdf; ‘Support for Russia’s Ruling Party Drops to 10-Year Lows, Poll
Says’, The Moscow Times, 5 October 2018.
12 ‘Deputat posovetoval Putinu uiti v otstavku, ne dozhidaias’, “kogda vynesut
vpered nogami”’, Znak, 9 October 2018; ‘Deputy Calls on Putin to Resign Before
“Being Dragged Out Feet First”’, The Moscow Times, 9 October 2018.
13 ‘Zhironovskii stal vtorym po urovniu doveriia politikom’, Levada-tsentr, 12
October 2020, https://www.levada.ru/2020/10/12/zhirinovskij-stal-vytorym-po-
urovnyu-doveriya-politikom-reiting-putina-ot-skandala-s-otravleniem-ne-post-
radal/.
14 ‘Russian Parties Receive Record-Setting Public Funds’, The Moscow Times, 15
June 2018.
15 For an editorial on precisely this matter, see ‘Oppozitsiia deistvuet po printsipu
“potom razberemsia”. Protivniki vlasti ne govoriat, kak budut rukovodit’ stranoi
posle smeny rezhima’, Nezavisimaia gazeta, 26 December 2018. For background,
see Cameron Ross, ed. Systemic and Non-Systemic Opposition in the Russian
Federation. Civil Society Wakens? London: Routledge, 2017.
16 Anna Dolgov, ‘Instagram Removes Kadyrov’s Video of Russian Opposition in
the Crosshairs’, The Moscow Times, 2 February 2016.
17 Dana Litvinova, ‘Navalny Launches New Lawsuit Against Russian Prosecutor
General’, The Moscow Times, 25 January 2016; ‘Russian Opposition Leader
Navalny Files Lawsuit Against Putin’, The Moscow Times, 11 February 2016;
‘Russian Opposition Leader Attacked in Moscow Restaurant’, The Moscow
Times, 10 February 2016. For the ‘liberal’ comment on Navalny, Putin’s Third
Term, op. cit., p. 79, endnote #88.
18 ‘Po slovam zheny Kara-Murza, sostoianie ee myzha stabilizirovalos’, no ostaetsia
tiazhelym’, Vedomosti, 7 February 2017.
19 Wolf Blitzer in the Situation Room, CNN, 8 February 2017. Kara-Murza’s wife
and children live in the USA and she was interviewed from her home in Virginia.
‘Opposition figure Kara-Murza out of coma, father denies allegations of poison-
ing’, RT, 9 February 2017. The RT is, of course, a state organ and so rightfully
suspect; but the more reliable Moskovsky Komsomolets carried an interview with
Kara-Muza Sr., who again denied that his son was poisoned.
20 See, e.g. Michelle Zilio, ‘Russian dissident calls on West to take stand against
Putin’, Globe and Mail, 1 June 2017.
 The political arena 119
21 ‘Doverie politikam’, VTsIOM, 15 April 2018, https://wcviom.ru/news/ratings/
doveriue_politikam/. The survey was conducted on 8 April among 1,000 people in
at least 80 Russian regions.
22 ‘Navalny Calls for Russian Protests Before Putin’s Inauguration’, The Moscow
Times, 13 April 2018.
23 ‘Bulk Team’, https://vk.com/wall-55284725_791667, 28 April & 4 May 2018. For
Navalny’s speech, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zgJwJIL08o&feature=yo
utu.be&t=3v?8.
24 ‘Russian Police Round Up Navalny Allies Ahead of Inauguration Protests’, The
Moscow Times, 4 May 2018. On Pussy Riot, see Black, The Russian Presidency of
Dmitry Medvedev, pp. 85–6.
25 For descriptions, see OVD-Info website, www.opendemocracy.net/author/ovd-
info, which monitors police repressive activities in Russia.
26 ‘23 Journalists Detained or Beaten at Anti-Putin Rallies Before Inauguration’,
The Moscow Times, 7 May 2018.
27 ‘Navalny Sentenced to 20 Days After Month-Long Jail Stint’, The Moscow Times,
25 September 2018; ‘Sud arestoval Alekseia Naval’nogo na 30 sutok’, Kommersant,
27 August 2018; ‘Navalny Sentenced to 30 Days Ahead of Pension Protests’, The
Moscow Times, 27 August 2018. See also Vedomosti, 24 September 2018
28 ‘Naval’ny rasskazal o vizite k sledovateliiu iz-za dela o klevete’, Vedomosti, 15
October 2018.
29 ‘On Second Try, Navalny Leaves Russia for European Court Ruling’, RFE/RL, 14
November 2018.
30 European Court of Human Rights, ‘Grand Chamber judgement concerning the
Russian Federation’, https://echr.coe.int/Pages/home.aspx?p=home, 15 November
2018; Leonid Bershidsky, ‘A Dissident Wins a Bittersweet Victory Over Putin’,
Bloomberg, 16 November 2018.
31 Andrew Higgins, ‘As Putin Era Begins to Wane, Russia Unleashes a Sweeping
Crackdown’, The New York Times, 24 October 2019; Evan Gershkovich, ‘Arrest
of Navalny Aide Highlights Latest Trend in Protest Clampdown in Russia’, The
Moscow Times, 17 June 2019.
32 ‘Kto zhdet protestov’, Levada-tsentr, www.levada.ru/2018/05/08/kto-
zhdet=protestov/; ‘100 Years After Revolution, Protests in Russia Are on the
Rise’, The Moscow Times, 7 November 2017.
33 ‘Attacks on Russian Activists and Journalists on the Rise, NGO Warns’, The
Moscow Times, 21 September 2018; for Agora website: mstrok.ru/news/
mezhdunarodnaya-pravozashchitnaya-gruppa-agora-zapustila-proekt-
apologiya-protesta-dlya.
34 Federal’nyi zakon, No. 377-F3, publication.pravo.gov.ru/Document/View/000120
1810310006?index=3&rangeSize=1, 30 October 2018.
35 ‘Mitrokhin uidet s posta rukovoditelia moskovskogo “Yabloka” posle vyborov
mera’, Vedomosti, 12 May 2018.
36 ‘Partiia Naval’nogo budet nazvyvat’sia “Rossiia budushchego”’, Interfax, 19 May
2018.
37 ‘Dmitrii Gudkov vozglavil Partiiu peremen. Ksenia Sobchak voshla v politsovet
partii’, Vedomosti, 23 June 2018; ‘How one of Navalny’s former staffers teamed
up with a notorious strategist to steal his political party’, Meduza, 22 February
2018.
38 See Birgit Beumers et alia, eds. Cultural Forms of Protest in Russia. London:
Routledge, 2017; Mischa Gabowitsch, Protest in Putin’s Russia. London:
Routledge, 2017; Samuel A. Greene, Graeme B. Robertson, Putin v. the People:
The Perilous Politics of a Divided Russia. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2019; Tsentr
sotsial’no-trudovykh prav, ‘Kak protestuiut rossiiane’, September 2019, http://
trudprava.ru/images/content/Monitoring_2_Quart_2019.pdf.
120 The political arena
39 ‘“Red Darya Polyudova Arrested Again’, The Russian Reader, 18 January 2020;
‘Imprisoned Russian Activist Facing Abuse Behind Bars, Mother Says’, RFE/
RL, 7 September 2017.
40 Twitter.com/brewerov/status/1006439558001709057, 12 June 2018; ‘Open Russia
Activists Detained in Far East Office Opening’, The Moscow Times, 12 June 2018.
41 ‘Police Raid Open Russia’s Offices After Khodorkovsky Live Feed’, The Moscow
Times, 28 February 2019; Khodorkovsky tweet, ‘Politsiia pytaetsia popast’ v ofis
“Otkrytoi Rossii” v Moskve’, mbk-news.appspot.com/news/policiya-otkrytoj, 27
February 2019; ‘First Victim of Russia’s “Undesirable Organization” Law
Declared Prisoner of Conscience’, The Moscow Times, 25 January 2019; ‘Russian
Opposition Rallies Calling for Release of Political Prisoners’, The Moscow Times,
10 February 2019.
42 ‘V Moskve zaderzhali troikh uchadtynikov skhoda v podderzhku Azat
Miftakhova’, OVD-Info, 2 March 2019.
43 Yevgenia Kuznetsova, ‘Center for Economic and Political Reform: Protests on
Rise in Russia’, The Russian Reader, 10 July 2017.
44 ‘Medvedev otpravil v otstavku rukovoditelia Rosprirodnadzor’, Vedomosti, 3 July
2018; ‘Thousands in Russia’s North Protest Moscow Landfills, Demand
Governor’s Resignation’, The Moscow Times, 8 April 2019; ‘Eight More Activists
Detained in Northern Russia Following Landfill Protests’, The Moscow Times, 10
April 2019; Richard Arnold, ‘Ongoing Environmental Protests in Russia Pose
Threat to Kremlin in 2019’, Eurasia Daily Monitor, 23 January 2019.
45 Karina Zabolotnaya, Robert Coalson, ‘Russian Landfill Protesters Grapple With
What Comes Next Following Court Win’, RFE/RL, 2 November 2020.
46 ‘Miting za otstavku gubernatora Ussa: “Lesnye pozhary stali tochkoi kipeniia”’,
Regnum, 2 August 2019; Evan Gershkovich, ‘As Anger Simmer Over Wildfires,
Protesters Demand Resignation of Siberian Governor’, The Moscow Times, 2
August 2019; Ekaterina Mereminskaia, ‘Stroitel’stvo musornogo poligona v
Arkhangel’skoi oblasti priostanoviat’, Vedomosti, 15 May 2019; ‘Violence Erupts
Between Protesters, Riot Police at Russian Landfill Site’, The Moscow Times, 4
June 2019; ‘Clashes Erupt at New Garbage Protests in Moscow Suburb’, The
Moscow Times, 16 July 2019.
47 ‘Dozens Arrested in Russian City Rocked by Protests Against Church Building’,
The Moscow Times, 16 May 2019; ‘Russian Mayor Halts Church Construction
Amid Protests, Clashes’, The Moscow Times, 16 May 2019; ‘Russian Officials
Scrap Yekerinburg Church Plan After Public Outcry’, RFE/RL, 23 May 2019.
48 Ivan Zhilin, ‘V Bashkortostane tysiachi chelovek vyshli na aktsiiu v zashchitu
shikhana Kushtay’, Novaia gazeta, 9 August 2020.
49 See Lauri Mälksoo, Wolfgang Benedek, eds. Russia and the European Court of
Human Rights: The Strasbourg Effect. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2017.
50 ‘Povyshenie pensionnogo vozrasta: reaktsii grazhdan’, Fond obshchestvennoe mne-
nie (FOM), 29 June 2018, fom.ru/Ekonomika/14057.
51 ‘“Edinaia Rossiia” edinoglasno poddershit pensionnuiu reformu’, Kommersant,
16 July 2018.
52 ‘Protestnye-nastroeniya’, Levada-tsentr, 1 July 2018, www.levada.ru/2018/08/01/
proytestnye-nastroeniya/; ‘Gotovnost;’ rossiian k protestam vernuklas’ k dokrym-
skomu maksimumu’, Vedomosti, 1 August 2018; ‘Russians’ Willingness to Protest
is Highest in 2 Decades, Survey Says’, The Moscow Times, 1 August 2018.
53 ‘TsIK odobrila tri voprosa dlia referenduma po pensionnomu vozrastu’,
Vedomosti, 8 August 2018; ‘Russia Approves Petitions for Referendum on
Retirement Age Hike’, The Moscow Times, 8 August 2018.
54 ‘Referendum o povyshenii pensionnogo vozrasta’, Levada-tsentr, 3 September 2018,
www.levada.ru/2018/09/03/referendum-protiv-povysheniye-pensionnogo-vazrasta/.
The survey was conducted 23–30 August, with the participation of 1,600 people
over the age of 18 in 136 cities and villages located in 52 components of the RF.
 The political arena 121
55 See ‘Russian Opposition Candidates Beaten, Cars Torched Ahead of Elections’,
The Moscow Times, 6 September 2018; ‘U rossiian pribavilos’ problemu: Levada-
tsentr zafiksiroval rezkii rost napriazhennosti v obshchestve’, Kommersant, 6
September 2018.
56 ‘Zaderzhaniia, izbieniia, ugolovnye dela: kak proshli aktsii protiv pensionnoi
reformy’, OVD-info, 10 September 2018; ‘More Than 150 Detained in Pension
Protests Across Russia’, The Moscow Times, 9 September 2018; ‘Russian Officials
Condemn Police Violence During Moscow Protests’, The Moscow Times, 21
August 2019.
57 ‘Politicheskie indicatory. Reiting politikov’, 29–30 September 2020, FOM, https://
bd.fom.ru/pdf/d39pi2018.pdf; ‘42 Percent of Russians Say No Existing Political
Party Represents Their Interests – Poll’, The Moscow Times, 26 October 2018.
58 For background, see William M. Reisinger, Bryon J. Moraski, The Regional Roots
of Russia’s Political Regime. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2017,
and ‘Russian Regional Elections’, Russian Analytical Digest, No. 239, 26
September 2019.
59 ‘Institutsional’noe doverie’, Levada-tsentr, 4 October 2018, www.levada.
ru/2018/10/04/institutsionalnoe-doverie-4/.
60 ‘V Moskve zaderzhali semerykh aktivistov “Drugoi Rossii” vo vremia aktsii u
“Sibir-Kholding”’, OVD-Info, 23 September 2018. ‘Kulak’ was the label given
‘rich’ peasants during the early Stalin era, when a policy of ‘liquidating the Kulaks
as a class’ originated.
61 ‘Russian Opposition Politician Ilya Yashin Announces Bid for Moscow Mayor’,
The Moscow Times, 11 April 2018.
62 Daria Harmonenko, ‘Yavlinskii ukrepliaet “Yabloke” vertikal’s vlasti’,
Nezavisimaia gazeta, 13 April 2018.
63 ‘Reports: Opposition Candidates Denied Spot in Moscow Mayoral Run’, The
Moscow Times, 15 June 2018.
64 ‘Sud priostanovil reshenie “Yabloka” zablokirovat’ vydvizhenie Mitrokhina v
mery’, Vedomosti, 27 June 2018.
65 ‘Zyuganov vystupil za priznanie Donbassa rossiiskim’, 10 September 2018, ria.ru/
politics/20180910/1528230259.html; ‘Russia Should Annex Donbass, Communist
Party Leader Says’, The Moscow Times, 11 September 2018.
66 For discussion of this phenomenon, see Andrey Pertsev, ‘Depoliticization in
Russia: The Growth of the Protest Vote’, Carnegie Moscow Center, 14 September
2018.
67 ‘Pamfilova nazvala zakonnomernoi otmenu rezul’tatov vyborov v Primor’e’,
Vedomosti, 20 September 2018; ‘Communist Protesters Rally in Vladivostok
Against Alleged Election Rigging’, The Moscow Times, 17 September 2018.
68 ‘Povtornoe golosovanie na vyborakh Glavy Respubliki Khakasiia …, 11 Noiabria
2018 goda’. Protokol. Izbiratel’naia kommissiia respubliki Khakasiia.
69 On this, see Mari Aburamoto, ‘The Politics of Anti-Corruption Campaigns in
Putin’s Russia: Power, Opposition, and the All-Russia People’s Front’, Europe–
Asia Studies, Vol. 71, issue 3 (2019), pp. 408–25.
70 ‘Shershukov: “Navalny’s Trade Union” – Political Parasitism on Current Topics’,
Solidarnost’, 24 January 2019 (solidarnost.org/news/), quoted in Irina Meyer-
Olimpieva, ‘Navalny’s Trade Union: Channeling Economic Discontent into
Political Activism’, The Russian File, Wilson Center Blog, 7 February 2019;
‘Workers of Russia, unite!’, The Economist, 11 May 2019, p. 44.
71 Ministry of Justice, ‘Obshcherossiiskoe obshchestvennoe dvizhenie zashchity
prav cheloveka “Za prava cheloveka” vkliucheno v reestr nekommercheskikh
organizatsii, vypolniaiushchikh funktsii inostrannogo agenta’, https://minjust.ru/
ru/novosti/obshcherossiyskoe-obshchestvennoe-dvizhenie-zashchity-prav-che-
loveka-za-prava-cheloveka, 12 February 2019; ‘Dvizhenie L’va Ponomareva “Za
prava cheloveka” priznali inoagentom’, Kommersant, 13 February 2019.
122 The political arena
72 General’naya prokuratura Rossiiskaia Federatsii, 11 March 2020, https://gen-
proc.gov.ru/smi/news/genproc/news-1805344/.
73 Gosudarstvennaia Duma, ‘Mozhet byt’ ustanovlena otvetstvennost’ za obuchenie
“spetsialistov po vmeshatel’stvu”’, 12 December 2019, http://duma.gov.ru/
news/47306/; ‘Russia Labels European Democracy NGO “Undesirable”’, The
Moscow Times, 11 March 2020.
74 ‘Protesters March in Memory of Boris Nemtsov Four Years After His Murder’,
The Moscow Times, 24 February 2019.
75 ‘Ot Moskvy do Vashingtona: kak uvekovechivaiout pamiat’ Borisa Nemtsova v
raznykh gorodakh mira’, Vedomosti, 27 February 2020; Zhanna Nemtsova, ‘From
the Archive: Around Nemtsov’s Murder, Key Questions Remain Deliberately
Unanswered’, The Moscow Times, 27 February 2020.
76 ‘Detention on May 1, 2019. List’, OVD-Info, 1 May 2019, ovdinfo.org/
news/2019/05/01/zaderzhaniya-1-maya-2019-goda-spisok; ‘Massovye zaderzha-
niia na soglasovannom pervomaiskom shestvii v Peterburge’, Vedomosti, 1 May
2019; ‘Over 100 Activists Detained at Russia’s Labor Day Marches’, The Moscow
Times, 2 May 2019; ‘Navalny, Khodorkovsky Aides Jailed After Violent Arrests’,
The Moscow Times, 3 April 2019.
77 ‘Petitsiiu s trebovaniem osvobodit’ Golunova podpisali bolee 100,000 chelovek’,
Vedomosti, 9 June 2019.
78 ‘Kolokol’tsev ob’iavil o reshenii osobodit’s Golunova ot otvetstvennosti’, Interfax,
11 June 2019; ‘Putin Sacks High-Ranking Police Generals Over Golunov Case’, The
Moscow Times, 13 June 2019; ‘Podpisan Ukaz ob osvobozhdenii ot dolzhnosti
sotrudnikov organov vnutrennykh del Rossiiskoi Federatsii’, Kremlin.ru, 13 June
2019, kremlin.ru/events/news/president/60742; ‘Sud otkazalsia vosstanavlivat’ na
rabote eks-politseiskogo, prichastnogo k delu Golunova’, RAPSI, 10 October 2019.
79 ‘Protestnyi potentsial’, Levada-tsentr, 4 June 2019, www.levada.ru/2019/06/04/
protestnyj-potentsial-9/.
80 Memorial, ‘Spisok politzakliuchennykh, presleduemykh za religiiu’, n.d., accessed
4 March 2020, https://memohrc.org/ru/aktualnyy-spisok-presleduemyh-v-svyazi-
s-realizaciey-prava-na-svobodu-veroispovedaniya.
81 Lev Gudkov, Natalia Zorkaya, Ekaterina Kochergina, Karina Pipiya, Alexandra
Ryseva, Russia’s ‘Generation Z’: Attitudes and Values 2019/2020. Bonn &
Washington: Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, 2020, pp. 31–2, 38. The research polled
1,500 ‘youth’ from across Russia, and also used focus groups.
82 Ibid., pp. 55–6, 121–3.
83 See Andrey Pertsev, ‘Symbolism and Radicalization: The New Russian Protest’,
Carnegie Moscow Center, 29 June 2019.
84 ‘Zaderzhaniia na vstreche s nezavisimymi kandidatami v Moskodumu’, OVD-
Info, 14 July 2019; Evan Gershkovich, ‘Moscow Police Detain Opposition
Politicians Rallying for Inclusion on City Legislature Ballot’, The Moscow Times,
15 July 2019.
85 ‘Yashina ne pustila na vybory v Mosgordumu’, Vedomosti, 15 July 2019.
86 Dar’ia Korzhakova, Elena Mykhametshina, ‘Oppozitsionery vydvinuli vlastiam
Moskvy ul’timatum’, Vedomosti, 20 July 2019; Ivan Gershkovich, ‘“A Pre-
Revolutionary Situation”: More Than 20,000 Rally in Moscow for Free Elections’,
The Moscow Times, 20 July 2019.
87 ‘Investigative Committee opens criminal case over unauthorized protests in
Moscow’, TASS, 30 July 2019; Kirill Bulanov, ‘SKR vozbudil delo iz-za stikhiinogo
mitinga u Mosgorizbirkoma’, Vedomosti, 24 July 2019; Glavnoe sledstvennoe
upravlenie, ‘In Moscow, a criminal case on the fact of obstruction of the activities
of election commissions’, (translated online), https://moscow.sledcom.ru/news/
item/1375815/; ‘Moscow Police Raid, Interrogate Opposition Candidates Ahead of
Election Rally’, The Moscow Times, 25 July 2019; ‘Obyski u nezavisimykh kandida-
tov v deputaty Mosgordumy. Chto izvestno’, OVD-Info, 25 July 2019.
 The political arena 123
88 Andrey Pertsev, ‘Moscow Protests: A Crisis of the Authorities’ Own Making’,
Carnegie Moscow Center, 25 July 2019; BBC Monitoring, ‘Russian election chief
accuses Navalny of fanning election dispute’, 24 July 2019, reprinted as #5 in
JRL, 25 July 2019.
89 ‘Bolee 150 zaderzhannykh na aktsii v tsentre Moskvy proveli noch’ v OVD’,
OVD-Info, 27 July 2019; ‘1373 stol’ko liudei zaderzhali v sviazi s aktsiei’, OVD-
Info, 28 July 2019.
90 Naval’nyi blog, ‘Very strange things’, 29 July 2019, https://navalny.com/p/6183/;
‘Kremlin Critic Says He May Have Been Poisoned’, The Moscow Times, 30 July
2019.
91 ‘3.08 v 14:00. Progulka po bul’vardam’, https://www.facebook.com/events/
871923563187010/.
92 ‘Rally at the Moscow City hall on July 27, 2019. Online’, OVD-Info, 27 July
2019; ‘Police in Moscow Detain Opposition Figures Before Protest’, The Moscow
Times, 27 July 2019; ‘Spisok zaderzhannykh na aktsii u merii Moskvy 27 iulia
2019 goda’, OVD-Info, 27 July 2019.
93 ‘Sobyanin commented on Saturday’s opposition rally in Moscow;’, TVU, 30 July
2019, www.tvc.ru/news/show/id/165334.
94 For US Embassy remarks, Andrea Kalen @USEmbRuPress, 28 Jul 2019; for the
EU, https://eeas.europa.eu/headquarters/headquarters-homepage/65919/state-
ment-spokesperson-detention-over-thousand-peaceful-protesters-moscow_en;
for the UK, https://www.gov.uk/government/news/russia-fco-spokesperson-
statement-in-response-to-moscow-arrests.
95 ‘Ni mera, ni voiny’, Vedomosti, 30 July 2019.
96 ‘“Vernem sebe parvo na vybory”, 3 avgusta’, OVD-Info, 3 August 2019. ‘Russian
Police Detain Over 800 Opposition Protesters in Central Moscow’, The Moscow
Times, 3 August 2019.
97 Ekaterina Eremenko, Svetlana Bocharova, Alisa Shtykina, ‘Kreml’ osudil
zhestokost’ politsii na mitingakh’, Vedomosti, 13 August 2019
98 ‘Ziuganov prizval otpravit’ v otstavku predsedatelia Mosgorizbirkoma’,
Vedomosti, 14 August 2019.
99 ‘TsK poluchil 19 zhalob ot nezaregistrirovannykh kandidatov v Mosgordumu’,
RIA Novosti, 6 August 2019; CECof Russia@VCIKRussia, 7 August 2017,
https://twitter.com/CIKRussia/status/1159074300000985088; TeamNavalny@
teamnavalny, 7 August 2019, calling for the demonstration and posting on
Facebook, https://twitter.com/teamnavalny/status/1159077876148461570;
‘Nearly 50,000 Protest for Fair Elections in Moscow’, The Moscow Times, 10
August 2019; ‘Za chestnye vybory i protiv politicheskikh repressii. Itogi aktsii 10
avgusta’, OVD-Info, 10 August 2019.
100 Dar’ia Korzhakova, ‘Roskomnadzor potreboval ot Google perestat’ reklamiro-
vat’ nezakonnye mitingi’, Vedomosti, 11 August 2019; ‘Google, Facebook Rebuff
Russia Over Political Advertising Accusation’, The Moscow Times, 9 September
2019.
101 ‘V Moskve nachalsia miting KPRF za chestnyi vybory’, Vedomosti, 17 August
2019; ‘Pikety za chestnye vybory v Peterburge 17 avgusta 2019 goda. Onlain’,
OVID-Info, 17 August 2019.
102 Putin, ‘Sovmestnaia press-konferentsiia s Prezidentom Finliandii Sauli Niiniste’,
Kremlin.ru, 21 August 2019, kremlin.ru/events/president/news/61349.
103 ‘31 avgusta, v 14:00. Ot Chistykh prudov do Pushkinskoi ploshchadi. Ya vyidu i
vas prizybaiu: youtu.be/R2a9ecBm6Qvc’, @SobolLubov – August 28, twitter.
com/SobolLubov; Andrew Higgins, ‘“I am Always Asked If I am Afraid’:
Activist Lawyer Takes On Putin’s Russia’, New York Times, 6 September 2020.
104 For Navalny’s ‘Smart Voting’ site, see ‘vote2019.appspot.com’.
105 ‘Umnoe golosovanie’, ‘Zdes my ob’ediniaemsia, chtoby pobedit’ “Edinyiu
Rossiiu”, vote2019.appspot.com.
124 The political arena
106 Evan Gershkovich, ‘What Appeared to Be a United Opposition During Moscow’s
Vote Protests Is Fraying – Again’, The Moscow Times, 27 August 2019; Elena
Mukhametshina, ‘Dlia Vladimira Putina net edinorossa’, Vedomosti, 28 August 2019.
107 ‘Delo a vyvikhnutom pleche natsgvardeitsa. Osvobozhdenie Pavla Ustinova iz
CIZO’, Mediazona, 20 September 2019; ‘Jailed Russian Actor Released Ahead
of Appeal After Moscow Protest Verdicts Spark Outcry’, The Moscow Times, 20
September 2019.
108 ‘Miting na prospekte Sakharova Glavnoe’, Vedomosti, 29 September 2019; Evan
Gershkovich, ‘“The Dragon Has Unclenched Its Jaws”: 25,000 Rally in Moscow
to Demand Release of Jailed Protesters’, The Moscow Times, 29 September 2019.
109 ‘Roskomnadzor predostereg Google i Facebook ot vmeshatel’stva vo vnutrennie
dela Rossii’, Vedomosti, 6 September 2019.
110 ‘Protestnaia aktivnost’, Levada Tsentr, 3 September 2019, https://www.levada.
ru/2019/09/03/protestnaya-aktivnost-5/; Paul Goble, ‘Russians Learn about
Protests from State TV but No Longer Accept Official Explanations, Levada Poll
Finds’, Window on Eurasia, 3 September 2019; Elena Mukhametshina,
‘Bol’shinstvo rossiian zametili protest v Moskve i ne veriat vo vmeshatel’stvo
Zapada’, Vedomosti, 2 September 2019.
111 ‘“There Will Be More Arrests”: New Opposition Protesters Face Trial’, The
Moscow Times, 29 November 2019.
112 ‘V edinyi den’ golosovaniia vozbudili 11 ugolovnykh del’, RIA Novosti, 9
September 2019; GOLOS, ‘KARTA narushenii na vyborakh, 8 sentiabria
2019/2037 soobshchenii’, https://www.kartanarusheniy.org/2019-09-08/stat.
113 ‘Opposition Leader Navalny’s Offices Across Russia Searched After Election’,
The Moscow Times, 10 September 2019; ‘Vrio glavy Ulan-Ude vyigral pervye za
12 let priamye vybory mera s 52%’, RIA Novosti, 9 September 2019; ‘Protest
Erupts in Far East Russia After Pro-Kremlin Candidate’s Victory’, The Moscow
Times, 10 September 2019; ‘Miniust priznal fond Naval’nogo inostrannym agen-
tom’, Vedomosti, 9 October 2019. For the Ministry of Justice’s accusations vs. the
FBK, see https://minjust.ru/ru/novosti/nekommercheskaya-organizaciya-fond-
borby-s-korrupciey-vklyuchena-v-reestr-nekommercheskih, 9 October 2019.
114 ‘Na “umnoe golosovanie” vlast’ otvetila politseiskoi spetsoperatsiei’, Vedomosti,
13 September 2019; Pavel Felgenhauer, ‘Russian State Carries Out Massive
Repressions After Local Elections’, Eurasia Daily Monitor, 12 September 2019.
115 State Duma. The Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation, ‘Commission on
Foreign Interference in Internal Affairs completed investigation into Deutsche
Welle case’, 27 September 2019, https://duma.gov.ru/en/news/46406/; ‘Russian
Lawmakers Accuse BBC, Meduza, RFE/RL of Violating Election Law’, The
Moscow Times, 18 October 2019; ‘Russian Duma Commission Accuses Foreign
Media of Breaking Election Law’, RFE/RL, 17 October 2019.
116 ‘Protestuiushchim nashli lageria podgotovki’, Kommersant, 18 November 2019;
‘Russian Lawmakers Claim Foreign-Funded “Camps” Train Protesters’, The
Moscow Times, 19 November 2019.
117 ‘Obyski v ofisakh FBK i “Moskovskoe delo”’, Levada-tsentr, 5 November 2019,
https://www.levada.ru/2019/11/05/obyski-v-ofisah-fbk-i-moskovskoe-delo/.
118 ‘Chto takoe stat’ia 20.2 KoAP?’, OI (OVD-Info) 20.2 KOAP: Primenenie,
November 2019, https://data.ovdinfo.org/20_2/#/regions/RU; ‘30,000 Russians
Charged Under Protest Law in 15 Years – Monitor’, The Moscow Times, 8
November 2019.
119 Elena Mukhhmetshina, ‘Kreml’ pridumal novyi sposob pomoch’ “Edinoi Rossii”
na vyborakh v Gosdumu’, Vedomosti, 2 December 2019; Andrey Pertsev, ‘Rise
of the Spoiler Parties’, Meduza, 14 January 2020; Mathew Luxmoore, ‘Ahead of
2021 Vote, Critics Say Kremlin Is Curating A New Crop of Spoiler Parties’,
RFE/RF, 17 February 2020.
120 Richard Arnold, ‘Violent Extreme-Right Movement Attracts New Generation
of Russian Youth’, Eurasia Daily Monitor, 2 March 2020.
 The political arena 125
121 ‘Pro-Kremlin Group Tears up Wreath Laid by Bolton at Nemtsov Memorial –
Reports’, The Moscow Times, 31 October 2018; for Bolton’s perspective, which
included the hint that Nemtsov was murdered by ‘Kremlin operatives’, see
Bolton, The Room Where It Happened. A White House Memoir. New York:
Simon & Schuster, 2020, p. 168.
122 US Department of State, ‘Designation of the Russian Imperial Movement’,
remarks by Nathan A. Sales, coordinator for Counterterrorism, 6 April 2020,
https://www.state.gov/designation-of-the-russian-imperial-movement/; Russian
Federal List of Extremist Materials, https://minjust.ru/ru/extremist-
materials?field_extremist_content_value=imperskoe+dvizheniia; ‘Russian
“Terrorists” Training German Neo-Nazi Youth in Combat – Reports’, The
Moscow Times, 5 June 2020.
123 ‘Levada-tsentr rasskazal ob otsutstvii problemy antisemitizma v Rossii’, RBC.
ru, 6 September 2018; ‘Russia has one of lowest rates of anti-Semitism in the
world, survey conducted by Russian Jewish Congress finds’, World Jewish
Congress, 3 November 2016.
124 For a breakdown of arrests, see ‘Zaderzhaniia v Den’ narodnogo edinstva’,
Mediazona, zona.media/chroncle/rm/, 4 November 2018.
125 ‘“Rossia dlia russkikh”: sotsiolog ob’iasnil, pochemu v strane krepnut natsional-
istskie nastroeniia’, Levada-tsentr, 10 October 2019, radiokp.ru/obschestvo/
rossiya-dlya-russkikh-sociolog-obyasnil-pochemu-v-strane-krepnut-nacionalist-
skie-nastroeniya_nid2682_au414au66.
126 Irina Pankratova, ‘Russia’s “Orthodox Tycoon” Is Bankrolling a Monarchist
Movement. But Where Does He Get His Money?’, The Bell, 22 November 2019.
127 Article 15 of the 1993 Constitution gave precedence to the ‘rules of international
agreement’. Putin overruled this with a law in 2015 permitting Russia’s Constitutional
Court to not recognize international courts if their rulings contradicted Russian law.
128 Omsk Oblast TV, ‘Dialogue with the Governor. Release from 06/18/2020’, http://
www.globalaffairs.ru/; ‘Vote on Putin’s Reforms Will “Wrest Soviet Rule From
Uncle Sam” – Official’, The Moscow Times, 18 June 2020. Council of Europe,
‘CDL-AD (2020)009-e. ‘Russian Federation – Adopted Opinion on draft amend-
ments to the Constitution …’, 18 June 2020, https://www.venice.coe.int/web-
forms/documents/?pdf=CDL-AD(2020)009-e.
129 ‘“Vy nastoiashchii?” V interv’iu TASS Putin otvechaet na samye neozhdannye
voprosy’, Argumenty i fakty, 4 March 2020.
130 Putin, ‘Vstrecha s rukovoditeliami fraktsii Gosudarstvennoi Dumu’, Kremlin.ru,
6 March 2020, http://kremlin.ru/events/president/news/62949.
131 Ukaz Mera Moskvu, ‘O vnesenii izmeneniia v Ukaz Mera Moskvu ot 5 Marta
2020 g. No, 12-UM’, 10 Marta 2020 g. No. 17-UM, https://www.mos.ru/upload/
documents/docs/17-YMot10032020(2).pdf.
132 ‘Coronavirus in Russia: The Latest News’, The Moscow News, 8–11 March 2020.
133 See Yashin on Twitter (@IlyaYashin), https://twitter.com/IlyaYashin/status/
1219152576412823552.
134 Evan Gershkovich, ‘Thousands Across Russia Rally for Slain Opposition
Leader’, The Moscow Times, 1 April 2020; ‘Marsh pamiati Nemtsova v Moskve
sobral bolee 22,000 chelovek’, Vedomosti, 1 April 2020; the NGO WhiteCounter
(BelyiSchetchik) gave the count as 22,300, https://twitter.com/WhiteCounter/
status/1233723307830194177.
135 ‘Prevent a constitutional crisis and an unconstitutional coup. Appeal of scien-
tists, writers and journalists to Russian citizens’, Echo Moscow Blog, 15 March
2020, echo.msk.ru/blog/echomsk/2606224-echo/.
136 ‘In Vladikavkaz, several hundred people came to a national gathering against the
regime of “self-isolation”’, MBX media, 20 April 2020, https://mbk-news.
appspot.com/news/narodniy-sxod/.
137 ‘Russian Opposition Plans Online Coronavirus Lockdown Protest’, AFP and
The Moscow Times, 21 April 2020.
126 The political arena
138 ‘5 steps for Russia. Report after the first day of the campaign’, 21 April 2020,
https://navalny.com/p/6338/.
139 ‘Vdokhnovliaiushche lichnosti’, Levada-tsentr, 11 June 2020, https://www.
levada.ru/2020/06/11/vdohnovlyayushhie-lichnosti/.
140 First reported on the Podyom Telegram news channel, t.me/pdmnews/36387; and
‘What you need to know today’, The Moscow Times, 10 December 2020.
141 See Facebook post by Aleksei Pivovarov, designated original moderator for the
debate, https://www.facebook.com/alexey.pivovarov.16/posts/10219760292631041.
142 For the online protest, http://youtube.com/watch?v=gYDkz-tjn7E, and for com-
mentary, Paul Goble, ‘First Russian Opposition Online Meeting Attracts
Widespread Interest and 4800 Participants’, Window on Eurasia – New Series, 2
May 2020.
143 For a dozen photos of the demonstrators, see ‘Na Pushkinskoi ploshchadi sobra-
lis’ protivniki popravok v Konstitutsiiu. Fotografii’, Vedomosti, 1 July 2020.
144 Irina Chevtaeva, Yurii Litvinenko, ‘Sud arestoval Furgal do 9 sentiabr’,
Vedomosti, 9 July 2020; ‘Sud arestoval gubernatora Furgala po delu o zakaznykh
ubiistvakh biznesmenov’, RAPSI, 10 July 2020.
145 Yurii Litvinenko, Sergei Mingazov, ‘Zhiteli Khabarovskaia vyshli na stikhiinyi
miting v podderzhku arestovannogo Furgala’, Vedomosti, 10 July 2020; ‘Giant
Protests in Russia’s Far East After Popular Governor’s Arrest’, The Moscow
Times, 10 July 2020.
146 Irina Chevtaeva, ‘V Khabarovske snova proshli protestnye aktsii v podderzhku
Furgala’, Vedomosti, 12 July 2020; ‘New Russia Protest Over Governor’s Arrest’,
The Moscow Times, 12 July 2020.
147 ‘Zhiteli Vladivostoka i Khabarovska vyshli na sovmestnuiu aktsiiu protesta’,
Vedomosti, 18 July 2020, with photos; see regular updates in OVD-Info, e.g.
https://ovdinfo.org/news/2020/08/08/spiski-zaderzhannyh-po-vsey-rossii-na-
akciyah-v-podderzhku-furgala.
148 ‘Degtyarev zaiavil o zvonke Mishustina i obeshchanii vydelit’ ₽1,3 mlrd’, RBC.
ru, 23 July 2020; Evan Gershkovich, ‘Anger at Kremlin Grows in Latest Massive
Russian Far East Protest’, The Moscow Times, 26 July 2020; Elena
Mukhametshina, Sergei Mingazov, ‘Putin nashel zamenu Furgalu v LDPR’,
Vedomosti, 20 July 2020; ‘Politsiia vo Vladivostoke zaderzhala trekh uchastnikov
aktsii v podderzhku gubernatora Khabarovskogo kraia’, OVD-Info, 19 July
2020; Artyom Hirsch, ‘Na Dal’nem Vostoke vozobnovilis’ mitingi v podderzhku
Furgala’, Vedomosti, 19 July 2020. For daily reports, see OVD-Info (opendemoc-
racy.net/en/author/ovd-info/) or vl.ru (Vladivostok news).
149 ‘Degtyarov obvinil priletevshikh iz Moskvy inostrantsev v organizatsii mitin-
gov’, Vedomosti, 24 July 2020; ‘Peskov iskliuchil organizatsiiu mitingov v
Khabaraovske iz-za rubezha’, Vedomosti, 24 July 2020.
150 On this, see Tatyana Stanovaia, ‘Russia’s In-System Opposition Gets Second
Chance in Kharbarovsk’, The Moscow Times, 27 July 2020; ‘Tens of thousands
continue to rally in fresh Khabarovsk Protest’, AFP, 8 August 2020; Anton
Troianovski, ‘Protests Swell in Russia’s Far East in a Stark New Challenge to
Putin’, New York Times, 25 July 2020.
151 ‘Actions in support of the Khabarovsk Territory on August 1, 2020. Online’,
OVD-Info, 1 August 2020; Evan Gershkovich, ‘Russian Far East Protesters Out
by the Thousands as Crackdown Intensifies’, The Moscow Times, 1 August
2020.
152 Alexander Litoi, ‘Cleaning up on the Amur. Authorities increase pressure on pro-
testers in Khabarovsk’, OVD-info, 17 November 2020, https://ovdinfo.org/arti-
cles/2020/11/17/zachistka-na-amure-vlasti-usilivayut-davlenie-na-protestuyushchih-
v-habarovske; ‘Participants of rallies in support of Furgal detained in Khabarovsk’,
OVD-Info, 25 September 2020; ‘Spiski zaderzhannykh na aktsiiakh v podderzhku
zhitelei Khabarovskogo kraia 15 avgusta’, OVD-Info, 15 August 2020.
 The political arena 127
153 ‘Russian Police Raid Homes of Opposition Group Coordinators, Independent
Lawmakers’, RFE/RL, 9 July 2020; for access to MBKh Media in English, twit-
ter.com/mbkhmedia?lang-en; Mikhail Shubin, ‘Protiv izmeneniia Konstitutsii.
Itogi aktsii 15 iulia’, OVD-Info, 16 July 2020.
154 ‘V ofis Fonda bor’by s korruptsiei prishli s obyskom’, Vedomosti, 17 July 2020; ‘A
Timeline of Russia’s Crackdown Since the Constitutional Reform Vote’, The
Moscow Times, 10 July 2020; Ilya Klishin, ‘Russian Authorities Are Targeting
Journalists, Historians and Activists. The Rest of Us Could Be Next’, The
Moscow Times, 10 July 2020.
155 ‘In Omsk, Alexei Navalny was hospitalized with poisoning. His plane made an
emergency landing’, OVD-Info, 20 August 2020; ‘V Kremle prokommentirovali
gospitalizatsiiu Naval’nogo’, Vedomosti, 20 August 2020; Evan Gershkovich,
‘Doctors Bar Navalny’s Evacuation to Germany as Confusion Surrounds
Presence of Poison in System’, The Moscow Times, 22 August 2020.
156 Andrei Zakharov, Roman Badanin, ‘Yadovityi istochnik. Rassledovanie o tom,
gde byl otravlen Aleksei Naval’nyi’, Proekt, 17 September 2020, https://www.
proekt.media/investigation/gde-otravili-navalnogo/; ‘Navalny Likely Poisoned
Before Arriving at Siberian Airports – Reports’, The Moscow Times, 17
September 2020; ‘Russia Accuses Germany of Refusing to Cooperate on Navalny
Medical probe’, The Moscow Times, 24 September 2020.
157 For doubts expressed by sceptics, ‘Novichok found in water bottle in Navalny’s
hotel room’, Intellinews, 18 September 2020; Paul Robinson, ‘Cups of tea and
bottles of water’, Irrussianality, 17 September 2020; Bryan MacDonald ‘Latest
Navalny Novichok water bottle poisoning claim stretches all credibility, but
Western media swallows it without question’, RT, 18 September 2020; John
Helmer, ‘Tale of two bottles – Navalny poison slowest acting weapon in assassi-
nation history’, Dances with Bears, 17 September 2020; ‘Otvety pravitel’stva
Germanii na voprosy deputatov Bundestaga ob otravlenii Alekseia Naval’nogo’,
Nezavisimaia gazeta, 30 October 2020.
158 ‘Alexei Navalny has “bank accounts frozen and flat seized”’, BBC.com, 23
September 2020; ‘Prigozhin likvidiruet kompaniiu rabotala, kotoraia so shkol-
ami’, The Bell, 12 April, 2019.
159 Gosudarstvennaia Duma, ‘Viacheslav Volodin: Naval’nyi rabotaet v interesakh
zapadnykh stran’, 1 October 2020, http://duma.gov.ru/news/49632/; ‘Alexei Navalny
blames Vladimir Putin for poisoning’, BBC.com, 1 October 2020; Benjamin Bidder,
Christian Esch, ‘Alexej Nawalny über den Giftanschlag. “Es war kein Schmerz, es
war etwas Schlimmeres”’, Der Spiegel, 1 October 2020. See also Alexander Baunov,
‘The Kremlin Takes On a Resurrected Navalny’, Carnegie Moscow Center, 5
October 2020; for a ‘Putin did it’ view, Amy Knight, ‘Aleksei Navalny, Ready to
Run Again in Russia’, New York Review of Books, 3 December 2020.
160 ‘Reiting Putina ot skandala s otravleniem ne postradal’, Levada-tsentr, 12
October 2020.
161 ‘Doverie politikam’, Levada-tsentr, 12 November 2020, www.levada.
ru/2020/11/12/doverie-politiki-6/. The question was asked of 1,601 people in 137
population points in 50 subject states.
162 ‘Bol’shinstvu rossiian vse ravno, kogo podderzhivaiut Putin i Navalnyi’, Levada-
tsentr, 8 October 2020; ‘Prezidentskie elektoral’nye reitingi i uroven’ doveriia
politikam’, Levada-tsentr, 10 December 2020, www.levada.ru/2020/12/10/
prezidentskie-elektoralnye-rejtingi-i-uroven-doveriya-politikam/.
163 See Joshua Yaffe, ‘What Navalny’s Poisoning Really Says About the Current
State of Putin’s Russia’, The New Yorker, 21 August 2020. See also Anna
Arutunyan, ‘Maybe the Kremlin Doesn’t Know Who Poisoned Navalny. It’s Still
Responsible’, The Moscow Times, 6 September 2020.
164 Tatiana Stanovaya, ‘Navalny Poisoning is the Act of a Sickly Regime’, Carnegie
Moscow Center, 26 August 2020.
128 The political arena
165 Putin, ‘Zasedanie diskussionnogo kluba “Valdai”’, Kremlin.ru, 22 October
2020, kremlin.ru/events/president/news/64261.
166 ‘Zasedanie Soveta po razvitiiu grazhdanskogo obshchestva i pravem cheloveka’,
Kremlin.ru, 10 December 2020, kremlin.ru/events/president/news/64638.
167 See Tim Lister, Clarissa Ward, Sebastian Shukla, ‘CNN–Bellingcat investigation
identifies Russian specialists who trailed Putin’s Nemesis Alexey Navalny before
he was poisoned’, 14 December 2020, https://edition.cnn.com/2020/12/14/
europe/russia-navalny-agents-bellingcat-ward/index.html; ‘Media Investigation
Names FSB Agents Behind Navalny Poisoning’, The Moscow Times, 14
December 2020; for criticism of a British rendering of the affair, Paul Robinson,
‘Navalny’s Underpants’, Irrussianality, 14 December 2020.
168 ‘“Funny to Read”: Russia Reacts to Navalny Poisoning Investigation’, The
Moscow Times, 16 December 2020; ‘Ezhegodnaia press-konferentsiia Vladimira
Putina’, Kremlin.ru, 17 December 2020, www.kremlin.ru/events/president/
news/64671.
169 ‘Russian Police Rule Out Navalny Poisoning, Diagnose Pancreatitis’, The
Moscow Times, 6 November 2020.
170 David Steindl, et alia, ‘Novichok nerve agent poisoning’, Case report, The
Lancet, 22 December 2020.
171 Some of the video responses can be seen in ‘Navalny’s Underwear Poisoning
Takes Over the Russian Internet’, The Moscow Times, 22 December 2020.
172 For the entire video, with introductions by Navalny and accompanying pictures
of the FSB toxin team, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibqiet6Bg38&feature
=youtu.be; ‘Naval’nyi opublikoval razgovor s “otravitelem iz FSB”’, Vedomosti,
22 December 2020; ‘Peskov zaiavil o manii velichiia u Naval’nogo’, ibid.; Mark
MacKinnon, ‘Navalny says he duped Kremlin agent into revealing poisoning
plot’, Globe and Mail, 22 December 2020. For opposing opinions, ‘Putin’s
Novichok ambiguity’, The Bell, 19 December 2020, and Gordon M. Hand,
‘Navalnyigate’, 17 December 2020, https://gordonhahn.com/2020/12/17/
navalnyigate/.
173 ‘Elektoral’nye reitingi partii’, Levada-tsentr, 7 September 2020, https://www.
levada.ru/2020/09/07/elektoralnye-rejtingi-partij-4/.
174 ‘Pamfilova zaiavila om prakticheski polnom otsutstvii narushenii v khode
golosovaniia’, Izvestiia, 14 September 2020; ‘“Golos” soobshchil o bolee tysiachi
zhalob na narusheniia na vyborakh v Rossii’, Kommersant, 13 September 2020;
Ben Noble, ‘The Meaning of Victory in Russia’s Sept. 13 Elections’, The Moscow
Times, 14 September 2020.
175 For the interview, ‘5 shagov dlia Rossii’, Ekho Moskvy, 27 April 2020, https://
echo.msk.ru/programs/razvorot-morning/2631218-echo/. ‘Authorities Probe
Navalny’s Coronavirus Interview for “Extremism”’, The Moscow Times, 1
December 2020.
176 Gosudarstvennaia Duma, ‘O proekte federal’naia zakona No. 1057230-7, “O
vnesenii izmenenii v federal’nyi zakon, ‘O sobraniiakh, mitingakh, demonstratsi-
iakh, shestviiakh i piketirovaniiakh’”’, 9 December 2020, http://vote.duma.gov.
ru/vote/112867; ‘How the State Duma wants to toughen the law on rallies and
where this will lead. Analysis of OVD-Info’, OVD-Info, 10 December 2020;
‘Russia Moves to Further Curb Protests’, The Moscow Times, 10 December
2020.
177 Elena Mukhametshina, ‘Gosduma v osenniuiu sessiiu bespretsedentno ogranich-
ila osnovnye prava grazhdan’, Vedomosti, 25 December 2020; ‘Russian
Lawmakers Back New Restrictions On Free Speech’, The Moscow Times, 23
December 2020.
178 ‘Elektoral’nye reitingi partii’, Levada-tsentr, 9 Dec 2020, https://www.levada.
ru/2020/12/09/elektoralnyj-rejtingi-partij.
4 Economic patterns and the
sanctions saga

Introduction
By the time Putin stepped into the prime ministerial office in August 1999,
the Russian economy had been sliding downhill for more than a decade.
Yeltsin’s devaluation of the ruble wiped out individual savings, brought soar-
ing inflation and bankrupted banks and private companies. Russia’s stock,
bond and currency markets imploded in 1998. The country was forced to
default on its domestic debt and declared a moratorium on foreign debts.
Wage arrears and strikes were endemic. To make matters worse, early in 2000
the European Union (EU) threatened economic sanctions against Russia
because of the conflict in Chechnya. The EU backed off, but the Kremlin was
soon to discover that economic sanctions would become the go-to knout
wielded by Westerners to lash Russia’s back.1
The apparent ‘triumph’ of liberal internationalism, with its emphasis on a
global economy and relatively unrestricted movements of capital and people,
didn’t help Russia in the 1990s. That dose of reality persuaded many Russian
economic planners that their country must have a home-grown capitalist sys-
tem. Although recovery actually began before Putin’s nomination as presi-
dent, mostly because of a sharp increase in oil prices, the need for change was
clear. Prime Minister Putin took the matter in hand in December 1999 by
establishing a Strategic Research Centre and ordering its chair, Minister of
Economics and Trade German Gref, to devise a national economic plan and
also help wrestle the economy out of the hands of the oligarchs. The conse-
quent strategy prepared by Gref and Deputy Finance Minister Aleksei
Kudrin outlined a simplified tax system, most importantly a 13 per cent flat
income tax that Putin set in place as of 1 January 2001. The reform included
lower payroll taxes and abolished sales taxes and taxes on the purchase of
foreign currency. By the end of 2001, for the first time in decades government
revenues covered expenditures and reduced the debt to the IMF by half. By
any measure, this was an astonishing leap forward.
With some justification, Putin blamed the sudden application of Western-
style capitalist methods for the collapse of the Russian economy in the 1990s,
yet he also made it plain that the long-term villain was the stifling communist
regime. Outlining ‘the lessons Russians should learn from their past’, he

DOI: 10.4324/9781003158646-5
130 Economic patterns
wrote in his 1999 ‘Manifesto’ that ‘Communism vividly demonstrated its
ineptitude for sound self-development, dooming our country to a steady lag
behind economically advanced countries. It was a road to a blind alley, far
away from the mainstream of civilization.’ He went on to insist that Russia
must ‘search for its own way of renewal’, not copy others.2 This was the pur-
pose of the Gref–Kudrin Centre. It remained to be seen how the ‘Russian
idea’, or Russian distinctiveness, could apply to the economy.
The tax reform, an attempt at rule of law, and new codes for labour and
government budgeting all helped attract investments from abroad. A 2003
law introducing private ownership, purchase and sale of agricultural land for
Russian citizens was another significant innovation. Russian GDP doubled
by 2008. Yet reliance on oil revenues and the reserves they helped accumulate
kept deeper reform on the back burner. In December 2003, these reserves
were combined in a Stabilization Fund to be used when the prices fell. Then
came the global recession of 2008–09, against which Russia was protected
somewhat by a 2007 budget amendment that split the Stabilization Fund into
a Reserve Fund and a National Welfare Fund. The new Reserve Fund was
designated for investments abroad in low-yield securities and when oil and
gas incomes dropped; the National Welfare Fund targeted riskier, higher
return vehicles, supplemented the federal budget and supported the Russian
pension system. The finance minister at that time, Kudrin, was instrumental
in setting these funds up with billions of surplus energy revenues and later
credited Putin for agreeing to and supporting the scheme against the wishes
of many of the oligarchs.3
To guard Russians from the harshest impact of the recession the state
quickly expanded its share in the economy. Huge state-owned corporations
with access to government funding spread out over the system. While the
Russian economy suffered less than its European counterparts during the
crisis, reliance on the state and energy export revenues became even more
entrenched than previously.
One of Russia’s major problems, of course, was the time it took to shift
from its long-time command economy to a market economy, especially after
help expected from the West never materialized. A sign of this was its diffi-
culty in gaining accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO). In 1993,
Yeltsin’s government applied for admission to the General Agreement on
Tariffs and Trade (GATT), the WTO’s predecessor, and was turned down.
The initial reason for rejection was the US’s refusal to recognize Russia as a
market economy, yet, even after that recognition came in 2002, Russia wasn’t
admitted to the WTO until 2012. Russians perceived these delays as American-
led efforts to keep their country down and isolated.
Gas ‘price wars’ between Russia (Gazprom) and Belarus (Beltransgaz)
since 2004, and Russia and Ukraine (Naftohaz) since 2006, bedevilled eco-
nomic relations between the three East Slav countries. The rows included
fights over transit fees, the actual price of Russian gas, which for the first
decade of Putin’s tenure was considerably lower than the global market
price, and ownership of pipelines. The main Russian pipeline to Europe, the
 Economic patterns 131
Druzhba (Friendship), transits both Ukraine and Belarus (see ahead) and
was often the object of international confrontation. In the case of Belarus,
there were also squabbles over agricultural products (e.g. a ‘milk war’ in
2009), and Minsk’s profits from re-selling petroleum products refined from
surplus duty-free oil from Russia.
Sanctions and declining oil prices caused the ruble to drop to record lows
between 2014 and 2016. Three years later, at the end of 2019, the ruble had
become one of the world’s most sought-after currencies and a budget regula-
tion that allocates oil revenue surpluses to Russia’s international reserve
holdings brought that fund up to more than a half trillion dollars. In this
sector, too, Putin’s policies seemed to have been successful. That said, the
rosy reports of 2018–19 came to a screeching halt in 2020.

Sanctions and the oligarchs4

Less than a month after Putin’s electoral victory in 2018, the US Treasury
Department launched a new round of economic prohibitions against Russia,
targeting 24 more individuals and 14 entities associated with the Kremlin,
bringing the totals to well over a thousand individuals and entities. This
time, assets of oligarchs and government officials in the US were frozen
because of Russia’s meddling in the 2016 US presidential election.5 Dozens
of separate economic sanctions levelled by the US against Russian individu-
als, entities and vessels were related to the annexation of Crimea, ‘mali-
cious’ cyber activities, alleged human rights abuses, corruption and use of
chemical weapons, and various relationships with Iran, North Korea, Syria
and Venezuela.6
Although the US led the way, by far, 36 other countries and the EU
imposed sanctions against Russia, albeit more cautiously and with much
greater economic consequences for themselves.
The broadest purposes of the restrictive regimes were to force Russia to
reverse its foreign policy, especially in connection to Ukraine, to undermine
Putin’s popularity at home and to inflict economic pain on his country and
his wealthy associates. They were successful only in the last-named: Russia
did not alter its foreign policies and Putin’s popularity rose for a time. To
mitigate the impact of sanctions, Russia’s financial institutions were encour-
aged to support struggling domestic companies, while the state offered larger
procurement contracts and invested directly in the manufacturing and agri-
cultural sectors. In fact, for the first time, post-Soviet Russia approached eco-
nomic independence and national unity, which were hardly the results
sanctioning countries hoped for.7
Rather than bend to economic pressure, in 2015 the Kremlin imposed
counter-sanctions, mostly on imports of foodstuffs from the EU, the US and
Canada, and established an import substitution commission to find new
sources of items no longer available from traditional suppliers. Russia also
made its economy more efficient and turned eastward for new trade partners,
thereby permanently re-tooling its political economy. Because, in practice,
132 Economic patterns
economic sanctions represent a collective action against an entire people, not
just businesses and individuals, they pushed Russian citizens to rally around
their flag.8
Economists calculated that the oligarchs and their businesses lost billions
in cash, investments and assets. Oleg Deripaska, whose eight companies
include Rusal (Aluminium) and the EN+ Group, and Viktor Vekselberg
(Renova) were the individuals most hurt financially. Subsidiaries of Gazprom,
Rosoboronexport, Russian Financial Corporation and Renova were also hit
hard.9 Among other things, US legislation forbade American companies and
citizens from doing business with listed people and companies and obligated
them to sell whatever shares they might have in some of the black-balled
concerns. As a result, shares in many Russian companies fell drastically and,
in April 2018, the ruble experienced its largest one-day drop since 2016.10
To cite one example of forced changes: Deripaska resigned his executive
positions with En+ and Rusal.11 Rusal changed its management team and
board of management and hinted that it might withdraw from the global
market altogether if that move did not sway the US Treasury office to lift
sanctions. They were, in fact, lifted in January 2019. As a result, Rusal joined
with an American firm to build a rolling mill in Kentucky. Metal for the mill,
of which Rusal will own 40 per cent, will come from Rusal’s new smelter in
Siberia, and its market will be the US Automobile industry.12
The company’s largest shareholder after Deripaska, who remained sanc-
tioned personally, was Vekselberg. When information emerged that Trump
lawyer Michael Cohen received payments from Columbus Nova, an American
subsidiary of Vekselberg’s Renova, the salivating media headlined the discov-
ery.13 A week later, Vekselberg repaid loans amounting to about $1 billion to
foreign banks, JP Morgan, Credit Suisse and UBS, and sold a number of
shares to several Russian groups. Renova took a credit line from
Promsvyazbank, through which the government set up a support bank for
large state contracts.14 In short, the oligarchs adjusted to the restrictive condi-
tions as well as they could.
Putin gave Russia’s billionaires a chance to recoup in December 2017,
when he allowed them to bring up to $3 billion of their off-shore holdings
back to Russia anonymously. The ‘return’ of such assets could be made in the
form of special bonds that would then be used to invest in domestic enter-
prises. The ‘capital amnesty’ ensured that no penalties would be assessed for
previous tax violations. It seemed, however, that many of the oligarchs con-
tinued to keep much of their funds abroad, some holding less than a third of
their financial assets in Russian banks. This was made plain by a report pub-
lished in October 2018 by the Russian marketing and banking analysis com-
pany, Frank RG. Other reports suggested that capital outflow from Russia
had increased with the new sanctions.15
The oligarchs lost little of their clout. When the government announced
plans in 2019 to amend residency rules to force wealthy Russians still living
abroad to pay taxes, a group of oligarchs lobbied against it to the Minister of
Finance, Anton Siluanov. At that time, a taxable resident was one who lived
 Economic patterns 133
183 days per year in Russia; the ministry had proposed cutting that number
of days to 90. Challenged by the Russian Union of Industrialists and
Entrepreneurs, Siluanov ‘postponed’ the reform.16
In its turn, the Russian government launched a quick sell-off of about 80
per cent of its US Treasury securities. By the end of May 2018, Russian hold-
ings of American debt dropped from about $96 billion to $14.9 billion, and
continued to drop until it hit single digits.17 As the share of US dollars in
Russia’s gross international reserve (GIR) fell, Russia’s Central Bank began
boosting its gold holdings, reaching $569 billion by mid-2020, the highest it
had been since 2014. Russia’s holdings in US debt rose again in 2019, bring-
ing it up to $11.5 billion by January 2020. According to the Central Bank,
this was part of a programme to diversify.18

Import substitution
Meeting with his commission on import substitution in April, 2018, Medvedev
said that he was ‘instructed to work out’ a programme of support for compa-
nies most hurt by the ‘unprincipled and non-competitive’ sanctions imposed
by Western countries.19 Although the import substitution package was
expected to be temporary in 2014, it was still firmly in place and growing by
2018. Legislation giving goods and services produced in Russia priority over
items of foreign origin applied to all government purchases, natural resource
monopolies and companies in which the state has more than a 50 per cent
stake. Products labelled ‘Made in Russia’ became a more common sight as
domestic production in agriculture, machinery and other manufacturing sec-
tors grew. Government subsidies, grants and loans provided incentives for
many projects.
That said, progress was slow as trade patterns shifted. Even in 2019,
Russian companies were still purchasing most of its machinery technology
abroad, buying finished products rather than the means to build the machin-
ery themselves.20 It was their place of origin that changed. Goods from
Germany now made up only 7.8 per cent of imports, while China provided 26
per cent of Russian imports. Total imports from the EU fell to 30 per cent of
all Russia’s imports, down from 43 per cent in 2013. Due to ‘sanctions break-
ers’ it has been increasing again, slowly, since 2017.21
Doing its bit, the Russian Duma proposed an upgraded series of counter-
sanctions, which included more bans on agricultural products, raw materials
and food products, alcohol, tobacco, medicinal products, technological
equipment and software, from sanctioning countries, plus select visa bans,
and any participation in privatization projects. This extensive draft bill was
discussed at great length, and then not acted upon. It was returned to the
floor in mid-May 2018 after more sanctions were levelled against Russia by
the US, this time with an added resolution to suspend international coopera-
tion with ‘unfriendly foreign states’. The second draft eliminated names of
goods, foods, services and economic sectors, leaving it up to the government
to designate specific items as need be. The restrictions were mild compared to
134 Economic patterns
sanctions imposed on Russia. According to reports released by the Centre for
Economic and Financial Research in October 2019, the import substitution
programme saw the cost of fish, meat, cheese and vegetables increase even
while domestic production in all these areas improved. 22
In November 2020, Putin renewed the counter-sanctions against EU food
imports until the end of 2021 and, in December, Peskov called the import
substitution a ‘great achievement’, even though food imports were still
important. He may have been exaggerating its level of success, but the claim
that Russia’s ‘food industry meets the needs of citizens fully’ was not entirely
wrong (see ahead).23

Sanctions become American weapon of choice

Almost before he settled into office for his fourth term, Putin was tested by
the US State Department’s proposal of a new set of sanctions. These included
measures to deny credit and prohibit the export of security-sensitive goods
and technology to Russia. Wide-ranging limits on investment in new Russian
sovereign debt and bank operations followed. Seven Russian banks in the US
were on the expanded list. Americans were prevented from investing in
Russian debt, energy projects, and sales of technology. Geopolitical consider-
ations were built in to the bill as well (see Chapter 5).24
In response, Sberbank, which holds nearly half of Russian savings, raised
its interest rates for ruble accounts and paid consumers to keep dollars in
their accounts to stop capital outflow, which had reached about $67 billion in
the private sector. It didn’t work very well, as the outflow increased in 2019.25
With inflation rising, Russia tried to protect the ruble by shifting away from
using the US dollar as a medium for international exchange. When the cen-
tral bank dumped billions in US Treasury holdings in 2018, it replaced them
with euros, yuan and yen. By the end of 2019, Chinese currency made up
about 15 per cent of Russian reserve holdings.26
These holdings were large. Putin’s decision in 2016 to sequester all govern-
ment energy revenue surplus to $40 per barrel of oil led to an accumulation
of over $475 billion in reserves. Cutbacks in spending, a greatly improved tax
collection system and much-reduced debt left Russia in a position to fend off
the worst effects of sanctions. In February 2019, the IMF agreed that Russia
had recovered, while recommending that the state reduce its footprint in the
economy and support private business. Withdrawal would be problematic,
however, for state intervention provides a firewall defending Russia’s econ-
omy from Western-imposed sanctions.27
The new American prohibitions prompted organizers for the 2019 World
Economic Forum in Davos to cancel invitations already sent Deripaska,
Vekselberg and Andrei Kostin (VTB Bank). The restrictions were lifted when
Medvedev threatened a boycott of the annual event if Russia could not
choose its own delegation. It was reported that Russian delegates were told
by organizers that they must avoid sitting on panels with Americans or
attending US-organized events.28 The silly season ran on.
 Economic patterns 135
Further rounds of sanctions in November and December 2018 were
related to the Skripal affair, assertions that Russia had not eliminated all
chemical weapons, Russia’s meddling in the 2016 US presidential election
campaign, and other misdeeds. The list of newly sanctioned individuals
included the two Russians who were accused of poisoning the Skripals, 15
GRU members, and entities involved in meddling, hacking into WADA
files and other ‘malign activities’.29 Trump signed the second round of
these sanctions into law in August 2019, this time forbidding all American
banks from issuing loans to Russians, blocking international banks from
doing so and preventing the IMF and World Bank from lending assistance
to Russia.
Russian companies and entities were hit from the South as well. In late
June 2018, Ukraine added 30 companies and 14 persons to its sanctions
regime against Russia. This action raised its list to 1,762 individuals and 786
entities, and included the Russian CEC and political parties that participated
in elections to the Russian State Duma held in Crimea.30 The US’s Best
Western hotel chain left Crimea in July, joining McDonald’s and Radisson
Hotels and other Western investors forced out by US-imposed sanctions
regimes. Russia’s retaliation came at the end of the year when it expanded an
existing ban on Ukrainian goods to include about $500 million in annual
imports of industrial products.31 Morgan Stanley closed its banking busi-
nesses in Russia because, it said, sanctions made it difficult for Russian firms
to access international capital markets.32 The company’s consulting business
remained because it does not require a licence.
The significance of the post-2014 disruption of Russian–Ukrainian eco-
nomic links can only be understood in connection with the degree to which
the economies of the two countries had been connected. Russian banks,
investment and contracts were major parts of Ukraine’s financial system; the
fact that Russian energy (gas, electricity, coal, atomic energy), both for
domestic use and, in the case of gas, also cross Ukraine to the EU, was even
more important. So, too, were co-production projects and general trade.
Mutual visa-free regimes, migrating labour and, no less significant, numerous
inter-marriages between ethnic Ukrainians and ethnic Russians made eco-
nomic and cultural relations apparently invaluable to both countries – until
they weren’t.33
On the same day, 20 June 2019, that the EU extended its economic sanc-
tions against Russia until January 2020, Putin claimed to his annual Q&A
audience that, ‘starting in 2014, [Russia] has lost about $50 billion as a result
of all these sanctions and restrictions, while the European Union lost $240
billion and the U.S. lost $17 billion’. A few days later he signed a decree
extending Russia’s ban on food imports from Europe until the end of 2020.
Injunctions on meat, fish and dairy product imports from the US, Australia,
Canada and Norway were maintained. The original purpose of the sanction-
ing regimes was lost in the mists. They were now deployed almost solely as
instruments of punishment or, perhaps, domestic political platform padding
in the US, the EU and Russia.34
136 Economic patterns
The sanctions saga had reached its great leap forward in October 2018 in
the form of US Senate legislation castigating Russia for almost everything.
Adopted in the winter of 2019, the Bill titled ‘Defending American Security
from the Kremlin Aggression Act of 2019’ (DASKA) tightened up provisions
in the draft version of August 2018 and included the following specific
provisions:

— prohibiting US investors from investing in new issues of Russian debt

bonds, or in oil projects in Russia;
— imposing sanctions on Russian banks that contribute to interference in
elections in foreign countries;
— imposing sanctions on all foreign energy projects which have Russian
state-owned companies participating, including projects for the produc-
tion of liquefied gas with Russian participating companies outside the
Russian Federation;
— imposing sanctions against 24 FSB agents, whom the United States
deemed involved in the conflict in the Kerch Strait and the detention of
Ukrainian sailors.35

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov complained that new penalties violated

international law and provided US companies with unfair advantages in
international trade. By this time the number of Russian companies sanc-
tioned by the US Treasury Office since 2014 had reached about 750, making
a mockery of earlier US outrage at Russia’s perceived use of its energy power
as an instrument of foreign policy. Peskov and Finance Minister Siluanov
said that Russia would withstand the storm.36

Weathering the storm

Some large foreign enterprises with self-sustaining branches in Russia took
advantage of weakened competition. McDonald’s, for example, nearly dou-
bled the number of its restaurants in Russia, reaching 416 by 2020. Already
the largest fast food service in the country, McDonald’s worked with part-
ners, Yandex, Sberbank and the Delivery Club, to open a delivery-only busi-
ness in Moscow in 2020. The purpose of this ‘Dark Kitchen’ was to curb the
loss of time and money caused by delivery service from the working outlets,
and the pandemic, and to get a jump on Burger King, McDonald’s main
competitor in Russia.37
The ministries of finance, trade and development were encouraged when,
in February 2019, Moody’s Investor Service raised Russia’s rating to invest-
ment grade, agreeing that recent policies strengthened the country’s public
finance sector, and noting specifically that Russia was now better able to
withstand further sanctions imposed by the US.38 S&P Global Ratings and
Fitch both affirmed that rating, stating that the country’s solid balance
sheets could offset potential sanctions. Fitch elevated Russia’s investment-
grade rating again in August, to BBB from BBB–, also citing better policy
 Economic patterns 137
and external balance sheets.39 A few weeks later, the World Bank’s Doing
Business report ranked Russia 28th of 190 economies, an increase of three
places over 2018’s listing. The report noted improvements in such scattered
matters as regulation efficiency, access to permits, protection for minority
shareholders and speed in providing electricity.40
The German agency, Scope Ratings, raised its assessment of Russia’s gov-
ernment debt too, from BBB– to BBB in January 2020. Low debt, increased
tax revenues, abundant reserves and inflation management made Russian
government debt an attractive purchase for foreign investors, it reported.
Ironically, Russia’s policies to protect itself against sanctions brought an
increase in foreign direct investment in non-strategic areas.41
Confirming this trend, Russia and Saudi Arabia agreed to several major
projects during a visit to that country by Putin in October 2019. These
included a joint project with a German company to lease passenger aircraft
for the Russian market, and the allocation of $600 million to modernize civil-
ian aircraft in Russia. Saudi investments in Russian rolling stock and a part-
nership in agricultural investment (livestock and fertilizer companies) were
agreed at the time. Also endorsed were more than a dozen other MOUs in the
energy, petro-chemical and artificial intelligence fields. Putin participated in
the first meeting of a new Russian–Saudi Economic Council, where he
pointed out that trade between the two countries had increased by 15 per cent
in 2018 and was growing even more quickly in 2019.42 Existing sanctions
against Russia appeared to have no impact on this relationship. Both sides
remained committed to OPEC+, and the super cartel of 24 countries that
support it (the Vienna Group). After explosions in important Saudi oil facili-
ties in 2019, Russia offered defence systems for their protection.
On leaving Riyadh, Putin travelled to the United Arab Emirates, where his
team picked up guarantees of other investments.43
Reports published in Europe in 2019 suggested that Western financial mar-
ket and banking sector sanctions ‘produced hardly any lasting negative mar-
ket effects’ during the previous two years. Of several reasons for this, the most
compelling one was that both international and Russian investors learned to
manage the sanctions and build their potential impact into their business
operations.44

Pandemic panic
The coronavirus pandemic disrupted the economies of individual countries
and also the global supply chain. When, in March 2020, G-20 leaders met in
a video conference chaired by Saudi King Salman, Putin called on them to
provide sanctions relief for certain countries. He didn’t mention any specific
countries; rather, he said it was a humanitarian issue, a matter ‘of life and
death’. Suggesting that the economic consequence of the pandemic could be
worse than the global recession of 2008–09, he said that no country should
act on the principle ‘each for himself’. To combat it, the G-20 ought to create
‘green corridors, free from trade wars and sanctions for the mutual supply of
138 Economic patterns
medicines, food, equipment and technology. Ideally, we should introduce a
moratorium, a joint moratorium on restrictions on essential goods, as well as
financial transactions for the procurement.’45
Similar statements came from other G-20 leaders, who agreed to a ‘united
front’, pledged $5 trillion for the global economy to help counter the pan-
demic and set up a joint action committee made up of central bank leaders.
Countries and entire regions deemed most vulnerable to the scourge, such as
Africa, were given priority. Russia agreed to support a UN appeal for $50
billion to help the world’s poorest countries and provide humanitarian aid to
refugee agencies. The IMF had already pledged $50 billion and the World
Bank another $12 billion financial package to help emerging markets combat
the outbreak of COVID-19.
Meanwhile, Russia had to manage the effects of the pandemic on its own
economy. At home, in addition to the measures mentioned in Chapters 1, 3
and 9, Putin signed bills to simplify bankruptcy proceedings, provide credit
payment deferrals for anyone whose income was decreased by a third and
also tax payment deferrals for small and medium-sized businesses. In April,
he signed a separate package of laws initiated by the Cabinet to protect and
promote investment in the economy. To be eligible for investment aid, a
company had to invest at least ₽250 million in a project dedicated to health-
care, education, culture, physical education or sports; at least ₽500 million in
the digital economy, ecology or agriculture, or at least ₽1.5 billion in manu-
facturing. The parcel excluded projects related to ‘gambling, alcohol and
tobacco production, most of the oil and gas sectors, wholesale and retail
trade, banking and other financial activities’. The government also limited
the size of penalties for persons unable to maintain payments to banks on
loans.46
Another important change loomed when, in his address to the nation on
23 June 2020, Putin said that, after it stood at 13 per cent for 20 years, he
would raise the flat income tax to 15 per cent for everyone with incomes over
₽5 million (71,000). This will greatly augment needed government revenues
and not anger many, if any, Russians.47
On the other hand, the ‘paid vacation’ for workers (see Chapter 9) did not
come with compensation for employers, and the tax on interest earned in
bank deposits fell on far more people than the government expected. Unable
to dismiss employees, some smaller businesses were forced to file for bank-
ruptcy. In May, the day before the non-working days ended, Putin ordered
the government to prepare a National Recovery Plan. In the meantime, he
released information on the third economic stimulus package of some $42
billion, and a list of more than 1,000 ‘strategically important’ companies that
were entitled to support. The payout in May focussed on small and medium-
sized businesses.48 Salaries still had to be paid, even when businesses closed,
so the state now offered subsidies and loan programmes to employers for that
purpose. Tax write-offs were possible as well, both to businesses and to the
self-employed. In October, he extended tax deferrals for small businesses, and
on insurance premiums for another three months.49
 Economic patterns 139
The Kremlin had several advantages over other countries, not the least
being the fact of its economic semi-isolation over the previous six years, and
the huge gold and foreign-exchange reserves it built up over that time.
Austerity budgeting, the pension reform, improved tax intake by new digital
technology and near self-reliance on domestic agriculture, all gave it a head
start on crisis management. So, too, did the fact that about 70 per cent of
Russians have savings accounts and very little debt.50 Still, the IMF forecast
a 5.5 per cent decline in Russia’s GDP for 2020 and a continued drop in dis-
posable income.51 For his popularity to rebound, the economy had to
rebound, and there was little evidence of that happening soon.

Domestic issues
National projects revisited
In the spring of 2018, Putin launched a broader restructuring of the Russian
economy by calling for a major shake-up of state-run companies, accusing
them of ‘monopolizing’ markets and unfairly squeezing out small and
medium-sized businesses. Current practices undermined entrepreneurial ini-
tiative, he said, because start-ups could not compete with ‘cartels’ that won
all state or municipal orders. ‘Fair and honest competition is a basic condi-
tion for economic and technological development’, he continued, as he pro-
moted four recently approved packages of anti-monopoly laws.52
A full year later, the Kremlin announced a vast stimulus plan with an out-
lay of over ₽25 trillion ($400 billion) to last until 2024. Ranging from large-
scale infrastructure projects, such as roads and airports, to support for
demographic policy, scientific research, sport facilities, and music equipment,
the scheme relied on Russia’s huge reserve fund for much of its funding.
Critics saw it as a return to Soviet-style planning with greatly increased state
involvement in the economy, proponents saw it as a means to reduce poverty
and, by providing more employment, raise the quality of life for Russians.53
Theoretically, the plan marked the potential culmination of the National
Priority Projects.
The National Priority Projects had four main sub-units, healthcare, educa-
tion, affordable housing and agricultural development. Prime Minister
Medvedev was put in charge in 2005 and remained more or less responsible
for them, even during the four years he served as president. The fact that their
original goals had not yet been reached may have been a reason for his dis-
missal in 2020. It was plain that Putin’s legacy as president, presumed then to
climax in 2024, was tied to the success or failure of these projects.
The rescheduling did not go well in 2019. According to the Russian
Accounting Chamber, only about half of the year’s allocation for infrastruc-
ture (ports and railways) had been spent by the end of the year. Kudrin
blamed this on government inefficiency, bureaucratic caution and confusing
restrictions related to anti-corruption regulations. That said, corruption was
also still in play: the PGO announced in October that it had found over 2,000
140 Economic patterns
‘irregularities’ in the administration of the National Projects, which were
given new leadership in January 2020 only to be stymied by the temporary
collapse in oil prices and manifestations of COVID-19.54

Infrastructure initiatives and SPIEF-2018

The annual St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF) met in
late May 2018 with infrastructure one of the main themes for Russia.
American businesses were present on a major scale for the first time since
President Obama urged them to stay away, and Ambassador Jon Huntsman
delivered a speech.55 One of the other invited speakers was the sanctioned
Viktor Vekselberg. France’s President Emmanuel Macron was a guest speaker
as well, taking the opportunity to negotiate with Putin on Iran, Syria and
Ukraine. So too were Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Chinese Vice
President Wang Qishan, and IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde, all
of whom participated in the opening plenary session hosted by Putin. Indian
Prime Minister Narendra Modi was there a day prior to SPIEF’s opener. The
largest foreign delegation at SPIEF was from the US, followed by Japan and
France.
Among the many economic announcements by Siluanov at SPIEF was the
six-year special infrastructure fund noted above and a proposed redistribu-
tion of tax revenues to the advantage of the regions. Lukoil and Gazprom
agreed on a large-scale joint venture in the Far North to develop gasfields in
the Nenets Autonomous District, and France’s Total purchased 10 per cent
of Novatek’s LNG-2 project in the Arctic, raising its stake to slightly over 21
per cent of Novatek’s LNG operations. Altogether, 550 agreements were con-
cluded at SPIEF.56
Infrastructure proposals were lent further credence in June when Putin
told his phone-in audience that transport links throughout Russia were a
priority for his new government.57 This too was an old story. So was his call
for a feasibility study of the costs and benefits of the construction of a bridge
to Sakhalin, which, he acknowledged, was ‘an old dream’ that would link the
mainland to the Island by road and rail, increase the value of the Trans-
Siberian railway and facilitate economic ties with Japan.58
Putin granted pride of place to the Projects in his opening address to
Moscow’s 11th ‘Russia Calling!’ (Rossiia zovet!) investment forum in
November, 2019. Speaking to an audience of 2,500 people from around the
world, he boasted that Russia had a record low unemployment rate and that
inflation was curbed in spite of sanctions, while admitting that disposable
incomes were ‘standing still’. He expected to resolve that problem by spend-
ing money on the National Projects, with about 45 per cent of the funds
allocated to infrastructure. In that sphere, roads took up over 60 per cent of
the $177 billion infrastructure outlay, followed by railways, waterways and
airports.
Russian and foreign analysts tended to take the ‘we’ll believe it when we see
it’ approach, but the fact that Putin recognized the need, and even Kudrin
 Economic patterns 141
agreed that more spending was necessary, was a start.59 Meanwhile, a new
high-speed toll road linking Moscow and St. Petersburg (669 km), construc-
tion of which began in 2012, opened for traffic with much fanfare.

Pension reform and Russian labour

The biggest economic issue for Russian citizens early on was the govern-
ment’s decision to raise pensionable retirement ages for men and women, a
policy deemed necessary as life expectancy improved, the population aged,
the active working population declined in numbers and state pension funds
hovered around depletion. As we have seen, public reaction to the proposal
was immediate and angry. The government’s timing was not great. Complaints
from Kudrin that funds set aside to fulfil the May decrees would not be
enough and the Ministry of Finance’s call for tax increases to fill the gap had
already irritated citizens.60
Responding to the outcry, Putin offered a series of concession to potential
retirees, making it clear at the same time that the Russian economy would not
survive if pensionable ages stayed as they were. The purpose of the reform, he
said, was ‘to ensure that the pension system remains sustainable and finan-
cially sound’. Before the reform, Russia spent ₽20 billion ($380 mln) per day
on pensions.61
Relevant to the pension issue was the low productivity of labour, which the
leadership had being trying to improve for years. To address this long-stand-
ing phenomenon, the government introduced a new national strategy in July
2018, titled ‘Improving Labour Productivity and Supporting Employment’.
The plan involved inviting large international consulting companies, such as
PricewaterhouseCoopers, to retrain managers of up to 10,000 Russian com-
panies over the next five years, beginning with 50 big working enterprises
over five regions. At the time, Russia occupied 36th place in the OECD’s
ranking of countries by labour productivity. A year later, Putin said that
improved ‘labour productivity’ was the best means to raise Russian standard
of living. 62 It still isn’t clear if the plan worked.
Available work in the shadow economy was part of the problem. Although
the percentage of workers in the shadow economy had been falling, by the
end of 2017 there were still about nine million unregistered workers who paid
little or no taxes, and the black market occupied about 20 per cent of Russia’s
GDP in 2018.63 As the infrastructure projects were launched, however, many
of these illicit labourers were absorbed into the regular workforce where
increasingly favourable conditions and strong demand for labour kept unem-
ployment levels very low.64

Revising the budget, and the pandemic

Within a few weeks of Putin’s address to the Federal Assembly in January
2020, new Prime Minister Mishustin ordered amendments to the budget
142 Economic patterns
already set for 2020–22. These included several increased allocations designed
to alleviate poverty in the country and further develop the National Projects.
Mishustin highlighted new spending to boost Russia’s growth rate to 3 per
cent or higher.65
That agenda was jolted almost immediately by the coronavirus epidemic.
Russian trade with China braked, tourism slowed to a standstill, healthcare
and disease prevention costs soared, internal travel by plane and train came
to a standstill, and fuel consumption dropped (see ahead). Shutting down
borders with China had an especially deleterious effect on regions close to the
border where small-business trade and tourism were most pronounced. Fruit
and vegetable prices soared in Vladivostok and other parts of the Russian
Far East, Chinese demands for local exports dropped, restaurants closed and
the absence of Chinese workers weakened the construction trades. Planners
cancelled SPIEF-2020, due to be held on 3–6 June.
The head of the Federal Tourism Agency, Zarina Doguzova, said that the
industry lost about 500 billion rubles ($10.9 billion) between March and
August 2020, so desperately needed subsidies.66 Earlier, on 17 March, the
government and the Central Bank (CB) announced measures to follow up on
several Mishustin decrees. The CB plan allowed banks to restructure loans to
transport and tourism industries, and also made it easier for manufacturers
of medicine and medical supplies to get loans. The government guaranteed
the loans. ‘Socially significant’ companies were monitored and fines for state
contract suppliers that missed deadlines because of the virus were lifted.
Mishustin added the ministers of finance, economics and transport to the
Coordinating Council formed to curb the impact of coronavirus. The head of
the CB, Nabiulina, joined them.67

Economic integration
Caspian Sea
There was at least one major economic development in 2018 when the
Caspian Sea littoral states finally settled the legal status of that body of
water. After some 20 years of debate, delegations from Russia, Kazakhstan,
Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan and Iran met in Aktau, Kazakhstan, and agreed
that the Caspian was a sea, not a lake, which determined the method of divi-
sion. Kazakhstan gained the largest portion, Iran the least. The agreement
authorized littoral states to lay pipelines on the seabed, needing permission
only when the line crossed another state’s zones. This made the Trans-
Caspian Pipeline, Turkmenistan to Azerbaijan, possible, whereas Russia and
Iran had previously objected to it. In addition to territorial waters and mari-
time borders, the accord set rules for navigation, fishing rights, environmen-
tal matters, and access to the sea’s resources. The economic benefits for
Russia lay mainly in the fact that the potential for dispute was diminished or
even eliminated in most of the above areas. Vladimir Putin led the Russian
delegation to the final session.68
 Economic patterns 143
Eurasia
Pressured by ever-increasing economic sanctions, Russia finally succeeded in
getting Putin’s longed-for Eurasian Economic Union (EEU) off the drawing
board. Years of negotiation included a tri-part trade union agreement
between Russia, Kazakhstan and Belarus in 2006, followed by the formation
of a customs union in 2010 and the Single Economic Space in 2011, overseen
by a Eurasian Economic Commission made up of vice-premiers and three
others from each member country. The EEU’s free trade zone came into
effect on 1 January 2015. Armenia joined the next day and Kyrgyzstan
acceded later in the year. Although Western commentators were already fore-
casting the EEU’s failure by 2017, Egypt and the EEU launched negotiations
on free trade in 2018, and Serbia signed a free trade agreement with it in
2019, over protests from the EU.69
In 2018, the EEU arranged special trade agreements with Iran and China.
The parties agreed to make a decision on permanent association in 2021. The
accord with China emphasized trade and economic cooperation and, though
there was no attempt to abolish customs duties, tighter regulation standards
were set, with intellectual property rights heading the list. Just prior to ses-
sions in Astana, the Supreme Council of the EEU gathered in Sochi and
granted Moldova status as an observer in the Unified Energy System.70
There were strains. During a meeting of the EEU’s Supreme Council in
December 2018, Belarusian President Lukashenka lashed out at Putin for
failing to treat other members, especially Belarus, as equal economic part-
ners. He was angry at the price Minsk had to pay for Russian gas, while
Russians pay much less. Putin responded that Germany pays nearly twice as
much as Belarus. By September 2019, while Minsk and Moscow were again
discussing economic integration (see Chapter 5), gas pricing rows were always
close to the surface. In fact, 2020 opened with a stand-off because contracts
on oil supply and transit fees for that year had not been signed. Chaos result-
ing from the suspicious Belarus presidential election in August 2020 put eco-
nomic negotiations between Minsk and Moscow on hold.

The BRICS
The BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), which began as
an association of emerging national economies in 2006, had grown enough
by 2012 to open discussions of a mutually-owned investment bank. These
negotiations culminated in 2015 with the launching of the New Development
Bank (NDB). Although the initial capital distribution saw China provide $41
billion, Brazil, Russia and India $18 billion each, and South Africa $5 billion,
each member held 100,000 shares in the bank. It is headquartered in Shanghai.
Since then the NDB has proven beneficial for Russia, funding projects to
provide clean water to remote villages and helping restore ‘historic cities’ in
Russia. Loans from the NDB amounted to about $500 million. Another $450
million helped reform the Russian judicial system. 71 Announcements to this
144 Economic patterns
effect came from the president of the NDB, K.V. Kamath, during SPIEF. The
NDB has issued similar loans to each of its members, the most to India and
China. The BRICS tries to function as an economic and political entity inde-
pendent of the IMF and other international agencies dominated by Western
European and North American governments.
In his opening address to the 10th BRICS summit in South Africa in 2018,
Putin noted that trade between partners grew by 30 per cent in 2017 and
asked for member support for Russia’s bid to host Expo 2025. Putin called
BRICS a ‘truly strategic partnership’, claimed that it made up the world’s
largest market and emphasized its new cooperation in building a joint digital
economy.72 At that time, the BRICS embraced nearly 43 per cent of the
world’s population and generated about a quarter of the world’s GDP.
Turkey’s Erdogan attended and made a deal to purchase meats from Russia.
It was at that meeting that he requested accession to the association.73 Russia
is Turkey’s second-largest source of imports, behind the EU.
The 11th BRICS summit gathered in Brasilia in November 2019. There,
the five leaders invited Columbia and Chile to join their NDB. The new
Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro had expressed doubts about the BRICS
generally and voiced some antagonism towards China, but still advocated
fuller integration of member-countries’ economies. Another guest, Argentina,
expressed an interest in accession as a member. Leaders talked about a com-
mon payment systems, collaboration on anti-virus programme and priorities
for Africa. They also took turns appealing for investments into their own
countries. Putin held lengthy bilateral sessions with India’s Modi and China’s
President Xi Jinping and encouraged the meeting to be more active as a bloc
in the UN, targeting money laundering, organized crime and international
terrorism.74
The BRICS faltered during the pandemic. Each of its members suffered
huge human and material losses from the COVID-19, behind only the US. Its
summit in November 2020, was conducted on-line and was dominated by
talk of the virus and its resultant economic slowdown. Xi led the discussion
on the pandemic and encouraged members to support the WHO. Modi called
for reform of the IMF, the WTO and the WHO, and Putin asked members to
manufacture and distribute coronavirus vaccines developed in Russia. Strains
between members, especially China and India, meant that the on-line method
was timely.75

Industry, trade and development

Infrastructure modernization, especially in the North and Far East, was cen-
tral to Putin’s address to the Federal Assembly in early 2019: ‘This is of great
importance for strengthening the entire framework of the state, for unlocking
the potential of the territory, for the growth of the economy of the Russian
Federation’, he said.76 To most Russians, this was an old story, heard almost
every year for more than a decade.
 Economic patterns 145
The Kerch Strait Bridge and domestic transportation issues
There were examples of progress. Transportation being a key to successful
trade and political integration, the inauguration of the auto section of the
bridge across the Kerch Strait linking Crimea to the Russian mainland gener-
ated great excitement. The bridge’s railway lines were completed in the spring
of 2019, for an estimated $4 billion, and Putin ‘drove’ the first engine across
it in December, thereby linking St. Petersburg and Sevastopol by direct rail
for the first time. The presumption in Moscow was that the bridge would
integrate Crimea into Russia’s transport system.77 To abet that process, in
February 2019 the Russian government committed $4.7 billion for infrastruc-
ture and tourism in Crimea. This money came in addition to a development
programme for the Peninsula generally and Sevastopol in particular that
included investments of some $300 billion until 2022.78
In addition to their strategic significance (see Chapter 5), both the bridge
and the Sea of Azov were part of Russia’s plans to enhance internal transit
links between the Azov and the Caspian Seas. Already connected by the
Volga–Don Shipping Canal, a proposal announced in March 2019 was for a
deeper canal with fewer locks, the Eurasia Canal, to serve both security and
trade purposes, and new port facilities on the Caspian. Moscow hoped to
integrate this system with the Belt and Road project (see ahead).79
Even before the COVID-19 transportation shutdowns, the Russian gov-
ernment tried to bolster the airlines industry by upgrading amenities at St.
Petersburg’s Pulkovo airport and opening it as a terminal for low-cost inter-
national carriers from more than 50 countries, including most EU members.
Neither the UK nor the US were part of the programme. It was hoped that
passenger traffic through Pulkovo would double and that regulations easing
access to e-visas would greatly increase tourist revenues in the St. Petersburg
and Leningrad regions. Fearing a loss in profits, domestic Russian airline
managements were not happy about the possibility of an Open Skies regime
in Pulkovo. They were told that this was a five-year pilot project whose con-
sequences would be scrutinized closely at the end of that period. 80 A large
new terminal opened at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport in January 2020 as
well. The new Terminal C, used mainly by Aeroflot, raised the airport’s
capacity to 80 million passengers per year, Russia’s largest, just in time for the
pandemic to force its closure.
In terms of domestic investment in the airplane industry, Aeroflot
abruptly cancelled orders with Boeing in October 2019 and, apparently,
planned to purchase passenger jet planes in Russia as new models come off
the assembly line. This possibility was suspended when the coronavirus pan-
demic kicked Russia’s (and the world’s) airline industry when it was down.
International flights were cancelled altogether and domestic flights curtailed
until late August and, in some cases, late September 2020. Thousands of
personnel took paid leave. On the other hand, the government announced
extensive renovations in the railway sector, assuming that travel by rail
might be the only solid link connecting many of the regions in the near
146 Economic patterns
future. Transport Minister Ditrich announced a 15-year project in March
2020 to ensure that the regions were better integrated internally and with
foreign networks. It would involve shoring up roadbeds and creating new
rail lines, both tasks increasingly expensive with permafrost thawing. One
of the new lines will cut across the northern regions, and new high-speed
networks are planned for the more populous western parts of the federa-
tion. On paper, the projects sounded exciting; in reality, the chances of their
completion were slim.81
In the automotive sector, Avtovaz, Volkswagen, Kia, Hyundai and Toyota
all saw their shares of the market grow in 2018, while Ford suffered losses.
The Ford–Sollers joint venture gave notice in March 2019 that it would close
two of its operations in Russia. One of its assembly plants remained open
and the company promised to compensate Russian workers and suppliers
who lost their jobs. The problem lay with a sharp decline in the Russian pas-
senger vehicle market since 2013. Sales began improving in 2017, but still
stood at only about two-thirds of the earlier level. The pandemic brought car
sales in Russia to a near close.82

Foreign investment
Foreign investments in Russian securities reached record levels in the winter
of 2019. According to a CB review, purchases of federal loan bonds were the
highest in five years. One analyst said that lifting sanctions from UC Rusal
was a factor in the improved demand for Russian bonds. Russia became a
safe credit risk, and foreign purchases of federal ruble-denominated bonds
continued to rise.83
More interesting was the fact that in 2019 Americans were the largest
investors in Russia. Traditionally, the main foreign direct investments (FDI)
in Russia were said to come from conduit countries, such as Cyprus,
Luxembourg or Bermuda, while their original source remained unknown. A
new system of estimation developed by the UN Conference on Trade and
Development (UNCTAD), if accurate, reveals significant increases in US
and EU investments in Russia, with the US leading the way.84
The Russian government invested overseas itself, in Africa, where its
approach was similar to the one adopted for Latin America: loans, debt for-
giveness and investments in return for access to natural resources and strate-
gic considerations.
In October 2019, representatives from more than 50 African countries
showed up at the first post-Soviet Russia–Africa summit, 43 heads of state
among them. Putin told them that he wanted ‘to build further ties with the
African continent’, in part by exchanging ‘debt for development’.85 The sum-
mit, co-chaired by Putin and Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, president of Egypt and
chair of the African Union, coincided with a Russia–Africa Economic
Forum and attracted representatives from about 2,000 Russian and foreign
companies.86 Of the dozens of military, energy and other deals or MOUs
signed, investment arrangements with the Republic of Congo, exploration
 Economic patterns 147
agreements with Equatorial Guinea, South Sudan and Rwanda, and helicop-
ter sales to Nigeria and the Central African Republic were typical.87
Citing the example of Egypt in his account of the value of Russia to
African countries, Putin referred to plans for a Russian industrial zone in the
Suez Canal region, the sale of 1,300 railway cars to that country and plans to
reconstruct the Egyptian railway network.88 The Africa economic summit
was larger than September’s Eastern Economic Forum (EEF) in Vladivostok
(see ahead), belying dramatically the notion that Western economic sanctions
had isolated Russia from the ‘civilized world’, as President Obama put it in
2014. The Africa forum was less energy-related than the EEF, dominated as
it was by Russian producers of fertilizers, grains, weapons, machinery and
transport equipment, all hoping to expand their market catchment in Africa.89

Pivot to the East

A big foreign investment step forward came early in 2018, when the China
Development Bank agreed to issue a loan of ₽600 billion ($9.3 bln) to state-
owned Vneshekonombank. The transaction was signed just before a Shanghai
Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit in June. The purpose of the loan
was to facilitate integration between the Eurasian Economic Union and
China’s One Belt, One Road (BRI) project, which will include the Northern
Sea Route (NSR) and high-speed links from China to Europe. The two coun-
tries also created a joint investment fund of $1 billion, linking the Russia
Direct Investment Fund and the China Investment Corporation. They
announced plans to create a joint ruble–yuan currency fund to generate fur-
ther trade and economic relations between them, as both countries decided to
move away from the US dollar as a medium of mutual exchange.90 After a
meeting between the new head of Roscosmos, Dmitry Rogozin, and the head
of China’s national space agency (CNSA), the two countries confirmed a
MOU on space exploration and navigation. This was a follow-up to agree-
ments reached in March 2018 on establishing a joint data centre.91
Given that direct foreign investment fell by more than 50 per cent in the
first half of 2018 and about a billion dollars were pulled out by investors by
the end of the year,92 economic contracts with Asian countries generally and
China particularly grew in importance to Moscow. These links were strength-
ened again in September when Putin and Xi met for the third time in 2018,
this time at the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok. Coinciding with a
large-scale Russia–China military drill, the Forum was marked by deals on a
$2 billion joint venture between the Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba
Group Holding Ltd. and Alisher Usmanov’s internet service Mail.ru Group
Ltd., backed by the Kremlin’s Direct Investment Fund. The deal will enable
the Alibaba Group to market goods in Russia via Internet.93
Welcoming guests from 60 countries, Putin invited them to join his attempts
to turn Russia’s Far East into a locale for international business and invest-
ment activity, stressing especially the NSR, now complemented by on-going
improvements on the Baikal–Amur Mainline (BAM) and Trans-Siberian
148 Economic patterns
railways. ‘Russia and our Far East are certainly open to expanding business
ties’, he added, while commenting that commercial activity ‘serves to bring
countries and peoples closer together’.94 He insisted that the Far East was ‘an
absolute priority’ for Russia, boasted of new projects with Japan, among
them a jointly operated plant for producing automobile engines in Primorsky
Krai, and infrastructure, energy and environmental ventures with Mongolia.
Announcing a new law that would compel companies benefitting from subsi-
dized projects in the Russian Far East to locate their engineering units,
research and development centres there, too, so as to provide employment
and training for regional citizens, he projected a ‘large world-class scientific
and educational centre’, including a ‘technopark’, at the Far Eastern
University in Vladivostok. Putin left little doubt that the ‘pivot to the east’
was well in hand (Figure 4.1).95
While there was a lot of wishful thinking and public relations hype in this
opening address, reports that Russia planned to spend $24 billion from its
Development Fund to build new highways and airports in its Northern,
Central and Far East regions added substance to the projections. According
to some contemporary reports, spending on infrastructure could reach as
much as five trillion rubles ($75.3 bln) over the following six years.96 A later
estimate set the amount at considerably more. Clearly, the government hoped
to at least look as if it was investing in a better quality of life for its citizens
in Russia’s eastern regions.97
Russia’s shift eastwards gained still more credibility when China announced
the completion of its part of the first railway bridge to Russia across the
Amur (Hellongjiang) River in October 2018 and the first vehicle bridge in
November 2019. These links were expected to provide all-year access and
lower transportation costs of imports and export between them.98 Part of
China’s Belt and Road project, the bridges were a good omen for the future;
so too were Portugal’s (December 2018) and Italy’s (March 2019) decision to
join China’s initiative. Switzerland and Luxembourg also signed on to the
huge infrastructure venture. Putin attended the three-day Belt and Road
summit held in Beijing in April 2019, along with representatives of 36 other

Figure 4.1 Northern Sea Route.

Source: Russian Ministry of Transport, nsra.ru, December 2019.
 Economic patterns 149
countries and the head of the IMF. The Russian leader praised the Chinese
initiative, saying that it fit ‘perfectly’ into Russia’s own plans to strengthen
cooperation among Eurasian countries.99
Courting Japan as well, Deputy Prime Minister and Presidential Envoy for
Development of the Far East Yury Trutnev travelled to Tokyo in October
2018. He lobbied Japanese economic and trade ministries to participate in the
development of Russia’s Far East. Although few specific agreements were
reached, Japanese banks decided to consider joint ventures in energy and
pulp and paper projects. Several potential investors expressed concern about
the limited capacity of Russian railways and ports.100
While the Kuril Islands issue dominated public discussion of Russia–Japan
relations, the economic links between the two countries quietly expanded. By
2019, Japanese consortia held 12.5 to 30 per cent shares in Sakhalin-1 & 2
energy projects and 80 per cent of the Sakhalin LNG plant. Automobile
manufacturers Toyota, Nissan, Mitsubishi, Mazda and others all had plants
in Russia, and Japanese direct investment was approaching half of China’s
investments. The years 2018–19 were proclaimed the ‘Year of Russia in Japan’
and the ‘Year of Japan in Russia’ and the number of Japanese tourists visit-
ing Russia grew rapidly, especially after visa rules were simplified.101
Putin’s participation in the 2018 East Asia Summit for the first time was
another signal of the importance of the area to Russia economically. At that
summit, he held bilateral meetings with the leaders of the host country,
Singapore, and also of Indonesia and Malaysia. He addressed the 10-mem-
ber Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), which met at the
same time, and appealed for cooperation between ASEAN and the SCO.
Russians signed multiple economic transactions, and Rosoboronexport con-
firmed military sales to Indonesia and Vietnam. Rosneft and Indonesia’s
Pertamina confirmed a project to build a refinery.102
Asked at home if economic sanctions hindered Russia’s cooperation with
Southeast Asian countries, Putin replied that trade with Asian countries had
reached 27 per cent of Russia’s foreign trade, and that free trade pacts between
the Eurasian Economic Union, India, China and Singapore were under dis-
cussion.103 The EEU already had such an arrangement with Vietnam, an
important customer for Russian weapons.
Central Asia was also a target of Russia’s aggressive trade campaign. A
Putin visit to Tashkent in October 2018, mainly to sign off on a Nuclear
Power Plant (NPP) project, resulted in over 700 long- and short-term agree-
ments and memoranda worth about $27 billion.104

The ASEAN
A significant consequence of the ASEAN summit in Singapore was the for-
malization of the existing Russia–ASEAN Strategic Partnership and a MOU
between the ASEAN and the Eurasian Economic Commission related to
economic cooperation. When Lavrov attended an ASEAN ministerial meet-
ing in Bangkok in July 2019, he remarked on the ‘virtually identical’ foreign
150 Economic patterns
policy decisions taken by member countries and called for further mutual
efforts to promote the Asia-Pacific region via such agencies as the ASEAN
Regional Security Forum, more East Asian summits and ministerial
conferences.105
Sixty-five countries were represented at the 2019 Eastern Economic Forum
in September, the most prominent after Russia being India, China and Japan.
Over 400 global companies sent delegates. About twenty US companies
showed up, including McDonald’s, IBM, General Electric and Master
Card.106 It was India that showed the greatest interest in the Arctic. The del-
egation from that country declared its readiness to open a credit line worth $1
billion to invest in Russia’s Far East, presumably because their supply of
hydrocarbons from Iran and Venezuela was curtailed. Above all, Delhi
looked for increased LNG from Novatek. South Korea, Japan and Australia
demonstrated interest in Russia’s Arctic too.107
At the 2019 ASEAN summit a few weeks later, Medvedev met with
Thailand’s prime minister privately and then urged members to sign on to a
‘Greater Eurasia Partnership’, that is, go beyond the existing cooperation
between the ASEAN and the Eurasian Economic Union to include the SCO
in a formal free trade union. Russian trade with ASEAN nations had risen,
slowly. To speed the process up, Medvedev suggested using national curren-
cies in trade and joint digitalization programmes to integrate remote territo-
ries. The response at the time was interest, but little action.108
In November 2020, the ASEAN signed on to the much-anticipated
Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), joining with
China, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand. The RCEP makes
up the largest trading bloc in the world, and about 25 per cent of the
global GDP. Russia was not part of the long-time negotiations, but its ties
with the ASEAN through the EEU and bilateral economic links with
Vietnam and China make it an important associate, especially as the econ-
omies of every country struggle to recover from the pandemic. Because
India was expected to join the RECEP, and did not, analysts assumed that
Delhi would turn more to the EEU and Russia for energy and agricultural
business.109

Western remnant
Even as political pundits everywhere expounded upon Putin’s alleged ambi-
tion to divide and conquer the EU, the continuing importance of trade
prompted him to tell an interviewer in Austria that he had no such wish
because the bloc was still Russia’s ‘biggest trade and economic partner. The
more problems there are within the European Union, the greater the risks
and uncertainties for us.’110 Rhetorical or not, the practical realities of trade
with the EU as a single economic unit were not yet lost on the Russian
leadership.
Oil and gas were the EU’s main imports from Russia while machinery,
transport equipment, chemicals, medicines and manufactured products
 Economic patterns 151
moved eastwards from the EU. Still, overall trade with the EU decreased
steadily after 2014. In addition to the EU’s sanctions against Russian busi-
nesses, as of the spring of 2018 Moscow had imposed 36 trade barriers
against the EU, the most recent coming in 2018 when only Russian-flagged
ships were allowed to traverse the Russian Arctic coast carrying hydrocar-
bons and coal.111
But ‘business is business’ – certain members of the EU skirted around the
sanctions to take advantage of Russia’s needs. For example, in July 2018, the
large Spanish clothing concern Inditex signed a deal to produce Zara brand
hats and scarves at a Russian textile factory in Tver. Inditex operates over 550
stores under various brands in Russia. US sanctions notwithstanding, as we
have seen, American businesses were the second-largest investors in Russia
during 2018 and 2019, behind only China, and American portfolio investors
ranked No. 1.112

Energy
Oil and gas exports have been the underpinning of the Russian economy for
decades and the ebb and flow of energy prices have consistently determined
the success or failure of government projects since the late 1980s.113

Gas & gas pipelines

Russian natural gas sales to Europe enjoyed a resurgence in 2018. Shortages
in Norway and a temporary shutdown in Libya helped boost deliveries by
nearly 7 per cent in the first quarter. By the end of July, gas shipments to
Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, France, Croatia, Denmark and Poland
had all increased, with the Netherlands (53.8% rise), Austria (48.3%) and
Croatia (40.1%) leading the way. Overall, Gazprom’s sales of gas to Europe
in 2018 reached record levels. Gas reserves in Russia also increased in value
in 2019, to about $221 billion, nearly a quarter more than in the previous
year. Its volume rose by 3.6 per cent.114
Contrary to critics’ expectations, Gazprom’s promise that its 3,000 km
(1,865 mile) Power of Siberia pipeline would be completed before the end of
the year proved true. It came on line in December, thereby enabling the huge
30-year, $400 billion gas sale agreement Gazprom signed with China in
2014.115 Putin and Xi Jinping watched the launch via video link. A second gas
pipeline to China, the Altai, was under discussion (Figure 4.2).
The Nord Stream-2 project faced stiffer opposition in the summer of 2018,
as expanded US sanctions complemented vigorous resistance to it from
Poland, the Baltic States and Ukraine. The orchestrated objections prompted
CEO’s of German companies to initiate a publicity campaign in support of
the project.116 The opposition notwithstanding, Gazprom received permits to
build Nord Stream-2 from Germany and Finland, and in November com-
pleted its offshore section of the TurkStream pipeline to connect Russia and
Turkey under the Black Sea.117
 152 Economic patterns
Figure 4.2 Power of Siberia pipeline, 2019.
Source: Gazprom website, https://gazprom.com/press/news/2020/november/article518680/.
 Economic patterns 153
In its turn, Poland began constructing a pipeline from Norway, also under
the Baltic Sea, and said that it would not re-sign contracts with Gazprom
when the current one ends in 2022. Paradoxically, when Poland begins taking
a greater share of Norwegian gas, less will be available to Germany, which
has announced plans to close its nuclear (2022) and coal-powered (2038)
plants, making Nord Stream-2 even more important for Germany, assuming
LNG stays more expensive than pipelined gas.118
Donald Trump joined the argument in July 2018. During a trip to the UK
for a NATO summit, he proclaimed that ‘Germany is totally controlled by
Russia because they’re getting between 60 to 70 per cent of their energy from
Russia and a new pipeline’.119 Typically, his pronouncement was bolstered by
false, or purposely exaggerated, data (only about 9 per cent of Germany’s
power is generated by Russian gas), and failed to mention that he wanted
Europe to buy more gas (LNG) from America, labelled by the US Department
of Energy, childishly, as ‘freedom gas’.120
Russia and Germany would have none of that. When Putin and Merkel
met in Germany in August they spoke in support of the Nord Stream-2 and
criticized ‘some states’ that levelled tariffs indiscriminately. They had already
been joined by Austria’s OMV energy company, which had signed a deal in
June to extend and increase supplies from Gazprom until 2040. Their
arrangement was signed on the day of a Putin visit to Vienna.121 The pipeline
still had a few obstacles to pass. For instance, Denmark hesitated about
granting the pipeline passage through its territorial waters and the US threat-
ened further sanctions against participating countries. Yet, even after the
Azov Sea affair in November 2018, Germany remained committed to the
project (Figure 4.3).122
An enormously important opportunity for Gazprom came in late May
2018 when it and the European Commission resolved a seven-year-old anti-
trust dispute. The energy giant agreed not to prevent Eastern European cus-
tomers from reselling their surplus gas, and that the lower price traditionally
set for Germany and the Netherlands would now be the standard for all. In
return, Russia avoided stiff penalties threatened by the European Commission
and, more importantly, was better able to hold its European market in the
face of competition from LNG producers, such as the US and Qatar. By 2018
Russia still supplied nearly 40 per cent of Europe’s gas.123
In the meantime, Gazprom won a suit when the WTO agreed that that
Croatia, Hungary and Lithuania discriminated against Russia by applying
different sets of rules to domestic and foreign (Russian) pipeline operators.124
In October, Gazprom’s Aleksei Miller led a delegation to Ashgabat, met with
President Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov and renewed gas purchases from
Turkmenistan, which had suspended such sales in 2016.125 As well as provid-
ing another source of natural gas for Gazprom, this accommodation drew
the Caspian littoral states closer together.
Other negotiations did not turn out so well. Ukraine’s Naftohaz requested
and won part of Gazprom’s South Stream assets in the Netherlands. This
served as payment for some of Gazprom’s debt to Naftohaz that had been
 154 Economic patterns
Figure 4.3 Nord Streams 1 & 2.
Source: Gazprom website, www.gazpromexport.ru/en/projects/5/.
 Economic patterns 155
subject to a lawsuit for several years.126 Gazprom faced another setback in
March 2020, when the Stockholm Arbitration Court decided against it in a
long dispute with the Polish state oil and gas company PGNIG. The court
ruled that the Russian company had overcharged since 2014 and that
Gazprom owed compensation of up to $1.5 billion. Poland complained of
non-compliance a few months later and threatened new court action. At that
time, Poland was the sixth largest consumer of Russian gas.127
Three important Russian natural gas pipeline projects were scheduled to
start delivering in 2019: The Power of Siberia pipeline to China, Nord
Stream-2 to Germany, and TurkStream, which involved lines from Russia to
Turkey under the Black Sea and another from Turkey to Europe. Gazprom’s
threat to cut off all transit via Ukraine was left open for negotiation as
Medvedev sought ways and means to connect Slovakia to both Nord
Stream-2 and the TurkStream. In January 2020, Putin and Erdogan launched
the TurkStream pipeline formally, with the leaders of Serbia and Bulgaria
standing by. Only Nord Stream-2 was delayed.
That latter-named pipeline remained a geopolitical point of departure and
was a target for a US Senate Foreign Relations Committee vote to support
sanctions against firms involved in its construction (August 2019). Sponsored
by Texas Senator Ted Cruz, who hypocritically claimed that such sanctions
would protect European security from ‘Russia … using energy as a weapon’,
the Committee further weaponized the sanctions file itself.128
The final country needed to agree on passage, Denmark, granted permis-
sion for the Nord Stream-2 pipeline to cross its underwater territory in
October 2019. The value of shares in Gazprom immediately rose by almost
five per cent, even though the US Congress went ahead with legislation to
sanction companies providing technical assistance to the pipeline construc-
tion.129 It may be that this attempt to impose penalties for an economic deci-
sion every sovereign country has the right to make was finally recognized for
what it was – economic extortion.
A day after the Danish announcement, Putin was in Budapest for a one-
day meeting with Viktor Orban, bringing with him representatives of LUKoil
and Transneft to sign agreements with Hungary’s MOL to facilitate the
transport of Russian fuel to Hungary via the Druzhba pipeline until 2025.130
Hungary remains a hub for the storage and distribution of Russian energy to
some other parts of Europe, and is a site for two Russian-made NPPs.
In another step forward, Russia and Ukraine, with a representative of the
EU as moderator, negotiated a return to natural gas talks in September 2019.
Ukraine had stopped buying from Russia in 2016, but found LNG and re-
sold gas from eastern Europe too expensive.131 Later in 2019, several long-
time disputes between Gazprom and Naftohaz over gas transit were suddenly
settled. Gazprom agreed to pay the $2.6 billion won by Naftohaz in litigation
in return for all other claims being dropped. A five-year gas transit contract
and direct deliveries of Russian gas to Ukraine were also agreed. Russia had
preferred one-year transit contracts, but the delay in Nord Stream-2 gave
Ukraine a bargaining chip. These protocols, signed in draft form during
156 Economic patterns
trilateral discussions in Berlin, were important to both sides, and marked a
difficult political compromise for Moscow, who had long planned on using
Nord Stream-2 and the TurkStream to bypass Ukraine altogether. In addi-
tion to political considerations, Gazprom’s market in Europe was threatened
by LNG competition from the US and Qatar, a new inner-Baltic pipeline
(Balticconnector), a Norway–Poland–Denmark link (Baltic Pipe), a Greek,
Cyprus and Israel pipeline deal (EastMed.Gas), and a Bulgarian plan to
obtain gas from Azerbaijan and also switch to LNG. 132
As 2019 wound down, several more bills enacted in Washington had
momentous consequences for the Russian energy sector. On 20 December,
Trump signed the US’s defence budget into law, carrying with it the threatened
sanctions against Nord Stream-2 and TurkStream. This act prompted
Switzerland’s Allseas Group DSA, which was setting out the Nord Stream
pipes, to drop out of the enterprise, throwing the project into disarray. Gazprom
said it would finish the project itself, but delays were necessary. Russia had only
one pipe-laying vessel that met requirements for the Danish permit and it had
to travel to the Baltic Sea from the Far East. When the Akademik Cherskii
arrived, in May, it had again to wait just off Denmark’s Bornholm Island until
it was granted Danish permission to proceed. Meanwhile, Washington broad-
cast threats of new sanctions against the Gazprom pipeline operation, and
Poland’s anti-monopoly agency fined Gazprom $57 million for, allegedly, not
providing Nord Stream documentation.133
The new sanctions failed to target key financial backers, Engie, OMV,
Uniper, Wintershall DEA and Royal Dutch Shell, all of whom stayed with
the project and committed to sharing 50 per cent of its $11.2 billion cost.134
The US sanctions were aimed at companies involved in construction of the
pipeline and their top management. While the US Energy Secretary boasted
that Russia would not be able to complete the project, the EU generally, and
the German, French and Swiss governments specifically, opposed the
sanctions.135
The US Congress filed another anti-Russia bill, in June 2020, as a compan-
ion bill to the US Senate’s Protecting Europe’s Energy Security Clarification
Act and called for still more sanctions against Nord Stream-2. In mid-August
2020, Uniper backed off because of US sanctions.
As it happened, over the protests from the US, Poland and Ukraine, in July
2020 Denmark granted final permission for Nord Stream-2 to use pipe-laying
vessels with anchors (as opposed to self-positioning ships that were sanc-
tioned) to complete its final stretch.136 Pompeo promised still tougher legisla-
tion against the pipeline. He had already warned companies involved in the
Nord Stream-2 project that they should ‘get out or risk the consequences’
and later told a Senate panel that the US would ‘do everything we can to
make sure the pipeline doesn’t threaten Europe’. This time he said he would
sanction insurers and ports involved in the project.137 The German Eastern
Business Association called Pompeo’s tactic ‘extortion’, the EU suggested it
violated international law and Peskov called it ‘an attempt to force Europeans
to buy more expensive gas’.138 It is hard to see it as anything else.
 Economic patterns 157
More calls to stop the Nord Stream-2 pipeline came from Washington
after the Navalny poisoning in August 2020. The pipeline project had been
lying fallow for almost a year when, on 11 December, construction started
again. The US asked Germany to impose a moratorium on it. With Trump
leaving, very begrudgingly, and a new administration waiting, Berlin had an
important choice to make.139

LNG
In July 2019, Novatek announced that it had found partners in Sweden,
Norway and Finland to help construct 15 more 1,000-foot-long ice-breaking
tankers to carry Yamal LNG from its seaport at Sabetta east or west on the
NSR. The first of these huge vessels had its successful maiden voyage in
December 2017; the second, a nuclear-powered icebreaker launched in May
2019. Putin boasted of the icebreakers and the NSR in his address to the 5th
International Arctic Forum when it met in Petersburg in April.140 Over 3,500
businesspeople, scientists and officials attended the sessions.
The future of Russia’s LNG brightened in October that year when Riyadh
announced investments in two major Russian energy projects, one of them a
$5 billion infusion into an LNG project in the Arctic, the other a $500 million
stake in a Russia–China investment fund. The Saudis also purchased a 30 per
cent equity in Novatek, one of only two Russian companies allowed to work
in the Arctic. The other is Gazprom. These investments softened the impact
of Western sanctions.141
Italy’s Saipem also signed multi-billion dollar deals with Novatek to build off-
shore platforms for Russia’s Arctic LNG 2, with export credit agencies from Italy
(SACE) and France (COFACE) guaranteeing the loan, and Turkey’s Renaissance
providing services. They hope to start producing LNG by 2022–23. The trade
war between China and the US boosted Russia’s LNG prospects as well.142
LNG had domestic uses too. In January 2019, Gazprom launched a termi-
nal to feed LNG directly into Kaliningrad, making the exclave energy inde-
pendent of its neighbours, and shut down the existing pipeline through
Belarus and Lithuania.143 After all that promise, however, funding for
Novatek’s projects was omitted from the Russian Finance Ministry’s budget
for 2020. An energetic lobbying campaign by the company in an attempt to
change the ministry’s proposals may have been handicapped by the fact that
LNG prices were dropping precipitously.

Oil sector
The 21st century has seen a huge expansion in the Russian oil export sector.
Oil production reached record levels in 2019–20 and Rosneft overtook Saudi
Arabia as the largest supplier to China. According to pronouncements from
the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment in September 2019, the
market value of Russia’s oil reserve had doubled since the previous year to an
estimated $1.2 trillion.144 That value is important only if the oil can be sold.
158 Economic patterns
The market had been looking up in 2018 when, although some foreign
companies, such as Exxon Mobil, withdrew from several joint ventures with
Rosneft because of the sanctions, the Russian oil producer signed a contract
with a subsidiary of France’s Total to export more oil to Germany.145 Saudi
Arabia and Russia revealed plans in May that year to revive oil production
independently of the other states with which they had agreed to halt output
in 2016. Russia is not one of the 13 members of OPEC, rather it is part of the
more loosely organized 22-member OPEC+. In June, the Energy Minister
Novak attended an OPEC summit in Vienna, where the organization agreed
to a modest hike in oil production. Teheran objected to an increase because
the US favoured it while at the same time imposing economic sanctions
against Iran and Venezuela, thereby limiting the global supply. Discussion
about amalgamating OPEC and OPEC+ intensified.146
At a time when the US took over the number one spot among the world’s
oil producers and wielded sanction-bearing pressure against countries that
purchase Iranian oil – picking which countries it would spare, such as Turkey,
India and South Korea – Russian energy interests sought new markets and
struggled to find ways to help Iran. Heavy investment in Iran’s oil and gas
sectors was one tactic, the reintroduction of the oil-for-goods barter system
was another.147 As it happened, in November and December, 2018,
Zarubezhneft and Rosneft withdrew plans to invest large sums of money in
the Iranian energy sector because they too were apprehensive about US
reaction.148
Attempting to forestall consequences of more sanctions expected after
the Democrats won control of the House in the US’s mid-term elections,
Russian oil companies put pressure on European buyers to use euros instead
of dollars. Contracts negotiated for 2019 included penalties if purchasers
fail to pay for supplies (because of sanctions) provided under contract.
Since Russian producers were still the source for about 10 per cent of global
oil shipped to refineries in Europe and Asia, Russian suppliers, especially
Rosneft, Gazprom Neft and Surgutneftgaz, had cards to play, yet ever-
broadening embargoes made it more difficult for purchasers to make
payments.149
The Arctic was again a focal point for large-scale oil-field development.
When Rosneft released its plans to utilize the Northern Sea Route to get oil
to markets, especially in Asia, Gazprom Neft signed a long-term contract to
develop the Achimov deposits in the Yamburg oil field, and lobbied the gov-
ernment successfully for a substantial 10-year tax relief to help cover the
development of part of its South Priobskoye field, in the Khanty-Mansi AO,
Western Siberia, which provides nearly 20 per cent of all its oil production.
Rosneft received a similar concession. Legislation adopted in January 2020
called for a $231 billion tax break regime as incentives for major investments
in Arctic oil. Petro-chemical projects, exploration in Siberia and the Far East,
transport and infrastructure development were also provided for in the bill.150
Speaking to Putin with unbridled optimism in February 2020, with oil
price and pandemic crises swirling around them, Rosneft CEO Igor Sechin
 Economic patterns 159
proclaimed that the company’s Vostok Oil project in the Arctic would be the
biggest project in the modern global oil industry, involving the development
of 15 new towns, two airports, a seaport and a new pipeline. It will create
100,000 new jobs and require about $150 billion in investment, or so Sechin
said. His assumption that Rosneft would find partners in China, India and
Japan, may have been wishful thinking. Foreign capital was going to be very
hard to access, in part because of sanctions and in part because of energy
market conditions.151
Oddly, Russian exports of oil to the US tripled in 2019 to reach an eight-
year high (170 mln barrels), mostly because of American sanctions against
Venezuela. Russia became the second-largest energy supplier to the US,
ahead of Mexico and behind only Canada. China, the Netherlands and
Germany bought the largest amount of Russian oil, while the US ranked
12th, having doubled its purchases over the volume acquired in 2018. The
UK, ranked 18th, also doubled its purchases.152 That said, in February
2020, Washington sanctioned Rosneft for giving ‘malign support’ to
Venezuela’s Maduro by delivering its oil via a subsidiary located in Geneva.
In response, the company transferred all of its assets in Venezuela to a
company owned by Russia’s government. This action was expected to pro-
tect Rosneft and its minority shareholders, BP and Qatar, from US
retaliation.153
The global consumption of oil continued to plummet because of climate
warming and the coronavirus outbreak. The ruble also tumbled and Russian
firms saw their share prices collapse (e.g. Rosneft 20%; Gazprom 25%), leav-
ing the country weakened in its negotiations with OPEC. Oil exports still
provided the Russian government with about 40 per cent of its revenues and
remained crucial to government projects. In 2020, Russia had a fall-back
reserve of about $150 billion in its National Welfare Fund, which should
have come into play if the oil price fell below $42 per barrel.154 It didn’t. Even
as Siluanov announced that Russia’s revenues from oil and gas sales would be
at least $40 billion lower than expected, the CB hesitated about dipping into
reserves, perhaps concerned about the fate of Putin’s National Projects.
Money was needed for pandemic recovery as well, but the reserves remained
mostly untouched. We have already seen that the National Projects were
jeopardized by the oil pricing crisis, declining oil consumption, and the coro-
navirus pandemic.
Relief loomed in April when OPEC and OPEC+ finally agreed to curtail
output over May and June 2020. North American producers were not
involved, though officials from the US, Canada and Mexico planned a joint
response for the upcoming meeting of G-20 energy ministers, and Putin
spoke with Trump and King Salman by telephone the day the agreement was
announced. After four days of video-conference negotiations, the countries
of OPEC and OPEC+ agreed to reduce output by a record 9.7 million barrels
per day. Restrictions would be relaxed gradually until the spring of 2022.
Mexico came on board. Of non-members, Canada had long since cut pro-
duction, and US, Norway and Argentina promised unilateral cuts.155
160 Economic patterns
Nuclear Power Plants (NPPs)
On the eve of the 2020 crises, Russia recently had become the world leader in
exporting new nuclear reactors, with 39 new NPPs under construction or
planned. No other country had even half this number. Before 2018 the file
was dominated by the US’s Westinghouse. In addition to needed income,
NPPs represent an important strategic commodity, and Russia includes in its
NPP market countries not firmly aligned with it or the US, such as Turkey,
Bangladesh, India, Argentina, Hungary and Finland.156 Like weapons sales,
their value lies in both economic and geopolitical returns.
Rosatom celebrated the launch of work on Turkey’s first nuclear power
plant in April, 2018, with expectations that the $20 billion project at Akkuyu
would start generating power by 2023.157 Six months later, construction began
on the first Uzbek NPP, financed by a loan from Russia. Putin and President
Shavkat Mirziyoyev presided over a ceremony in Tashkent that marked the
onset of geological surveys to decide the best location for the facility.158 That
same month, Putin and Egypt’s President el-Sisi discussed the creation of a
Russian technology park in Egypt and the construction of a nuclear power
plant in El Dabaa.
Rosatom signed four NPP agreements with the Chinese government in
2018. Construction details for two units at the existing Xudabao NPP were
not finalized until the spring of 2019, and actual work was scheduled for 2021
and 2022. Two more units will be assembled in Tianwan. Total value of the
contract was $3.62 billion.159
The world’s first floating NPP (Akademik Lomonosov) was authorized to
start work in July. Its purpose is to provide electricity to a resource-rich
region in Russia’s Arctic, and to offshore platforms in the area. After years of
planning and three years under construction, the vessel began a 5,000-km
journey under tow from Murmansk to Pevek in August 2019. At that time,
there were seven more such plants under construction. Critics such as
Greenpeace refer to them as ‘floating Chernobyls’.160
Some of the NPPs had immediate political implications. Belarus, for exam-
ple, officially opened its first nuclear plant in November, at the height of anti-
Lukashenka demonstrations. The NPP at Astravyets is sited only 40 kms
southeast of Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital. Though Rosatom, its builder,
and the IAEA endorsed its safety standards, the power plant represents
another sore spot between Belarus and Lithuania, a member of the EU and
NATO.161

SPIEF-2019
Putin’s address at the annual SPIEF, in June 2019, was optimistic about
Russia’s economy even as, he said, the world economic model was ‘in crisis’.
The four-day session attracted about 19,000 participants from 145 countries,
but Western attendance was low. The presidents of Slovakia and Bulgaria,
both members of the EU, Armenia and China delivered addresses at the
 Economic patterns 161
opening session, as did UN Secretary-General António Guterres and Putin.
Altogether participants signed some 650 economic agreements, valued at
about $50 billion, or so Sputnik news proclaimed.162
Speakers agreed on the need for greater cooperation, supported the Belt
and Road initiative and warned against the overuse of sanctions and tariffs
as foreign policy levers. In the former connection, Putin acknowledged that
Moscow had been slow in delivering large-scale infrastructure in Eurasia
(roads and rail lines) necessary to make the BRI work for Russia. His prom-
ise to speed these projects up were optimistic given their cost and China’s
unwillingness to contribute much to trans-Siberian high-speed rail
projects.163
SPIEF and Putin’s one-on-one meeting with Xi coincided with the Second
Russian–Chinese Energy Forum, the first having taken place in Beijing in
November 2018. According to a Chinese spokesperson, some 400 representa-
tives of 100 energy companies participated and reached 17 joint agreements.
Energy accounted for 40 per cent of the trade between China and Russia, he
said, observing too that he and his Russian counterparts expected the total
trade between the two countries soon to reach $200 billion in value. The level
of mutual satisfaction was good, at least in public.164
A feature event of the Forum was an intergovernmental deal worth about
$1 billion (US) for Russia to upgrade Cuba’s dilapidated railway system.
Prime Minister Medvedev travelled to Havana in October to sign more agree-
ments, including a substantial augmentation of the railway undertaking,
making it a 10-year project to restore Cuban rail infrastructure.165 As 2019
wound down, Cuba’s financial debt to Russia amounted to about $3.2
billion.

Other natural resources

Most economists, Russia’s included, realize that the Russian economy relies
too heavily on sales of energy resources. Kudrin has been insisting on this for
more than a decade, and challenged Putin on it publicly in 2013. If diversity
ever becomes a reality, it is worth knowing that in 2019 Russia was the world’s
leading producer of diamonds, ranked third in gold production, and was the
second largest holder of coal reserves. Nickel deposits at Norilsk-Tainakh are
the largest nickel–copper–palladium deposits in the world. With the launch
of a new Arctic Palladium joint venture between Nornickel and Russia
Palladium, Russia expected to become the world’s leading producer of pal-
ladium, a precious metal valued more than gold per ounce.166
Its holding of renewable fresh water is the world’s second largest, just
behind Brazil and ahead of the US and Canada. Russia leads the world in
forest resources, and in 2020 was sixth in lumber production. In that latter
industry, timber exports to China amounted to close to $4 billion worth in
2019, as over 100 Chinese mills operate in Siberia. Worries in Russia about
the potential forest depletion by rapacious Chinese companies were drowned
out by the economic benefits – jobs – accruing to the region.167
162 Economic patterns
In the case of gold, in 2019 a new find at the country’s largest gold mine, in
Sukhoi Log, increased Russia’s gold resource by about 10 per cent; and a
$283 million sale of a gold development project by a private company,
N-Mining in the Khabarovsk region, to Canada’s Kinross kept the industry
booming. Kinross has two more gold mines in Russia.168 Among other things,
Russia’s access to huge gold deposits strengthened the ruble and softened the
impact of sanctions.

Government shuffle, coronavirus, price war and an energy strategy for 2035
Energy was one of the departments that retained its minister after the grand
cabinet shuffle in January 2020. Energy Minister Novak, and Rosneft’s Sechin
were key players in finding markets for Russia’s LNG and managing compli-
cations arising from price and production issues with OPEC, via OPEC+.169
The coronavirus was an unexpected variable that seriously impacted the oil
sector by causing a drop of fuel consumption for travel and factory work,
and therefore also a drop in the world price. As demands for crude slipped to
its lowest level since the slump of 2008, OPEC proposed a cut in production
if Russia would approve similar cuts. To that time, Russia had agreed only to
an extension of earlier reductions. Novak met with OPEC and OPEC+ offi-
cials on 4 March and rejected the idea of production cuts; Saudi Aramco
responded by increasing its oil output to record levels.170
Before Moscow and OPEC could reach a deal, the oil price hovered at
Russia’s solvent line. The Kremlin treated the Saudi decision as a form of
blackmail and refused to budge.171 The crisis was such that Putin and Trump
agreed in late March by telephone to have their senior energy officials, Novak
and US Secretary for Energy Dan Brouillette consult directly on the matter.
As we have seen, both sides eventually gave in, and the price of oil returned
to as high as $51 per barrel before the year was out.172
Russia emerged less damaged than it might have been if the dispute had
gone on. The government was able to avoid drawing heavily from reserve
funds, but not before the plunge in prices, combined with the pandemic,
ensured that the federal budget would run small deficits between 2020 and
2022.173 In August 2020, the National Wealth Fund (13 trillion rubles), which
had grown to slightly less than 12 per cent of GDP, was tapped to help finance
the federal deficit.174
Driven by the crisis, in June 2020 Russia adopted a long-term ‘Energy
Strategy 2035’ that included the following objectives: 1) raising domestic con-
sumption; 2) diversifying exports by increasing production of LNG; 3) mod-
ernizing the energy infrastructure, especially in Eastern Siberia and the Far
East, and boosting the gasification of Russia’s regions; 4) achieving techno-
logical independence; and 5) digitalizing the fuel and energy complex (FEC).
The ‘strategy’ claimed to take into account ‘changes in the global economic
and political situation, … and Russian energy’ situations. It also assumed
that the energy sector would remain unchallenged as the main source of rev-
enue for the Russian government and that external competition from LNG
 Economic patterns 163
would be deemed a threat. The sector was expected to contribute to the
‘dynamic socio-economic development and national security of the Russian
Federation’.175 Inevitably, then, larger state subsidies would always be in
demand from energy oligarchs, and environmental challenges would always
take second place.
The Energy Strategy 2035, while encompassing and probably wise, was
also probably too much, too late.
After much hesitation, in June Moscow cancelled the Eastern Economic
Forum scheduled to meet in Vladivostok in November, 2020, purportedly
because of the pandemic, though the huge fuel spill may also have a
consideration.

Down on the farm: The agricultural sector

Of all sectors in the Russian economy, agriculture is the one that made the
most substantial progress during the last two decades. In the late 1990s and
early 2000s, over half the used arable land in Russia was still collectively
owned, food shortages were endemic, and human edibles and animal feed
(e.g. 900,000 tons of wheat in 2000) were imported and expensive. Large gov-
ernment subsidies to agriculture seemed to have been wasted, or siphoned off
by corrupt officials.176 It took a series of active measures, most of them while
Aleksei Gordeev was Minister of Agriculture (2000–09), to bring some order
into chaos.
These included tariffs on raw sugar (2000) that boosted domestic sugar
beet production, a law that legalized private ownership and limited foreign
ownership of agricultural land (2005), and priority given to a long-term
national project on ‘Development of the Agro-industrial Complex’ (2005,
2008), which provided continuing subsidies to farmers. The government
introduced a food security doctrine in 2010 that set percentages on foodstuffs
that had to be produced domestically.
Russia suffered a major drought in 1998 and such low harvests for that year
and 1999 that Moscow had to appeal to Canada and the US for aid in animal
feed (soybean, meal and maize) so as to free other grains for food. In addition
to feed grains, Canada, the US and the EU sent large amounts of food sup-
plies in 1999 and 2000, including wheat, rice, beef, pork, poultry and dried
milk, all on low interest, long-term credit.177 It was an extraordinary achieve-
ment, then, that by 2011 Russia had become a world leader in grain exports.178
The agricultural sector modernized even more after the government
imposed counter-sanctions against sanctioning countries in 2014 and 2015,
compelling state and private investors to introduce new facilities, subsidize
farm equipment manufacturing and help farmers increase production.
Analyses of the counter-sanctions show that the monetary value of Russia’s
food imports dropped by almost half after 2015, and only began to rise again
by 2018. Russian import of agricultural machinery slowed to the extent that
domestic manufacturers had 60 percent of the market share in 2019, as
opposed to 24 per cent in 2014.179
164 Economic patterns
Russia had record grain production years in 2017 and again in 2019, and
record figures in sunflower, rice, soybean and greenhouse vegetable harvests
in the latter year. Dairy producers and food exporters had a very good 2019
too, and Vietnam, Latvia and Turkey increased their purchases of Russian
wheat.180 Russia is one of the top exporters of GMO-free products, with
Japan, Israel and Europe its main markets, and the world’s second-largest
exporter of sunflower oils, behind Ukraine. Low-interest long-term loans
from Rosselkhozbank amounted to over ₽80 billion in 2018, mostly to food
and food processing industries.181 By 2019, Russia was a principal exporter of
fish, a net exporter of poultry, had reached self-sufficiency in pork and was
close to doing so in beef.182 Ministry reports claimed that agricultural sales
overtook arms sales as the second-place export sector, behind oil and gas.
Compared to 2000 and earlier, these gains were remarkable, though there was
still a long way to go before Russia could claim to be feeding itself com-
pletely, and food price inflation still needed to be controlled.183 The disrup-
tions of 2020 placed some of these gains at risk.
The after-effects of drought, heat and floods were apparent in 2020.
Traditional grain-producing areas, such as the Stavropol and Kuban regions
had lower harvests than usual, while the Black Earth Region, central Russia
and part of the northwest had larger harvests. The latter result was due to
wider use of previously abandoned land and, in fact, the Ministry of
Agriculture insisted in December that it was on track for one of the largest-
ever grain harvests (131 million tons). Potatoes had to be imported and their
cost in stores, and that of onions, carrots and beets rose. The loss of sugar
beet crops caused sugar prices to double. Peskov’s claims (see above) that
Russia was feeding itself was true enough, but needed some qualification. To
ease the problem, sugar, butter and sunflower oil producers signed an agree-
ment with the Ministry to regulate prices.184
Russia and China agreed on mutual trade in poultry in 2018, but the most
important change came in January 2020 when Beijing opened up its vast mar-
ket to Russian beef exporters for the first time.185 The coronavirus froze this
good news in its tracks, and also cut back Russia’s sales of poultry products
to China. The problem was not so much with the pandemic as it was with the
fact that refrigeration facilities at Chinese ports of entry were filled because
China could not move their own products out.
Among the achievements of Putin’s visit to Saudi Arabia in October 2019
was a relaxation of some of the Saudi specification for wheat imports and a
joint agreement between the RDIF and a Saudi agency for joint investments
in Russia’s agricultural sector.186
The Russian government introduced a new minister of agriculture in May,
2018, when Dmitry Patrushev replaced Aleksandr Tkachev, who had held the
post since 2015. Patrushev has a university degree in management and
brought with him experience as chairman of Rosselkhozbank’s Management
Board and member of the board of Gazprom. Very well-connected because
his father, Nikolai, has been secretary of the Security Council since 2008, the
younger Patrushev kept his post after the ‘January Revolution’.
 Economic patterns 165
Dmitry Patrushev’s first few years saw continued success, and also some
controversy. For instance, a decision to lease huge spaces in Russia’s Far East
to Asian countries for agriculture use was unsettling to Sibiriaks, who already
resented inroads from China. China expanded its crops of soybeans, corn
and rice on Russian soil and negotiated joint ventures to build dairy farms.
South Korea planned also to develop its land use in Russia to about 150,000
hectares. Leonid Petukhov, CEO of Russia’s Far Eastern Investment and
Export Agency, used the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok to invite
other Asian countries to apply.187
There were some problems, though, as several large agro-industrial com-
plexes declared bankruptcy, mainly in the poultry sector. Debt, corporate
feuds and bird flu were factors in these breakdowns, as large entities grew
while pushing smaller operations out of business. One report suggests that
bankruptcies in the food industries reached about 20 per month in 2019.188

Coronavirus and protecting the food supply

Reacting to the coronavirus epidemic in March, Patrushev ordered all of
Russia’s regions to prepare a two-month stock of basic foods so as to offset
potential shortages. He also created an operational body to monitor volumes
and prices in retail chains and later signed an order establishing an export
quota on grains (wheat, barley, maize, rye) until the end of June.189 This mea-
sure ensured domestic food supplies during the pandemic and helped keep
prices down. Whereas the WTO and WHO warned that countries should not
impose restriction that might interfere with the global food supply chain, the
EEU instigated rules that were broader than Russia’s, including limits on
trade in ‘onions, garlic, turnips, rye, buckwheat, millet, cereals, wholemeal,
cereal grains, soybeans and sunflower seeds’. Trade in other food products
within the EEU remained open.190

Back to work
Budgeting to cover for 2020
As we saw in Chapter 1, the much-revised National Projects were in the news
again within days of the All-Russia Vote, with Putin calling for a more realis-
tic approach to the existing $400 billion-dollar undertaking. In addition to
important new targets set for social indicators (healthcare, housing, educa-
tion), he told the Council for Strategic Development and National Projects to
reset schedules for foreign and domestic economic investments and economic
growth for the next decade, that is, to 2030. Ministry of Finance proposals of
budget cuts up to 10 per cent for 2021 revealed that fiscal conservatism was
back in place.
Observing that it was necessary to improve the business and entrepre-
neurial climates, the president named the import substitution field and tour-
ism as ones that needed expansion. Equipment production, high tech and
166 Economic patterns
engineering were others. Domestic investment should increase at 5–6 per
cent rate annually, he said, and new ‘financial instruments’ would make that
possible.191 Russia still had substantial foreign exchange reserves and a low
debt to work with. He targeted the oligarchs again, too, forcing them to pay
more domestic taxes on the monies they deposited overseas, a 15 per cent
levy on dividend payments to parent companies in offshore locations.
Other taxes were raised in the budget for 2021–23, which built in overall
cuts of 10 per cent in all unprotected budget items, and halted cost-of-living
increases for bureaucrats. Tax increases included a 2 per cent more VAT
(2019) and a moderate progressive income tax for the wealthy, while keeping
the flat tax for everyone else. The National Welfare Fund remained untouched,
for now, and foreign currency and gold reserves were expected to grow, pro-
viding Russia with a ‘fiscal fortress’ to guard against further sanctions. More
taxes on the mining and metal industries, reductions in subsidies for oil and
gas companies and cuts in defence spending are all features of the new bud-
get. The new taxes came over the objection of Kudrin, who recommended a
privatization programme instead.192
The Ministry of Finance compromised in October by announcing that the
new tax rate would apply only to salaries, dividends and active income over
five million rubles (circa $66 mln), related directly to work, meaning it would
not affect the majority of Russians.193 Perhaps the government had learned
not to poke the larger hornet’s nest. The reaction of oligarchs, the military
and the public is a matter for 2021–24.

Notes
1 Konstantin Ugodnikov, Aleksei Chichkin, ‘Evropa grozit zabit’ okno v Rossiiu’,
Rossiiskaia gazeta, 28 January 2000. For a recent overview, Torbjorn Becker,
Susanne Oxenstierna, The Russian Economy under Putin. London: Routledge,
2020.
2 Putin, ‘Rossiia na rubezhe tysiacheletii’, Nezavisimaia gazeta, 30 December 1999.
3 ‘Russia’s Ex-Finance Minister Reveals How Putin Saved the Country’s Economy’,
Sputnik, 25 December 2019; Black, The Russian Presidency of Dmitry Medvedev,
pp. 92–3.
4 On Russian oligarchs generally, see ‘Russian Oligarchs’, Russian Analytical
Digest, No. 233, 14 March 2019. For background, see items in ‘Economic Crisis’,
Russian Analytical Digest, No. 180, 23 March 2016.
5 US Treasury Department, 6 April 2018, www.treasury.gov/resource-center/sanc-
tions/OFAC-Enforcement/Pages/20180406.aspx; ‘“Insanity’ and “Terrorism” –
Russia Reacts to New U.S. Sanctions’, The Moscow Times, 6 April 2018. For an
accounting of the vast web of US-sanctioned Russian people and firms, see
Congressional Research Service, ‘U.S. Sanctions on Russia’, Updated January 17,
2020’, https://crsreports.congress.gov, R45415.
6 Congressional Research Service, ‘U.S. Sanctions on Russia: An Overview’, 29
August 2019, fas.org/sgp/crs/row/IF10779.pdf.
7 On this, see Richard Connelly, Russia’s Response to Sanctions. How Western
Economic Statecraft is Reshaping Political Economy in Russia. Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 2018, pp. 69–74, 192–4.
8 Daniel W. Drezner wrote about this in the 1990s, see his The Sanctions Paradox:
Economic State Craft and International Relations. New York: Cambridge UP,
 Economic patterns 167
1999, pp. 18–21; ‘Igra ne po pravilam: chto ne tak s amerikanskimi sanktsiiami’,
Aktual’nye komentarii, 15 June 2020.
9 ‘Bespretsedentnye sanktsii: chto grozit rossiiskim milliarderam i ikh biznesam’,
RBC.ru, 6 April 2018.
10 ‘50 bogateishikh rossiian poteriali za den’ pochti $12 mlrd’, RBC.ru, 9 April 2018;
Anton Novoderezhkin, ‘Ruble Experiences Biggest One-day Fall Since 2016’, The
Moscow Times, 9 April 2018; Vitalii Petlevoi, Mikhail Overchenko, ‘Chem groziat
rossiiskomu biznesu novye sanktsii SShA’, Vedomosti, 8 April 2018.
11 ‘Reuters soobshzhil o zamorazhivanii aktivov “Renovy” Veksel’berga na $1,5
mlrd’, Vedomosti, 22 April 2018; ‘Sanctions-Hit Deripaska Quits Russia’s En+
Board’, The Moscow Times, 18 May 2018.
12 ‘US Rusal planiruet postroit’ zavod v SShA’, Vedomosti, 15 April 2019; ‘Russia’s
Rusal to Quit Global Market if Sanctions Remain after Board Shake-up’, The
Moscow Times, 27 April 2018.
13 See, e.g. Mike McIntire, Ben Protess, Jim Rutenberg, ‘Firm tied to Russian oli-
garch made payments to Cohen’, Globe and Mail, 9 May 2018; CNN.com, 9 May
2018.
14 ‘“Renova” Veksel’berga pogasila kredity v zapadnykh bankakh na $1 mlrd’,
Vedomosti, 20 May 2018.
15 Frank RG, ‘Private Banking in Russia 2018’, www.frankrg.com/index.php?new_
div_id=1107; ‘Russian Millionaires Hold Two-Thirds of their Money Abroad,
Report Says’, The Moscow Times, 31 October 2018; Darya Korsunkaya, Oksana
Kobzeva, Polina Devitt, ‘Russian tycoons, fearing new sanctions, float new bond
idea: sources’, www.reuters.com, 5 December 2017; ‘Putin To Let Sanctions-Hit
Oligarchs Return $3 Bln to Russia, Anonymously’, The Moscow Times, 22
December 2017.
16 ‘Oligarchs still alive & kicking’, The Bell, 12 October 2019.
17 Michael Selby-Green, ‘Russia is dumping US debt and buying gold instead’,
Russian Business Insider, 19 July 2018; Thomas Franck, ‘Treasury data shows
Russian holdings of US debt plunged 84% since March, but here’s what it really
means’, CNBC.com, 29 July 2018.
18 ‘Russia to Continue Investment in US Debt Securities, Experts Say’, Russian
Business Insider, 19 January 2020; Central Bank of the Russian Federation,
‘March 2019. Monetary Policy Report, 1 April 2019’, https://www.cbr.ru/eng;
‘Russia’s Gold Reserves Hit Five-Year High’, The Moscow Times, 9 April 2019.
19 Medvedev, ‘Zasedanie Pravitel’stvennoi komissii po importozameshcheniiu’, 12
April 2018, government.ru/news/32268.
20 On this, see the always negative Paul Goble, ‘Import Substitution in Russia Failing
as Moscow Buys Products Not Technologies’, Eurasia Daily Monitor, 28 March
2019.
21 See European Commission, Trade. Russia, update 13 November 2019, https://
ec.europa.eu/trade/policy/countries-and-regions/countries/russia/.
22 ‘Gordye platiat vsem’, Kommersant, 29 October 2019; A. Bychkov et al., ‘Russia
Proposes Harsh New Counter-Sanctions’, Sanctions & Export Controls Update,
16 April 2018; ‘Russian Lawmakers Pass Counter-Sanctions Bill, Restricting U.S.
Imports’, The Moscow Times, 22 May 2018.
23 Tatiana Zamakhina, ‘Putin prodlil kontrasanktsii do kontsa 2021 goda’,
Rossiiskaia gazeta, 21 November 2020; Kira Latukhina, ‘V Kremle nazvali
uspeshnoi programmu importozameshcheniia’, Rossiiskaia gazeta, 7 December
2020.
24 ‘A Bill to strengthen the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, to combat interna-
tional cybercrime, and to impose additional sanctions with respect to the Russian
Federation, and for other purposes’. ROS18A89, 115th Congress, 2nd Session.
US Department of State, ‘U.S. Sanctions on Russia Tied to U.K. Attack to Take
Effect Monday’ [27 August], The Moscow Times, 24 August 2018.
168 Economic patterns
25 The numbers varied: ‘Capital Flight from Russia triples to $42bn in January–
October’, BNE/intellinews, 18 January 2019; ‘Russia’s Capital Outflow More
Than Doubled in 2018 to $68 Bln – Reports’, The Moscow Times, 18 January
2019; Scott Johnson, ‘Capital Flight from Russia Carries $750 Billion Price Tag’,
Bloomberg, 12 March 2019; ‘Ottok kapitala iz Rossii prevysil s nachala goda $25
mlrd’, RBC.ru, 9 April 2019.
26 ‘Po zakonam sanktsionnogo vremen. Bank Rossii perelozhilsia iz dollara v iuani
i evro’, Kommersant, 10 January 2019; ‘Russia Dumps $101 Bln From Dollar
Reserves in Pivot to China’, The Moscow Times, 10 January 2019.
27 Nick Butler, ‘How Well are Russia Sanctions Working?’ Russia Matters, 21
December 2018; Stacy Clossen, ‘Diminishing Returns: How Effective Are
Sanctions Against Russia?’ PONARS Eurasia, January 2019; ‘IMF Cuts Forecast
for Russian 2019 GDP Growth to 1.2%. Calls for Reform’, The Moscow Times, 17
July 2019.
28 ‘Rossiiskikh milliarderov lishili Davosskogo foruma’, Kommersant, 7 November
2018; ‘CMI soobshchili o dopuske rossiiskikh biznesmenov na Davosskii forum’,
Kommersant, 15 December 2018.
29 ‘U.S. Imposes Fresh Russia Sanctions for Election Meddling’, The Moscow Times,
20 December 2018; ‘TASS: SShA anonsirovali vtoroi paket sanktsii protiv RF po
“delu Skripalei”’, Kommersant, 2 December 2018; Heather Nauert, Press
Statement, ‘Imposition of Chemical and Biological Weapons Control and
Warfare Elimination Act Sanctions on Russia’, U.S. State Department, 8 August
2018, www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2018/08/285043.htm.
30 ‘Ukrainian President imposes sanctions against a number of Russian political
parties’, Kyiv Post, 23 June 2018.
31 ‘Rossiia zapretila import ukrainskikh tovarov na polmilliarda dollarov’, RIA
Novosti, 29 December 2018; ‘Russia widens ban on Ukrainian imports in tit-for-
tat sanctions row’, Reuters, 30 November 2018.
32 Dar’ia Borisiak, Ekaterina Litova, Anna Eremina, ‘Morgan Stanley ukhodit iz
Rossii’, Vedomosti, 6 May 2019.
33 For a preliminary detailed assessment, see Andrey Sushentsov, ‘A New Russian
Ukraine Policy and the Future of Russian–Ukrainian Interdependence’, 2014–
2015 Hurford Next Generation Fellowship Research Papers, No. 2, 2016. These
papers are sponsored by the Euro-Atlantic Initiative (EASI) of the Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace. Sushentsov is the Director of Programmes,
Valdai Club.
34 Vladimir Rubinskii, ‘Kuda vedut antisanktsii’, Vedomosti, 25 June 2019. ‘Priamaia
liniiam Vladimirom Putinym’, Kremlin.ru, 20 June 2019, kremlin.ru/events/presi-
dent/news/60795; ‘EU Extends Economic Sanctions on Russia Until 2020’, The
Moscow Times, 21 June 2019.
35 For the Bill, https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/senate-bill/482/text#toc-
id8ECC7DE75C5F408089FFD9B1C838ECEB; Cyrus Newlin, Jeffrey Mankoff,
‘U.S. Sanctions against Russia: What You Need to Know’, CSIS (Centre for
Strategic & International Studies), 31 October 2018.
36 ‘Siluanov sravnil novye sanktsii SShA protiv Rossii s “vystrelom v nogu”’, RBC.ru,
14 February 2019; ‘“Insane, Ridiculous”: Russian Lawmakers React to New U.S.
Sanctions Bill’, The Moscow Times, 14 February 2019; ‘Russia’s Economy Can
Weather New U.S. Sanctions, Kremlin Says’, The Moscow Times, 14 February 2019.
37 Natalya Ishchenko, Tatyana Romanova, ‘McDonald’s otkryl pervyi restoran
tol’ko dlia dostavki fastfuda’, Vedomosti, 18 February 2020.
38 ‘UPDATE 1-Moody’s raises Russia rating to investment grade’, Reuters, 8
February 2019.
39 ‘S&P affirms Russia’s rating with stable outlook’, Reuters Business News, 18
January 2019; Fitch Ratings, https://www.fitchratings.com/site/russia; ‘Russia:
Fitch Upgrades Russian Credit Rating’, Stratfor/World View, 12 August 2019.
 Economic patterns 169
40 World Bank Group, Doing Business 2020, p. 4.
41 Ivan Tkachev, ‘Sanctions: the 2020 Agenda’, Riddle, 9 January 2020; ‘Russia’s
Sovereign Credit Rating Upgraded’, The Moscow Times, 20 January 2020; Anna
Kholiavko, ‘Priamye inostrannye investitsii vernulis’ na stabil’nyi uroven’,
Vedomosti, 19 January 2020.
42 ‘Rossiia i Saudovskaia Araviia podpisali soglasheniia po investitsiiam’,
Kommersant, 14 October 2019; ‘Putin podaril koroliu Saudovskoi Aravii kam-
chatsckogo krecheta’, Vedomosti, 14 October 2019.
43 Rauf Mammadov, ‘Putin’s Gulf Visit Yields Three Energy Deals, Sets Stage for
More’, Eurasia Daily Monitor, 23 October 2019.
44 Gunter Deuber, ‘Five Years of Financial Market and Banking Sector Sanctions
– a “New Equilibrium” Locally and Internationally’, Russian Analytical Digest,
No. 236, 6 June 2019, pp. 2–5; Henry Foy, ‘Russia: adapting to sanctions leaves
economy in robust health’, Financial Times, 29 January 2020.
45 Putin, ‘Sammit “Gruppy dvadtsati”’, Kremlin.ru, 26 March 2020, kremlin.ru/
events/president/news/63070.
46 Vladimir Kuzmin, ‘Pravitel’stvo ogranichit’ razmer neustoiki za prosrochku
vyplat po kreditu’, Rossiiskaia gazeta, 9 April 2020; Roman Markelov, ‘Putin
podpisal paket zakonov o zashchite kapitalovlozhenii’, Rossiiskaia gazeta, 1 April
2020.
47 Putin, ‘Obrashchenie k grazhdanam Rossii’, Kremlin.ru, 23 June 2020, Kremlin.
ru/events/president/news/63548.
48 ‘Russia government adopts a third economic stimulus package, calls for rescue
plans by June 1’, Intellinews, 12 May 2020.
49 Putin, ‘Soveshchanie o sanitarno-epidemiologicheskoi obstanovke’, Kremlin.
ru, 11 May 2020, kremlin.ru/events/president/news/63340; ‘Putin predlozhil
prodlit’ otsrochku po uplate nalogov dlia malogo biznesa’, Vedomosti, 20
October 2020.
50 On this, see Jon Hellvig in Russian Insider, 14 May 2020.
51 International Monetary Fund, World Economic Outlook, April 2020: The Great
Lockdown, April 2020, Table 1, p. ix; https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WEO/
Issues/2020/04/14/weo-april-2020; Thomas Graham, ‘Kto-kogo: Putin vs.
COVID-19’, Russia Matters, 7 May 2020.
52 Putin speech at ‘Meeting of the State Council on promoting competition’,
Kremlin.ru, 5 April 2018, Kremlin.ru/events/president/news/567205.
53 For an outline of Putin’s economic plans, see Putin, ‘Plenarnoe zasedanie
Peterburgskogo mezhdunarodnogo ekonomicheskogo foruma’, Kremlin.ru, 7
June 2019, kremlin.ru/events/president/news/60707; ‘Putin’s $400Bln National
Projects Will Barely Boost Russian Economy, Study Finds’, The Moscow Times,
31 October 2019.
54 Schetnaia Palata Rossiiskoi Federatsii [RF Accounting Chamber], ‘Analiticheskii
otchet o khode ispolneniia federal’nogo biudzheta i biudzhetov gosudarstven-
nykh … za ianvar’-sentiabr 2019 goda’, http://audit.gov.ru/promo/analytical-
report-federal-budget-2019-3/index.html.
55 ‘Na Peterburgskom forum vpervye s 2014 goda vystupit amerikanskanskii chi-
novnik’, Vedomosti, 11 May 2018.
56 ‘Na PMEF zakliucheny 550 soglashenii na 2,365 trln rublei’, Kommersant, 24
May 2018; Yulkiya Kotova, ‘Glavnyi ityogi Peterburgskogo foruma – 2018’,
Vedomosti, 25 May 2018.
57 ‘Priamaia liniia s Vladimirom Putinym’, Kremlin.ru, 7 June 2018, kremlin.ru/
events/president/news/57692,
58 ‘Putin poruchil otsenit’ tselesoobraznost’ stroitel’stva mosta na Sakhalin’,
Vedomosti, 24 July 2018; ‘Kogda sbyvaiutsia bol’shie mechtu’, Vedomosti, 26 July
2018; see also Putin statement to the press after a meeting with Xi in June 2019,
Kremlin.ru, 5 June 2019, en/kremlin.ru/events/presidents/transcripts/60672.
170 Economic patterns
59 Ben Aris, ‘Build, Build, Build: Russia’s national projects get underway’, BNE.
Intellinews, 21 November 2019; Putin address at ‘Russia Calling! Investment
Forum’, Kremlin.ru, 20 November 2019, en/kremlin.ru/events/president/
transcripts/62073.
60 ‘Rost nalogov profinansiruet maiskie ukazy’, Kommersant, 7 July 2018.
61 ’Golikova nazvala stoimost’ smiagcheniia pensionnoi reformy’, RBC.ru, 29
August 2018.
62 ‘Priamaia liniia s Vladimirom Piutinym’, Kremlin.ru, 20 June 2019, kremlin.ru/
events/president/news/60795; Aleksandr Trusahin, ‘Vse vyshe, i nizhe, i nizhe.
Kak Rossiia stala rodnoi neproizvoditel’nogo truda’, Kommersant, 23 July 2018.
63 Maksim Solopov et al., ‘Finansovaia razvedka otsenila v R20 trln ob’em tenevoi
ekonomiki v Rossii’, Ekonomika, 22 February 2019.
64 Anastasia Manuylova, ‘V teni pokholodalo’, Kommersant, 30 July 2018.
65 ‘Russia’s PM Orders New Spending Plan to Boost Living Standards’, The Moscow
Times, 22 January 2020; ‘Mikhail Mishustin poruchil podgotovit’ izmeneniia v
zakon o federal’nom budzhete na 2020-2022 gody i zakon o biudzhete Pensionnogo
fonda …’, 22 January 2020, government.ru/news/38805/.
66 ‘Poteri Rossii ot zakrytiia granits dlia turistov otsenil v 500 mlrd rublei’,
Kommersant, 4 August 2020.
67 Artem Hirsch, ‘TsB i pravitel’stvo vypustil sovmestnoe zaiavlenie po situatsii s
koronavirusom’, Vedomosti 17 March 2020.
68 ‘Fifth Caspian Summit’, Kremlin.ru, 12 August 2018, kremlin.ru/events/presi-
dent/news/58296; Bruce Pannier, ‘A Landmark Caspian Agreement – And What
It Resolves’, RFE/RL, 9 August 2018.
69 For background, see Rilka Dragneva, Katerian Wolczuk, eds. Eurasian Economic
Integration: Law, Policy and Politics. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2013; for
an update. ‘Eurasian Economic Union’, Russian Analytical Digest, No. 247, 17
February 2020. On its inevitable failure to deliver ‘on its grand promises’, see
Rilka Dragneva, Kataryna Wolczuk, ‘The Eurasian Economic Union. Deals,
Rules and the Exercise of Power’. Chatham House, Russia and Eurasia
Programme, Research Paper, 2017, p. 24.
70 Announcements by RIA Novosti, 14 and 17 May 2018.
71 ‘BRIKS idet s den’gami po sudam i gorodam russkim’, Kommersant, 26 May
2018.
72 Putin, ‘Press Conference following the results of the BRICS summit’, Kremlin.ru,
27 July 2018, Kremlin.ru/events/president/news/58119.
73 ‘Erdogan poprosil chlenov BRIKS priniat’ Tyrtsiiu v svoiu gruppu’, RBC.ru, 29
July 2018.
74 Putin speech, ‘Vstrecha liderov BRIKS’, Kremlin.ru, 14 November 2019,
Kremlin.ru/events/president/news/62045; For details of the sessions, see the
BRICS Information Portal, Brazilia 2019, infobrics.org/news//. See also Emily
Palios, ‘What Does the Future Hold for the BRICS Bloc?’ Geopolitical Monitor,
19 December 2019.
75 Rajeswari Pollai Rajagopolap, ‘Contradictions Grow Amid Another BRICS
Summit’, The Diplomat, 19 November 2020; ‘Putin Urges BRICS to Mass
Produce Russian COVID-19 Vaccines’, The Moscow Times, 17 November 2020.
76 Putin, ‘Poslanie Prezidenta Federal’nomu Sobraniiu’, Kremlin.ru, 20 February
2019, Kremlin.ru/events/president/news/59863.
77 ‘Putin Drives Truck Across Bridge from Russia to Crimea’, RFE/RL, 15 May
2018; ‘Putin Launches Direct Train Service to Crimea’, The Moscow Times, 23
December 2019; ‘Putin otkryl dvizhenie poezdov po Krymskomu mosty’,
Kremlin.ru, 22 December 2019, Kremlin.ru/events/president/news/62388.
78 For the federal target programme, ‘Social and economic development of the
Republic of Crimea and the city of Sevastopol until 2022’, see Direktsiia po
upravleniiu FTsP, https://fcp2020.ru/program/.
 Economic patterns 171
79 For further details, Paul Goble, ‘Moscow Plans to Expand Canal System between
Caspian and Azov Seas’, Eurasia Daily Monitor, 26 March 2019.
80 Ukaz, ‘O porioadke v’ezda v Rossiiskuiu Federatsiiu i vyezda iz Rossiiskoi
Federatsii inostrannykh grazhdan …’ (No. 347), 18 July 2019, http://publication.
pravo.gov.ru/Document/View/0001201907190031; ‘European Budget Airlines
Push For St. Petersburg Flights’, The Moscow Times, 24 September 2019.
81 Paul Goble, ‘Domestic and Foreign Challenges Prompt Moscow to Announce
Unrealistically Ambitious Railway Plan’, Eurasia Daily Monitor, 16 April 2020.
82 ‘Russia – Flash report, Sales volume, 2020’, MarkLines. Automotive Industry
Portal, accessed 25 April 2020; Gleb Stolyarov, Olesya Astakhova, ‘Ford consid-
ers closing two Russian plants – sources’, Reuters, 5 March 2019; ‘Ford Will Pay
Out $200M to Laid-Off Russian Workers’, The Moscow Times, 27 March 2019.
83 Anna Tretyak, ‘Inostrantsy vlozhili rekordnye summy v rossiiskie tsennye
bymagi’, Kommersant, 12 February 2019; Giancario Perasso, ‘Investors redis-
cover appeal of Russian bonds’, Financial Times, 1 August 2019.
84 See United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, World Investment
Report: Annex Tables, June 2019; Leonid Bershidsky, ‘Where Russia’s Foreign
Investment Really Comes From’, Bloomberg. Opinion, 6 November 2019.
85 Putin, ‘Interv’iu informatsionnomu agentstvu TASS’, Kremlin.ru, 21 October
2019, Kremlin.ru/events/president/news/61858.
86 Putin, ‘Plenarnoe zasedanie ekonomicheskogo foruma Rossia–Afrika’, Kremlin.
ru, 23 October 2019, Kremlin.ru/events/president/news/61880
87 ‘Arms, Oil and Influence: What You Need to Know About Russia’s First-Ever
Africa Summit’, The Moscow Times, 24 October 2019; Vanand Meliksetian, ‘Oil,
Military and Nuclear Tech: Russia’s Influence in Africa’, Oilprice.com, 17 October
2019. For the Russia–Africa Summit agenda and results in English, see its website,
summitafrica.ru/en/.
88 ‘Unprecedented Sochi Summit: Russia Back in Africa For First Time Since
Break-Up of USSR!’, Vesti.ru, 24 October 2019.
89 Andrey Maslov, ‘No Sentiment, All Pragmatism as Russia Unveils New Approach
to Africa’, Carnegie Moscow Center, 31 October 2019.
90 ‘Rossiia i Kitai sozdadut sovmestnyi investfond na $1 mlrd’, Vedomosti, 7 June
2018; Elena Medvedeva, ‘Kitai vydelit VEBu bolee 600 mlrd lei na razvitie eko-
nomiki Rossii’, Vedomosti, 8 June 2018.
91 ‘Roskosmos. Podpisan memorandum o vzaimoponimanii s KNKA’, www.roskos-
mos.ru/25173, 8 June 2018; ‘Russia, China Sign Space Exploration Deal’, The
Moscow Times, 8 June 2018; for progress on the Belt and Road project, Nadège
Rolland, ‘Reports of Belt and Road’s Death Are Greatly Exaggerated’, Foreign
Affairs. Snapshot, 29 January 2019; Yuen Yuen Ang, ‘Demystifying Belt and
Road. The Struggle to Define China’s “Project of the Century”’, Foreign Affairs.
Snapshot, 22 May 2019.
92 ‘Investorov importozamestili. Za god inostrannye fondy vyveli iz Rossii $1 mlrd’,
Kommersant, 24 December 2018; ‘Foreign Investors Flee Russia in 2018, Pull $1
Bln’, The Moscow Times, 24 December 2018.
93 For details, see Ilya Khrennikov, Dina Khrennikova, ‘Alibaba Sets Up $2 Billion
Russia Venture with Kremlin Help’, Bloomberg, 11 September 2018.
94 ‘Plenary meeting of the Eastern Economic Forum’, Kremlin.ru, 12 September
2018, kremlin.ru/events/president/news/58537,.
95 Ibid. See also items in ‘The Russian Far East’, Russian Analytical Digest, No. 230,
21 December 2018.
96 ‘Ot Kamchatki do Suetsa: kakie proekty profinansiruet infrastrukturnyi fond’,
RBC.ru, 19 September 2020; ‘Russia’s Development Fund to Spend $25Bln on
New Highways, Airports – Media’, The Moscow Times, 19 September 2018.
97 Emily Ferris, ‘Putin’s Fourth Presidential Term: Looking East for Answers’,
Russian Analytical Digest, No. 224, 26 September 2018, pp. 2–5.
172 Economic patterns
98 State Council of the People’s Republic of China, ‘China part of cross-river rail-
way bridge to Russia completed’, english.gov.cn/news/video/2018/10/15/con-
tent/_281476346196324.htm, 15 October 2018.
99 Putin, ‘International Forum “One Belt, One Way”, Kremlin.ru, 26 April 2019,
Kremlin.ru/events/president/news/60378; AP, “Putin Lauds China Infrastructure
Initiative, Warming Ties’, New York Times, 26 April 2019.
100 ‘Dal’nii Vostok zovet Tokio uskorit’ investitsii’, Kommersant, 31 October 2018.
101 See Russian International Affairs Council, ‘Russia–Japan Relations: New Stage
of Development’, Working Paper, 50/2019, Russia-Japan-WP50-En.pdf.
102 Jun Suzuki, Tomoyo Ogawa, ‘Russia draws closer to Southeast Asia with arms
and energy trade’, Nikkei Asian Review, 14 November 2018. For more details, see
https://www.asean2018.sg.
103 Putin, ‘Answers to Russian Journalists’ Questions’, Kremlin.ru, 15 November
2018, en/kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/59131; Nick Bowie, ‘As US–
China tussle and joust, Russia moves on SEAsia’, Asia Times, 26 November
2018.
104 Umida Hasimova, ‘After Putin’s Visit, Russia’s Footprint in Uzbekistan is Set to
Grow’, Eurasia Daily Monitor, 22 October 2018.
105 Lavrov, ‘Opening Remarks … Russia–ASEAN Ministerial Meeting, Bangkok,
31 July 2019, www.mid.ru/ru/foreign_policy/news/-/asset_publisher/cKNon-
kJE02Bw/content/id/3745864; ‘Sammit Rossiia–ASEAN’, Kremlin.ru, 14
November 2018, Kremlin.ru/events/president/news/59120.
106 ‘American Companies to Attend Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok’,
Russia Business Today, 2 September 2019; for the Forum’s website, forumvostok.
ru/en.
107 For details, Sergey Sukhankin, ‘Eastern Economic Forum Confirms Strong
Foreign Interest in Russian Arctic Territories’, Eurasia Daily Monitor, 12
September 2019; ‘“Rosneft’” soobshchila ob interesa indiiskikh kompanii k pro-
ektu v Arktike’, Vedomosti, 17 September 2019.
108 Evgenia Kryuchkova, ‘Kontinental’naia sverkhideia’, Kommersant, 5 November
2019; for the ASEAN summit, https://www.asean2019.go.th/en/meeting/35th-
asean-summit-and-related-summits/.
109 For background, see ASEAN, ‘Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership
(RCEP)’, https://asean.org/?static_post=rcep-regional-comprehensive-eco-
nomic-partnership, accessed 8 November 2020; Chris Devonshire-Ellis, ‘India
Turns Down the RCEP Free Trade. Will It Turn to The Eurasian Economic
Union?’, Russia Briefing, 6 November 2019.
110 Putin ‘Interview for the Austrian TV channel ORF’, Kremlin.ru, 4 June 2018,
Kremlin.ru/events/president/news/57675,.
111 European Commission, ‘Report on Trade and Investment Barriers (1 January
2017–31 December 2017)’, Fact Sheet, trade.ec.europa.eu/doclib/docs/2018/june/
tradoc_156979.pdf; ‘Russia’, ec.europa.eu/trade/policy/countries-and-regions/
countries/Russia/, accessed 28 June 2018.
112 Ksenia Zubacheva, ‘These countries are the biggest investors in Russia’, Russia
Behind the Headlines, 29 October 2019; Kenneth Rapoza, ‘Wishful Thinking?
Trump Wants More Trade with Russia’, Forbes, 12 December 2019.
113 On this insofar as oil is concerned, see Thane Gustafson, Wheel of Fortune: The
Battle for Oil and Power in Russia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2012, and
Sharples, Gazprom and the Russian State, op. cit. For detailed background, see
Ingerid M. Opdahl, The Russian State and Russian Energy Companies, 1992–
2018. London: Routledge, 2020.
114 Charles Kennedy, ‘Russia’s Oil Reserves Now Worth $1.2 Trillion’, Oilprice.com,
22 September 2019; ‘Gas supplies to Europe’, Gazprom Export, www.gazprom-
export.ru/en/statistics/, accessed 5 December 2018; ‘“Gazprom” uvelichil eksport
v Evropu’, Vedomosti, 1 August 2018.
 Economic patterns 173
115 ‘Gazprom zavershit stroitel’stvo “Sily Sibiri” po kontsa 2018 goda’, Vedomosti,
25 April 2018; ‘Russia Launches Gas Exports to China’, The Moscow Times, 2
December 2019.
116 See, e.g. Klaus Schaer, Mario Mehren, Rainer Seele, ‘Misplaced Fears Over Nord
Stream 2’, The National Interest, 2 May 2018.
117 Tsvetana Paraskova, ‘Europe Buys More Russian Gas Despite Strained
Relations’, Oilprice.com, 8 May 2018; Yekaterina Chulkovskaya, ‘Putin, Erdogan
boost Russia-Turkey ties with TurkStream’, Al-Monitor, 21 November 2018.
118 Vanand Meliksetian, ‘The Inevitable Finale Of The Nord Stream 2 Saga’,
Oilprice.com, 17 November 2019.
119 Bob Bryan, ‘Germany may not be ‘controlled’ by Russia – but Trump did have a
point highlighting a growing connection between the 2 countries’, Business
Insider, 11 July 2018.
120 Katherine Dunn, ‘The U.S. Department of Energy’s Rebranded “Freedom Gas”
Is a Not-So-Subtle Dig at Russia’, Fortune, 21 May 2019.
121 ‘Russia Extends Austria Gas Deal to 2040 After Putin’s Visit’, The Moscow
Times, 6 June 2018.
122 Rauf Mammadov, ‘Nord Stream Two Makes New Headway, as Pressure Mounts
to Block the Pipeline’, Eurasia Daily Monitor, 14 November 2018; ‘Germany
Committed to Nord Stream 2 Pipeline Despite Ukraine Crisis’, The Moscow
Times, 28 November 2018.
123 Tim Daiss, ‘Russia Just Won Big in the European Gas War’, Oilprice.com, 28
May 2018; Nick Cunningham, ‘Russia Outmaneuvers U.S. LNG’, Oilprice.com,
28 November 2018.
124 Tom Giles, ‘WTO largely reject Russia’s challenge of EU gas rules’, Globe and
Mail, 11 August 2018.
125 ‘Alexey Miller visits Turkmenistan’, www.gazprom.com/press/news/2018/octo-
ber/article462605/, 9 October 2018; John C.K. Daly, ‘After Three Years Hiatus,
Gazprom to Renew Purchases of Turkmen Gas’, Eurasia Daily Monitor, 22
October 2018.
126 ‘“Naftogaz”: sud Amsterdam arestoval aktsii “dochki” “Gazprom”’, Vedomosti,
25 October 2019; ‘Pol’she soglasovali stroitel’stvo truby, kotoraia mozhet zames-
tit’ ei postavki “Gazproma”’, Vedomosti, 25 October 2019.
127 Arthur Toporkov, ‘Pol’sha zaiavila o pobede nad “Gazpromom” v Stokgol’mskom
arbitrazhe’, Vedomosti, 30 March 2020; Toporkov, ‘Pol’sha ugrozhaet
“Gazpromu” novym razbiratel’stvom v Evrokomissii’, Vedomosti, 24 April 2020.
128 Tim Daiss, ‘The World’s Most Geopolitically Charged Pipeline’, Oilprice.com,
19 January 2019; Nick Cunningham, ‘Will the U.S. Slap sanctions On Nord
Stream 2?’, Oilprice.com, 23 May 2019.
129 Danish Energy Agency, Press Release, ‘Permit for the Nord Stream 2 project is
granted by the Danish Energy Agency’, 30 October 2019, https://en-press.ens.
dk/pressreleases/permit-for-the-nord-stream-2-project-is-granted-by-the-dan-
ish-energy-agency-2937696; Brett Forrest, ‘Congressional Moves Against
Russia’s Pipeline To Europe Are Running Aground’, Wall Street Journal, 31
October 2019.
130 ‘Rossiisko-vengerskie peregovory’, Kremlin.ru, 30 October 2019, Kremlin.ru/
events/president/news/61936.
131 ‘Medvedev dopustil prodlenie dogovora o tranzite gaza cherez Ukrainu’,
Vedomosti, 5 June 2019; Julia Kusznir, ‘The Negotiations between Ukraine and
Russia on Gas Transit: A Progress Report’, Russian Analytical Digest, No. 242,
3 December 2019, pp. 120–17; ‘Russia–Ukraine Gas Talks Resume as EU Seeks
to Avert Supply Cut’, The Moscow Times, 17 September 2019.
132 ‘Rossiia i Ukraina soglasovali tranzit gaza’, Kommersant, 20 December 2019;
Joshua Posaner, ‘Sefcovic: Ukraine–Russia gas deal should put Nord Stream
criticism in “perspective”’, Politico, 21 December 2019; Alla Hurska,
174 Economic patterns
‘Russia–Ukrainian Gas Transit Deal: A Collapse of Putin’s Gas Strategy or a
Temporary Retreat?’, Eurasia Daily Monitor, 4 February 2020.
133 ‘Poland Fines Gazprom $57M in Nord Stream Probe’, Shale Directories (Reuters
rpt), 2 August 2020; Artur Toporkov, ‘Truboukladchik “Gazprom” priblizhaet-
sia k Baltike’, Vedomosti, 27 April 2020; Margarita Assenova, ‘Russia’s Push to
Complete Nord Stream Two’, Eurasia Daily Monitor, 14 May 2020; ‘Russia’s
Nord Stream II Handed A Potential Death Knell’, Forbes, 26 June 2020.
134 Martin Jirusek, Robert Dillon, ‘Unilateral sanctions targeting Russia come at
cost to transatlantic relationship’, Euractiv, 9 January 2020; Jasmin Bauomy,
‘TurkStream: Europe needs gas and Russia has it – the story behind that new
pipeline’; Euronews, 8 January 2020.
135 Daria Korzhova, Arthur Toporkov, ‘Miller raskryl detali soglasheniia o tranzite
gaza cherez Ukrainu’, Vedomosti, 20 December 2019; Daria Korzhova, Arthur
Toporkov, ‘Sanktsii SShA protiv “Severnogo potoka-2” vstupili v silu’, Vedomosti,
20 December 2019; Patrick Donahue, Mathew Miller, ‘U.S. says sanctions mean
Russia can’t finish Nord Stream 2 pipeline’, World Oil, 16 February 2020.
136 ‘UPDATE 1 – Denmark gives Nord Stream 2 nod to restart pipeline work’,
Reuters, 6 July 2020.
137 ‘Pompeo Says U.S. Will “Do Everything” to Stop Nord Stream 2 Project’, RFE/
RL, 30 July 2020; ‘U.S. Threatens To Expand Sanctions On Nord Stream 2 As
Russia Moves to Complete Pipeline’, RFE/RL, 15 July 2020.
138 Nick Williams, Lars Paulsson, ‘Pompeo Warns Energy Majors Over Russian Gas
Pipelines’, Bloomberg. Politics, 15 July 2020; ‘“Attempted extortion”: Germany
reaffirms commitment to Russian gas project despite US threats’, RT, 16 July
2020; Vera Eckert, ‘EU “highly concerned” by U.S. stance on Nord Stream pipe-
line’, Reuters, 14 August 2020.
139 ‘U.S. Calls for “Moratorium” on Nord Stream 2 Pipeline – Report’, The Moscow
Times, 5 December 2020; Matvei Katkov, ‘Nord Stream 2 vosobnovila ukladku
trub “Severnogo potoka – 2”’, Vedomosti, 13 December 2020.
140 Putin, ‘Plenarnoe zasedanie Mezhdynarodnogo arkticheskogo foruma’, Kremlin.
ru, 9 April 2019, kremlin.ru/events/president/news/60250; ‘Russia Launches
Nuclear Icebreaker as it Eyes Arctic Future’, The Moscow Times, 26 May 2019.
141 For more detail, Stephen Blank, ‘Russia’s Connection to Saudi Arabia Intensifies’,
Eurasia Daily Monitor, 31 October 2018.
142 Tim Daiss, ‘Russia Could Take Hold of China’s Entire Gas Market’, Oilprice.com,
14 May 2019; Katya Golubkova, Stephen Jewkes, ‘Italy’s Saipem to sign deal this
week for Russian LNG work – sources’, Reuters, 18 December 2018; ‘Russia’s Gas
Giant Novatek Signs $2.5Bln Contract for Arctic LNG Facility With Foreign
Partners’, The Moscow Times, 19 December 2018; see also Saipem website, www.
saipem.com/sites/SAIPEM_en_IT/con-sidedx/Press%20releases/2018/Arctic%20
LNG.page.
143 ‘Putin dal komandu na vvod v ekspluatatsiiu plavuchego SNG-terminala v
Kaliningrade’, Interfax, 8 January 2019; ‘Putin Declares Exclave’s Energy’, The
Moscow Times, 8 January 2019.
144 Charles Kennedy, ‘Russia’s Oil Reserves Now Worth $1.2 Trillion’, Oilprice.com,
22 September 2019.
145 Rosneft website 14 May 2018, www.rosneft.com/press/releases/item/190875/.
146 See Will Kennedy, Elena Mazneva, Wael Mahdi, ‘Russia –Saudi plans for super-
OPEC could reshape global oil order’, World Oil, 22 June 2018; ‘Strany OPEK+
soglasovali uvelichenie neftedobychi na 1 mln barrelei v sutki’, Kommersant, 23
June 2018; Clifford Krauss, ‘United States, Saudi Arabia and Russia Find
Agreement on Oil Policy’, New York Times, 14 June 2018.
147 Arshad Mohanned, et al., ‘U.S. grants waivers to eight allies to buy Iranian oil’,
Globe and Mail, 3 November 2018; ‘Russian Oil Producer Quits Iran Projects
Due to Sanctions – Sources’, The Moscow Times, 2 November 2018; Vanand
 Economic patterns 175
Meliksetian, ‘Can Russia Relieve the Iranian Oil Crisis?’, Oilprice.com, 30
October 2018.
148 ‘“Rosneft” otkazalas’ rabotat’ v Irane’, Vedomosti, 12 December 2018; ‘Rosneft
Pulls Out of $30 Bln Iran Oil Project Over Fears of US Sanctions, Media
Reports’, The Moscow Times, 13 December 2018.
149 Olga Yagova, Dmitry Zhdannikov, ‘Exclusive: Russia clashes with Western oil
buyers over new deals as sanctions loom’, Reuters Business News, 9 November
2018.
150 ‘Zasedanie Pravitel’stva’, 30 January 2020, http://government.ru/news/38878/;
‘Moscow Outlines $231Bln Plan for Arctic Development’, The Barents
Observer, 5 February 2020; ‘“Gazprom Neft’” poprosila l’goty dlia svoego
krupneishego mestorozhdeniia’, Kommersant, 16 April 2019; ‘“Gazprom
Neft’” gotovit novyi mega-proekt v Arctike’, Vedomosti, 16 April 2019;
‘Rosneft, Gazprom Neft to Get $9.4bn in Tax Breaks for Arctic Project’,
Russia Business Today, 30 October 2019.
151 Tsvetana Paraskova, ‘The Race For Arctic Oil Is Heating Up’, Oilprice.com, 6
February 2020; Sergey Sukhankin, ‘Russia Prepares Ambitious Economic
Strategy for Arctic Region’, Eurasia Daily Monitor, 11 February 2020; Putin,
‘Vstrecha s glavoi kompanii “Rosneft”: Igorem Sechnym’, Kremlin.ru, 11
February 2020, kremlin.ru/events/president/news/62763
152 ‘Russian Energy Exports to U.S. Set 8-Year Record in October’, The Moscow
Times, 6 February 2020; ‘SShA i Velikobritaniia rezko narastili zakupku nefti v
Rossii’, RBC.ru, 27 February 2020; ‘Rossiia stala vtorym krupneishim postavsh-
chikom energonositelei v SShA’, RBC.ru, 6 February 2020.
153 Katrina Manson, David Sheppard, Michael Stott, ‘US imposes sanctions on
Rosneft subsidiary over Venezuelan oil’, Financial Times, 18 February 2020.
154 ‘Kremlin’s Fiscal Strength Put to The Test by Plummeting Oil Prices’, RFE/RL,
12 March 2020; Andrey Movchan, ‘War with OPEC Can’t End Well for Russia’,
Carnegie Moscow Center, 13 March 2020; ‘Ruble falls firmly out of favor’, The
Bell, 2 October 2020.
155 Elena Vavina, ‘Rossiia i OPEK zakliuchili krupneishuiu sdelku ob ogranichenii
dobychi nefti’, Vedomosti, 12 April 2020; Javier Blas, Salma El Wartdeny, Grant
Smith, ‘Oil Price War Ends With Historic OPEC+ Deal to Slash Output’,
Bloomberg, 12 April 2020; for a skeptic, Pavel Felgenhauer, ‘Russia’s Oil
Production Is Incapable of Making Needed Cuts to Stabilize Price’, Eurasia
Daily Monitor, 9 April 2020.
156 Ira Martina Drupady, ‘Emerging nuclear vendors in the newcomer export mar-
ket: strategic considerations’, The Journal of World Energy Law & Business, Vol.
12, Issue 1 (March 2019, pp, 4–20; ‘Russia leads the world at nuclear-reactor
exports: China is its only real competitor’, The Economist, 7 August 2018.
157 ‘Russia starts building Turkey’s first nuclear power plant’, WNN [World Nuclear
News], 3 April 2018. See also Mehmet Cagatay Güler, Building a Nuclear Empire:
Nuclear Energy as a Russian Foreign Policy Tool in the Case of Turkey. Istanbul:
Cinius, 2020.
158 ‘Russia and Uzbekistan Start Work on Nuclear Power Plant’, The Moscow
Times, 19 October 2018.
159 Zheng Xin, ‘China, Russia to ink deal for two nuclear reactors in Liaoning’,
China Daily, 15 May 2019.
160 ‘Russia Allows World’s First Floating Nuclear Power Plant to start Work –
Rosatom’, Sputnik News, 27 June 2019; Mary Ilyushina, ‘Russia plans to tow a
nuclear power station to the Arctic. Critics dub it a “floating Chernobyl”’, CNN.
com, 30 June 2019; ‘Russia Touts Arctic Floating Nuclear Plant’s Safety Despite
“Chernobyl on Ice” Concerns’, The Moscow Times, 5 August 2019.
161 Michael Daventry, ‘Belarus opens first nuclear power plant amid criticism from
Lithuania’, Euronews, 7 November 2020.
176 Economic patterns
162 See charts in ‘What You Need to Know About St. Petersburg International
Economic Forum’, Sputnik News, 5 June 2019.
163 Vladislav Inozemtsev, ‘Integrating the Eurasian Union and China’s Belt and
Road: A Bridge Too Far?’, Eurasia Daily Monitor, 21 June 2019.
164 ‘Vstrecha s uchastnikami Vtorogo Rossiisko-kitaiskogo energeticheskogo
foruma’, Kremlin.ru, 7 June 2019, kremlin.ru/events/president/news/60706.
165 ‘$1 billion deal with Cuba to modernize its railways’, Reuters, 7 June 2019;
‘Russia, Cuba sign agreement for upgrading Cuban railways, says deputy prime
minister’, Interfax, 7 June 2019.
166 Atle Staalesen, ‘Arctic Palladium invests $15 billion in new projects, will make
Russia world’s biggest producer of rare metal’, The Barents Observer, 19
November 2019.
167 See Andrew E. Kramer, ‘China is Leveling Siberia’s Forests’, New York Times
International, 3–4 August 2019; see also ‘Canadian and Russian pulp, log
exports to China increase amid U.S. trade tensions’, Pulp & Paper Canada, 2
July 2019.
168 Daniel Gleeson, ‘Polyus’ massive Sukhoi gold deposit gets even bigger’, IM–
International Mining, October 2019; Thomas Grove, ‘Siberian Gold Find
Brightens Ruble’s Future’, The Wall Street Journal, 7 February 2019.
169 Raul Mammadov, ‘Implications of the Government reshuffle for Russia’s Oil and
Gas Sector’, Eurasia Daily Monitor, 27 January 2020.
170 Galina Starinskaya, ‘Strany OPEK reshil dopolnitel’no sokratit’ dobychu nefti
iz-za koronavirusa’, Vedomosti, 4 March 2020; ‘OPEC Backs Biggest Oil Cut
Since 2008 Crisis, Awaits Russia’, The Moscow Times, 4 March 2020; Irina Slav,
‘HIS: Oil Demand Set For Largest Decline In History’, Oilprice.com, 5 March
2020; ‘Russia–Saudi Oil Alliance Under Pressure as Moscow Rejects Production
Cuts’, The Moscow Times, 6 March 2020.
171 Ilya Arkhipov, Yevgenia Pismennaia, Dina Khrennikova, Olga Tanas, ‘Putin
Won’t Bow to What’s Seen as Saudi Oil-Price Blackmail’, Bloomberg Economics,
20 March 2020.
172 Julianne Geiger, ‘Relief On The Horizon? Trump and Putin Discuss Oil Markets’,
Oilprice.com, 30 March 2020; Anna Podlinova, ‘Neftianye tsenu vernulis’ na
dokrizisnyi uroven”, Vedomosti, 13 December 2020.
173 Tsvetana Paraskova, ‘Oil price Crash Causes Major Recession in Russia’,
Oilprice.com, 7 July 2020.
174 ‘Ob’em FNB v avguste uvelichilsia na 298 mlrd rublei’, Vedomosti, 7 September
2020.
175 Pravitel’stvo Rossiiskoi Federatsii, Rasporiazhenie ot 9 iiunia 2020 g. No., 1523-r,
Moskva, http://static.government.ru/media/files/w4sigFOiDjGVDYT4Ig-
sApssm6mZRb7wx.pdf; Department of Energy, Russian Federation, ‘The
Energy Strategy of the Russian Federation Until 2035 Was Approved’, 10 June
2020, https://minenergo.gov.ru/node/18038; Sergey Sukhankin, ‘Russia’s Energy
Strategy 2035: A Breakthrough or Another Impasse?’, Eurasia Daily Monitor, 2
June 2020.
176 On this, see ‘Agriculture’, REDA, Vol. 1. The Russian Federation. Gulf Breeze,
FL: Academic International Press, 2001, and subsequent years.
177 ‘Agriculture’, REDA 1999, Vol. 1 (2000), pp. 244–45, 283; Michael R. Gordon,
‘Tough Year Is Projected for Farms of Russia’, New York Times, 28 June 1999;
Geoffrey York, ‘Food Shortages Prompt Russian Plea for Canadian Grain’,
Globe and Mail, 19 February 1999.
178 For overviews, Ekaterina Burlakova, ‘Kak Rossiia za 20 let sama sebia nakormila’,
Vedomosti, 22 October 2019; M. Crumley, Sowing Market Reforms: The
Internationalization of Russian Agriculture. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013;
Zvi Lerman et alia, Russia’s Agriculture in Transition. Lanham, MD: Lexington,
2007.
 Economic patterns 177
179 See William M. Liefert, Olga Liefert, Ralph Seeley, Tani Lee, ‘The effect of
Russia’s economic crisis and import ban on its agricultural and food sector’,
Journal of Eurasian Studies, Vol. 10, issue 2 (2019), pp. 119–35; Polina Kuznetsova,
Natalya Volchkova, ‘The Russian Food Embargo Five Years later’, Free Network,
Policy Brief, 14 October 2019; Stephen K. Wegren, ‘Effects of Russia’s Food
Embargo After 5 Years’, Russian Analytical Digest, No. 241, 11 November 2019,
pp. 6–10.
180 See ‘Grain Exports From Russia’, Russian Analytical Digest, No. 244, 17
December 2019.
181 Michael Quinn, ‘Russia Says No to GMO, becomes World’s Biggest Exporter of
non-GMO Food’, Russia Insider, 3 December 2018.
182 ‘Agro-superpower Russia will harvest 118mln tonnes of grain in 2019, minister
says’, Intellinews, 14 March 2019.
183 ‘Russia’s agricultural exports to hit $25 billion this year’, RT, 20 December 2018.
For more detail, Ilya Kuzminov, Leonid Gokhberg, Thomas Thurner, Elena
Khabirova, ‘The Current State of the Russian Agricultural Sector’, EuroChoices,
Vol. 17, Issue 1 (April 2018), pp. 52–57.
184 Dmitry Beglov, ‘Zhara podogrela tsena’, Rossiiskaia gazeta, 11 December 2020;
‘Proizvoditeli sakhara i masla podpisali soglashenie o stabilizatsii tsen’,
Rossiiskaia gazeta, 16 December 2020.
185 Ekaterina Burlakova, ‘Kruneishii rynok mira otkrylsia dlia rossiiskoi goviadinu’,
Vedomosti, 17 January 2020.
186 ‘Saudi Visit Signals Putin’s Deepening Middle East Influence’, The Moscow
Times, 15 October 2019.
187 Anatoly Medetsky, ‘Russia Says Asia’s Food Companies Want to Rent Area the
Size of Jamaica for Farming’, Bloomberg, 11 September 2019.
188 Mikhail Kuvyrko, ‘Sel’skoe khoziaistvo Rossii rastet za cschet “national’nykh
chempionov”’, Vzgliad. Delovaia gazeta, 7 January 2020.
189 ‘Minsel’khoz poruchil regionam sozdat’ zapasy produktov na dva mesiatsa’,
RBC.ru, 16 March 2020.
190 ‘Eda na samoizoliatsii. Zachem vvoditsia embargo na eksport prodovol’stvi’,
Vedomosti, 3 April 2020.
191 Putin, ‘Zasedanie Soveta po stratigicheskomu razvitiiu i natsional’nym proek-
tam’, Kremlin.ru, 13 July 2020, kremlin.ru/events/president/news/6363; Pavel
Golovkin, ‘Putin prizval rasshirit’ gorizont planirovaniia natsproektov’,
Vedomosti, 13 July 2020; ‘Russia Resets Ambitious National Development Plan’,
The Moscow Times, 13 July 2020.
192 Henry Foy, ‘Russia to cut defence spending in bid to prop up ailing economy’,
The Financial Times, 21 September 2020; ‘The Kremlin is hiking taxes for the
first time in twenty years’, Intellinews, 21 September 2020; ‘Kudrin predlozhil
zamenit’ povyshenie nalogov privatizatsie’, Vedomosti, 21 September 2020.
193 Igor Zubkov, ‘Minfin raz’iasnil, k kakim dokhodam budet primeniat’sia NDFL
po stavke 15%’, Rossiiskaia gazeta, 21 October 2020.
5 Russia in the world
Changing patterns

Introduction
The 1993 Russian Constitution assigned international affairs to the president
(Art. 86. a.). That was not altered in the burst of Constitutional amendments
announced in 2020, though there were several important changes related to
foreign policy. In the first place, Russian law now takes precedence over inter-
national treaties and other acts.1 Secondly, Russian territory cannot be ceded
to any other nation and, thirdly, office holders may not have dual citizenship
or foreign residency permits. For the most part, these amendments legalized
long-standing presumptions held by Russians.
After nearly a decade of Boris Yeltsin’s wavering on crucial foreign affairs
issues, Prime Minister Putin took the file in hand. In a long and rambling
open letter to voters published just prior to his first presidential election in
2000, Putin wrote that Russia needed an international policy based entirely
on ‘the national interests of our own country’, not on the interests of other
nations. If Russia is to regain status as ‘great power’, he said, it must harness
its resources properly and not be ‘lured into costly global undertakings’
while it is economically weak.2 Maintaining this theme after the election,
Putin told BBC interviewer David Frost that Russia should be a ‘strong,
powerful state’, but not an aggressive one. He added that, unfortunately,
Western countries were still captive of Cold War notions and saw Russia ‘as
a potential aggressor’.3
His expectations about foreign responses to Russian assertiveness proved
correct as the years went on. Every subsequent major Russian venture on the
international arena was termed ‘aggressive’, or ‘malign’, by Western authors
and politicians, who tended to ignore or shrug off any possibility that Western
policies might have influenced Russian strategic planning.4
Nonetheless, Putin’s first term was one in which he hoped to normalize
relations with the West and its institutions. On more than one occasion he
made it plain that he would like to see the United Nations and the OSCE
play greater roles in resolving international conflicts, supplanting NATO in
Europe. Disillusioned quickly by the apparently inexorable enlargement of
NATO, Western support of regime change and coloured revolutions, and
the US’s apparent lack of faith in existing arms control treaties, his two

DOI: 10.4324/9781003158646-6
 Russia in the world 179
other ambitions in foreign policy rose to the forefront. The first of these
was the preservation of the unity of the Russian state, and the other was to
recover the country’s traditional place as an important player in the global
arena. These objectives were openly expressed and were never, as some
would suggest, secret. Doubtless, after two decades he achieved both,
though they came at the cost of alienating the West generally, the USA
particularly.
Although Russia had no reliable military allies after the dissolution of the
USSR, it was the leading member of the Commonwealth of Independent
States (CIS). The CIS was an association of nine former Soviet republics
agreed first by the presidents of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus in 1991. Six
more joined between 1992–3 and the organization was formalized by charter
in 1999. It is held together by a political structure, a permanent headquarters
in Minsk and hundreds of treaties and agreements. These latter defined
commercial, educational, taxation and cultural relationships. Ukraine and
Turkmenistan adhered in 1991, but never ratified. Georgia ratified in 1994,
and withdrew in 2008. Ukraine left in 2014. The Baltic States never joined.
The CIS provides an umbrella for the Collective Security Organization
(CSTO), the Eurasian Economic Union and the Union State, a supranational
state structure agreed between Russia and Belarus in 1997. As the successor
state to the USSR, Russia inherited the Soviet Union’s permanent seat on the
United Nations Security Council (UNSC), plus all of its debt and international
obligations.
Russia’s foreign policy after the 1990s was defined by a new National
Security Concept (January 2000) and a Foreign Policy Concept (June 2000),
both of which cited NATO’s ‘out-of-zone’ and expansion policies as external
threats and, in contrast to Yeltsin’s emphasis on ‘partnership’, stressed only
‘cooperation’ with the West.5 Russian worries about NATO were confirmed
in the 1990s by US and NATO engagements in Bosnia (1995) and actions
against Serbia, which included bombing Belgrade (1999).6 These, and subse-
quent Western ‘regime change’ wars in Iraq, Libya and Syria were perceived
in Moscow as purposeful threats to its security. As a respected American
scholar wrote during the height of the Ukraine crisis:

As reprehensible as many aspects of Russian policy might be, both domes-

tic and foreign, the West has contributed to the increasingly hostile rela-
tionship ever since the Soviet collapse by ignoring Russian policy concerns
and attempting to take advantage of Russian weakness – both charges
brought by Russia that have a basis in reality. In some respects, at least,
Russian security paranoia has been stimulated by various Western
behaviours.7

One such behaviour was the West’s endorsement of Kosovo’s unilateral dec-
laration of independence from Serbia in early 2008 without any consider-
ation of terms agreed by the UN in 1999. In that case, UNSC Resolution
1244 guaranteed Serbian territorial integrity and forbade Kosovo secession
180 Russia in the world
without consultation with Belgrade. In 2009, however, the United Nations
International Court of Justice validated Kosovo’s unilateral action by accept-
ing the judgement that ‘unilateral declarations of independence by a part of
the country do not violate any international norms’. This statement echoed
an advisory opinion offered by the US State Department. Russia took that to
mean South Ossetia and Abkhazia had the right to defend the de facto inde-
pendence they had won from Georgia more than a dozen years earlier and
that Crimea had legal precedent for unilateral secession in 2014. The
Armenian inhabitants of Nagorno-Karabakh make the same claim while
demanding their independence from Azerbaijan.8
If there ever had been a real chance of close cooperation between Russia
and the West, it was laid to rest by the events of 2014 that earned Putin
centre-fold in the world’s most pressing international imbroglio. Russia’s
occupation of the Crimean Peninsula and its involvement on one side of a
civil war in eastern Ukraine caused it to be drummed out of the G-8, lose its
voting rights in PACE, and face an ever-growing list of damaging economic
embargoes. American President Obama proclaimed that he hoped to ‘isolate
Russia from the civilized world’, by which, of course, he meant the Western
world, where Putin soon became a pariah.9
More to the point, the crisis in Ukraine exacerbated international trends
that had already begun to challenge the globalist vision of the future, a world
united by free trade, liberal-democracy and diplomacy. Instead, geopolitics
and national security interests were again ruling the day. In the case of
Ukraine, one scholar in a Western university accurately pointed out that all
attempts to explain home-grown sources of the conflict and also the
humanitarian crisis caused by Kyiv’s Anti-Terrorist Operation in eastern
Ukraine ‘fell on deaf ears. Instead, both Western and Ukrainian media
launched a vigorous campaign of demonization of all things Russian and
Russia-related.’10 The narrative launched in 2014, and given definition by
another US scholar who labelled Putin ‘evil’, with a record of ‘inhumanity’,
never changed.11
Russian foreign policy before 2014 was determined by what the country’s
leaders saw as threats to its security, and its hoped-for restoration as a major
power. In addition to the Kremlin’s aversion to NATO’s expansion eastward,
the hazards for Russia included Washington’s unilateral abrogation of the
ABM Treaty in 2002, and its invasion of Iraq in 2003. NATO’s failure to
ratify agreed-upon modifications to the Conventional Forces in Europe
(CFE) Treaty, Georgia’s invasion of South Ossetia in 2008 with, the Kremlin
assumed, Western encouragement, the US’s drawn-out reluctance to allow
Russia’s accession to the WTO, and the decade-long threat of a European
missile defence system that was finally deployed by 2016 also kept Russia–
West relations on edge. In turn, Western perception of Russian actions in
Chechnya, its war with Georgia and its objections to Georgian and Ukrainian
accession to NATO, fuelled suspicions of the Kremlin’s motives. The old
Soviet, and even Imperial Russian, assumption that Russia was surrounded
by enemies who wanted to keep it weak resurfaced alive and well in Putin’s
 Russia in the world 181
Moscow, while visions of a ‘Soviet/Russia threat’ were resurrected in
Washington and West European capitals. In international affairs, perception
is often more important than reality, so truth lay in the eye of the beholder. 12
That said, Russia has greatly expanded the scope of its multiple ‘soft
power’ tools, that is, various propaganda agencies that spread the official
Kremlin line on international events and worked to nurture a better image of
Russia abroad.13 Whether these efforts have succeeded, or not, is moot.
In the two years following Putin’s easily won election in March 2018,
Russia became a major player in the Middle East, upgraded its military ties
to NATO-member Turkey and built a strategic partnership with China. Israel
was outwardly friendly, as was Iran, Israel’s enemy. Saudi Arabia became
Russia’s partner in oil production and pricing. As we saw in Chapter Four,
huge gatherings of leaders and business representatives from Asia in
Vladivostok and from Africa in Sochi solidified Russia’s presence in those
areas of the world, and the Eurasian Economic Union was functioning well.
By 2019 several EU countries were balking at further economic sanctions
against Russia and/or seeking ways to circumvent them.14 For the most part,
the Russian public welcomed, even relished, their country’s renewed status as
a power to be reckoned with.

The Skripal factor

Already an outsider to the Western world, Russia’s gradual resurgence was
hampered again by the Skripal affair, which sent new waves of anger sweeping
over the Kremlin from the West. The British government accused the Russian
state, meaning Putin, of poisoning former GRU officer Sergei Skripal, who
was living in Salisbury. Sentenced to 13 years in prison after he was caught
spying for the West in 2004, Skripal was exchanged in a spy swap in 2010 and
sent into exile to the UK. He and his daughter, Yulia, a Russian citizen
visiting him, were poisoned on 4 March 2018, with Novichok, the military-
grade toxin said by British Prime Minister Theresa May to exist only in
Russia.
The issue was confused by the speed at which the British government
denounced the Russian state, well before any investigation was completed.
May’s virulent accusations were undermined by the Organization for the
Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), which confirmed that the poison
was Novichok, but could not determine where it was manufactured.15 Later
reports from the German media that samples of the toxin were secured by
German intelligence services in the early 1990s and passed on to counterparts
in Britain and the US also disputed key elements of the official narrative.16
Although Theresa May called Novichok the deadliest military-grade poi-
son available, the Skripals recovered. Neither the two Russian men accused
of placing the poison on the doorknob of the Skripal dwelling, somehow, nor
others on the scene who found and helped the Skripals were infected. Britain
rejected all of Moscow’s many requests for proof of guilt.17 Contradicting
their own government’s passionate declarations, British scientists at Porton
182 Russia in the world
Down, where the nerve agent was tested and identified, said they could not
verify its origins. When two other British citizens appeared to fall victim to
Novichok found in a perfume bottle some 13 km. from Salisbury nearly two
weeks later, the UK government again vehemently accused the Russian
state.18 The two Russian suspects had long since left the country and the pub-
lic bin in which the bottle was found had been cleaned out between their
leaving and its discovery. Even some of the British media expressed uncer-
tainty this time.19
Whatever the details, the Skripal affair hardened minds set already in 2014,
and set a stage for similar accusations in the Navalny affair in 2020.
Since the ongoing crisis in Ukraine shaped Russia’s relationship with
both the western and eastern world in varying degrees, we start here with
Ukraine.20

Ukraine
The international crisis generated by Russia’s military occupation of Crimea
and the peninsula’s subsequent secession from Ukraine and integration with
Russia in 2014 (see ahead and Chapter 2), and the concomitant separatist
uprising in parts of eastern Ukraine had reached an impasse by 2020. That
said, a few Western analysts began to acknowledge that, long after the fact,
independent surveys still showed that over 80 per cent of Crimea’s ethnic
Russians (65.3% of the population in 2020; 58.3% in 2014) and Ukrainians
(15.1% in 2020; 24.3% in 2014), approved accession to Russia. In fact, in 2014
polls conducted by Ukrainian pollsters and the most actively anti-Russian
American propaganda agency, Radio Free Europe, admitted that an
‘overwhelming majority of Crimeans feel that their secession was legitimate,
that Russia is playing a positive role in Ukraine, and that the United States
should not play a role there at all’.21 After six years, even a slight majority of
the Tatar population of Crimea (12% of the population) had come to accept
the change. In some cases, this was due to a natural cultural and ethnic
affinity and in other cases the deciding factor was economic, for Russia
poured funds into the area for infrastructure and other uses.
The geopolitical tussle in eastern Ukraine is also the subject of clashing
interpretations. One side treats the struggle in the Donbas as a civil war,
fought between Ukrainian citizens on Ukrainian soil, and caused in 2014 by
an interim government in which people of the rebellious region was
unrepresented, and felt threatened by it. That government was dominated by
the nationalist (Batkivshchyna) and neo-Nazi (Svoboda) parties. Its leaders
ousted, by coup, a president the people of the Donbas elected overwhelmingly
and then tried to abrogate a hard-won law that protected their right to use a
language of their choice. In the Donbas in 2014, nearly 40 per cent of the
population was ethnic Russian, and about 72 per cent were native Russian
speakers.22
The forced break-up of the Party of Regions, the largest party in the Rada
in 2014 (6.1 million votes in 2012), and the abolition of the Ukrainian
 Russia in the world 183
Communist Party’s (1.6 million votes) right to participate in elections
disenfranchised Donbas residents further, making Ukrainian electoral
democracy suspect. Ukrainian President Poroshenko characterized former
Party of Regions members and Communists still in the Rada as ‘fifth
columnists’. People of the Donbas, the most populous and industrialized
region of Ukraine, had long since believed themselves discriminated against
by western Ukrainians and already preferred joining the Russian-led Customs
Union over the more stringent EU.23 Given the example set by the
Euromaidans, an uprising in the Donbas was hardly surprising.
The other side interpreted the conflict as a proxy war launched by Russia
against Ukraine for the purpose of acquiring more territory, Novorossiia.
Poroshenko rationalized months of indiscriminate shelling of rebel-held
parts of the Donbas by labelling his action an ‘Anti-Terrorist Operation’.
Although it should have been obvious to any observer that thousands of
civilian deaths and injuries, and extensive damage to airports, residences,
schools and hospitals, were factors driving more people of the Donbas to
support separatism, this crucial reality went missing in Ukrainian and
Western accounts.
By the end of 2015, UN data revealed ‘serious human rights abuses’ in the
areas controlled by rebels and equally serious abuses committed by ‘elements
of the Security Service of Ukraine’. The Human Rights Monitoring Mission
reported that ‘armed groups’ everywhere were not restrained by the rule of
law, and civilians in the ‘conflict-afflicted eastern parts of Ukraine … [are] in
a very difficult humanitarian and human rights situation’.24 Neither side
could claim the moral high ground after two years of bitter conflict. This fact
was lost in the fog of blame-casting rhetoric out of Kyiv, Washington,
Brussels and Moscow.
Giving up the ‘terrorist’ tag after about a year, Kyiv began to call the
conflict a defensive war against Russian aggression. This depiction made it
easier for Ukraine to acquire arms, funds and advisers from Western
countries. In its turn, the government in Moscow designated the Ukrainian
forces ‘fascist’ and assisted the rebels with arms, funds and advisers.25
Ukraine cut all remaining ties with the CIS in April 2018, unilaterally
terminating articles of the existing Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation
with Russia. Poroshenko then proposed that Russia be deprived of veto pow-
ers at the UNSC.26
Years after the overthrow of the Yanukovych government in 2014, the
Ukrainian official and Western narrative remained oblivious to the central
roles played in that action by Svoboda and its activist ally, the openly fascist
and revolutionary Right Sector (Praviy sektor). The politicization of the
events of 2014 in Kyiv meant that individuals responsible for tragic actions
such as the sniper fire that led to deaths of Ukrainian protesters (glorious
hundred) and Ukrainian police (reviled) on the Maidan, or the ‘Odesa
massacre’, were never found – or even truly sought, because a public trial
might undermine the official version of events.27 After long and exhaustive
research, one scholarly investigator’s conclusion that ‘the absolute majority
184 Russia in the world
of the protesters were killed and wounded from Maidan-controlled locations
and that the investigation and trials were for this reason stonewalled’ met
only deafening silence from authorities in Kyiv and the West.28
The ever-widening split between Russia and Ukraine became a chasm in
the spring of 2018, when Poroshenko accused the Russian Orthodox Church
(ROC) of serving as an agent for Moscow in his country, calling it one of the
‘tentacles with which the aggressor country operates inside the body of our
state’.29 His remarks signalled a first step in a process that led to the indepen-
dence of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church from the ROC (see Chapter 9).
Growing discrimination in Ukraine against the country’s tens of thousands
of Russian Orthodox adherents, and laws banning minority language instruc-
tion after grade five in all schools encouraged further cultural hostilities
between Ukrainians and Russians. Whereas Western governments remained
indifferent to these actions, Europe’s human rights and democracy arbiter,
the Venice Commission, ruled the Education Law discriminatory, in vain.30
As Ukrainian separatists and the country’s regular army sniped at each
other in the Donbas, Gazprom and Naftohaz fought competing lawsuits in
European courts, several Ukrainian provinces banned Russian films, TV,
newspapers and historical symbols. Well before the pandemic, planes and
trains were halted at border crossings, and trade between the two countries
slowed to a trickle. In May 2020, President Volodomyr Zelenskiy black-listed
a large number of Russian cultural institutions, among them Moscow State
University, the Russian Geographic Society, the Hermitage, the Pushkin
Museum and a number of research institutions in Crimea. He terminated
scientific and educational cooperation, suspended financial obligations, and
extended bans on Russian Internet and social networks.31 The relationship
was toxic, to say the least.

Donbas
The death toll in the easternmost parts of the separatist-held Ukrainian
provinces Donetsk and Luhansk, the Donbas, climbed to over 13,000 by the
winter of 2019, with about 30,000 people wounded since fighting broke out
in May 2014.32
As civil war intensified in the spring of 2018, the Dutch Safety Board
reported that a BUK anti-aircraft missile shot down the Malaysian Airliner
MH17 in 2014, and that it was fired from the Donbas by a Russian military
unit. Consequently, international prosecutors charged three Russians and
one Ukrainian with murder. None of the four actually fired the missile;
rather, they ‘formed a chain’ linking the action to Russia, the prosecutors
from Ukraine and the Netherlands said.33
The original Dutch Safety Board report, published in 2015, made it plain
that the civil aviation sector (airline operators, state agencies, international
organizations, such as the ICAO) ‘bear a major responsibility’ for planes
‘flying over conflict zones’. This very important qualification seems not to
have been addressed in later assessments, as the ‘sides’ stuck to their original
 Russia in the world 185
tales, no matter mitigating circumstances.34 Malaysia did not blame Russia.
Instead, it found fault with Ukrainian air traffic controllers for allowing a
passenger plane to fly over a war zone where a Ukrainian military transport
plane (Antonov An-26), which resembles a passenger plane on radar, and at
least 16 jet fighters and helicopters had already been shot down by rebels with
hand-held MANPADS.
The trial in absentia bogged down when the court called on the US State
Department to produce photographic evidence John Kerry claimed that he
had seen in 2014 within hours of the incident (‘We picked up the imagery of
the launch …’), and it could not, or would not, produce the alleged evidence.
Kerry made that argument twice. Trying to bolster his assertion, he
complained that the rebels had shot down a dozen planes, ‘two of which were
transport planes’ in the previous weeks, unwittingly begging the key ques-
tion: why was the MH-17 allowed to fly over the war zone?35 That possible
story-changing query remains unanswered to this day.
***
During the Putin–Trump agenda-free meeting in Helsinki, July 2018, Putin
proposed a referendum in the Donbas as a means to resolve the conflict
there, or so he told Russian journalists. When that claim was made public,
the US rejected it and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo made a point of
saying that Crimea must be returned to Ukraine before sanctions could be
lifted.36
Talking heads in Kyiv and the West chastised Moscow in November for
‘agreeing’ to general elections in the Donbas. These were won easily in the
Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) by Denis Pushilin and in the Luhansk
People’s Republic (LPR) by Leonid Pasechnik, who had forced founding
leader Igor Plotnitsky to resign in November 2017. US envoy to the OSCE,
Harry Kamian, posted an open letter condemning the ‘illegal so-called
“elections” … in Russian-controlled eastern Ukraine’. He and the EU saw
the event as a violation of the Minsk agreement. Russia countered by saying
that Ukraine had not fulfilled its Minsk obligations and the promised law on
special status for the Donbas still had not passed the Rada.37 Neither side
would budge.
Not surprisingly, Ukraine’s presidential election campaign in the winter of
2019 featured outbursts of anti-Russia rhetoric. When political satirist
Zelenskiy won the first round on 1 April with 30 per cent of the votes cast,
Poroshenko (16%) and Yulia Tymoshenko (13%) raised concerns that
Zelenskiy was a puppet of oligarch Ihor Kolomaisky and too cosy with
Russia. Some Western analysts agreed.38 Poroshenko presented himself as the
saviour of Ukraine from Russian aggression, and his campaign distributed
large posters showing him facing down Putin.
Poroshenko’s stepped-up anti-Russian campaign failed to stop Zelenskiy
from winning in a landslide. His platform promising to end the war in eastern
Ukraine, curb corruption and fix the economy were what Ukrainians
preferred.
186 Russia in the world
Faint glimmers of hope for compromises didn’t last long. Zelenskiy’s vic-
tory coincided with the Rada’s approval of a new language law discriminat-
ing against Russian-speaking Ukrainians and a lesser number of Hungarian
speakers, and with a Putin order making it easier for residents of the Donbas
to obtain Russian passports.39 When Putin said Ukrainians and Russians
were one people, Zelenskiy responded that the only thing the two peoples
shared in common was a border, and offered Ukrainian citizenship to
Russians.40 Meeting with US officials on his first day in office, the new
Ukrainian president asked them to increase sanctions vs. Russia and expressed
a wish that the EU would follow suit.41
That said, Zelenskiy’s suggestion to the OSCE that there should be a
summit comprised of leaders from the Minsk and Normandy Groups
(Ukraine, Russia, Germany, France, the UK and the US) to discuss a
settlement in eastern Ukraine was met with favour in Moscow, though Lavrov
insisted that direct dialogue between Kyiv and the separatist leaders was
needed.42 As a follow-up, on 11 May Putin and Zelenskiy held their first tele-
phone conversation and a start was made in July 2019 when Russia, Ukraine
and the OSCE agreed to an ‘indefinite’ ceasefire. This came none too soon,
because the previous three months had seen a marked increase in violations
along the front line.43
Promises of millions of dollars in aid from the US and Canada guaranteed
that Zelenskiy would remain focused on integration with the West, where an
anti-Russian stance is an effective fund-raising mechanism. Making his
position stronger, Zelenskiy’s political party, Servant of the People (Sluha
narodu), won a near majority in a summer election to the Rada. He and
Putin spoke again in early August and agreed on the need for peace talks,
presumably with the recall of the Normandy Quartet (Ukraine, Russia,
Germany and France), which had not met since 2016, and to speed up pris-
oner exchanges.44
An exchange of 35 from each side took place in September. Russia gave up
24 Ukrainian sailors and film-maker Oleg Sentsov, who was in his fifth year
in a penal colony. Ukraine released a possible witness in the MH17 case.
France’s Macron was credited with acting as middleman in the negotiation
process.45 A few weeks later, at a meeting held in Minsk and chaired by the
OSCE, Ukraine’s negotiators agreed to allow local elections in the Donbas
after the region was granted self-government within Ukraine. According to
Zelenskiy, this agreement, a formula put forward earlier by German Foreign
Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, was conditional on Ukraine gaining
control over the 400 km of borders with Russia. Thus, what purported to be
an important breakthrough for the Donbas depended on Russian acquiescence
to Zelenskiy’s added conditions. The accord also faced stiff opposition in
Ukraine, where nationalists rallied against it.46
If the swap encouraged some to think that a general thaw might ensue,
most Western politicians still accepted the Poroshenko–Yatsenyuk narrative,
much of which is untrue or skewed.47 In spite of crying wolf many times,
claiming that Russia was massing tens of thousands of troops on the border
 Russia in the world 187
to invade the Donbas, no evidence of that was ever found. Repeated reference
to leaders in the Donbas as Russia’s ‘stooges’ shrug off the fact that rebels in
Donetsk and Luhansk had a legitimate cause in 2014 with the Euromaidan
example to emulate, and that a majority of civilian deaths early on were the
result of random shelling of the Donbas by the Ukrainian army (some of it
with illegal cluster bombs) and its volunteer battalions.48 The core of the
Poroshenko–Yatsenyuk storyline is that the crisis in the Donbas began with a
Russian invasion of the region and that Russia is responsible for all the
deaths.49 Neither was true; rather, the government in Kyiv launched the civil
war by refusing to negotiate and initiating a brutal ‘Anti-Terrorist Operation’
against Ukrainian citizens who, for the most part, preferred to stay in Ukraine
if only their language rights and some local autonomy were guaranteed.
Russia is by no means an innocent, but ignoring the root causes of rebellion
in eastern Ukraine renders the mainstream Western narrative false.50
On the other hand, Russia’s continued refusal to acknowledge the extent
of its real role in the conflict and its simplified portrayal of Ukrainian
leadership in 2014 as fascist, is also a false narrative and an obstacle to the
full implementation of the Minsk II and Normandy Four agreements.51
It seemed also that the inhabitants of parts of the Donbas had not changed
their minds significantly since surveys conducted in 2014 showed that they
too preferred Russia to Ukraine. A detailed face-to-face survey of 1,600
persons in over 50 ‘occupied’ cities and towns taken by a Kyiv-based research
team in October 2019 revealed that 76 per cent believed they were in a civil
war, not a conflict pitting Ukraine against Russia; and 86 per cent said that
Moscow did not start the war. A clear majority (58%) also still considered
themselves Ukrainian and the vast majority (81%) wanted to stay in their
homes. Whatever the flaws in this extensive survey, published by one of
Ukraine’s mainstream newspapers Dzerkalo Tyzhnya (Weekly Mirror), with
the admonition that resolution of the crisis ‘must not be based on emotions,
fantasies and intuitive beliefs’, its results may have been revelatory for
Ukrainians living elsewhere in Ukraine, especially the extensive responses
about worsening living conditions – if they cared.52
The first meeting of the Normandy Quartet in three years, in December
2019, and the first Putin–Zelenskiy face-to-face, had some logistical
accomplishments. They decided to attempt a full armistice, and an ‘all-for-
all’ prisoner exchange before the end of the year, plus troop withdrawals and
de-mining by March 2020. They opened negotiations about gas transit
through Ukraine, and planned to meet again four months later.
They agreed as well to three areas of full disengagement, with the promise
of three more in the spring of 2020. At a press conference following the ses-
sion, Zelenskiy again demanded full control of the Donbas border with
Russia, ‘complete disarmament’ in Donetsk and Luhansk and withdrawal of
all foreign troops. Zelenskiy said he would never permit constitutional
changes that could lead to the federalization of Ukraine, even though ‘spe-
cial status’ for parts of the Donbas is precisely what the Minsk agreement
called for.53
188 Russia in the world
The all-for-all prisoner exchange, which took place in December, and an
important gas deal (see Chapter 4), generated some optimism that a settle-
ment might be reached. This was premature, for Kyiv continued to demand
that it get full control of the border with Russia before elections could be
held in the Donbas, while the Minsk agreement says that local elections and
constitutional amendments must come first.54 It took an intense firefight,
with casualties on both sides, in February 2020 to jolt observers back to
reality.55
As the sniping continued, Donbas residents who took out Russian pass-
ports were allowed to participate in the All-Russia Vote of July 2020, and
rumours spread again that Russia planned to annex the region. Kremlin
spokesman Peskov insisted that the passports were granted for humanitarian
reasons, because Donbas residents were completely ‘thrown away by their
own country’.56
The rumours persisted, in part because political advisers to the Normandy
Four met in Berlin (3–4 July 2020) and Russia demanded that Ukraine
implement long-promised constitutional changes that would recognize
special status for parts of the Donbas. Kyiv still refused to negotiate directly
with Donbas separatists, rejected the idea of ‘special status’ for the region,
and stipulated that it get control over its borders with Russia before any
election was held. Neither side would bend on their conditions, though they
agreed to a comprehensive ceasefire, further troop withdrawals and prisoner
exchanges before the next scheduled Tripartite Contact Group meeting
(Russia, Ukraine and the OSCE).57

Crimea
By 2020, Crimea was fully incorporated into the Russian Federation (see
Chapter 2). An exclamation point to the annexation came on 15 May 2018
when Putin drove a heavy KAMAZ truck to inaugurate the bridge across the
Kerch Strait. Ukraine’s mission to the UN described the bridge as a violation
of ‘the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine’ and the US State
Department and most Western states agreed. The Kremlin shrugged these
complaints off, saying merely that ‘Crimea is Russia’ and therefore it needed
no permission to construct the bridge.
Efforts on the part of Moscow to ‘Russianize’ Crimea intensified. That has
meant funding for Russia-centred cultural events, special school curricula
and media programming. Young men in Crimea are subject to conscription
into the Russian army and, before that, they may enrol in the National
Military Patriotic Social Movement Association, or Young Army (Yuarmia),
founded in 2015 by the MoD for boys from the ages 8 to 18.58
In addition to augmenting its Black Sea Fleet at Sevastopol, the MoD built
up its naval forces on the Sea of Azov. An incident in November 2018, when
the Russian Navy fired on and seized several Ukrainian vessels (see Chapter
7), confirmed that the Azov region would prove to be another point of
conflict between Russia and Ukraine.
 Russia in the world 189
Ukraine acknowledged that it had two SBU agents on board the ships in
question, and Russian pundits maintained that Poroshenko looked for a
reason to invoke emergency measures so as to legitimize postponing the
election that he ultimately lost. In an interview for Bild and in an op-ed piece
for the New York Times, Poroshenko called on NATO to deploy ships to the
Sea of Azov, declaring that Russia wanted to annex the entire sea and Ukraine
itself. When Ukraine’s infrastructure minister added that Russia was
preparing to invade Western Europe, even the usually hostile-to-Russia New
York Times accused Kyiv of ‘wild exaggerations’.59 An irony related to the
Azov Sea incident is that, in May 2019, Ukraine’s state investigation agency
opened a criminal probe again Poroshenko, then no longer president, for
‘deliberately provoking’ Russia by sending naval ships through the Kerch
Strait.60 Russia returned the naval vessels to Ukraine in November 2019.
Poroshenko imposed severe restrictions on Russian citizens living in
Ukraine, forbidding withdrawals of bank deposits, currency exchange
transactions or even travel abroad, and forbade entry into the country of all
Russian men between the ages of 16 and 60. In the latter instance, he said that
his government was acting to prevent the formation of private Russian armies
within Ukraine.61
Ukraine and the West were angered by celebrations in Crimea marking the
fifth anniversary of what Russians call the peninsula’s ‘reunification with
Russia’. Parades with Russian flags, visits by various Russian party leaders
and, on the final day, Putin, marked the occasion. They were upset again
when Crimeans participated in Russia’s regional elections, September 2019,
causing the EU to impose more sanctions and freeze assets of Russians who,
by organizing the election, ‘undermined the sovereignty of Ukraine’.62
A new variable was thrown in to the mix in April 2020 when Zelenskiy
nominated virulently anti-Russian Micheil Saakashvili as deputy minister and
head of Ukraine’s National Reform Council. The former president of Georgia
(2004–13), where he created a ministry of national reintegration and insti-
gated the war with Russia in 2008 (see ahead), he fled his homeland where,
after separate trials in absentia, he was convicted for covering up evidence in
a murder case and abusing the power of his office. Two years after he granted
Saakashvili Ukrainian citizenship, and named him governor of the Odesa
region, Poroshenko took the citizenship away. Zelenskiy restored it. This very
peculiar action gratified Saakashvili’s political friends in Washington, but
made accommodation with Russia more difficult and alienated Tbilisi.63
On the international level, for the Kremlin, the addition of Crimea extends
Russia’s maritime boundaries, provides it with access to greater oil and gas
resources under the Black Sea, gives it a third permanent ice-free port (the
others are Murmansk and Vladivostok), and slows Western geopolitical
expansion. Strategically, Crimea serves as a base for quick access to the
Mediterranean, the Balkans and the Middle East, and brings Russia closer to
Romania, Bulgaria and Turkey by sea. Putin acted in Crimea knowing very
well what the Western reaction would be, making a strategic decision where
the reward (Crimea) was deemed greater than the risk.64
190 Russia in the world
South Caucasus65
Like Ukraine, Georgia maintains close relations with NATO and the US. In
Georgia’s case, relations with de facto independent South Ossetia and
Abkhazia are still frozen, as they have been since the mid-1990s. When
Georgia launched a sneak attack on South Ossetia in 2008, its army overran
a peacekeeping force mandated on that border by the OSCE and the UNSC
and killed a dozen Russian troops. Georgian artillery and tanks bombarded
Tskhinvali, the capital of the self-proclaimed republic that had won its
independence from Tbilisi by bloody fighting in the early 1990s. Saakashvili
then raved on TV that the ‘glorious’ Georgian army had won a great victory.
The Russian army crossed into South Ossetia and quickly drove the Georgian
army out.
Relations between Russia and Georgia were growing more hostile prior to
the assault on Russian and Ossetian peacekeepers and Saakashvili had won
an election on a platform guaranteeing reintegration. He even created a
Ministry of Reintegration, so perhaps the attack was inevitable. Nevertheless,
Western portrayal of Russia as the ‘aggressor’ in that conflict, while rarely
looking either to its origins or to the wishes of the Abkhaz and Ossets, rings
more than hollow.66 Nothing much has changed since.
Salome Zurabishvili’s success in Georgia’s presidential election, November
2018, brought confirmation of closer ties to Europe and the US. The first
woman to hold that post, she was born and raised in France and was granted
Georgian citizenship only in 2004, when she was named foreign minister.
While the presidential position is more symbolic than powerful, its holder
wields influence that worried some Russian strategists at the time. They had
reason. In June the next year, protesters shouting anti-Russian slogans tried
to storm the General Assembly building in Tbilisi where Russian legislators
were attending the Inter-Parliamentary Assembly of Orthodoxy. Zurabishvili
catered to them by calling Russia Georgia’s ‘enemy and occupier’ and accused
Moscow of ‘fifth column’ attempts to divide Georgian society. Riot police
used tear gas, rubber bullets and water cannon to disperse the crowd. 67 In
response, Putin cancelled all passenger air flights to Georgia, citing potential
danger to Russian citizens and the Russian Duma adopted a resolution call-
ing for sanctions against Georgia. Putin declined to sign it. 68
Russia increased the number of its troops based in Abkhazia and South
Ossetia in 2020, prompting Georgia to lobby aggressively for accession to
NATO. From Russia’s point of view, further complications in its relations
with the West were again worth the risk.69
Things were not going well for Russia’s ally in the region, Armenia, where
a political storm posed still more problems for Moscow. When President
Serzh Sargsyan’s second consecutive term expired in April, the stacked
National Assembly elected him prime minister, creating a tandem like the one
in Russia during the Medvedev presidency. But the Armenian public was not
nearly so acquiescent as Russia’s and, in contrast to Putin, Sargsyan was not
popular. Thousands hit the streets in protest. The uproar caused Sargsyan to
 Russia in the world 191
resign. Although pundits referred to events in Yerevan as a ‘colour’ revolution,
Putin’s bête noire, the Russian president was quick to congratulate protest
leader Nikol Pashinyan on becoming acting prime minister.70 The prominent
role of Russian business circles in Armenia and Yerevan’s frozen war with
Baku over Nagorno-Karabakh made stability in the region very important to
Moscow. Putin handed the ‘Armenia problem’ to Sergei Naryshkin and, in
the meantime, welcomed Pashinyan to Moscow where they had a ‘construc-
tive and cooperative’ discussion.71
Running on an economic reform and anti-corruption platform, Pashinyan’s
coalition won December’s snap presidential election, securing 70.4 per cent
of the vote. What this meant for Russia remained to be seen.72
Putin met twice with Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliev in September
2018. At the first one, in Sochi, they signed documents outlining cooperative
projects in agriculture and tourism, and a $5 billion arms deal. They met in
Baku later to confirm previous agreements while Rosoboronexport initialled
more arms sales contracts. Baku appeared to be moving closer to Moscow, in
part because its leadership was well aware that no help would be coming from
the West in its dispute with Armenia and also because the West continued to
criticize Azerbaijan for human rights violations.73
The hot-spot in this case was the decades-old quarrel over Nagorno-
Karabakh, a region within Azerbaijan populated by ethnic Armenians. The
danger of the entire South Caucasus becoming a war vortex that would suck
in Russia, Turkey, Iran and the West, has been present since 1992. In that
year, France, Russia and the US formed the Minsk Group under the OSCE
to find a peaceful solution to the conflict, which had been a bloody point of
contention between Armenia and Azerbaijan since 1988, when they were
both still republics within the USSR.74
The fact that in 2019 the Armenian president called Karabakh ‘part of
Armenia, period’ and, at a Valdai Club session with Putin in attendance,
Azerbaijan’s Aliev called the Armenian leader a ‘liar’ signalled that not much
progress was likely.75 The geopolitical line-up in the region was fraught with
dangers for Russia. Armenia is a member of the CSTO, Azerbaijan is a friend
of Turkey, a member of NATO (Figure 5.1).
Hopes for resolution were shaken by renewed conflict between Armenia
and Azerbaijan in mid-July 2020. After a brief respite, heavier fighting broke
out again in September, Azeri forces attacked territory occupied in the 1990s
by Armenia and then moved against Nagorno-Karabakh itself. There were
dozens of casualties among soldiers and citizens. 76
Erdogan announced support for Baku. Armenia declared martial law and
general mobilization; Azerbaijan declared martial law in regions close to the
conflict.77 The Kremlin, which has close economic relations and is an arms
supplier to both countries, has been avoiding antagonizing any potential
protagonist in the region. Putin spoke with Pashinyan and Lavrov was in
touch with both foreign ministers, to no avail. Both sides rejected foreign
mediation and claimed huge losses for the other side. Pashinyan did not ask
for CSTO intervention at that point in time.78
192 Russia in the world

Figure 5.1 Nagorno-Karabakh.

Source: University of Kent, Conflict Analysis Research Centre (CARC) https://blogs.kent.ac.uk/
carc/2018/04/15/the-nagorno-karabakh-conflict/.

Co-chairs of the Minsk group, Putin, Trump and Macron, issued a joint
statement condemning the violence and calling for an ‘immediate end to hos-
tilities’.79 As the number of presumed dead, many of them civilians, climbed
in October, the sides agreed to talks in Moscow mediated by Lavrov. A cease-
fire was agreed as of noon, 10 October. It didn’t last long, and had to be
renewed after a week of mutual shelling. That too only slowed the action and
the death toll rose. A ceasefire and diplomatic resolution was the Kremlin’s
only way to avoid bad choices: alienating either Armenia or Azerbaijan and
confronting Turkey or letting Ankara have its way in the Caucasus.80
Lavrov met again with the Armenian and Azeri foreign ministers for sepa-
rate talks in Moscow on 20 and 21 October. The two Caucasus ministers held
talks with US Deputy Secretary of State Stephen E. Biegun two days later, also
separately, and a third ceasefire was agreed.81 That too quickly broke down,
and the casualty toll continued to climb. Asked about Nagorno-Karabakh dur-
ing his address to the Valdai Club in October, Putin said that he spoke to both
leaders several times, put the death rate at about 5,000 altogether and insisted
that he favoured neither side. Both were very important to Russia, so much so
that Putin encouraged the US to help resolve the conflict. 82 Iran strengthened
its northern borders which they share with both Armenia and Azerbaijan,
Putin and Erdogan spoke regularly by telephone and they, and Pompeo, urged
both combatants to step down. Neither did; instead, they ramped up their hos-
tile rhetoric. A fourth ceasefire collapsed before it even started.83
On 30 October, Pashinyan asked Moscow for security assistance and was
told that Russia would honour their defence treaty by providing ‘all necessary
 Russia in the world 193
assistance’ if the territory of Armenia was attacked.84 Responding to a query
from a Swedish journalist during the ‘Russia Calling!’ investment forum,
Putin said that the best result would have Armenia return the Azeri territory
it occupied during the 1990s (‘five plus two regions’) and Azerbaijan provide
special status for Nagorno-Karabakh. A ‘consensus and balance’ must be
found.85 Iran’s foreign ministry also said that the occupied regions must be
returned, and the UNSC warned that shelling of civilian areas by both sides
may amount to war crimes.86
Finally, on 9 November, the Kremlin brokered a ‘permanent’ truce. Putin,
Pashinyan and Aliev signed a joint statement ending the occupation of Azeri
territory by Armenian forces. Russia will provide a peacekeeping contingent of
1,960 troops to keep the Lachin corridor open (connecting Nagorno with
Armenia) and displaced persons will return to Nagorno-Karabakh and sur-
rounding areas under the auspices of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.
In addition, economic and transport links will be restored. An economic cor-
ridor between Nakhichevan and the rest of Azerbaijan was guaranteed. The
Kremlin earned a diplomatic victory, the results of which were what Russia
had hoped for. Yet the Kremlin may soon have reason to rue the agreement.
Fierce public opposition to the ceasefire terms in Armenia will greatly harm
Russia’s image there, and Turkey has become a major player in the South
Caucasus.87 In fact, by arranging the truce, Russia may have prevented Azeri
forces from overrunning Nagorno-Karabakh. Azerbaijan won convincingly,
defeating a Russian ally, and Turkey, which was not mentioned in the agree-
ment, gained a role in the joint centre for monitoring the ceasefire.
As Azeri troops began moving into formerly occupied territories and
Russian peacekeepers deployed, the now-vulnerable Armenian prime minister
invited Shoigu to strengthen military cooperation with this country. At a
virtual meeting of the CSTO in December, ‘in order to ensure a peaceful
settlement’, Putin asked members to support Pashinyan, who also spoke to
the gathering. For further manifestation of this major confrontation on its
southern flank, Russia could do little more than wait it out.88

The Middle East

Turkey’s aggressive behaviour in Syria, where Ankara and Moscow had more
or less common interests, and in the South Caucasus where their interests
parted dramatically, kept the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MID) in a con-
stant state of uncertainty.89
Before the Nagorno-Karabakh matter prompted Turkey to challenge a
member of the CSTO, Russia had reached a state of normalcy in its
relationships with members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), the
UAE, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Qatar and Kuwait. Lavrov toured
Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the UAE in March 2019 to discuss Syria
and Israeli–Palestinian issues. These latter were complicated by Trump’s
announcement that Washington would recognize Israel’s ownership of the
Golan Heights, a decision that Pompeo attributed to God’s work.90
194 Russia in the world
Whether God’s hand was in play or not, before the year was out it was
Moscow, not Washington, that most observers recognized as the major
outside player in the Middle East. Still friendly with Israel, increasingly cosy
with Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iran, Israel and sometimes Turkey, the diplomatic
tide seemed to be shifting in Russia’s favour. It has military bases in Syria and
has acted as a mediator between the Assad government and various factions
in that country. However, the same observers all knew that the tide could shift
almost any time.91

Iran–Iraq–US, 2020. Russia in the middle

Friction between Iran and the US escalated quickly in 2018 after Trump
pulled out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (nuclear deal) and
reinstated severe economic sanctions against Teheran. Relations grew worse
at the turn of 2020 when Iranian-backed militias attacked the American
Embassy in Iraq and the US retaliated with a drone strike that killed senior
Iranian military commander, Qassem Soleimani. That action, at the Baghdad
International Airport, also killed the deputy chair of Iraq’s Popular
Mobilization Forces, and eight others. This was the second such action and
reaction in less than a month, all of them on Iraqi territory, and more
retribution was promised. Chairman of Russia’s Federation Council’s foreign
affairs committee, Konstantin Kosachev, cautioned that war might be next.92
The ripples spread quickly. Iran announced that it would no longer fulfil
the requirements of the 2015 nuclear deal. Lavrov and the Iranian foreign
minister spoke over the phone; Putin talked with Macron and Merkel
separately, both of them calling for calm, and the Iraqi parliament voted to
ask US forces to leave their country. Donald Trump, as was his wont, warned
Teheran that he had 52 designated sites that US forces would hit if Iran
retaliated, including cultural targets, and told the Iraqi government that he
would level sanctions against its government if US troops were ordered to
leave.93
Afraid of getting caught in the middle, Putin launched a grand tour of key
Middle Eastern centres. On 7 January 2020, he paid a surprise visit to Syria,
where he held talks with Assad. Putin walked the Christian quarter in
Damascus and presented the Patriarch of Antioch an icon, and also visited
the oldest and largest mosque in the city. In this way, he confirmed Russia’s
traditional role as patron of the Orthodox population in Syria and elsewhere
in the Middle East, and also paid deference to the large Islamic population
back home. The next day, he was in Istanbul for the grand opening of the
TurkStream pipeline and long talks with Erdogan, and on the 9th he observed
Russian naval exercises in the Eastern Mediterranean. He scheduled a visit to
Israel before the month was out.
The tit-for-tat confrontations between Iran and the US complicated mat-
ters for Russia, even though Putin made it clear early on that Russia and Iran
were not allies; rather, they shared geopolitical interests. A war between Iran
and the US would force Russia to rely more on Turkey. Yet Turkey and Russia
 Russia in the world 195
have different, if not quite opposing preferences in regard to the Syria and
Libyan governments. Indeed, in January 2020, Turkey’s parliament approved
a plan to deploy troops to Libya in support of the government and against
forces backed by Russia.94
Turkey also had troops in north-western Syria, preventing Assad from re-
taking control of his entire country, and had established good relations with
Ukraine, making Ankara’s relationship with Moscow more a matter of
mutually important economic matters, and not shared geopolitical interests.
The situation was such that Syrian and even a few Russian troops were killed
by fire from Turkish positions in early 2020.95 Still, the $20 billion unfinished
Russia-built NPP in Turkey, the TurkStream and strategically important
weapons sales are projects that neither side wants to jeopardize.
Attempting to find common ground, Putin and Erdogan talked regularly
by telephone, though matters escalated again when Syrian forces attacked
and killed over 50 Turkish troops in Idlib. In the meantime, Russia’s Black
Sea Fleet dispatched four warships to the region, while Turkey called for a
NATO Council meeting to consult on Syria. All of a sudden, as Erdogan
prepared to go to war against Assad, the Turkish–Russian relationship was at
risk. To their mutual relief, Putin and Erdogan met in Moscow on 5 March
2020 and agreed to break off hostilities. They decided to patrol a security
corridor in the Idlib province jointly, Russia to the south and Turkey to the
north. Both leaders said they wanted to avoid making the humanitarian crisis
worse, as thousands of refugees massed on the Turkish–Greek border after
Erdogan gave the 3.6 million refugees housed by Turkey a green light to head
for Europe.96
Meanwhile, Trump signed further sanctions against Iran into law, raising
the total number of Iranian companies and entities so listed to over 1,000.
The inability of Iran to sell its oil benefitted Russian exporters, but caused an
escalation of tensions in the region. The US sanctions were maintained
during the coronavirus crisis, even though the EU urged Washington to lift
them so the IMF could forward economic aid to help Iran deal with the
pandemic. The US refused, while Russia and other countries ignored the
restrictions and helped Teheran.97

Syria
One of the first overseas trips by Putin after his election in March 2018 was
to Turkey for a summit on Syria. He and Erdogan were joined there by the
president of Iran, Hassan Rouhani. They confirmed their intent to cooperate
and pondered the US president’s almost-simultaneous remark in Washington
that he wanted to withdraw US troops from Syria. Ankara’s obsession with
the ‘Kurdish problem’ already posed some problems for the Kremlin.98
A few days after the Ankara meeting, an emergency meeting with the
United Nations Security Council (UNSC) discussed alleged chemical attacks
in the city of Douma, eastern Ghouta. The Americans and British charged
the Russians with helping the Assad regime deploy nerve agents against
196 Russia in the world
civilians, and continued doing so even after reports issued by the OPCW in
July 2018 and March 2019 said that, while traces of toxic chemicals containing
elements of chlorine were detected in the area, there was no evidence of the
alleged poison gases. According to one report, whistleblowers who claimed
that the OPCW was pressured by NATO and Western ambassadors to
manipulate the results in their favour were dismissed. This was yet another
case where blame-casting by both sides obscured whatever actual facts were
found.99 Later in April, the US refused a visa to a Russian chemical weapons
specialist who was scheduled to brief the UNSC on Russia’s version of the
gas attack in Syria.100 Apparently, Washington was not interested in any
opinion but its own.
Prior to that refusal, the US, the UK and France launched more than 100
missiles from ships and planes against selected military targets in Syria. An
outpouring of wild statements followed. Syria boasted that it downed a
number of the missiles with S-300 anti-missile systems, the Pentagon denied
it. Russia, whose forces were not targeted, and Iran labelled the strikes
violations of international law. American representative on the UNSC, Nikki
Haley, said that her country was preparing new sanctions vs. Russia; Trump
said they weren’t. Another chemical attack, in Aleppo, a city held by the
Syrian army, attracted less attention, perhaps because circumstantial evidence
suggested that rebels whom the West supported might have been responsible.
This last incident led to a break from an existing truce, as Russian planes
attacked rebel-held territory in northern Syria. Russian and Syrian jets
pounded rebel strongholds in the region unhindered and, by August 2019,
Lavrov acknowledged that Russia had ‘troops on the ground’ in the ‘Idlib
de-escalation zone’ created by Moscow and Ankara in 2018.101 At a September
summit in Ankara, leaders from Russia, Turkey and Iran agreed that Syria
should not be divided, and that the ‘terrorist threat’ in Idlib must be contained.
The earlier agreement was jolted in October 2019 by Trump’s sudden
pullback of US troops from Syria. Turkey quickly launched an air assault on
Kurdish-held territories in north-eastern Syria, as it said it would. Since the
Kurdish forces had been among the US’s most important allies against ISIS
and guarded thousands of Islamicist prisoners of war, the Turkish onslaught
had implications for which neither Western countries nor Russia had been
fully prepared. In a telephone call, Erdogan told Putin that he did not plan
any permanent occupation of Syrian territory and fought only against
Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), or Rojava, who were allied with
the separatist Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in Turkey. The next day, the
Russian envoy in Syria, Aleksandr Lavrentiev, admitted that an earlier
agreement between Ankara and Damascus allowed Turkish forces to push up
to 10 km into Syria for anti-terrorist operations, adding that any suggestion
of permanent occupation was ‘unacceptable’.102
The situation quickly grew more confused as the ISIS prisoners and their
families began to escape and the Kurds turned to Damascus for help.
Washington now levelled sanctions against Turkey, promising stiffer ones if
Erdogan didn’t reverse course. When Trump sent a delegation led by
 Russia in the world 197
Vice-President Pence to Ankara for talks with Erdogan, a five-day ‘pause’
was agreed. Trump called it a ‘truce’ and, bizarrely, a ‘great day for civiliza-
tion’.103 In fact, the ISIS prisoners continued to escape and fighting continued
unabated, with Turks and Kurds blaming each other. Ignoring Trump,
Erdogan and Putin met in Sochi and agreed that Syrian and Russian forces
would transport the Syrian Kurd militia and their weapons 30 km (19 miles)
from the Turkish border. Then Turkey and Russia would jointly patrol a
much longer 10-km strip, a ‘safe zone’, in northern Syria, which was what
Turkey wanted all along.
The tale grew stranger. Trump lifted the sanctions from Erdogan and the
oil located in the ‘safe zone’ reverted by default to Assad’s government. The
US then sent troops already deployed to Iraq into the Deir al-Zour province
of northern Syria to guard oil depots there.104 The Syrian scenario had
changed dramatically, almost overnight, but its future was less clear than it
had been eight years beforehand. Although refugees were returning to other
parts of Syria, renewed Russian air strikes forced thousands to flee Idlib city
and towns in December 2019.
To sustain Russia’s standing in Syria, in May 2020 Putin created a new
diplomatic position, ‘Special Representative of the President of the Russian
Federation for the Development of Relations with the Syrian Arab Republic’,
and handed the post to the current ambassador to Syria, Aleksandr Efimov.
Consolidating ties further, in September Lavrov accompanied a delegation to
Damascus led by Deputy Prime Minister Yury Borisov. This was the foreign
minister’s first visit since 2012.

Iran, Israel and further diplomatic muddle

Washington’s decision to withdraw from the Iranian nuclear deal and
re-institute sanctions on that country saw Moscow and Teheran draw closer
together, and Russia finally taking a stand on Israeli air strikes (200 over
2016–18) against Iranian arms convoys in Syria. Moscow had been ignoring
such attacks, but condemned one launched in May, 2018. Israel’s Prime
Minister Netanyahu flew to Moscow to discuss the events of the moment.
That being Russia’s Victory Day, 9 May, he (and Serbian President Alexander
Vucic) joined Putin in the annual ‘Immortal Regiment’ procession in Moscow,
where thousands paraded with photos of relatives killed in the ‘Great
Patriotic War’. While the Russian foreign ministry declared that it would
continue to work closely with Teheran, no matter the new penalties imposed
on that country by the US, to appease Israel it also announced that it would
not send S-300s to Iran, having only recently said that it would.
Washington’s subsequent demand that Iran sign a new nuclear treaty under
strict conditions set by the US, or face ‘the strongest sanctions in history’,
added to confusion in the Middle East.105 So did Russia’s advocacy that Iran
and its proxies leave Syria, which angered Iran and placated Israel. Moscow
and Damascus both preferred that Syria’s border with Israel be stabilized
and Russia, in particular, had to start making choices, above all one that
198 Russia in the world
would guarantee the safety of its naval and air bases on the Syrian coast. As
its economic situation deteriorated, Turkey became the weak link in the
Moscow, Teheran and Ankara triumvirate and its strained relations with
Washington opened the way for Russia to increase its influence on the Black
Sea, the crucial waterway between the Middle East, Russia and Europe.106
The diplomatic muddle appeared to settle down somewhat after Netanyahu
visited Moscow for the second time in 2018. Their conversation dealt primar-
ily with Syria and Iran. Putin agreed again to urge Iran to leave Syria and
Netanyahu agreed not to try to oust al-Assad.107 The very next day, Putin
received an Iranian delegation headed by Ali Akbar Velayati, senior adviser to
the Supreme Leader of Iran, where they mooted the same issues.108 Although
neither Syria nor Israel were mentioned in post-meeting press statements,
Velayati told journalists that the meeting was ‘very constructive’, that Iran
would cooperate with Russia in Syria and that Moscow was prepared to invest
in Iranian oil projects. Russia’s prospects in the region grew, again.
Netanyahu was back in Moscow in February and April 2019. In February,
he told the Israeli cabinet that he and Putin had approved a joint task force
to work on removing foreign troops from Syria. His main intent was to keep
Iranian forces out. That wasn’t going to happen. In March, Syrian and
Iranian military chiefs met in Damascus and issued a joint demand that all
US troops leave and that Kurdish units submit to Syrian state authority.
They said they were negotiating opening the borders between Syria and Iraq.
Russia seemed not be part of these discussions. The Israeli prime minister’s
trip a few weeks later to Moscow, where he and Putin spoke of ‘shared
values’, was most likely an attempt by Netanyahu to win a looming election
at home by presenting himself as an international negotiator.109
In January 2020, a month prior to the election, Netanyahu flew directly to
Moscow from Washington. He returned home with an Israeli-American
woman who was pardoned by Putin after serving eight months of a seven-
year sentence for smuggling drugs. Putin noted the warm relations between
the two countries and that Israel and the EEC were negotiating a free trade
agreement.110
In August and September 2019, Israeli air strikes against Iran-connected
targets in Syria, Lebanon and Iraq, with expressed support from Washington’s
Pompeo, and the devastating bombing of oil wells in Saudi Arabia from
drones claimed by Iranian-supported Houthi rebels in Yemen, sent a deeper
chill over the Middle East. The US and its allies contemplated, aloud, military
actions against Iran. This was a Catch-22 situation for Russia.
***
In fact, Russia’s MID had business elsewhere in the Middle East. In October
2018, Egypt’s President Abdelfattah Sisi and Putin signed a pact on strategic
cooperation while their respective foreign ministers penned an MOU on
political consultations. Meeting in Sochi, they discussed the reopening of
tourist traffic between the two countries, a Russian industrial zone in Egypt
and also the construction of a NPP.111 This link-up appeared to have a life of
 Russia in the world 199
its own, relatively unaffected by the violence and confusion elsewhere in the
Middle East.
Meanwhile, the war in Syria raged on, forcing Putin to confirm his stance.
He messaged President Assad in December 2018 to guarantee assistance
against the ‘forces of terrorism’, while Lavrov held discussions with senior
officials from Jordan, Palestine and Turkey, all apparently successful attempts
to maintain the status quo in the Middle East.112
In that connection, Putin travelled to Riyadh in October 2019 for his first
trip to Saudi Arabia since 2007. The visit took place just as Turkish forces
were bombarding Kurdish sites in North-east Syria and Russia was trying
desperately to curb Ankara’s aggression, stay allied with Damascus and not
draw Teheran into an escalating conflict.113 Although the meetings were eco-
nomic in their expressed purpose, the situation in Syria and the Persian Gulf
region, and the Israeli–Palestine dispute, were on the table. Putin took part in
the first session of the Russian–Saudi Economic Council, which had been
agreed in 2017 when the king of Saudi Arabia visited Moscow, but had not
yet met.114 On leaving Saudi Arabia, Putin went to the UAE for similar
conversations.
Consumed by oil price matters in late 2019–20 and in 2020 by the pandemic,
news of Syria fell off the front pages in Russia, but did not disappear. Boasts
of victory were quietly overtaken in the Russian non-government media by
criticism of Assad for refusing to make any political concessions to opposition
forces. Yet Russia had few options other than to keep supporting Assad pub-
licly while in private trying to persuade him to be more flexible.115 When it
was clear that persuasion would not work, subtlety was taken over by direct
criticisms of Assad, whose regime the Russian state media now called corrupt.
Even TASS wrote that Russia, Turkey and Iran might be planning to depose
Assad.116
Whether Assad stays or goes, Russia achieved its main objectives in Syria:
there was no Western-sponsored regime change, Russia kept its naval base at
Tartus and airbase at Khmeimim, and the US was prevented from creating
another political vacuum in the Middle East. Moscow’s military strategy
based on air power and proxy ground forces worked. Importantly, Russia and
the US were both careful not to confront each other directly in the region.
The Kremlin was well aware, though, that these gains were likely short-term
in nature.117 It remained to be seen how its ‘allies’ in the region, Turkey and
Iran, would behave as Russia pulled back.

Europe and the EU118

It was noted earlier that the EU was Russia’s main trading partner until
indignation against Russia for its actions in Crimea in 2014 spawned mutually
damaging economic sanctions. Trade between them decreased substantially,
but did not disappear. Within a few years, the EU began to present an
asymmetrical face when dealing with Moscow, some members more
supportive of sanctions than others; some suffering from loss of trade with
200 Russia in the world
Russia more than others. Traditional divides between West, East and Central
Europe began to re-emerge while Europeans coped with thousands of
refugees from the Middle East, the rise of populism, Brexit and, in 2020,
borders shutting because of COVID-19. Although Russia exploited these
divisions whenever it could, it didn’t cause them.119
The problem, one author says, is that Russia views the international arena
from a traditional realpolitik perspective, usually meaning zero-sum games
(one country’s gain is another country’s loss), while the EU has adopted a
post-modern emphasis on normative power (community building) and
Europeanization.120 If this description is accurate, then Russia’s relations
with the EU as a collective will likely persist in a state of disarray, if not
always dangerously so.

Eastern Europe
Poland and the Baltic States
Poland and its Baltic neighbours are the EU’s most aggressive proponents of
sanctions against Russia.
Washington welcomed Poland’s President Andrzej Duda, who is supported
by the anti-Semitic, populist and nationalist Law and Justice Party (PiS), in
the midst of 2020’s bitter presidential election campaign in Poland. His
victory in the second round of voting did not bode well for Russian–Polish
relations or even for the EU, where his domestic policies are regarded with
suspicion.
Estonia is the only EU country with which Russia has undecided border
issues. Although agreements were signed in 2005 and 2014, Tallinn authorities
still make claims on territories that were in Estonia when the Treaty of Tartu
was signed in 1920 and were lost in 1944. That contention did not prevent the
president of Estonia, Kersti Kaljulaid, from travelling to Moscow in the
spring of 2019, the first state visit in nine years. She and Putin discussed
mutual problems, including trade, the border issue and the treatment of
ethnic Russians in Estonia, who make up about 27 per cent of the popula-
tion, as they do in Latvia (25%).121 The meeting was controversial in Estonia
and, by November, some lawmakers in that country re-opened demands that
Russia return the areas ‘annexed’ in 1944 and have almost entirely Russian-
speaking populations.122
Members of NATO and the EU and bordering Russia, the Baltic States
are the front line between Russian and NATO forces. In addition to issues
posed by the large ethnic Russian populations in Latvia and Estonia, the
strategic circumstance is made more volatile by controversies about pipeline
access, cyber-disinformation barrages from all sides, and historic memories
of Soviet occupation. Estonia has constructed a barbed-wire fence on
sections of its border with Russia and both the EU and NATO are building
patrol roads as part of a three-year border infrastructure project. In
Lithuania’s case, a neighbour is the heavily-armed Kaliningrad, the home of
 Russia in the world 201
Russia’s Baltic Fleet. In December, 2020, Russia deployed an armoured tank
group to the exclave in response, the MoD claimed, to NATO build-ups on
the Kaliningrad borders.
The worry in Moscow is that both real and artificial fears in the Baltics that
‘we’re next’, whether accurate or not, could result in actions that lead to a
self-fulfilling prophesy.123

Belarus
The fate of the Union State grew contentious during Putin’s fourth term, in
part because pundits opined that Putin wanted to become its president when
his fourth term in the Russian post was complete. With a mutually-agreed
State Secretary, an elected State Council, Council of Ministers and a
bicameral Union Parliament headquartered in Minsk, the Union State is
institutionalized and functional, but to date has no powers over its two
founding members.
That said, it was in the EEU that difficulties between Moscow and Minsk
emerged in 2018. At a meeting of the Eurasia Economic Council, Lukashenka
accused Russia of the ‘dishonest’ pricing of gas. Putin responded that the
price of gas for Belarus was lower than the market price and about half of
what it was for Germany. Lukashenka apologized soon after for the flare-up,
but the potential for disruption in the EEU was real. There may have been a
trade-off. At a CSTO meeting held at the same time, members decided to
select a representative from Belarus, not from the presumed Armenia, as the
organization’s next general secretary. These incidents signalled cracks in the
unity of several Russia-dominated associations.124
Relations with Belarus were still strained when Putin, Lukashenka and
their economic teams met again a few weeks later and confirmed a five-year
plan approved by the Union State earlier in the year, and agreed to address
gas prices and other issues without rancour. Siluanov complained that EU
products were slipping past Belarusian customs. A working group was created
to hash out differences and provide guidelines for further development of
their countries’ relationships. 125
In February 2019, Putin and Lukashenka held a three-day bilateral
conference that culminated with the Belarusian president telling reporters
that a union was possible if the peoples of both countries were ready for it,
prompting a flurry of second guessing in the West.126 Yet, squabbles over
Russian bans on certain fruits from Belarus, because they thought they
originated in the EU, a new Russian tax on exported oil and, in May, the
scandal over tainted oil in the Druzhba pipeline resurrected friction between
Moscow and Minsk. Putin tried to ease some of that by firing his ambassador
to Minsk, Mikhail Babich, who was very unpopular there, and replacing him
with Dmitry Mezentsev, former secretary general of the SCO and much more
diplomatic than his predecessor.
One of Russia’s advantages, unstated in public, was that Belarus was still
the country most indebted to Russia, with unpaid loans of about $7.5 billion.
202 Russia in the world
In the summer of 2019, Putin refused a request from Lukashenka that the
loan be refinanced, keeping it for future negotiations.127 Russia buys about 40
per cent of Belarusian exports, sends it billions in bilateral loans and still
subsidizes Minsk’s economy with preferred oil prices.
All these issues aside, in September 2019, a plan of action for Russian and
Belarusian economic integration become a matter for public discourse.
Apparently, a preliminary proposal that would include a single tax code, a
civil code and unified oil, gas and electricity market regulators was in the
works. The two prime ministers agreed that the plan was both preliminary
and serious, though in October the Belarusian foreign minister said that sev-
eral of Russia’s requirements were unacceptable.128
While celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Union State, Putin and
Lukashenka met twice in December 2019 (in Sochi and St. Petersburg) to
discuss further integration. Original expectations of travel without border
checks, customs-free trade, a joint currency, and new joint political bodies
and institutions, had not been achieved. Military integration was extensive.
On the other hand, hundreds of citizens demonstrated in Minsk against any
further union with Russia.129
By mid-winter 2020, as Moscow and Minsk failed to agree on an oil
contract, Lukashenka was talking about alternative energy supplies, from the
US, Saudi Arabia and the UAE. He criticized Russia for trying to force
Belarus into a union that, among other things, might cost him his job.
Pompeo visited Minsk shortly after these statements were made and
proclaimed that the US was willing to provide Belarus with 100 per cent of its
oil and gas. Because Pompeo flew to Minsk from Kyiv, where new promises
of support to the Zelenskiy government had rung pretty hollow after the US
impeachment trial, it was unlikely that Lukashenka saw Washington as any-
thing but a card to play against Moscow.130
Minsk targeted Moscow again in June as Lukashenka prepared to
campaign for the Belarusian presidential election, set for 9 August 2020.
Aware that his popularity was waning, Lukashenka fired off accusations that
Russia was meddling in his country’s electoral process and even plotting a
coloured revolution for Belarus. Although Western media made much of this
apparent new rift, Lukashenka and his sons attended the military parade in
Moscow a few days after his outburst.131
Less than two weeks prior to that election, the Belarusian KGB in Minsk
arrested 33 Russian mercenaries. Headlines in the state-owned news agency
BelTA screamed that the men were there to ‘destabilize’ the country during
the campaign, and called them ‘terrorists’. The Russian press said they were
members of the Wagner Group (see ahead, Africa), using Belarus as a transit
point on their way to Africa, the EU being off-limits because of the pandemic.
Later the line was that they were on their way to Latin America. They had
not been planning to stay in Belarus. The Kremlin asked that the men be
released; Belarusian officials then said the men were working for opposition
critics who were recently jailed.132 Until the election in Belarus erased all
­concerns about the mercenaries, this affair had the potential of becoming
 Russia in the world 203
more than the usual ‘he said, she said’ variable in Russia’s too often confused
international posture.
The 9 August election itself was a mess. Official results gave Lukashenka
80 per cent of the votes cast and granted his challenger, Sviatlana
Tsikhanouskaya, whose husband had been jailed for trying to compete for
the position, only 10 per cent. She claimed 60 per cent were hers. Few believed
the official numbers and thousands protested in Minsk and elsewhere in the
country. Military vehicles patrolled the streets. Police deployed tear gas, stun
grenades and rubber bullets in several locations and detained over 3,000
people. At least one man was killed. The Internet was shut down. Lukashenka
blamed the crisis on foreign agitators, but not Russia this time. He released
the Russian mercenaries. Putin and Xi congratulated Lukashenka on the
election victory; Western governments didn’t.133
From 15 August, Lukashenka and Putin held multiple telephone con-
versations. While not openly agreeing with the ‘external interference’
charge, Putin concurred that ‘destructive forces’ were working to divide
Russia and Belarus. As larger crowds gathered and stories of torture and
beatings by the authorities spread, the possibility of a coloured revolution
caught Putin’s attention. He promised to send military police and even
troops to assist Lukashenka, but only as a last resort.134 The Russian
media printed photos of the swelling demonstrations, and made much of
the fact that the anger was orchestrated mostly by women. Tsikhanouskaya
fled to Lithuania, where she began to form a transitional Co-ordination
Council and lobby the EU for support. Lukashenka promised a constitu-
tional referendum and a new election, only after pressure from demon-
strators ceased. Another opposition leader, Veronika Tsepkalo, fled to
Poland. 135
The head of the European Council, Charles Michel, and both Merkel and
Macron discussed the situation in Minsk with Putin. Lukashenka invoked
both the Union Treaty and the CSTO, both of which provide for military
assistance if one or the other is attacked by a third party, and opened a
criminal investigation of Tsikhanouskaya’s Co-ordination Council. As the
weeks passed with large, but mostly peaceful demonstrations on the streets of
Minsk, Lukashenka’s patience grew thin.136
Inflaming the situation further, the Russian MoD agreed to participate in
scheduled Minsk-based army drills in September, causing another huge
demonstration. The exercise was preceded by warnings from the EU, the US
and Canada that they might impose sanctions against the Belarusian
government. On the ground the manager of Vmest’ (Together) party, Maria
Kolesnikova, called for unity and the re-organization of society, but not
necessarily for the immediate ouster of the president. After a month, state
police became more aggressive against demonstrators and Kolesnikova was
taken by police.137 Joint Russia–Belarus military drills inside Belarus and
coinciding US–Ukraine exercises inside Ukraine brought an ominous
international military dimension to what began as a domestic political crisis
(see Chapter 7).
204 Russia in the world
In contrast to the Maidan demonstrators in Ukraine, neither opposition
group in Belarus is expressly hostile to Russia, nor do they express any
interest in foreign policy issues. Moreover, Putin has little empathy for
Lukashenka; rather, he worries mostly about foreign interference and a
colour revolution.138 That said, Mishustin travelled to Minsk, and foreign
ministry officials conferred regularly during the crisis. Putin and Lukashenka
met in Sochi on 14 September to talk of the ‘further development of Russian–
Belarusian strategic partnership’, sparking more speculation about
integration. Putin agreed to a $1.5 billion loan. Tsikhanouskaya announced
that any agreement reached there would not be upheld by her government.
Lukashenka closed his country’s borders with Poland and Lithuania as
thousands marched again in central Minsk (20 September) and on the 23rd
inaugurated himself as president. From Vilnius, Tsikhanouskaya again pro-
nounced herself the only elected president of Belarus.139
Canada, the UK, the US and the EU levelled sanctions against Belarusian
officials believed to be involved in manipulating the election, and
Tsikhanouskaya met with various world leaders (Macron, Merkel) who
seemed to accept her as rightful president, even though there was no hard
evidence that she had actually won the election. She was the keynote
speaker on a virtual panel discussion titled ‘Democracy and the Future of
Belarus’, hosted by the University of Toronto on 16 October and intro-
duced by foreign ministers of Lithuania and Canada, Linas Linkevicius
and Françoise-Philippe Champagne.140 The EU awarded her the Sakharov
Prize for human rights in December. Although her meetings with foreign
leaders and international appeals gave rise to talk of regime change and
coloured revolution, the situation in Belarus remained unchanged as the
year ended.141
The weekly demonstrations continued and security forces wielding batons
detained dozens each week. Tsikhanouskaya used her Telegram channel to
issue a ‘People’s Ultimatum’ calling for a general strike for 26 October if
Lukashenko did not resign. The Belarus Investigative Committee put her on
its wanted list for trying to harm national security. Although thousands
marched in Minsk and other cities on Sunday, the 25th, for the 11th straight
week of the ‘perpetual protest’, the nationwide strike failed to take shape.
Some factory workers, journalists with state TV, students and pensioners,
took to the streets across the country, and many small private companies
declared a non-working day, but the turnout was patchy.
Demonstrations continued every Sunday through November and
December, and police continued to respond. The EU levelled its third round
of sanctions against Belarus on 19 November.142 Moscow waited.

Moldova
Confusion elsewhere in Russia’s near-neighbourhood kept Moscow–
Chisinau relations out of the headlines. Constant political uproar in Moldova,
situated between Ukraine and Romania, and continued dispute over
 Russia in the world 205
Transdniestria, another hot-spot left to fester by the USSR, made the coun-
try important to Russia geopolitically. Soon after Putin’s inauguration in
2018, ‘pro-Russian’ Moldovan President Igor Dodon was relieved of his
duties to allow a snap election. The electorate split between his executive
branch and the legislative branch headed by Pavel Filip. The court named
Filip interim president, an act Dodon labelled a ‘coup’. Russia and the EU
both called for calm as thousands set up camp in front of ministry buildings.
From behind the Kremlin walls this resembled another Maidan in the mak-
ing. By the fall of 2019, however, Dodon had recovered power by dint of a
coalition made up of his Socialist Party and the pro-Europe ACUM bloc.
Moldova re-opened to Russian business and journalists, both of which had
been restricted by the previous coalition.143
Moldova remained polarized, with the EU and Russia vying to bring it
into their spheres of influence. A candidate for EU membership, it is held
back by its level of poverty and the Transdniestrian contest. The two ‘sides’,
often wrongly described as either ‘pro-Russia’ or ‘pro-West’, are more eas-
ily defined by their levels of corruption and struggles for power by compet-
ing oligarchs. Another election in November 2020 brought an avowed
‘pro-European’ to the president’s office. Maia Sandu, a former prime min-
ister whose government fell in November 2019, after a non-confidence vote,
defeated Dodon handily and promised to maintain a ‘true balance’ in for-
eign policy, whereas Dodon referred to Russia as a ‘strategic partner’.
Romania and the EU immediately congratulated her.144 Dodon rushed to
get a law allowing Moldovan Russians to use their own language for inter-
ethnic communications adopted before Sandu was inaugurated. Less than
5 per cent of the population is Russia, though close to 15 per cent use
Russian at home. Russian is the primary language of Transdniestria and
has official status in Gaugazia, an autonomous territory within Moldova.
How all this will play out is another ‘wait-and-see’ issue for Putin’s
government.

Populist leaders in Europe and Russia

Repeated pundit and politician complaints that Putin caters to Europe’s
right-wing leaders fall short when one considers Duda’s hostility towards
Moscow. Doubtless, however, the Russian leader finds common ground with
EU-sceptics. His conversations with Italy’s Deputy Premier Matteo Salvini
and Hungary’s Viktor Orban persuaded critics that Russia was catering to
Europe’s populists, such as Orban, Salvini, France’s Macron and Austria’s
Sebastien Kurz. In each case, their preference for national sovereignty over
collective EU activity would certainly appeal to Moscow. A late October one-
day summit with Orban in Budapest, where the two leaders encouraged
mutual trade and political cooperation, helped strengthen Russia’s recovering
presence in parts of the EU. They signed multiple trade and corporate
agreements (see Chapter 4). As a member of both NATO and the EU,
Hungary represented a potential breakthrough site for Moscow, though
206 Russia in the world
Orban gave no indication that he would break ranks with the EU sanctions
regime against Russia.
Other European politicians still found it easier to find Russia culpable for
their domestic ills than face their own responsibility. Fresh accusations in
2019 that Russia was meddling in the upcoming elections to the European
Parliament made the usual rounds, setting up excuses for electoral losers. One
of the most egregious of such claims came from the Belgian prime minister,
Guy Verhofstadt, who scolded his Italian and Hungarian counterparts,
Salvini and Orban, plus French right-winger Marine Le Pen, Brexit advocate
Nigel Farage and former Austrian Chancellor Heinz-Christian Strache for
taking money from Putin. He offered no proof for his accusations. The fact
that Donald Trump met with and praised Orban and Duda didn’t shake the
‘Russia did it’ narrative.145
To be sure, Russian trolls and bots intruded in the Brexit campaign, and
favoured Catalonians in Spain, the Five Star Movement (M5S) and Salvini’s
League in Italy, Le Pen in France and the AfD in Germany. Yet meddling in
the political affairs of foreign states is a practice hardly unique to Russia, and
it is not clear that Russian ‘support’ ever made the slightest difference in a
foreign election, including American ones.146 A 2020 British parliamentary
report on Russian trolling in the Brexit campaign, for example, found no
evidence to support the clamour of voices that insisted that Russian
interference may have turned the tide against the EU. This in spite of an
‘expert witness’ list limited to Putinophobes Professor Anne Applebaum,
William Browder, Christopher Donnelly (special adviser on East Europe to
NATO), Edward Lucas and Christopher Steele.147

Western Europe
Western Europe was undergoing dramatic changes of its own in 2018. A split
in Merkel’s centre-right bloc prompted her to step down as long-time leader
of the Christian Democratic Union. Although she stayed on as chancellor, an
already divided German political scene split further. Moscow was concerned
because it needed German support for Nord Stream-2. In the meantime,
France was in an uproar as protests against rising taxes led to violence on the
streets. Rumours that Russia was involved in spreading falsehoods to inspire
the ‘yellow vests’ were given evidence-free credence by British and American
media, thereby posing a threat to Moscow’s tenuous relationships with
Paris.148 In its turn, the UK was consumed by Brexit negotiations.
Russia was helped indirectly by Western European countries that found it
difficult to manage their relationships with Donald Trump’s Washington.
Following his disruptive participation in 2018 at the G-7 summit in Québec
and the subsequent NATO summit in Brussels, Trump travelled to Britain,
where he antagonized almost everyone. These sessions all served as
preliminaries to his face-to-face with Putin in Helsinki where, one may
assume, the Russian president was pleased with the diplomatic rubble left in
Trump’s European wake.
 Russia in the world 207
Taking advantage of Trump’s shaky relationship with Europe, Putin
regularly criticized the contemporary tendency towards economic isolationism
and the use of sanctions as political levers. During his opening address to
SPIEF in May 2018, he said:

But arbitrariness and lack of control inevitably lead to the temptation to

use the instruments of restrictions [sanctions] again and again, ever
wider and wider, to the right and left, on any occasion, regardless of
political loyalty, talk about solidarity, old agreements and long-term
cooperative ties…
The openness of markets and fair competition are gradually replaced
by various kinds of exemptions, restrictions, sanctions. The terms are
different, but the essence is one: they have become an official instrument
of trade policy of many countries. And some states are simply compelled
to adapt to this, to react, to apply mirror measures.149

It’s doubtful that any made-up mind was swayed.

Even as Russophobes railed that the GRU was conducting a secret cam-
paign to ‘destabilize Europe’ for Putin, Washington appeared to be doing
that job for Russia openly.150 European signatories did not follow Trump’s
lead in pulling out of the nuclear deal with Iran, Macron mused about
NATO’s ‘brain death’ and Merkel suggested that Europe could no longer rely
on the US to maintain international norms
Western Europe’s growing indecision about Russia came to a halt in August
2020 by outrage generated first by the electoral crisis in Belarus and then by
the Navalny poisoning.

Germany
Russia’s oddest relationship among the European powers is with Germany.
Interviewed just prior to the NATO summit in July 2018, Merkel stressed the
need to strengthen the Alliance against potential Russian aggression. At the
same time, Germany increased its purchases of Russian gas and continued its
vigorous support of Nord Stream-2.151 It seemed a contradiction to treat
another state as both a real and potential enemy on the one hand and, on the
other, covet it as a reliable supplier of energy.
The first formal bilateral meeting of Putin and Merkel in Germany in
over five years came in August 2018. The three-hour session marked a dip-
lomatic breakthrough for Putin insofar as relations with Europe was con-
cerned. For him, confirmation of Germany’s support for the pipeline was
perhaps the most important achievement, especially after Trump chided
Germany because of it. Although little of substance was agreed, in the post-
meeting press conference they both hoped for peaceful solutions to civil
conflicts in Syria and Ukraine, and maintained support for the nuclear
agreement with Iran.152
208 Russia in the world
A Merkel working visit to Moscow in January 2020 came amid the multiple
crises mentioned previously, among them Washington’s sanctions against
Nord Stream-2. German Foreign Minister Haiko Maas accompanied the
chancellor.153 At the subsequent press conference, she and Putin again
remarked on the importance of Nord Stream-2 and also the five-year
agreement on pipeline transit through Ukraine. Political solutions to strife in
Libya and Syria were reviewed in detail, they said, and both again insisted on
sustaining the nuclear deal with Iran. While Merkel stuck to the mainstream
narrative on Ukraine, she and Putin appeared to agree on most other major
issues.154
This partial agreement on the status quo didn’t last out the year, as the
Navalny poisoning saw intense pressure put on Germany by Washington to
cancel Nord Stream-2.

The UK
Theresa May’s anger at Russia showed no sign of abating a year and a half
after the Skripal affair. Caught glowering in a photo of her and Putin shaking
hands at the G-20 summit in Osaka, July 2019, she recovered by insisting that
Russia could not be treated as a normal country until it stopped its abnormal
behaviour on the international scene.155 A month after that she was out of
office and replaced by Boris Johnson, whose attitudes towards Russia were
slightly more flexible, if not accommodating.156
Putin dismissed Aleksandr Yakovenko, Russia’s ambassador to the UK, in
August 2019 and replaced him with a senior embassy staff member. Because
Yakovenko had been there since 2011, pundits suggested this was part of an
attempt to improve relations between the two countries. Three months later,
Andrei Kelin, former Russian representative to the OSCE, was named to the
post. Yakovenko took Kelin’s previous spot as head of the Foreign Ministry’s
Diplomatic Academy.157
Tensions between the UK and Russia were not eased. For example, in July
2020 the UK decided to impose its first sanctions independently of the EU,
choosing to target human rights violators from Russia, Saudi Arabia, North
Korea and Myanmar. In the case of Russia, this meant travel bans and assets
frozen for 25 persons who were alleged to have aided and abetted the death
of Sergei Magnitsky in 2009. Britain’s foreign secretary, Dominic Raab,
introduced the list and then met with Magnitsky’s widow and the ever-present
William Browder. Since the UK’s foreign office drew their list of names from
individuals already blacklisted by the US or the EU, the sanctions would not
alter their lives very much. Russia promised to retaliate.158 Even with Hong
Kong in an uproar, there were no Chinese names on the list. As a matter of
form, Raab also accused Russia of meddling in Britain’s 2019 General
Election; to what end was left unstated.
Russia retaliated nearly five months later by levelling sanctions against 25
British officials, banning them from travel to the Russian Federation.
 Russia in the world 209
The Italian link
After welcoming France’s Macron to Moscow in May 2018, Putin travelled
to Austria and Italy. He was greeted in Rome by Italy’s new prime minister,
Giuseppe Conte, who spoke against sanctions and made it clear that Italy
planned to do business with Russia. Conte later announced that Italy intended
to join China’s Belt and Road project, making it the first G-7 country to do
so.159 Although the US objected, within a short time at least 12 other EU
countries had signed MOUs with China on the Belt and Road Initiative.
Putin was back in Italy in July 2019, met Conte again and also President
Sergio Mattarella at a Russia–Italy forum. Discussions on cooperation were
wide-ranging. In a pre-visit interview for a major Italian newspaper, Putin
urged Italy to help lift sanctions, called for a joint Russia–EU security
agreement, as opposed to ‘the archaic, cold war concept of deterrence’, and
called accusations of Russian meddling in US and European elections
‘absurd’. On the other hand, he voiced some mild praise for Salvini, whom he
greeted at a dinner, and Silvio Berlusconi, because they both advocated closer
ties with Russia.160
The Russian president conversed with Pope Francis, for the third time,
though the Orthodox Church still made it plain that it is not yet the time for
the Pope to visit Russia. He and the Pope exchanged gifts and talked about
humanitarian aid to Syria and the protection of Christian shrines there.161

European institutions
Stripped of its voting rights in the Council of Europe in 2014, the Russian
State Duma debated full withdrawal in October 2018 while the Council voted
on a rule change that would restore those rights. The Council’s parliamentary
body, PACE, turned the proposal back for further study (99–79, with 16
abstentions) and demanded that Russia pay the annual contributions it had
withheld since 2017. The possibility of Russia being formally excluded, or
withdrawing from PACE, loomed large.162
In January 2019, the Duma rejected an invitation to send a delegation to
PACE’s Winter Session in Strasbourg because their voting rights had not yet
been restored. Among other things, the Duma statement said, more than half
of the judges now in the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) were
elected without Russian participation, which, it complained, would skew any
ECHR ruling related to Russia.163 As it happened, given the choice of reject-
ing Russian membership altogether and ending demands for payment, PACE
decided in June to clear the way for the restoration of Russia’s voting rights.164
After Russia was readmitted in the summer of 2019, representatives of sev-
eral member-states formed a bloc in opposition to the Kremlin. Dubbed
Baltic+, it included Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine, Poland, Slovakia
and Georgia.165
Membership rancour didn’t change much. In March 2019, the European
Parliament adopted a resolution (402–163) to further tighten its restrictions
210 Russia in the world
on Russia. Introduced by a Latvian member, the motion supported continued
sanctions against Russia, accused Moscow of destabilizing political arenas in
several European countries, opposed Nord Stream-2 and stated that Russia
was not a strategic partner of the EU. The EU imposed further sanctions,
naming the Azov Sea events as their reason. This raised the number of
Russian individuals blacklisted by the EU to 170 and the number of entities
to 44.166 Putin’s expressed hope, in his address to the Federal Assembly a few
weeks later, that the EU would take ‘real steps to restore normal political and
economic relations with Russia’, was a fanciful one.167
Putin returned to France in August, holding his seventh meeting with
Macron a few days before the French president presided over a G-7 meeting.
They discussed Ukraine and their mutual concerns over mass unrests, the
yellow vests in France and the electoral protesters in Moscow.168 Although
Macron insisted that Russia not be included in the G-7 while the crisis in
Ukraine continued, he later told The Economist that dialogue with Russia
was necessary if the EU was to survive. His opinion was driven by the US’s
apparent inconsistency and isolationism in connection to both the EU and
NATO (Macron: ‘we are currently experiencing … the brain-death of
NATO’), and also by an assumption that Russia’s only long-term choice was
re-association with Europe. Both these opinions were undermined by the
likelihood that the US might recover from its isolationist stance when Trump
left office, and that Moscow’s ‘pivot to the East’ may have more permanence
than what was at first thought.169
A few days before the earlier G-7 summit, Donald Trump again mused that
Russia should be allowed back in, suggesting that it would be good for the
world, Russia and the US. Russia’s foreign ministry was unenthusiastic,
saying it might consider a formal invitation, while other Russian commenta-
tors said Russia should re-join only if China and India were also invited.170
By that time, Putin was in Helsinki talking bilateral cooperation with
President Sauli Niinisto. At a subsequent press conference the presidents
noted that their countries had no problems with each other, and that trade,
economic and environmental cooperation were satisfactory. Putin thanked
Niinisto for his support on Nord Stream-2, and told journalists that Russia
wanted a ‘full-scale restoration’ of relations with the EU, of which Niinisto
had just been appointed president. Asked about the raucous political demon-
strations in Moscow, Putin responded that popular unrest of that type were
common in European capitals, and insisted that electoral rules and laws
about demonstrations were heeded in Russia – that arrests were made for
unlawful acts.171 He was exaggerating about law and order in Russia, to be
sure, but his remarks about problems in Europe were accurate enough and
when, a year later, America imploded with nation-wide protests and violent
reactions to a police killing of yet another unarmed black man, the West
clearly had lost its moral high ground.
As it seemed to be for everything else, the year 2020 was a crucial one for
the G-7. Scheduled for Camp David in June with Trump as presiding host, it
was postponed because of the pandemic. Calling the membership of the G-7
 Russia in the world 211
‘outdated’, Trump then suggested that Russia and four other non-members
(India, Brazil, South Korea, Australia) be invited. Suspicion in some circles
that this was an attempt to build an anti-China bloc, even though three of the
potential invitees were from the BRICS, further discredited a G-7 that was
supposed to limit its agenda to economic issues.172
It was with France’s Macron that Putin had his most productive
conversations. They coordinated mediation efforts on Nagorno-Karabakh,
agreed to fight terrorism (after a series of terrorist attacks in France) and
took a common stance on Libya. A telephone conversation in early November
also saw mutual interest in the two countries collaborating to develop vaccines
against coronavirus. While exchanging views on Ukraine, they both said that
the Minsk package should be strictly implemented, along with all the agree-
ments reached in the ‘Normandy format’ at the Paris summit.173 This
approach was good news for Russia.
Whatever good news there was, it was drowned out by tit-for-tat sanctions
over the Navalny case. On 15 October, the EU imposed sanctions against six
senior Russian officials and a research institute who, the EU said, knew of
the Navalny poisoning (see Chapter 3). These individuals included Bortnikov
and Kiriyenko, the presidential envoy to the Siberian Federal District and
two deputy defence ministers. Russia retaliated in December, calling in
ambassadors from Germany, France and Sweden, and levelling sanctions
against same-level officials in Germany and France.174 Not a good start to the
New Year.

Latin America
A visit to Moscow by Cuba’s new president (Chairman of the State Council
and Council of Ministers), Miguel Diaz-Canel in early November 2018 had
the American media waxing feverishly about renewed Cold War alignments
and Cuba as Russia’s spearhead in Latin America. This reaction had a very
familiar ring to it. After signing a joint statement on common approaches in
international affairs, Putin and Diaz-Canel stressed the importance of
expanded trade, opposed ‘arbitrary sanctions’ and criticized ‘illegal’ actions
of the US and NATO against Russia and other independent states. They
objected to the US withdrawal from the INF, its threat to weaponize space
and its continued ‘use of the Monroe Doctrine’. Their statements and the US
rejoinders echoed old Cold War rhetoric.175
Two weeks after that meeting, the Russian and Cuban defence ministers,
Shoigu and Leopoldo Cintra Frias, announced their ‘solidarity’ on
international issues and mutual opposition to sanctions used for political
ends.176 This ‘solidarity’ was tightened further by the deal signed at SPIEF
2019 committing Russia to upgrade Cuba’s inefficient railway system. Shortly
thereafter, the Cuban president was again in Moscow.177
Before that, in January 2019, carefully nurtured economic and political
links with Venezuela were shaken when the leader of the opposition in that
country declared himself interim president and was given immediate support
212 Russia in the world
by US President Trump. Rosneft’s large investments in Venezuela’s oil sector
and large contracts from Caracas for weapon purchases from Russia on
credit, were in jeopardy if the Maduro government collapsed. So, too, could
Moscow’s strategy in Latin American generally if it became involved in a
military conflict there.178 The Kremlin’s concern grew deeper when it was dis-
covered that opposition leader Juan Guaido visited the US secretly before he
declared himself president. Russia responded by offering to mediate between
Maduro and Guaido.179 That went nowhere. China urged non-interference,
and sent humanitarian aid. Tensions grew as Canada and the UK, which
froze Maduro’s assets in British banks, openly supported Guaido, though no
one knew who had actually won the election.
As far as the Kremlin was concerned, happenings in Caracas represented
yet another US-attempted ‘colour revolution’. The Russian government, plus
Rostec and Rosneft, had loaned Venezuela at least $17 billion over the
previous decade, including a payment of $100 million at the end of March
2019. In December 2018, two Russian strategic bombers arrived in Venezuela,
and two planes carrying soldiers landed there the next year to show support
to Maduro.180 Whereas American officials fumed about a Russian military
presence and John Bolton harked ominously to the Monroe Doctrine, the 94
Russian troops involved could be no more than symbolic. Behind the scenes,
according to Bolton, it was Trump who wanted to use the ‘military option’.181
Russia’s defence ‘advisers’ in Venezuela, once numbering around 1,000, had
been reduced over the previous few years, leaving about 300 Russian
servicemen in Venezuela by the spring of 2019. Putin told international
reporters in June that the Russian specialists were there under contract to
service weapons sold by Rosoboronexport and that Russia was not sending
activated troops there.182
At any rate, the US settled for stiff sanctions, Maduro stayed in office and
thousands of citizens fled the country.
Venezuela was a theatre for the broader Russia–US diplomatic dance.
Lavrov flew to Caracas to show support for Maduro, just a few days after
Pompeo visited Ukraine, Belarus and Central Asia. Lavrov discussed
cooperation in the energy, mining, transport, agriculture and defence sectors
with officials in Caracas and denounced Washington’s sanctions against that
country. He stopped in on Cuba and Mexico on the way to negotiate further
economic ties. Before leaving Moscow, Lavrov met with the ambassador from
Kazakhstan, presumably for clarifications of Pompeo’s visit.183 In turn,
Washington embargoed Rosneft’s Geneva-based trading branch, Rosneft
PJSC, for helping to sell Venezuelan oil.
The Venezuela story was complicated further in May 2020, when a group
of dissidents led by US mercenaries attempted a raid on the country, intend-
ing to overthrow the government, and failed. Two of the captured mercenar-
ies were former US Special Forces soldiers. The US government and Guaido
claimed that they were not involved in the attempted coup, but, true or not,
America’s long history of such ventures (e.g. Bay of Pigs) made suspicion of
Washington a natural product of the sordid affair. Putin called a meeting of
 Russia in the world 213
his Security Council and expressed support for the government of Venezuela,
another hot spot that could still draw Russia into an unwanted international
conflagration.

Pivot to the East: Central Asia, Southeast Asia, Far East

Valdai’s ‘Asia’ theme, 2019
The Valdai Club’s 16th meeting, held in Sochi, October 2019, had ‘Asia’ as its
central theme. Putin delivered a concluding address, following Presidents Aliev
of Azerbaijan, Tokaev of Kazakhstan and Duterte of the Philippines, and
King Abdullah II of Jordan. Putin credited ‘Asian states’ for making the world
multi-polar, and opined that Syria had been saved from ‘terrorists’ by means
of ‘complicated’ efforts by Russia, Turkey, Iran, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Jordan
and even the USA. He hoped that that ‘mutual cooperation’ might serve as a
model for regional conflict resolution, perhaps for the Korean Peninsula, and
congratulated Donald Trump for his efforts to negotiate with North Korea.
New transport arteries created by the Belt and Road project linking Russia
and China via Central Asia, Iran and India, and Russia’s Northern Sea
Route, are there for everyone’s benefit, Putin continued, but only if peace and
cooperation could be maintained. He went on to extoll the EEU’s newly
minted free trade agreements with Vietnam, Singapore and Iran, talks about
similar deals with Israel, India and Egypt, and cooperative agreements
between it and the ASEAN, the CIS and SCO.184 Other speakers echoed these
opinions, though there were no specific action plans for a more integrated
Asian economy laid out. CIS and EEU leaders discussed these issues further
during a December 2019 summit in Moscow.

Moscow’s ‘pivot to the East’ and the Shanghai Cooperation

Organization (SCO)
Keeping Russia out of the G-7 made it more likely that Moscow’s post-2014
‘pivot to the East’ would become enduring.185
Within a space of a few days connected with SPIEF-2018, Putin held seri-
ous meetings with leaders of France, Germany Japan, China, India and the
IMF. At a SCO summit in Qingdao, China, he conducted one-on-one meet-
ings with the presidents of Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Iran and Mongolia, and
signed major deals with China. The expanded organization, which has
included India and Pakistan as full members since 2017, issued an enthusiastic
Action Plan for 2018–22 at about the same time that the G-7 meeting in
Québec fell into disarray. Russia was heartened, too, by earlier remarks from
Hamid Karzai, former president of Afghanistan, who said that the US and
the UK could ‘never help Afghanistan fight terrorism’; rather, it was Russia
that could do it. He castigated Americans for ‘lying’ about the source of ter-
rorism in his country and charged both the US and the UK with ‘killing
[Afghans] for 17 years’.186 Afghanistan is an official Observer State in the SCO.
214 Russia in the world
Trying to arrange peace talks, the MID invited governments of Afghanistan,
China, Iran, India, the US, Kazakhstan, the four former Soviet Central Asian
countries and the Taliban to send representatives to Moscow for a peace
conference on Afghanistan set for 4 September 2018. Washington and Kabul
decided not to participate. In the case of Afghanistan, this was a sudden
shift, because Kabul had only recently asked Moscow to broker negotiations
with the Taliban, whose attacks had increased. The Afghan government now
said it would prefer to negotiate directly with the Taliban without third-party
oversight. The US accused Russia of trying to gain more influence over the
region; Russia charged the US of supporting peace only if it could be
accomplished entirely on Washington’s own terms. They were both right, and
peace remained a faint hope.187
Afghan President Ashraf Ghani changed his mind and, in November 2018,
sent four senior representatives to meet in Moscow with Taliban members,
along with Central Asian, Iranian and Pakistani delegations. Although
nothing substantial came from the session, it was a start and, among other
things, put Russia back in play as potential mediator.188
Talks between the Taliban and Afghan opposition figures, including
Karzai, were also held in Moscow, in February 2019. Kabul objected, to no
avail. These talks took place about a week after lengthy discussions in Qatar
between US representatives and the Taliban. The push to end the conflict in
Afghanistan, or at least foreign involvement in it, continued and became a
matter of focus after Trump announced that Washington had been conducting
its own peace talks with the Taliban secretly for some time. These conversations
progressed to the extent that, in February 2020, the US and the Taliban
agreed to a short-term ‘reduced violence’ stage and soon afterwards a pact
that enabled the US to begin a partial withdrawal of US troops.189 After 18
years of war and $1 trillion spent by Washington, nothing much was resolved
and Russia and the SCO now had more worries about creeping Taliban
incursions against their allies in Central Asia.
In the same general sphere, Russian foreign affairs experts worried that the
US’s Five Plus One project, designed in 2015 to wean Central Asian countries
away from Russia and China and towards the West seemed to be bearing
fruit. The presidents of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan visited Washington
separately in the summer of 2018 and concluded a number of economic and
other cooperative accords. When Pompeo visited Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan
a half year later, he warned them and the three other Central Asia states
against too much reliance on either China and Russia. It is doubtful that his
cautionary tale made much of an impression on leaders who knew their
region much better than he did.190
In fact, trouble was brewing in Kazakhstan, Russia’s most consistent
Central Asian partner, where nationalists lobbied aggressively against a law
that made Russian an official language of their country and against the com-
mon use of Russian in state meetings. This contributed to an outflow of eth-
nic Russian Kazakhstanis, many of whom don’t speak Kazakh. It was clear
that Moscow needed to consolidate its policies in the region (Figure 5.2).191
 Russia in the world 215
Figure 5.2 Central Asia.
Source: http://researchgate.net/figure/Map-of-Central-Asia-Retrieved-from-http-originsosuedu-article-69-maps_fig2_319865958; and http://origins.osu.edu/arti-
cle/69/maps.
216 Russia in the world
Coinciding trips to Turkmenistan by Gazprom’s Aleksei Miller and by
Putin to Uzbekistan in October went a long way towards that consolidation.
In Ashgabat, Miller renewed Gazprom’s right to purchase natural gas and in
Astana Putin signed agreements on both short- and long-term strategic proj-
ects, including the construction of a NPP.192
A major change in the hierarchies of Central Asia came in March, 2019,
when Kazakhstan’s only post-Soviet president and close friend of Putin,
78-year-old Nursultan Nazarbaev, suddenly announced his retirement.
Speaker of the upper house and former prime minister, Kassym-Jomart
Tokaev, replaced him temporarily. Nazarbaev retained his position as chair
of the Security Council and leader of the dominant Nur Otan party – so he
would still be the national leader, or ‘Yelbasy’, of the nation.193 Because oil-
rich Kazakhstan is Russia’s leading trade partner in Central Asia and close
ally in both the SCO and CSTO, Nazarbaev’s decision was taken very
seriously in the Kremlin and prompted a flurry of diplomatic activity in the
region.
Still, Moscow had no problem with Tokaev’s accession to the Kazakh
presidency, to which he was elected in June with over 70 per cent of the
popular vote. Tokaev made his links to Moscow plain in an interview with
Germany’s Deutsche Welle news broadcaster in December, telling them that
the Kazakh government had ‘believed in the wisdom and decency of the
Russian leadership’, adding that he accepted the referendum that brought
Crimea into Russia as properly representative of the wishes of the people
there.194
At the SCO summit in Bishkek, Putin met individually with the presidents
of Kyrgyzstan, Belarus, Mongolia, India, Iran and China. Traditional
subjects, how to combat extremism, terrorism and drug-trafficking, and how
to improve their economies, were discussed by the group at large. They all
urged cooperation in normalizing the situations in Afghanistan and Syria,
and agreed to support the 2015 nuclear agreement with Iran. Joint declara-
tions confirmed cooperation on all these subjects.195
Later in 2019, Medvedev joined SCO prime ministers in Tashkent, where
he conversed with individual leaders. He declared that the trade turnover
between member-states and Russia had reached $150 billion, and urged them
to agree on a joint environmental protection programme, transportation
infrastructure development and food security. Medvedev also advocated
close cooperation between the SCO and the EEU. The SCO prime ministers
signed agreements or MOUs on all these matters.196
The MID was concerned, however, that the Central Asian calm was fragile.
Increasing incidents of violence between Tajiks and Kyrgyz, mostly over
border delineation and inter-ethnic disputes, an emerging economic crunch
in Uzbekistan, expanding Chinese infiltration of the region and a resurgence
of Islamic extremism as Taliban supporters moved north, all threatened to
disrupt the region.197
These issues brought SCO defence ministers together in Moscow in
September, 2020, with invited observers from the CSTO. Their foreign
 Russia in the world 217
ministers met the following week. In addition to the issues noted above, the
political uproar in Belarus, looming war between Armenia and Azerbaijan,
the India–China confrontation in the Himalayas and the ongoing
manifestations of the pandemic provided an agenda that was clearly
unmanageable, at least insofar as Moscow’s leadership was concerned.
When violence reminiscent of the ‘coloured’ revolutions of 2005 and 2010
broke out in Kyrgyzstan after the 4 October parliamentary election, Moscow
watched nervously. Protesters denounced the government for fraud and
occupied government buildings after parties supported by President
Sooronbai Jeenbekov (elected 2017) claimed victory. Dozens were injured.
Demonstrators released former president Atambaev and two former prime
ministers from jail. Police reacted with water cannon and stun grenades. The
election results were annulled and a re-election called for within the following
two weeks, though demonstrators continued to occupy several government
buildings.
Jeenbekov resigned on 15 October and new Prime Minister Sadyr Japarov,
also a former prisoner and minister in Kumanbek Bakiev’s government,
became acting president. In January 2021, Japarov was confirmed as president
in a landslide election victory. A simultaneous referendum approved
amendments to the Kyrgyz constitution that granted the president greater
power over the country’s parliament (Supreme Council). His populist and
nationalist stance may appeal to Moscow – or not. Political turmoil in
Bishkek was yet another straw weighing down the MID’s back.198

India
Prime Minister Narendra Modi arrived in Sochi on 27 May 2018, just prior
to the opening of SPIEF. While emphasizing India’s long-time friendship
with Russia, he cautioned that economic ties were weakening as Russian–
Chinese–Pakistani relations strengthened. Modi changed his tune in October
when Putin travelled to New Delhi for a Russia–India Business Forum. They
signed agreements in the fields of space, nuclear energy, railways and weapons
sales. This time, both leaders praised their bilateral relationship. Modi gushed
that it had gone ‘beyond their traditional framework’ and encouraged mutual
cooperation in the SCO, ASEAN and the G-20.199 He didn’t mention the
BRICS.
Sudden renewed violence between India and Pakistan, both nuclear pow-
ers, in February 2019, was a major concern for Russia. The immediate cause
of the crisis was a devastating suicide attack on an Indian military site by a
terrorist group based in Pakistan. India retaliated with fighter plane assaults
on targets inside Pakistan; Pakistan shot down two Indian planes. Long-
standing competing entitlements related to Kashmir exacerbated the situa-
tion. Lavrov offered to mediate. Pakistan accepted immediately, but India was
not ready yet to negotiate, let alone use an arbiter. While world leaders urged
calm, the two protagonists talked tough to appease their citizenry.200 Both are
members of SCO, so that organization was shaken as well.
218 Russia in the world
Russia was concerned too by attempts on the part of Washington and
Canberra to turn the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (India, the US, Japan
and Australia) into a military association for the purpose of containing
China. The QUAD, as it is called, was formed in 2007 on the suggestion of
Japan’s Prime Minister Abe. It went dormant within a year or so and was
then revived in 2017 to counter Chinese assertiveness in the Pacific region.
India was reluctant to expand the QUAD’s involvement further than the
strategic discussion group it had been to that time, though Modi worried that
China’s inclusion of Pakistan as a major link in its Road and Belt project
would encroach on India’s zone of interest.201 Modi’s second straight major-
ity electoral victory in May, 2019, strengthened his position.
As if renewed disputes over contested borders between CSO members
India and Pakistan weren’t enough, deadly clashes between India and China
over disputed territory in the Himalayas shook the Kremlin. Nepal also has
land disputes with India in the same region. Although Moscow tried
desperately to avoid involvements on any one ‘side’ in these disputes, and
urged de-escalation, it agreed to speed up delivery of S-400 batteries to India.
After a visit to Moscow by Defence Minister Rajnath Singh, Russia promised
to deliver the first battery in January 2020, rather than at the end of that year.
Delhi planned to deploy three of the S-400s units on its border with China
and two on its border with Pakistan. These clashes threatened the unity of
the SCO, and even the BRICS, and may also force India to align more closely
to the US.202
Less than two weeks later the Russian, India and Chinese foreign ministers
met prior to a scheduled BRICS session. India and China exchanged
prisoners taken in the battles noted above, and all sides appeared to be
content – for now. We have seen that India kept out of the RECEP, a decision
that could push New Delhi towards Russia, or Washington.

North Korea
The North Korean minister of foreign affairs was in Moscow in April,
2018, to discuss rising apprehensions on the Korean peninsula. In light of
the Inter-Korean summit on the 28th of that month, when Moon Jae-in
and Kim Jong-un met in the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), and crossed into
each other’s territory for the first time since the end of the Korean War in
1953, the conversations between Moscow and Pyongyang were part of a
process intended to lead to general accommodation in the region. The
North Korean leader also met with China’s Xi Jinping, first in March
(Beijing) and then in May (Dalian). Buoyed by the release of three
American prisoners in North Korea, a meeting scheduled between the
presidents of the USA and North Korea in Singapore, 12 June, capped the
flurry of activity.
The on–off talk of a summit between Trump and Kim, and separate meet-
ings between the North Korean leader and China’s Xi, and another sudden
meeting of the two Korean presidents, kept the Kremlin off stride in its Asian
 Russia in the world 219
diplomacy. In late May, though, Lavrov was the first senior official from
Moscow to meet with Kim in Pyongyang, where he handed him an official
invitation to Russia. The target date and place was the 4th Eastern Economic
Forum set for Vladivostok in September.203 It was also clear that Moscow
wanted the Trump–Kim talks to succeed. Peace and stability on the Korean
Peninsula would benefit Russia and China as much as it would the US, per-
haps even more. Russia already had a railway connection with North Korea.
Plans for a gas pipeline through North Korea to South Korea and a Far
Eastern electricity grid could proceed only if peace were guaranteed. Both
projects would be a boon to Vladivostok. The Kremlin hoped that North
Korea could be persuaded to give up its nuclear weapons project and work
out a regional cooperative programme in its stead.204
Kim arrived by armoured train in April, with a retinue of 250. They
gathered on Russky Island, close to Vladivostok. The first face-to-face
meeting between the two presidents did not end with a press conference or
joint statement, but Putin said later that the talks were wide-ranging and
that, for North Korea to denuclearize, it must have absolute guarantees ‘of its
security [and] preservation of sovereignty’. A treaty to that effect with North
and South Korea, Russia, the US, China and Japan all signing might well
accomplish denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, he mused. Plainly, he
thought the US was the most reluctant of the possible partners in guarantee-
ing peace in the region.205
Sporadic acts of violence confused the issue. In September, for example,
the Russian coastguard seized two North Korean fishing boats in Russian
waters after one of them attacked a Russia patrol vessel that was inspecting
the other for poached fish. North Korean motorboats were present as well.
There were injuries on both sides. Eventually, 161 North Korean crewmen
were detained and diplomatic activity between Moscow and Pyongyang grew
heated. A month later, Russian border guards fired on North Korean fishing
boats, and arrested 21 crew members for poaching.206 So the MID was learn-
ing first hand that nothing could be taken for granted when dealing with
North Korea.

Japan
A two-day official visit to Moscow by Prime Minister Abe in May 2018
assuaged some of Russian anxieties about the Far East. He and Putin
discussed ownership of the Kurils, again fruitlessly, and agreed on several
joint business projects. Points of departure included Russian military drills
on the islands and plans for the installation of a US land-based missile
defence system (Aegis Ashore) on Japanese territory.207 They consulted again
in Vladivostok during the Eastern Economic Forum, where the Russian
president suddenly proposed that the two countries sign a peace treaty before
Christmas, with no conditions attached. Abe did not respond at the time and
the Japanese government said the next day that it preferred to have the terri-
torial issue settled first.208
220 Russia in the world

Figure 5.3 Russia’s Far Eastern Neighbourhood.

Source: Asia Times, 5 April 2019. Also, https://www.freeworldmaps.net/russia/east/map.html.

When Lavrov and Japan’s foreign minister, Taro Kono, opened the first
round of talks on the Kurils in Moscow in January 2019, it was plain already
that Russia would not bend on ownership of the islands. One of Russia’s
concerns was that, if it gave up on some of the territory, Japan would allow
the US to build a base there (Figure 5.3).209
Abe’s death in August 2020 may lead to changes in the relatively
accommodating pattern of Moscow–Tokyo relations, and not necessarily for
the better. Abe encouraged economic ties, and tried to secure Japan’s northern
frontier against China and North Korea by normalizing relations with
Russia. He visited Moscow eleven times between 2013 and 2019, always
hoping for an agreement on the Kurils. Whatever hopes there were for this
happening were dashed in 2020 by the constitutional amendment that forbids
territorial concessions and, in fact, Russia has become too close to China for
Japan’s interests ever to take priority. Without Abe in office, the future of
Russia-Japan relations was even less certain than it had been with him there.210

Africa
Although Russia has been dealing with a cross-section of African countries
for a long time, especially in arms sales, by 2018 Western analysts began to
see broader approaches to the Kremlin’s activities there. More attention was
driven by an assumption that Putin was trying to guarantee Russia a place as
an authentic global player at a time when the US seemed to be pulling back
and China’s global influence was growing.
 Russia in the world 221
Military and strategic deals were front and centre at the Russia–Africa
Summit, in Sochi, the economic importance of which was described in
Chapter 4. Economic and military ties with Sudan, Libya, the Central African
Republic (CAR), Gabon, Algeria, Mozambique, Angola, Eritrea, Tunisia,
Uganda, Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and others provide
Russia with about 13 per cent of its arms sales market, several military bases
and access to mineral and energy resources. In the case of the CAR, entrée to
the country’s vast diamond supply was one of the reasons why the MID
worked hard to resolve internecine wars over the lucrative diamond trade.211
Russia’s first ever delivery of weapons to Gabon, small arms in this case to
combat poachers, came in November 2019.212 Russian, American and Chinese
lobbying for influence in Africa and Latin America was reminiscent of the
‘Great Game’ between the European Powers in the nineteenth century,
though this time the arena was more dangerous, for the Great Power
protagonists had to deal with myriad sovereign countries, some of which
were competing, and sometimes warring, with each other, or caught up in
civil war.
Already closely associated with South Africa through the BRICS, Moscow
strengthened the relationship by sending two nuclear-capable bombers, a
military cargo plane and a passenger jet to that country in October 2019 to
acknowledge deeper military cooperation. The visit, the first to Africa with
nuclear-capable planes, echoed a similar trek to Venezuela in December
2018.213 Plans to construct a permanent base in Sudan for the Russian navy
were finalized in December 2020 (see Chapter 7).
Russian forces were involved elsewhere in Africa more directly. Russian
mercenaries operated in Mozambique in the south, where several were killed,
and in Libya in the north.214 In the latter case, Putin told Merkel that Russian
soldiers were provided by a private security organization called the Wagner
Group, which did not represent the Russian state, nor were the mercenaries
paid by the Russian state.215 They fought together with the so-called Libyan
National Army (LNA), led by General Khalifa Haftar, against the
Government of National Accord (GNA) in Tripoli. Haftar is supported with
arms from Egypt and the UAE, while Turkey provisions the GNA. The UN’s
embargo on arms shipments to Libya is, obviously, very leaky, which leaves
Libya poised for another Syria scenario.216 Cautious in the case of Libya,
when, in April 2020, Haftar declared himself head of the country, Lavrov
termed the action ‘very disturbing’ and called for mutual concessions and
compromises. Moscow sought to self-isolate from Haftar.217 Soon thereafter,
Haftar began losing battles to Turkish-backed forces and so offered to
participate in peace talks. In late May 2020, the US said that Russia sent 14
fighter jets to back up the Wagner Group. Russia denied it.218 The prize, of
course, is Libyan oil.
Acting as mediators in January 2020, Russia and Turkey chaired peace
talks in Moscow. The government based in Tripoli signed a ceasefire
agreement, but the LNA asked for more time to consider the terms. Leaders
of the two factions would not deal with each other, so Russian and Turkish
222 Russia in the world
diplomats acted as liaisons between them.219 No peace, no war, is not likely to
work for long.

Coronavirus: manifestations for the world order

Although the coronavirus pandemic posed a threat to all states, the way each
state dealt with the infectious disease disrupted the global order. The ‘every
man for himself’ approach adopted by most countries, and an apparent
unwillingness to share research data on vaccines, rendered the traditional
notion of international ‘leaderships’ impotent. Washington, which many
assumed would lead the way in combating the virus, instead frantically tried
to shift all responsibility to China and the WHO while it quickly became the
epicentre of the pandemic itself. The US also tried to ban exports of
respirators made by 3M to Canada and Mexico under contract, but was
thwarted by immediate threats of retaliation: the US needed Canadian nurses
and Mexican-made components for ventilators. ‘Vaccine nationalism’, as
analysts called it, could have consequences for the world order far beyond the
matter of health (see Chapter 9).220

Pandemic aid
Before it was overwhelmed by COVID-19 itself, Russia’s military sent 15
large plane loads of medical aid to Italy, the first epicentre of the disease in
Europe. These flights included 104 army doctors, virologists, epidemiologists,
vehicles and diagnostic and disinfectant equipment, some of it emblazoned
with ‘From Russia with Love’.221 The propaganda value of the aid from
Russia was tarnished by complaints from some circles in Italy that Moscow
sent the wrong expertise, and mean-spirited accusations from Western media
and politicians that it was merely a publicity stunt intended to counter
Chinese influence and divide NATO and the EU.222 La Stampa called the aid
‘useless’ and accused Russia of sending GRU spies with the medical aid. The
Russia MoD responded with angry denials.223 The harping notwithstanding,
senior Italian officials thanked Russia profusely, and the aid was welcomed
on the ground.
Russia sent over test kits to Central Asian states, Iran, North Korea and
Mongolia prior to the loads of medical supplies and personnel going to Italy.
Altogether Russia dispatched forms of medical assistance to 30 countries
before Putin placed a prohibition on exporting medical mask, respirators and
other protective equipment on 2 March ‘to protect. the interests of Russian
citizens’. That ban was lifted on 30 April and, almost immediately, Russia
sent medical research supplies and two mobile labs to the Republic of Congo.
By mid-August, Russia had provided at least some medical aid to 46 countries,
mostly former Soviet republics and the Asia-Pacific area. More than a dozen
African and Latin American countries were recipients as well. The aid usually
consisted of test kits, protective equipment, medicines and medical person-
nel.224 As the pandemic spread, Russia provided, or leased out, huge
 Russia in the world 223
transport planes, the Antonov AN-225, enabling other countries to deliver
PPEs around the world.
Altruistic or not, such acts may have been effective instruments of soft
power.
***
Although there were no obvious post-pandemic changes foreseen in Russia’s
foreign policy, its growing reliance on China and India for trade, investment
and technology, and its continued isolation from the West, may eventually
prove fatal to Russia’s aspirations as a global player – especially if it settles
for a junior partnership role with China.
Moreover, Putin seemed uncertain in his own neighbourhood. As 2020
came to a close, the Kremlin’s favoured candidates in Kyrgyzstan (Jeenbekov)
and Moldova (Dodon) failed to keep their seats. An acknowledged success in
the South Caucasus could become a pyrrhic one and Russia’s putative ally in
Belarus sat on a shaky throne. The aura of strength on which the Russian
president relies was fraying and, if enough Russians care about foreign policy,
that may prove to be his Achilles’ Heel.

Notes
1 For background, Sergey Y. Marochkin, The Operation of International Law in the
Russian Legal System. A Changing Approach. Leiden & Boston: Brill, 2019.
2 Putin, ‘Otkrytoe pis’mo Vladimira Putina k rossiiskim izbirateliam’, Izvestiia, 25
February 2000.
3 ‘Interv’iu v efire programmy “Zavtrak s Frostom” na telekanale “Bi-bi-ci”’,
Kremlin.ru, 5 March 2000, kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/24194.
4 For the emphasis on Russian culpability in international crises see, e.g. Masha
Gessen, The Future is History. How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia. New York:
Random House, 2017; Michael McFaul, From Cold War to Hot Peace: An
American Ambassador in Putin’s Russia. New York: Houghton Mifflin, Harcourt,
2018; Mitchell Orenstein, The Lands in Between: Russia vs the West and the New
Politics of Hybrid War. Oxford: OUP, 2019.
5 REDA 2000, Vol. 1, pp. 162–71 (National Security Concept), pp. 201–9 (Foreign
Policy Concept); for an early study, Bobo Lo, Russian Foreign Policy in the Post-
Soviet Era. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.
6 On Russia’s reaction to NATO’s attacks on Belgrade, see Black, Russia Faces
NATO Expansion, pp. 109–15.
7 Roger E. Kanet, ‘The failed Western challenge to Russia’s revival in Eurasia’,
International Politics, Vol. 52, No. 5 (2015), pp. 503–33.
8 For the ‘Kosovo precedent’, UN International Court of Justice, ‘Accordance with
International Law of the Unilateral Declaration of Independence in Respect of
Kosovo. Advisory Opinion of 22 July 2010’, and the US Department of State,
‘Written Statement … Concerning the Request of the United Nations General
Assembly for an Advisory Opinion on … Kosovo’, Chapter IV, Section 1, pp. 50ff,
17 April 2009
9 ‘Russia, Putin Held in Low Regard Around the World’, Pew Research Center, 5
August 2015.
10 Mikhail A. Molchanov, ‘Media Uses in Ukraine’s War with Itself’, in S.F.
Krishna-Hensel, ed. Media in Process: Transformation and Democratic Transition.
London: Routledge, 2016, p. 31; and Molchanov, ‘Russia as Ukraine’s “other”:
224 Russia in the world
identity and geopolitics’, in Agnieszka Pikulicka-Wilczewski, Richard Sakwa,
eds. Ukraine and Russia: People, Politics, Propaganda and Perspectives (2016), op.
cit., pp. 206–21.
11 Alexander Motyl, ‘Putin, just evil enough’, CNN.com, 25 July 2014.
12 For background, see Stephen J. Cimbala, ‘Russian Threat Perceptions and
Security Policies: Soviet Shadows and Contemporary Challenges’, The Journal of
Power Institutions in Post-Soviet Societies, Issue 14/15 (2013), on-line.
13 On this in the early days of the Ukraine crisis, see Stephen G.F. Hall, ‘Reconsidering
western concepts of the Ukrainian conflict: the rise to prominence of Russia’s
“soft force” policy’, in Andrey Makarychev, Alexander Yatsyk, eds. Vocabularies
of International Relations after the Crisis in Ukraine. London: Routledge, 2016,
Chapter 5.
14 For background on all of these see J.L. Black, Putin’s Third Term …, Chapter 6
and passim; for different perspectives on Russia’s place in the world in 2018, see
Georgi Asatryan, ‘How the West still continues to misunderstand Putin’s Russia
and Putinism’, Euronews.com, 14 May 2019; Michael Mandelbaum, ‘The New
Containment’, Foreign Affairs, March/April 2019.
15 OPCW NEWS, ‘OPCW Issues Report on Technical Assistance Requested by the
United Kingdom’, www.opcw.org/media-centre/news/2018/04/opcw-issues …, 12
April 2018.
16 ‘Report: Germany obtained sample of Novichok in the 1990s’, AP, Berlin,
Deutsche Welle, 17 May 2018, and multiple others.
17 For a litany of sceptical analyses of the Skripal affair, see Rob Slane, the Blogmire
series, http://www.theblogmire.com/the-10-main-holes-in-the-official-narrative-
on-the-salisbury-poisonings-3-the-capability/, 23 August 2018. There are seven
others in the series. See also John Helmer’s publications and blog.
18 ‘Novichok strikes (but doesn’t kill) again, and all the old questions re-emerge’,
The Moscow Times, 5 July 2018.
19 See, e.g. Simon Jenkins, ‘If the Novichok was planted by Russia, where’s the evi-
dence?’, The Guardian, 5 July 2018; ‘Russia’s 70 requests on Skripal poisoning
case left unanswered’, TASS, 20 November 2018.
20 For background, see Richard Sakwa, Frontline Ukraine. Crisis in the Borderlands.
London: I.B. Tauris, 2015, and J.L. Black, ‘Crisis in Ukraine 2013–2015: A
Paradigm for the New World Disorder’, in J.L. Black, Michael Johns & Alanda
Theriault, eds. The New World Disorder. Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2019, pp.
11–38.
21 Broadcasting Board of Governors & Gallup, ‘Post-Maidan Ukraine Opinion
Polls’, 1 April 2014, https://archive.org/details/BBGUkraineOpinion/page/n3/
mode/2up; Gerard Toal, John O’Laughlin, Kristan M. Bakke, ‘Six Years and $20
billion in Russian investment later, Crimeans are happy with Russian annexation.
Our survey shows high level of trust in Putin – though lower than in 2014’, The
Washington Post, 18 March 2020.
22 For an interesting discussion, see Erika Harris, ‘What is the Role of Nationalism
and Ethnicity in the Russia–Ukraine Crisis?’, Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 72, No. 4,
pp. 593–613. For a Russian perspective, Serhiy Kudelia, ‘The Donbass Rift’,
Russian Politics and Law, Vol. 54, No. 1 (2016), pp. 5–27, here p. 5, and Kudelia,
‘Domestic Sources of the Donbas Insurgency’, PONARS Eurasia, Policy Memo
351 (September 2014).
23 Elise Giuliano, ‘The Origins of Separatism. Popular Grievances in Donetsk and
Luhansk’, PONARS Eurasia Policy Memo No. 396, October 2015.
24 For the full 9 December 2015 12th UN report from the Human Rights Monitoring
Mission, http://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Countries/UA/12thOHCH​Rreport
Ukraine.pdf.
25 For an update to 2019, see ‘Russia–Ukraine’, Russian Analytical Digest, No. 242,
3 December 2019. For an argument that ‘civil war’ is the right terminology, see
 Russia in the world 225
Jesse Driscoll, ‘Ukraine’s Civil War: Would Accepting This Terminology Help
Resolve the Conflict?’ PONARS Eurasia, Policy Memo 572 (February 2019).
26 ‘Poroshenko predlozhil lishit’ Rossiiu prava veto v OON’, Nezavisimaia gazeta, 13
April, 2018; ‘Ukraina rvet poslednie sviazi s SNG’, ibid., 12 April 2018;
‘Poroshenko intends to deprive Russia of veto rights in UN’, Kyiv Post, 13 April
2018.
27 For perspectives that challenge the official narrative, Volodymyr Ishchenko, ‘Far
right participation in the Ukrainian Maidan protests: an attempt of systematic
estimation’, European Politics and Society, Vol. 17, Issue 4 (2016), pp. 453–72;
Gerard Toal, Near Abroad: Putin, the West and the Contest for Ukraine and the
Caucasus. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. See also Josh Cohen,
‘Ukraine’s Got a Real problem with Far-Right Violence (And No, RT Didn’t
Write This Headline)’, Atlantic Council, 20 June 2018; Sakwa, Frontline Ukraine,
pp. 91–2, 97–9.
28 Ivan Katchanovski, ‘The Buried Maidan Massacre and its Misrepresentation by
the West’, Consortium News, Vol. 25, No. 112, 22 April 2019. See also Volodymyr
Ishchenko, ‘The limits of change and wishful thinking: lessons from Ukraine’s
Euromaidan uprising’, The Broker Online, 26 July 2017, who says that the ‘least
progressive’ elements of Ukraine shaped the Maidan protests.
29 Kait Bolongaro, ‘Russian Orthodox Church “a national security threat” to
Ukraine, says president’, Politico, 28 July 2018; for background, see Maksym
Bugriy, ‘The War and the Orthodox Churches in Ukraine’, Eurasia Daily Monitor,
18 February 2015.
30 Gwendolyn Sasse, ‘Ukraine’s Poorly Timed Education Law’, Carnegie Europe, 2
October 2017; Elise Giuliano, ‘Is the Risk of Ethnic Conflict Growing in
Ukraine?’, Foreign Affairs. Snapshot, 18 March 2019.
31 ‘Ukraina vvela sanktsii protiv Ermitazha, MGU i Muzeia imeni Pushkina’,
Vedomosti, 15 May 2020. For a full list, see Ukrainian presidential website, https://
www.president.gov.ua/storage/j-files-storage/00/92/29/6c8cd10deca202dd91ee033
8e74da7d6_1589550379.pdf.
32 ‘Death Toll Up to 13,000 In Ukraine Conflict, Says UN Rights Office’, RFE/
REL, 26 February 2019. For a general account, see Nikolaus von Twickel, The
State of the Donbass. A Study of eastern Ukraine’s separatist-held areas. Institute
for Economic Research and Policy Consulting, Sweden, 1 March 2019.
33 ‘Update in criminal investigation MH17 disaster’, 19 June 2019, www.youtube.
com/watch?v=Kq-L72slP18; Kirill Bulanov, Anina Didkovskaia,
‘Mezhdunarodnye rassledovateli obvinili v krushenii MH17 chetyrekh chelovek’,
Vedomosti, 19 June 2019; Rahul Kalvapelle, ‘Malaysian transport minister refuses
to blame Russia for downing of flight MH17’, Global News, 31 May 2018.
34 Dutch Safety Board, ‘Crash of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17. Hrabove, Ukraine,
17 July 2014’, The Hague, October 2015, pp. 7–8. This was a 279-page report.
debcd724fe7breport_mh17_ceash.pdf.
35 For Kerry’s remarks on TV, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78r1qAHUVwY
&feature=youtu.be&t=76. For a full revisionist study, Kees van der Pijl, Flight
MH17, Ukraine and the New Cold War. Manchester, UK: Manchester UP, 2018.
In a videoed testimony, one defendant said that he had left the Russian armed
forces in 2008 and that no one in his volunteer unit had any access whatsoever to
a BUK missile. It would have been impossible for them to get one. Mike Corder,
‘Suspect charged in downing of MH17 denies involvement’, Globe and Mail, 4
November 2020.
36 Ilya Arkhipov, ‘Putin tells Diplomats He Made Trump a New Offer on Ukraine
at their Summit’, Bloomberg.com, 19 July 2018; reprinted in The Moscow Times,
20 July 2018; Mairead McArdle, ‘White House “Not Considering Supporting”
Putin’s Ukraine-Referendum Proposal’, National Review, 20 July 2018; ‘Russia
Blasts U.S. Rejection of Crimean Annexation’, The Moscow Times, 26 July 2018.
226 Russia in the world
37 ‘Ukraine preparing “powerful package” of sanctions over sham elections in
Donbas – Turchynov’, UNIAN, 15 November 2018; ‘On the Illegal “Elections” in
Donbas’, as delivered by Chargé d’Affaires Harry Kamian to the OSCE Special
Permanent Council, Vienna, November 12, 2018; Kirill Krivosheev, ‘The Lessons
of the Donbas Election Campaigns’, Carnegie Moscow Center, 29 October 2018.
Problems with the Minsk II agreement are outlined in Kristian Atland, ‘Destined
for deadlock? Russia, Ukraine, and the unfulfilled Minsk agreements’, Post-Soviet
Affairs, Vol. 36, No. 2 (2020), pp. 122–39.
38 See, e.g. Alexander J. Motyl, ‘Ukraine’s TV President Is Dangerously Pro-
Russian’, FP (Foreign Policy), 1 April 2019; Konstantin Skorkin, ‘Ukrainian
Candidates Set to Haggle Ahead of Presidential Runoff’, Carnegie Moscow
Center, 2 April 2019.
39 ‘Russia’s Passport Offer to East Ukrainians Slammed in Kiev, Washington’, The
Moscow Times, 24 April 2019; ‘Reuters: Ukraine passes language law, irritating
president-elect and Russia’, Kyiv Post, 25 April 2019; Brian Milakovsky, ‘How
Ukraine’s new language law will affect Donbas’, Kyiv Post, 30 April 2019;
Vladimir Socor, ‘Ukraine’s State Language Law Enshrines the Lingua Franca’,
Eurasia Daily Monitor, 16 May 2019.
40 ‘Zelensky: Border only “common” thing between Ukraine, Russia’, UNIAN, 2
May 2019; ‘Putin says Russians and Ukrainians Would Benefit from Shared
Citizenship’, The Moscow Times, 29 April 2019.
41 ‘President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky discussed the reforms and counterac-
tion to Russian aggression with the representatives of the United States’, 20 May
2019, www.president.gov.ua/en/news/prezident-ukrayini-volodimir-zelenskij-
obgovoriv-iz-predstav-55517.
42 ‘Zelensky’s idea of multilateral Donbass summit has right to exist – Lavrov’,
Interfax, 9 July 2019; ‘Putin gotov obsuzhdat’ rasshirennuiu vstrechu po
Donbassu’, Kommersant, 11 July 2019; Myroslava Gingadze, ‘Ukraine’s Zelenskiy
Calls for Putin, Trump to Join Peace Talks’, VOA, 8 July 2019.
43 The OSCE Monitoring Mission blamed both sides OSCE, see ‘Statement of the
Trilateral Contact Group’, 18 July 2019, https://www.osce.org/whoweare/425921;.
44 Illia Ponomarenko, ‘Zelensky calls Putin after 4 Ukrainian soldiers killed in
Donbas’, Kyiv Post, 7 August 2019; Putin, ‘Telefonnym razgovor s Prezidentom
Ukrainy Vladimirom Zelenskim’, Kremlin.ru, 7 August 2019, Kremlin.ru/events/
president/news/61279; Dar’ia Korzhakova, ‘Kreml’ raskryl detali telefonnogo
razgovora Putina s Zelenskim’, Vedomosti, 7 August 2019.
45 Evan Gershkovich, ‘Signaling Readiness for Thaw, Russia and Ukraine Swap
prisoners’, The Moscow Times, 7 September 2019; Angelina Krechetova, ‘Rossiia
i Ukraina obmenialis’ zakliuchennym’, Vedomosti, 7 September 2019.
46 ‘Ukraine Agrees to Elections in Occupied East’, RFE/RL, 1 October 2019;
‘Ukraine Peace Talks Get Breakthrough as Kiev Accepts Compromise’, The
Moscow Times, 2 October 2019; ‘Kreml’ povyshaet stavki v peregovorakh o per-
voi vstreche Putina i Zelenskogo’, Vedomosti, 1 October 2019; Volodymyr Petrov,
‘Kyiv protesters rally against approval of “Steinmeir Formula” (Photos)’, Kyiv
Post, 2 October 2019.
47 See ‘The Ukraine conundrum’, Chapter 4, Putin’s Third Term, pp. 91–124.
48 On the problem of volunteer battalions, see Tetyana Malyarenko, David J.
Galbraith, ‘Paramilitary motivation in Ukraine: beyond integration and aboli-
tion’, Southeast European and Black Sea Studies, Vol. 16, Issue 1 (2016), pp.
113–38.
49 For Poroshenko’s nonsensical claim to the UN that all the deaths and all refugees
were ‘at the hands of Russian backed terrorists and occupiers in Donbas’, www.
president.gov.ua.en/nebws/vistup-prezidenta-ukrayini-na-samit-z-pitan-mirot-
vorchosti-143, 29 September 2015.
 Russia in the world 227
50 For examples, see Steven Pifer, ‘How to End the War in Ukraine’, Foreign Affairs,
21 November 2019; Serhii Plokhy, M.E. Sarotte, ‘The Shoals of Ukraine’, Foreign
Affairs, 22 November 2019. Typical is, ‘Death Toll Up To 13,000 in Ukraine
Conflict, Says UN Human Rights Office’, RFE/RL, 26 February 2019, which fails
to mention the ATO and ignores casualties caused by indiscriminate Ukrainian
shelling of Donbas civilian sites. For a counterview, see Elise Giuliano, ‘The
Origins of Separatism: Popular Grievances in Donetsk and Luhansk’, PONARS
Eurasia. Policy Memo 396 (October 2015).
51 See Kristian Atland, ‘Destined for deadlock? Russia, Ukraine, and the unfulfilled
Minsk agreements’, Post-Soviet Affairs, Vol. 36, No. 2 (2020), pp. 122–39.
52 Anna Vedernikova, Vladimir Kravchenko, Iuliia Mostovaia, Tat’iana Silina, ‘Test
na sovmestimost’, ZN, UA, 9 November 2019; ‘Survey: Population of occupied
Donbas believes Russia not involved in war;’, Kyiv Post and Ukrainetoday.org., 9
November 2019. The survey was conducted between 7 and 31 October 2019.
53 ‘Sovmestnaia press-konferentsiia po itogam vstrechi n “Normandskom format”’,
Kremlin.ru, 10 December 2019, Kremlin.ru/events/president/news/6227.
54 Gordon M. Hahn, ‘Hope Against Hope in Paris: VVP, Ze, and Some from the
West’, Russian and Eurasian Politics, 19 December 2019. For the Minsk Protocol
in English, see https://peacemaker.un.org/sites/peacemaker.un.org/files/
UA_140905_MinskCeasfire_en.pdf.
55 ‘Zelenskii: obostrenie v Donbasse ne izmenit kurs na prekrashchenie voiny’,
Kommersant, 18 February 2020; ‘Fighting Flares in Eastern Ukraine, Kiev and
Rebels Blame Each Other’, The Moscow Times, 18 February 2020; Illia
Ponomarenko, ‘Fierce fighting flares in Donbas, Ukraine reportedly loses posi-
tions’, Kyiv Post, 18 February 2020.
56 ‘Kreml’ otsenil perspektivu vkliucheniia DNR i LNR v sostav Rossii’, Vedomosti,
6 July 2020.
57 Natalia Datskevych, ‘Russia demands constitutional changes from Ukraine in
Normandy peace negotiations’, Kyiv Post, 4 July 2020.
58 Ksenia Mironoiva, Ivan Sinergiev, ‘Voennym zavodam zakazali “Iunarmiiu”’,
Kommersant, 12 March 2019.
59 Petro Poroshenko, ‘Putin Must be Punished’, New York Times, 5 December 2018;
Andrew Higgins, ‘Russia is Squeezing A Key Port in Ukraine’, New York Times
International, 22–23 December 2018; ‘President counts on the support of the
Naval Forces of the NATO countries for the security of navigation in the Black
Sea and the Sea of Azov’, www.president.gov.ua/news/prezident-rozrahobvuye-
ne-pidtrimku-vms-krayin-nato-dlya-bezr-51506, 29 November 2018.
60 ‘Ukraine opens high treason case against Poroshenko over Kerch Strait incident’,
TASS, 21 May 2019.
61 On his Twitter feed, Petro Poroshenko@poroshenko, ‘Ne treba bigti do kramnits’
i skupati …, 29 November 2018; ‘Ukrainian President Calls to Impose Restrictions
on Russian Citizens’, The Moscow Times, 29 November 2018; ‘Ukraina ogranich-
ila v’ezd rossiiskim muzhchinam’, Vedomosti, 30 November 2018; Oleksiy
Sorokin, ‘Ukraine bans Russian men between 16 and 60 from entering the coun-
try’, Kyiv Post, 30 November 2018.
62 ‘EU to extend sanctions against Russians amid holding elections in occupied
Crimea’, 112 UA, 28 January 2020.
63 Peter Dickenson, ‘Is Saakashvili the right choice for Ukraine?’, Atlantic Council,
27 April 2020; ‘Ukrainian President Names Saakashvili to Head Reform Council’,
RFE/RL, 7 May 2020.
64 On this, see Steven Blockmans, ‘Crimea and the quest for energy and military
hegemony in the Black Sea region: governance gap in a contested geostrategic
zone’, Southeast European and Black Sea Studies, Vol. 15, Issue 2 (2015), pp.
179–89.
228 Russia in the world
65 For general background, see; ‘Russia’s Relations with the South Caucasus’,
Caucasus Analytical Digest, No. 109, 22 March 2019.
66 A year after the fact, an independent review commissioned by the EU and headed
by Swiss diplomat Heidi Tagliavini blamed Georgia for starting the war.
67 ‘“Russia is Our Enemy’: The Reaction to Anti-Russian Protests in Georgia’, The
Moscow Times, 20 June 2019.
68 ‘Podpisan Ukaz ob otdel’nykh merakh po obespecheniiu natsbezopasnosti Rossii
i ee grazhdan’, Kremlin.ru, 21 June 2019, Kremlin.ru/events/president/news/60805.
69 On this, see Emil Aslan Souleimanov, Eduard Abrahamyan, Huseyn Aliyev,
‘Unrecognized states as a means of coercive diplomacy? Assessing the role of
Abkhazia and South Ossetia in Russia’s foreign policy in the South Caucasus’,
Southeast European and Black Sea Studies, Vol. 18, Issue I (2018), pp. 73–86.
70 Putin by telephone, Kremlin.ru, 8 May 2018, en.Kremlin.ru/events/president/
news/57435.
71 ‘Meeting with the Prime Minister of Armenia’, Kremlin.ru, 14 May 2018,
Kremlin.ru/events/president/news/57459.
72 See Alexander Iskandaryan, ‘Armenia–Russia Relations: The Revolution and the
Map’, Russian Analytical Digest, No. 232, 22 February 2019, pp. 20–4. See also
‘Protests in Armenia. The Domestic Dimension’, Caucasus Analytical Digest, No.
108, 31 January 2019.
73 Fuad Shahbazov, ‘Could Vladimir Putin’s Visit to Azerbaijan Shift the Regional
Balance of Power?’, Eurasia Daily Monitor, 12 October 2018; Murad Ismayilov,
‘Azerbaijan and Russia: Towards a Renewed Alliance, for a New Era’, Russian
Analytical Digest, No. 232, 22 February 2019, pp. 2–11.
74 For documentation, see USSR Documents Annual, 1988 (1989), pp. 369–74;
USSR Documents Annual 1989 (1990), pp. 73–7.
75 ‘Zasedanie diskussionnogo kluba “Valdai”’, Kremlin.ru, 3 October 2019,
Kremlin.ru/events/president/news/61719. Igor Kurbanov ‘Karabakh Peace Talks
Break Down as Azerbaijan and Armenia Operate at Cross-Purposes’, Eurasia
Daily Monitor, 4 March 2019; Ali Askanov, ‘Shadows of the April 2016 War:
Armenia and Azerbaijan Back in a Deadlock?’ Eurasia Daily Monitor, 1 April
2019.
76 ‘Child, Woman Among Casualties in Nagorny Karabakh Heavy Fighting’, The
Moscow Times (AFP), 27 September 2020; ‘Press Statement of the OSCE Minsk
Group Co-Chairs’, 29 June 2019, https://www.osce.org/minsk-group/424346;
Vasif Huseynov, ‘Azerbaijan, Armenia Respond to Growing US Engagement in
South Caucasus’, Eurasia Daily Monitor, 27 June 2019; ‘Na granitse Armenii i
Azerbaidzhana proizoshlo vooruzhennoe stolkno’, Rossiiskaia gazeta, 12 July
2020.
77 ‘Erdogan zaiavil o podderzhie Azerbaidzhana v konflikte vokrug Nagornogo
Karabakha’, Vedomosti, 27 September 2020; ‘V Armenii ob’iavili voennoe
polozhenie i vseobshchuiu mobilizatsiiu’, ibid.; ‘Peskov vpervye prokommen-
tiroval konflikt v Nagornom Karabakhe’, Vedomosti, 28 September 2020.
78 Mariam Harutyunyan, Emil Guliyev, ‘Armenia, Azerbaijan Reject Russia-
Mediated Talks as Fighting Rages Over Karabakh’, The Moscow Times, 30
September 2020. For background, Vicken Cheterian, ‘The Uses and Abuses of
History: Genocide and the Making of the Karabakh Conflict’, Europe-Asia
Studies, Vol. 70, Issue 6 (2018), pp. 884–903; Eduard Abrahamyan, ‘NATO and
CSTO in the Caucasus: Evolving Collision and Potential Engagement’, in Frederic
Labarre, George Niculescu, eds. What a ‘New European Security Deal’ Could
Mean for the South Caucasus. Study Group Information. Band 14 (2018), Vienna.
79 ‘Statement of the President of Russia, USA and France on Nagorno-Karabakh’,
Kremlin.ru, 1 October 2020, Kremlin.ru/events/president/news/6413.
80 ‘Russian Colonel Zhilin: “This is Erdogan’s war against Russia for the Caucasus”’,
The Armenian Weekly, 8 October 2020; Robert M. Cutler, ‘Without Russian Aid
 Russia in the world 229
to Armenia, Azerbaijan Has the Upper Hand in Nagorno-Karabakh’, FP
(Foreign Policy), 9 October 2020; Aleksandr Baunov, ‘Why Russia Is Biding Its
Time on Nagorno-Karabakh’, Carnegie Moscow Center, 9 October 2020; Denis
Kurenev, ‘Armeniia i Azerbaidzhan vnov’ obvinili dryg druga v narushenii
peremiriia’, Vedomosti, 18 October 2020.
81 US Department of State, ‘U.S.–Armenia–Azerbaijan Joint Statement’, Media
Note. Office of the Spokesperson, 25 October 2020, https://www.state.
gov/u-s-armenia-azerbaijan-joint-statement/.
82 Putin, ‘Zasedanie diskussionnogo kluba “Valdai”’, Kremlin.ru, 22 October 2020,
Kremlin.ru/events/president/news/64261
83 ‘Karabakhskaia voina vse blizhe k Rossii’, Kommersant, 2 November 2020; ‘Putin,
Erdogan discuss Syria, Libya, Nagorno-Karabakh – Kremlin’, TASS, 27 October
2020; Tom O’Connor, ‘Iran Boosts Border Defense Against Armenia–Azerbaijan
Conflict, Israel and ISIS’, Newsweek, 27 October 2020; ‘Third Attempt at
Nagorno-Karabakh Ceasefire Collapses Within Minutes’, The Moscow Times, 27
October 2020; ‘Nagorno-Karabakh Briefing, Oct 28’, The Moscow Times, 28
October 2020.
84 Mariam Harutyunyan, ‘Russia Pledges Help to Yerevan if Fighting Reaches
Armenia’, The Moscow Times, 31 October 2020.
85 Putin, ‘Investitsionnyi forum “Rossiia zovet!”’, Kremlin.ru, 29 October 2020,
Kremlin.ru/events/president/news/64296.
86 United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner, ‘Nagorno-
Karabakh conflict: Bachelet warns of possible war crimes as attacks continue in
populated areas’, Geneva, 2 November 2020, www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/
Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=26464&LangID=E.
87 ‘Zaiavlenie Prezidenta Azerbaidzhanskoi Respubliki, Prem’er-ministra Respubliki
Armeniia i Prezidenta Rossiiskoi Federatsii’, Kremlin.ru, 10 November 2020,
Kremlin.ru/events/president/news/64384; Mark Galeotti, ‘Russia’s Influence in
the South Caucasus is waning’, VTimes, 11 November 2020.
88 ‘Sessiia Soveta kollektivnoi bezopastnosti ODKB’, Kremlin.ru, 2 December 2020,
Kremlin.ru/events/president/news/64534; Pavel Felgenhauer, ‘Russia watches as
Karabakh War Reaches Decisive Turning Point’, Eurasia Daily Monitor, 29
October 2020; Mariam Harutyunyan, Emil Guliyev, ‘Armenia PM Urges Stronger
Military Links With Russia’, The Moscow Times, 21 November 2020.
89 For wide-ranging essays on these matters, see Marlene Laruelle, ed. Russia’s
Policy in Syria and the Middle East. CAP Paper, No. 212, Georgia Washington
University, January, 2019.
90 ‘Pompeo says God may have sent Trump to save Israel from Iran’, BBC.com, 23
March 2019; Marco Carnelos, ‘Russia’s Next Move in the Middle East: Improving
Relations with GCC’, Valda Discussion Club, 21 March 2019.
91 See the two overlapping essays by Eugene B. Rumer, ‘Russia, the Indispensable
Nation in the Middle East’, Foreign Affairs, 31 October 2019, and ‘Russia in the
Middle East: Jack of all Trades, Master of None’, Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace, 31 October 2019.
92 ‘Kosachev prokommentiroval ubiistvo iranskogo generala Suleimani’, RIA
Novosti, 3 January 2020.
93 Erin Banco, Christopher Dickey, Asawin Suebsaena, ‘Iraq Tells Trump GTFO
After Soleimani Strike’, The Daily Beast, 5 January 2020; ‘Putin, ‘Telephone con-
versation with French President Macron’, Kremlin.ru, 3 January 2020, Kremlin.
ru/events/president/news/62539; ‘Kremlin Says Merkel, Putin to Discuss Middle
East Crisis in Moscow’, The Moscow Times, 6 January 2010.
94 Leonid Bershidsky, ‘Putin Now Needs a Plan B on Iran’, Bloomberg Opinion, 7
January 2020; ‘Turkey, Russia Call for Libya Ceasefire as Rivals Clash’, The
Moscow Times (from Reuters), 8 January 2020; ‘Turkey’s Latest Power Grab Has
Europe on Edge’, Oilprice.com, 1 February 2020.
230 Russia in the world
95 Henry Meyer, Firat Kozok, ‘Putin Swallows Irritation at Erdogan as Syria
Strains Ties’, Bloomberg, 5 February 2020; Bobby Ghosh, ‘Putin Discovers the
Pain of being Erdogan’s Pal’, The Moscow Times, 7 February 2020; Ivan
Safronov, Aleksei Nikol’skii, Svetlana Bocharova, ‘Rossiia vpervye ofitsial’no
ob’vinila Turtsiiu v podderzhke voevikov’, Vedomosti, 20 February 2020; ‘Russia–
Turkey Tensions in Syria, Explained’, The Moscow Times, 21 February 2020.
96 Michael Mainville, Maria Panina, ‘Turkey, Russia Agree Ceasefire in Syria’s
Idlib’, The Moscow Times, 5 March 2020; ‘Rossiisko–turetskie peregovory’,
Kremlin.ru, 5 March 2020, Kremlin.ru/events/president/news/62936.
97 Robin Emmott, ‘EU regrets U.S. refusal to allow economic aid for Iran to fight
coronavirus’, Reuters, 22 April 2020.
98 Igor Subbotin, ‘Rossii, Turtsii i Iranu pridetsia potesnit’sia v Sirii’, Nezavismaia
gazeta, 5 April 2018.
99 Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, ‘OPCW Issues Fact-
Finding Mission Reports on Chemical Weapons Use Allegation in Douma, Syria
in 2018 and in Al-Kamadaniya and Karm Al-Tarrab in 2016’, 6 July 2018, www.
opcw.org/news/article/opcw-issues-fact- …; OPCW, ‘Note by the Technical
Secretariat. Report of the Fact-Finding Mission Regarding the Incident of
Alleged Use of Toxic Chemicals as a Weapon in Douma, Syrian Arab Republic,
on 7 April 2018’, S/1731/2019, 1 March 2019, www.opcw.org/sites/default/files/
documents/2019/03/s-1731-2019(e).pdf. On the whistleblowers see Aaron Maté,
‘OPCW executives praised whistleblower and criticized Syria cover-up, leaks
reveal’, Gray Zone, 7 December 2020, https://thegrayzone.com/2020/12/07/
opcw-executives-whistleblower-syria-leaks/.
100 ‘US fails to provide visa to Russian expert set to speak at UNSC session, says
source’, TASS, 26 April 2019.
101 ‘Vystuplenie i otvety na voprosy CMI Ministra … S.V. Lavrova …, Moskva, 20
avgusta 2019 goda’, www.mid.ru/ru/foreign_policy/news/-/asset_publisher/
cKNonkJE02Bw/content/id/3757837; ‘Tens of Thousands Flee Russian-Led
Onslaught on Syrian Opposition Enclave’, The Moscow Times, 21 August 2019.
102 ‘What Does Turkey’s Syria Offensive Mean For Russia?’ The Moscow Times, 10
October 2019; Mathew Petti, ‘Will the Syrian Kurds Ally With Iran and Russia
Against Turkey?’, The National Interest, 9 October 2019; Jamie Dettmer,
‘Analysts: Russia Goes Along with Turkey, But Has Red Lines’, VOA, 10 October
2019; Olesya Asrakhova, Andrew Osborn, ‘Russia says “unacceptable” Turkish
incursion into Syria Must be temporary’, The Moscow Times, 15 October 2019.
103 Ron Blitzer ‘Trump celebrates “great day for civilization” …’, Foxnews.com, 18
October 2019; ‘Erdogan otkazalsia obsuzhdat’ Siriiu s vitse-prezidentom SShA’,
Vedomosti, 16 October 2019; ‘Clashes and Confusion Mar Attempt at Cease-Fire
in Syria’, New York Times, 18 October 2019.
104 Henry Meyer, ‘Putin Faces Syria Money Crunch After U.S. Keeps Control of
Oil’, Bloomberg, 30 October 2019; ‘Zaiavleniia dlia pressy po itogam rossiisko-
turetskikh peregovorov’, Kremlin.ru, 22 October 2019, kremlin.ru/events/presi-
dent/news/61876; Pavel Felgenhauer, ‘Putin’s Intricate Syrian Balancing Act’,
Eurasia Daily Monitor, 24 October 2019.
105 US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, ‘After the Deal: A New Iran Strategy’,
Remarks at The Heritage Foundation, 21 May 2018, www.state.gov/secretary/
remarks/2018/05/282301.htm.
106 See ‘The Geopolitics of the Black Sea’, Geopolitical Monitor, 7 September 2018.
107 Putin, ‘Meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’, Kremlin.ru,
11 July 2018, Kremlin.ru/events/president/news/57983.
108 Putin, ‘Meeting with the adviser of the Supreme Leader of Iran on international
issues Ali Akbat Verayati’, Kremlin.ru, 12 July 2018, Kremlin.ru/events/presi-
dent/news/57984; ‘Iranian Supreme Leader’s Adviser Hails “Very Constructive”
Meeting with Putin’, RFE/RL, 12 July 2018.
 Russia in the world 231
109 Zev Chafets, ‘Netanyahu gets a Timely Campaign Gift from Putin’, The Moscow
Times, 13 April 2019.
110 Putin, ‘Vstrecha s Prem’er-ministrom Izraila Bin’iaminom Netan’iakhu’,
Kremlin.ru, 30 January 2020, kremlin.ru/events/president/news/62698.
111 ‘Peregovoru s Prezidentom Egipta Abdel’fattakhom Sisi’, Kremlin.ru, 17
October 2018, kremlin.ru/events/president/news/58839.
112 ‘Vstrechi Ministra’, www.mid.ru/ru/vizity-ministra, 21–29 December 2018;
‘Putin Sends Congratulations’, Kremlin.ru, 30 December 2018, Kremlin.ru/
events/president/news/59625.
113 ‘“We Don’t Want to Entertain Possibility of Clash With Turkey in Syria”,
Kremlin Says’, The Moscow Times, 15 October 2019; Ruslan Mamedov, ‘What
To Expect From Putin’s Visit to Saudi Arabia?’, The Moscow Times, 15 October
2019.
114 ‘Gosudarstvennyi visit v Saudovskuiu Araviiu’, Kremlin.ru, 14 October 2019,
Kremlin.ru/events/president/news/61799.
115 See a discussion of this by Henry Meyer and Ilya Arkhipov, ‘Putin Has Syria
“Headache” and the Kremlin’s Blaming Assad’, Bloomberg, 28 April 2020.
116 ‘Report: Russia, Turkey, Iran agree to remove Syria’s Assad’, MEMO. Middle
East Monitoring, 4 May 2020; ‘Putin may be rethinking why Russia is in Syria’,
Arab News, 9 May 2020.
117 For a detailed assessment from the American viewpoint, see Seth G. Jones, ed.
Moscow’s War in Syria, Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS)
Report, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, May 2020.
118 See Kristi Raik, Andras Racz, eds. Post-Crimea Shift in EU–Russia Relations:
From Fostering Interdependence to Managing Vulnerabilities. Talinn:
International Centre for Defence and Security, 2019. For a summary of Russia–
EU relations, see Viktoria Akchurina, Vincent Della Sala, ‘The European
Union, Russia and the Post-Soviet Space: Shared Neighbourhood, Battleground
or Transit Zone on the New Silk Road?’, Europe–Asia Studies, Vol. 70, Issue 10
(2018), pp. 1543–51. For a study of continuing relationships, Thomas Hoffmann,
Andrey Makarychev, Russia and the EU: Spaces of Interaction. London:
Routledge, 2019.
119 For an early recognition of long-term interdependence of the EU and Russia,
and the damaging mistakes made by both sides during the Ukraine crisis, see
essays in Avoiding a New ‘Cold War’: The Future of EU–Russia Relations in the
Context of the Ukraine Crisis, LSE Ideas. Dahrendorf Forum. Special Report,
March 2016.
120 Vasile Rotaru, Russia, The EU and the Eastern Partnership. Building Bridges or
Digging Trenches? Stüttgart: Ibidem-Verlag, 2018.
121 For a discussion, see Anno Tiido, ‘Russian-Speakers in the European Union:
Positive Interdependence or a Source of Vulnerability?’, in Kristi Raik, Andras
Racz, eds. Post-Crimea Shift in EU–Russia Relations, op. cit., pp. 250–68.
122 ‘Estonian President Meets With Putin On Rare Visit To Russia’, RFE/RL, 19
April 2019; Kristi Rajk, ‘Same, but Different: Estonia and Russia Presidents held
a Historic meeting’, RKK/ICDS (International Centre for Defence and Security’,
Estonia), 23 April 2019; ‘Estonia Demands “Annexed” Territory Back From
Russia’, The Moscow Times, 20 November 2019.
123 For cultural and political background, Aliide Naylor, The Shadow in the East.
Vladimir Putin and the New Baltic Front. London: I.B. Tauris, 2020. See also
Michael Kofman, ‘Assessing a Russian Fait Accompli Strategy’, Russian
Analytical Digest, No. 259, 30 November 2020, pp. 9–12.
124 ‘Lukashenka potreboval ot Putina edinykh s Rossiei tsen na gaz’, Vedomosti, 6
December 2018; see also Kommersant, 7 December 2018.
125 ‘Russia, Belarus Decry Loss of “Brotherly Trust” Ahead of Summit’, The
Moscow Times, 25 December 2018; ‘I do not call Russia “brotherly state”
232 Russia in the world
anymore – Lukashenka’, Belsat, 25 December 2018. Putin, ‘Meeting with
President of Belarus Alexander Lukashenka’, Kremlin.ru, 29 December 2018,
Kremlin.ru/events/president/news/59618.
126 See, e.g., Andrew Higgins, ‘As Putin Pushes a Merger, Belarus Resists’, New York
Times International, 6–7 July 2019; Grigory Ioffe, ‘Belarus–Russia Integration:
No Decision Yet’, Eurasia Daily Monitor, 26 June 2019; ‘Lukashenka rasskazal,
kak daleko Belorusiia i Rossiia gotovy zaiti v voprose ob’edineniia’, Interfax, 15
February 2019; ‘We’re Ready to Unite With Russia, Belarus Leader Lukashenka
Says’, The Moscow Times, 15 February 2019.
127 ‘Minfin ob’iasnil uvelichenie platezhei inostrannykh zaemshchikov v adres
Rossii’, RBC.ru, 3 July 2019
128 ‘Plan dlia Siouza’, Rossiiskaia gazeta, 6 September 2019; ‘Druzhba nalogov’,
Kommersant, 16 September 2019; ‘Belarus Rejects Russia’s “Unacceptable”
Terms of Integration’, The Moscow Times, 2 October 2019.
129 ‘Hundreds Protest in Minsk Against Union with Russia’, RFE/RL, 7 December
2019; ‘Hundreds Protest Russia–Belarus Integration Pact in Minsk’, The Moscow
Times, 9 December 2019.
130 US Department of State, ‘Travel to the U.K., Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan and
Uzbekistan, January 29–February 4, 2020’.
131 Andrew Higgins, ‘Belarus Leader’s Enemy: Russia’, New York Time International,
27–28 June 2020; ‘Belarus Accuses West, Russia of Destabilization Ahead of
Polls’, The Moscow Times, 19 June 2020.
132 ‘Mercenaries in Minsk’, The Bell, 1 August 2020; ‘Russian Mercenaries in
Belarus: All You Need to Know’, The Moscow Times, 30 July 2020; ‘Posol Rossii
rasskazal o planakh zaderzhannykh v Belorussii rossiian’, Vedomosti, 30 July
2020; ‘Putin ne obshchalsia s Lukashenka po povodu zaderzhannykh rossiian’,
Kommersant, 31 July 2020; ‘Zaderzhannye v Belorussii rossiiane utverzhdaiut,
chto napravlialis’ v Latinskuiu Ameriku’, Vedomosti, 3 August 2020.
133 ‘Lukashenka on street actions’, BELTA, 10 August 2020; Morozova, ‘Lukashenka
zaiavil o kooordinatsii protestov iz-za rubezha’, Vedomosti, 10 August 2020;
Tatiana Kalinovskaya, ‘Challenger Demands Lukashenka “Hand Over Power”
After Election Crackdown’, The Moscow Times, 10 August 2020; for back-
ground, see Alex Foster, ‘Belarus Presidential Election: Lukashenka’s Gamble
and its Geopolitical Implications’, Geopolitical Monitor, 4 August 2020.
134 Svetlana Bocharova, Aleksei Nikol’ski, ‘Rossiia gotov okazat’ vlastiam Belorussii
silovuiu pomoshch. No tol’ko v krainem sluchaev – i nadeetsia na dialog’,
Vedomosti, 28 August 2020.
135 See, e.g. ‘V Kremle raskryli detali telefonnogo razgovora mezhdu Putinym i
Lukashenka’, Vedomosti, 15 August 2020; Mark Galeotti, ‘Lukashenka’s Gamble
on Thuggishness’, The Moscow Times, 13 August 2020; ‘Spasenie dlia Lukashenka
– novye vybory. Inache-tut vse tol’ko nachinaetsia’, Komsomnol’skaya Pravda, 14
August 2020; ‘V tzsentre Minska vnov’ sobralis’ tysiachi protivnikov Lukashenka’,
Kommersant, 17 July 2020.
136 ‘Lukashenko poprosil Putina peredat’ Merkel’ pros’bu ne vmeshivat’sia’ v dela
Belorussem’, Kommersant, 19 August 2020; for potential impact on Russia, Paul
Goble, ‘Belarus Now Dividing Russians More Deeply and Permanently Than
Ukraine Did in 2014’, Eurasia Daily Monitor, 13 August 2020; Ben Aris,
‘Tikhanovskaya to hold first transition council meeting, EU opens talks with
opposition’, Intellinews, 18 August 2020.
137 ‘Maria Kolesnikova was detained and taken away by unknown persons in the cen-
ter of Minsk’, tut.by (Minsk), 7 September 2020, https://news.tut.by/econom-
ics/699502; Tatiana Kalinovskaya, ‘Belarus Opposition Figure Detained at Ukraine
Border’, The Moscow Times, 8 September 2020; ‘Na Ukraine zaderzhali dvukh
chlenov Koordinatsionnogo soveta oppozitsii Belorussii’, Vedomosti, 8 September
2020.
 Russia in the world 233
138 ‘Belorusskaia oppozitsiia ob’iavila o sozdanii partii “Vmeste”’, Kommersant, 1
September 2020; Dmitri Trenin, ‘Game Over for Lukashenko: The Kremlin’s
Next Move’, Carnegie Moscow Center, 17 August 2020; Nigel Gould-Davies,
‘Putin and the Belarusian Question’, The Moscow Times, 2 September 2020
139 Putin, ‘Vstrecha s Prezidentom Belorussii Aleksandrom Lukashenko’, Kremlin.
ru, 14 September 2020, Kremlin.ru/events/president/news/64031; David Walsh,
‘Lukashenko goes to Russia: What the meeting of “brothers” could mean for
Belarus’, Euronews, 14 September 2020; ‘Belarus Opposition Leader Criticizes
Putin’s Talks With “Usurper” Lukashenko’, The Moscow Times, 14 September
2020.
140 Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, University of Toronto,
‘Democracy and the Future of Belarus’, 16 October, https://uoft.me/
belarus2020.
141 See, e.g. Vladimir Socor, ‘Russia’s Regime-Change Experiment in Belarus Runs
Into Difficulties’ (Parts One & Two), Eurasia Daily Monitor, 7 & 8 October 2020.
For other aspects, ‘40 people were included in the EU sanctions list due to the
situation in Belarus’, RAPSI, 2 October 2020; Dario Thuburn, ‘Belarus
Opposition Leader Takes Risky Diplomatic Path’, The Moscow Times (from
AFP), 1 October 2020.
142 Gleb Mishutin, ‘V Tretii paket sanktsii ES protiv Belorussii popadet blizkii k
Aleksandru Lukashenko biznes’, Vedomosti, 22 November 2020; ‘Thousands
March in Belarus Opposition Rally in Minsk’, The Moscow Times, 22 November
2020.
143 ‘Russia Says It Welcomes Formation of Government in Moldova’, The Moscow
Times, 10 June 2019; ‘Moldova v stupila v dosrochnoe dvoevlastie’, RBC.ru, 9
June 2029.
144 Ania Tsoukanova, ‘Moldova Vote Winner Promises “Balanced” Ties With the
West, Russia’, The Moscow Times, 16 November 2020.
145 Richard Gonzales, ‘Trump Greets Hungary’s Hard-Right Leader in Oval Office’,
NPR, 14 May 2019; Guy Verhofstadt @guyverhofstadt, 20 May 2019; ‘Russia Is
Targeting Europe’s Elections. So Are Far-Right Copycats’, New York Times, 12
May 2019; Matt Apuzzo, Adfam Sarariano, ‘Russia and far right spreading dis-
information ahead of EU election, investigators say’, Independent, 12 May 2019;
‘The Russians are coming for European elections! Just don’t ask for proof’, RT,
12 May 2019.
146 For some examples, see, Jacob Iacoboni, ‘The Russian propaganda against
Renzi: and Grillo’s web backs it up’, La Stampa, 11 November 2016 (translated
by Anna Martinelli); Caroline Wheeler, ‘Revealed: the Russia Report’, The
Times, 17 November 2019; Gabriel Gatehouse, ‘German far-right MP “could be
absolutely controlled by Russia”’, BBC News, 5 April 2019; Gennady Rudkevich,
‘In the West, Russia Backs Chaos, not Candidates’, The Moscow Times, 25
February 2020. See also Aleksandr Fisher, ‘Demonizing the enemy: the influence
of Russian state-sponsored media on American audiences’, Post-Soviet Affairs,
Vol. 36, Issue 2 (2020), pp. 281–96.
147 Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament, ‘Russia’, HC 632, printed on
21 July 2020, available at the Committee’s website, isc.independent.gov.uk.
148 ‘Frantsiia proverit informatsiiu o prichastnosti Rossii k protestam “zheltykh zhi-
letov”’, Vedomosti, 9 December 2018; Carol Matlack, Robert Williams, ‘France
to Probe Possible Russian Influence on Yellow Vest Riots’, Bloomberg News, 9
December 2018; Leonid Bershidsky, ‘France’s Yellow Vests Aren’t Imported
from Russia’, Bloomberg. Opinion, 11 December 2018.
149 ‘Plenarnoe zasedanie Peterburgskogo mezhdunarodnogo ekonomicheskogo
foruma’, Kremlin.ru, 25 May 2018, Kremlin.ru/events/president/news/57556.
150 For discussion, see, Michael Schwartz, ‘Top Secret Russian Unit Seeks to
Destabilize Europe, Security Officials Say’, New York Times, 8 October 2019;
234 Russia in the world
‘Secret Russian Military Intelligence Unit Linked to “Campaign to Destabilize
Europe”’, The Moscow Times, 9 October 2019; Mark Galeotti, ‘Quick thoughts
about the GRU’s Unit 29155’, In Moscow’s Shadows, 9 October 2019.
151 ‘Merkel: NATO Must Refocus on Russia Threat’, Atlantic Council, 8 July 2018.
152 ‘Russiisko-germanskie peregovory’, Kremlin.ru, 18 August 2018, Kremlin.ru/
events/president/news/58328; ‘Merkel Hosts Putin in Meeting of Convenience
Forged by Trump’, The Moscow Times, 17 August 2018.
153 Dmitrii Azarov, ‘Putin i Merkel, provodiat vstrechu v Kremle’, Kommersant, 11
January, 2020.
154 ‘Press-konferentsiia po itogam rossiisko-germanskikh peregovorov’, Kremlin.ru,
11 January 2020, Kremlin.ru/events/president/news/62565.
155 Mark Galeotti, ‘The Geopolitics of Theresa May’s Dutiful Handshake’, The
Moscow Times, 1 July 2019.
156 ‘7 Things British PM Boris Johnson Has Said About Russia’, The Moscow Times,
13 December 2019; ‘British PM Johnson Says Not Possible to Reset Russia
Relations’, RFE/RL, 24 December 2019.
157 ‘Andrei Kelin naznachen poslom Rossii v Velikobritanii’, Kommersant, 5
November 2019.
158 ‘UK imposes sanctions against human rights abusers’, BBC News, 6 July 2020;
‘Russia Will Impose Counter-Sanctions on U.K.–Kremlin’, The Moscow Times,
6 July 2020; Mark Landler, ‘Britain, Charting Its Own Course On Human
Rights, Imposes New Sanctions’, New York Times, 6 July 2020.
159 ‘Italy’s PM Slams Economic Sanctions Against Russia’, The Moscow Times, 16
October 2018; ‘Conte to push for EU–Russia de-escalation at Summit’, Euractiv,
28 June 2018.
160 Putin, ‘Interv’iu gazete “Korrr’ere della Sera”’, Kremlin.ru, 4 July 2019, Kremlin.
ru/events/president/news/60912.
161 Ekaterina Eremenko, ‘Putin tretii raz vstretilsia s papoi Rimskoi Frantsiskom’,
Vedomosti, 4 July 2019.
162 Parliamentary Assembly, ‘Citing Crimea, PACE suspends voting rights of
Russian delegation and excludes it from leading bodies’, 4 April 2014, www.
assembly.coe.int/nw/xml/AssemblyList/MP-Alpha-EN.asp; ‘Rossiiu mogut iskli-
uchit’ iz Soveta Evropy v 2019 godu’, Vedomosti, 10 October 2018.
163 ‘Gosduma vystupila protiv vozvrashcheniia k rabote v PASE’, Interfax, 17
January 2019.
164 Parliamentary Assembly/Assemblée parlementaire, Resolution 2287 (2019)
Provisional version, 25 June 2019, http://assembly.coe.int/nw/xml/XRef/Xref-
XML2HTML-en.asp?fileid=27980&lang=en. For a discussion, Tom Luongo,
‘Russia Grinds Out Win in Europe’, The Duran, 20 May 2019.
165 Jack Laurence, ‘Ukraine, Georgia, Baltic States form PACE alliance against
Russia’, Kyiv Post, 2 October 2019.
166 ‘Russia Will Respond to New EU Sanctions – Reports’, The Moscow Times, 16
March 2019.
167 Putin, ‘Poslanie Prezidenta Federal’nomu Sobraniiu’, Kremlin.ru, 20 February
2019, Kremlin.ru/events/president/news/59863; Evgeny Pudovkin,
‘Evroparlament progolosoval za uzhestochenie podlhoda k Rossii’, RBC.ru, 12
March 2019; ‘Statement by the Vice-President of the Commission/High
Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy – A
European human rights violations sanctions regime’, 12 March 2019, europarl.
europe.eu/plenary/en/home/html.
168 ‘Ukraine High On the Agenda As Macron Hosts Putin in Southern France’,
RFE/RL, 189 August 2019; ‘Prezidenty Rossii i Frantsii sdelali zaiavleniia dlia
pressy i otvetili na voprosy zhurnalistov’, Kremlin.ru, 19 August 2019, Kremlin.
ru/events/president/news/61336.
 Russia in the world 235
169 ‘The future of the EU. Emmanuel Macron warns Europe: NATO is brain-dead’,
The Economist, 7 November 2019. The interview was conducted in Paris on 21
October.
170 Rym Montaz, ‘Macron, Putin seek solution on Ukraine, clash over Syria and
protests’, Politico, 19 August 2019; ‘Trump Calls to Allow Russia to Join G7,
Moscow Responds with Skepticism’, The Moscow Times, 21 August 2019;
Michael Crowley, ‘Trump Says Russia Should be Readmitted to G7’, New York
Times, 20 August 2019.
171 ‘Sovmestnaia press-konferentsiia s Prezidentom Finliandii Sauli Niiniste’,
Kremlin.ru, 21 August 2019, Kremlin.ru/events/president/news/61349.
172 Caroline Linton, ‘Trump delays G7 until fall and calls it an “outdated group of
countries”’, CBSnews.com, 30 May 2020; Patrick Wintour, ‘Trump cancels sum-
mit but says he will invite Putin to later G7 event’, The Guardian, 31 May 2020.
173 ‘Telefonnyi razgovor s Prezidentom Frantsii Emmanuelem Makronom’, Kremlin.
ru, 16 November 2020, Kremlin.ru/events/president/news/64426; Kira Latukhin,
‘Putin i Makron obsudili Karabakh, Donbass, Liviiu i koronavirus’, Rossiiskaia
gazeta, 7 November 2020.
174 Peter Nikolaev, ‘Delo Naval’nogo: Rossiia rasshirit sanktsii protiv ES’,
Rossiiskaia gazeta, 22 December 2020.
175 ‘Joint Statement by … Putin and … Bermudez on common approaches in inter-
national affairs’, Kremlin.ru, 2 November 2018, Kremlin.ru/supplement/5354.
For typical uproar in the US, see CNN ‘The Situation Room’ with Wolf Blitzer,
2 November 2018.
176 Ministry of Defence of the Russian Federation, ‘Rossiia vysoko otsenivaet soi-
uznicheskoe vzaimodeistvie s Kuboi na mezhdunarodnoi arene’, Minoborony
Rossii, 14 November 2018.
177 ‘Putin, ‘Peregovory s Prezidentom Kuby Migel Diaz-Kanelem Bermudesom’,
Kremlin.ru, 29 October 2019, Kremlin.ru/events/president/news/61930.
178 For a regional analysis, see Vladimir Rouvinski (Columbia), ‘Venezuela: A Dead
End for Russia? (Op-ed)’, The Moscow Times, 25 January 2019; Kirk Semple,
‘Echoes of the Past in Venezuela Crisis, but Heard More Lightly’, The New York
Times, 24 January 2019.
179 Ernesto Londono, Nicholas Casey, ‘Trump Administration Discusses Coup
Plans with Rebel Venezuelan Officers’, New York Times, 8 September 2019.
180 ‘Russian Mercenaries Arrive in Venezuela to Shore Up Maduro’s Rule’, The
Moscow Times, 26 January 2019; Russian Finance Ministry Says Venezuela Must
Repay Its Debt to Moscow on Time’, The Moscow Times, 29 January 2019; Ellen
R. Reid, ‘Amid the Venezuelan Crisis, A Look At Oil, Russia and Trump’, Forbes,
23 January 2019; Lesley Wroughton, Brian Ellsworth, ‘U.S. calls Russian deploy-
ment of planes to Venezuela “reckless escalation”’, Reuters, 25 March 2019.
181 Bolton, The Room Where It Happened, op. cit., p. 255.
182 Putin, ‘Meeting with Heads of international news agencies’, Kremlin.ru, 6 June
2019, en.Kremlin.ru/events/president/news/60675.
183 ‘Russia Sends Lavrov To Venezuela to “Counteract” U.S. Sanctions’, The
Moscow Times, 4 February 2020; ‘O vstreche Ministra … Lavrova s Poslom
Respubliki Kazakhstan …’, 3 February 2020, www.mid.ru/ru/foreign_policy/
news/-/asset_publisher/cKNonkJE02Bw/content/id/4018579.
184 ‘Vladimir Putin vystupil na itogovoi plenarnoi sessii XVI zasedaniia narodnogo
diskussionnogo kluba “Valdai”’, Kremlin.ru, 3 October 2019, Kremlin.ru/
events/president/news/61719.
185 For a discussion, see Stephen F. Cohen, ‘Will Russia Be Driven From the West?’,
The Nation, 18 September 2019.
186 ‘US, Britain Expand Terrorism – says Karzai’, 9 April 2018, afghancentral.
blogspot.com/2018/04/us-britain-expand-terrorism-says-karzai.html.
236 Russia in the world
187 ‘U.S. Afghanistan Reject Russian-Sponsored Peace Talks’, RFE/RL, 22 August
2018; ‘Afghanistan “will not attend” Russia-led peace talks’, Al-Jazeera, 22
August 2018; ‘Taliban Accepts Russian Invitation to Talks, Afghan Govt
Declines’, The Moscow Times, 23 August 2018; see also Tanisha M. Fazal, Sarah
Kreps, ‘The United States’ Perpetual War in Afghanistan’, Foreign Affairs.
Snapshot, 20 August 2018.
188 ‘Russia Challenges U.S., in Hosting Taliban at Afghan Talks’, The Moscow
Times, 9 November 2018.
189 Carter Malkasian, ‘How the Good War Went Bad’, Foreign Affairs, March/April
2020; C. Todd Lopez, ‘U.S., Taliban Negotiate 7-Day Proposal for Reduction in
Violence’, U.S. Dept. Of Defense, 13 February 2020.
190 Shukhrat Khurramov, ‘Pompeo in the “Stans”’, Asia Times, 2 February 2020.
191 For mixed opinions, see, e.g. Farkhad Sharip, ‘Language-Motivated Emigration
of Russian Causes Shortage of Qualified Workers in Kazakhstan’, Eurasia Daily
Monitor, 1 November 2018; ‘Sredniaia Asiia prevrashchaetsia v uspeshnyi ameri-
kanskii platsdarm’, Nezavisimaia gazeta, 30 August 2018; Paul Goble, ‘Russia
Losing Out to U.S. in Central Asia, “Nezavisimaia gazeta” Says’, Window on
Eurasia, 31 August 2018.
192 Umida Hashimova, ‘After Putin’s Visit, Russia’s Footprints in Uzbekistan is Set
to Grow’, Eurasia Daily Monitor, 22 October 2018.
193 ‘President of Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbayev, Resigns After Three Decades’,
The Moscow Times, 19 March 2019; Elena Mukhametshina, Svetlana Bocharova,
‘Pochemu Nursultan Nazarbaev ushel v otstavku’, Vedomosti, 19 March 2019.
194 ‘“We Don’t Call It Annexation” Kazakh Leader Says of Crimea’, The Moscow
Times, 4 December 2019; Z. Nemtsova, ‘My ne nazyvaem to, chto proizoshlo v
krymy annekasiei’, Deutsche Welle, 34 December 2019; ‘Kassyn-Jomart Tokayev
gives interview to Deutsche Welle’, Kazinform, 4 December 2019; Rico Isaacs,
‘Russia–Kazakhstan Relations and the Tokayev–Nazarbayev Tandem’, Russian
Analytical Digest, No. 248, 6 March 2020, pp. 2–5.
195 ‘Vstrecha liderov stran ShOS’, Kremlin.ru, 14 June 2019, Kremlin.ru/events/
news/president/60749.
196 Government of the Russian Federation, ‘Meeting of the Council of Heads of
Government of the SCO Member States, Tashkent, 2 November 2019’, govern-
ment.ru/news/38252/.
197 See, e.g. Paul Goble, ‘Tajikistan-Kyrgyzstan Frontier Descending Into Deadly
Violence’, Eurasia Daily Monitor, 1 August 2019; ‘Raikhan Tashtemkhanova,
Zhanar Medeubayeva, Aizhan Serikbayeva and Madina Igimbayeva, ‘Territorial
and Border Issues in Central Asia: Analysis of the Reasons, Current State and
Perspectives’, The Anthropologist, Vol. 22, Issue 3 (2015), pp. 518–25; Edward
Lemon, Bradley Jardine, ‘How is Russia Responding to China’s Creeping
Security Presence in Tajikistan?’, Russian Analytical Digest, No. 248, 6 March
2020, pp. 6–8.
198 ‘TsIK Kirgizii naznachit povtornye parlamentskie vybory v techenie dvukh
nedel’, Vedomosti, 6 October 2020; Tolkun Namatbayeva, ‘Kyrgyz Leader
Missing as Power Vacuum Persists’, The Moscow Times, 8 October 2020; Andrew
Higgins, ‘A Convicted Kidnapper is Chosen to Lead Government of Kyrgyzstan’,
New York Times, 10 October 2020; Temur Umarov, ‘Who’s in Charge Following
Revolution in Kyrgyzstan?’, The Moscow Times, 26 October 2020; George
Voloshin, ‘Third Regime Change in Fifteen Years Upends Kyrgyzstan Politics
(Part Two)’, Eurasia Daily Monitor, 27 October 2020.
199 ‘Press statements following Russian–Indian talks’, Kremlin.ru, 5 October 2018,
en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/58732.
200 ‘Russia Offers to Help Mediate Between India and Pakistan’, The Moscow Times,
28 February 2019; ‘Putin obsudil s indiiskim prem’erom konflikt mezhdu Indiei i
Pakistanom’, Vedomosti, 28 February 2019.
 Russia in the world 237
201 Andrew Tillett, ‘India dashes hopes for military role for Quadrilateral Security
Dialogue’, Australian Financial Review, 11 March 2019; Jesse Parker Gale,
Andrew Shearer, ‘The Quadrilateral Security Dialogue and the Maritime Silk
Road Initiative’, CSIS Brief, 2 April 2018.
202 ‘Rossiiskoe oruzhie speshit v Indiiu’, Kommersant, 26 June 2020; ‘Russia to
Speed Up S-400 Delivery to India Amid China Standoff’, The Moscow Times, 26
June 2020; ‘India or China: Who Will Russia Support In A Possible Clash
Between India & China’, The Eurasian Times, 26 June 2020.
203 ‘SMI nazvali vozmozhnye sroki vstrechi Putina i Kim Chen Yna v Rossii’,
Vedomosti, 4 June 2018.
204 ‘Kim Chen Yn otpravilsia na vstrechu s Vladimirom Putinym na bronepoezde’,
Kommersant, 24 April 2019.
205 ‘Rossiisko-severokoreiskie peregovory’, Kremlin.ru, 25 April 2019, Kremlin.ru/
events/president/news/60363.
206 ‘Rossiiskie pogranichniki zaderzhali bolee 160 brakon’erov iz KNDR posle ataki
v Yaponskom more’, Vedomosti, 18 September 2019; ‘Russia Detains 2 North
Korean Vessels After Attack’, The Moscow Times, 17 September 2019; ‘Russia
Opens Fire on North Korean Fishing Boat, Detains 21 for Alleged Poaching’,
The Moscow Times, 2 October 2019.
207 On this, see Satoshi Iizuka, ‘Abe continues balancing act with Putin as he chases
peace treaty, disputed isles at Moscow summit’, The Japan Times, 27 May 2018.
208 ‘Putin predlozhil Yaponii mir bez predvaritel’nykh uslovii’, Vedomosti, 12
September 2018; ‘Putin Proposes to Sign a Peace Deal This Year with Japan’s
Abe’, The Moscow Times, 12 September 2018.
209 Putin, ‘Negotiations with Prime Minister of Japan Shinzo Abe’, Kremlin.ru, 22
January 2019, en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/59713; Erik Khzmalyan,
‘Abe’s Kuril Gamble: Why Russia Will Never Return the Islands’, Geopolitical
Monitor, 30 January 2019; Julia Vvroda, Lyubov Poryvaeva, ‘Kyoda soobshchilo
ob otkaze Rossii obsuzhdat’ peredachu Yuzhnykh Kuril Yaponii’, RBC.ru, 14
July 2019.
210 On this, see James D.J. Brown, ‘The Coming Chill: Russia–Japan Relations After
Abe’, The Moscow Times, 31 August 2020. For general background, Dmitry
Streltsov, Nobuo Shimotyomai, eds. A History of Russo-Japanese Relations.
Leiden: Brill, 2019, esp. Hidetake Kawaraji, ‘Japanese–Russian Relations in the
21st Century, 2001–2015’, pp. 521–34.
211 Dionne Searcey, ‘Russia’s Grab for Diamonds, and Influence’, The New York
Times International, 5–6 October 2019.
212 RF Ministry of Defence, ‘Minoborony Rossii bezvozmezdno postavilo Gabonu
strelkovoe vooruzhenie dlia bor’by s brakon’erstvom’, 28 November 2019,
https://function.mil.ru/news_page/country/more.htm?id=12264134@egNews;
‘Russia Delivers First Weapons to Central Africa’s Gabon’, The Moscow Times,
29 November 2019; Mac Bennetts, ‘Russia delivers weapons to Gabon to fight
elephant poachers as it builds role in Arica’, The Times, 30 November 2019.
213 ‘Russia Sends Nuclear-Bombers to South Africa in “Friendly” Visit’, The
Moscow Times, 22 October 2019.
214 David D. Kirkpatrick, ‘Russian Snipers, Missiles and Warplanes Try to Tilt
Libyan War’, New York Times, 5 November 2019; Pjotr Sauer, ‘7 Kremlin-linked
Mercenaries Killed in Mozambique in October – Military Sources’, The Moscow
Times, 31 October 2019.
215 ‘Press-konferentsiia po itogam rossiisko-germanskikh peregovorov’, Kremlin.ru,
11 January 2020, kremlin.ru/events/president/news/62565.
216 For background, see Tarek Megerisi, ‘Libya’s Global Civil war’, European
Council on Foreign Relations, Policy Brief, June 2019.
217 Barbara Podrugina, ‘Liviiskii fel’dmarshal Khaftar ob’iavil sebia glavoi Livii’,
Vedomosti, 28 April 2020.
238 Russia in the world
218 ‘Russian envoy blasts “fabricated” allegations of Wagner’s Group’s presence in
Libya’, TASS, 9 June 2020; Dmitri Simes, ‘Russia, Seeking to Bolster its Influence
Steps Up Intervention in Libyan Conflict’, CSNnews.com, 10 June 2020.
219 Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, ‘Speech by … Lavrov during a joint press
conference with … M. Chavushoglu, …’, 13 January 2020, www.mid.ru/ru/for-
eign_policy/news/-/asset_publisher/cKNonkJE02Bw/content/id/3993236.
Thomas J. Bollyky, Chad P. Brown, ‘The Tragedy of Vaccine Nationalism. Only
Cooperation Can End the Pandemic’, Foreign Affairs, 27 July 2020. Bollyky is
director of the Global Health Program at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Brown is Reginald Jones Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International
Economics.
220 See Thomas J. Bollyky, Chad P. Bown, ‘Vaccine Nationalism Will Prolong the
Pandemic’, Foreign Affairs, 29 December 2020.
221 Andrew Osborn, ‘“From Russia With Love”: Putin Sends Aid to Italy to Fight
Virus’, Euractiv, 22 March 2010, and Financial Times same date; John Follain,
Stepan Kravchenko, ‘Putin Flies Help to Virus-Stricken Italy, Exploiting EU
Fumble’, Bloomberg Politics, 22 March 2020.
222 Gunnar Ulson, ‘As Russia sends Aid, US and NATO Sneer and Smear’, NEO.
New Eastern Outlook, 8 April 2020; Dario Cristiani, ‘Russian Motives behind
Helping Italy’s Coronavirus Response: A Multifaceted Approach’, Eurasia Daily
Monitor, 8 April 2020.
223 ‘Coronavirus, la telefonata Conte-Putin agita il governo: “Più che aiuti arrivano
militari russi in Italia”’, La Stampa, 25 March 2020; ‘80% of Russia’s Coronavirus
Aid to Italy “Useless” – La Stampa’, The Moscow Times, 26 March 2020; ‘Gli
aiuti russi in Italia sul Coronavirus, il generale Kikot e i timori sull’intelligence
militare in azione’, La Stampa, 1 April 2020; ‘Italy and Russia Spar Over Alleged
Coronavirus Spies’, The Moscow Times, 3 April 2020.
224 ‘Russia Supplies Ex-Soviet States, Iran, North Korea with Coronavirus Test
Kits’, The Moscow Times, 12 March 2020; ibid., 23 March 2020; Alena Iakushova,
‘Pravitel’stvo snialo zapret na vyvoz iz Rossii meditsinskikh masok’, Vedomosti,
3 May 2020; ‘Russia will send two mobile laboratories to DR Congo to combat
COVID-19’, Interfax, 5 May 2020; ‘Russia Sends Coronavirus Aid to 46
Countries – Analysis’, The Moscow Times, 19 August 2020. For a list of aid
recipients, see report by Russia’s Centre for Advanced Governance (CAG) pub-
lished in Moscow in August 2020, https://cpur.ru/research_pdf/russian-anti-
covid-aid-2020.pdf.
6 New Cold War
The Russian Federation,
the United States – and China

Introduction
When Gorbachev pronounced the post-World War II Cold War over in the
late 1980s, and the West declared ‘victory’, the general mood on both sides
was one of relief and, for many in the East, uncertainty. In the West, where
certainty reigned, politicians and media waxed euphoric and agreed with the
notions encapsulated in a Frances Fukuyama essay titled ‘The End of
History’. His message was that communism had imploded, leaving no
alternatives to liberal democracy. Representative government, free markets
and consumer cultures had won the day and the history of human governance
had reached its ultimate goal. The essay was rendered in book form a few
years later.1 Fukuyama became a celebrity guru of political philosophy until
his theory, or at least the popular understanding of it, was overtaken by
events. By 2018, even he had changed his tune, writing then that ‘democracy
has retreated in virtually all regions of the world’.2 Looking back in 2020, a
writer for Global Research accurately defined the post-Cold War era as one of
‘rampant intellectual triumphalism’ driven by a ‘misguided optimism’.3
Seeking explanations for the apparent reversal of fortunes, Stephen Holmes
and Ivan Krastev argued, in The Light that Failed (2020), that the current
wave of populism and xenophobia in Eastern Europe was a direct consequence
of the too-soon and too-urgent compulsion of many countries to become
liberal democracies after 1989.4 In a more cold warrior-like piece, former US
Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, Victoria
Nuland (of ‘fuck the EU’ fame as she meddled in Ukraine’s Maidan uprising
in 2014), blamed it all on Putin’s ‘increasingly Soviet’ methods.5
Soon after Fukuyama’s foray into political philosophy fame, the Soviet
Union disappeared and citizens in former Warsaw Pact countries of Eastern
Europe and the peoples of 14 of the USSR’s 15 Union Republics rejoiced
over new found or newly restored independence. Many, perhaps most, citizens
of the Russian Federation also were pleased that they were about to build a
new society as friend and partner of the Western states, or so they assumed.
Circumstances quickly made that dream unattainable. Deep-rooted internal
problems and habits formed over 70 years of communist rule, coupled with
Western indifference to, or ignorance of, Russia’s needs and expectations,

DOI: 10.4324/9781003158646-7
240 New Cold War
soon persuaded Russian leaders that they were alone in the world and would
have no help in restoring an element of dignity to the Russian state. This
perception was confirmed, as far as the Kremlin was concerned, when NATO
and the EU began gobbling up former Warsaw Pact states and Soviet
republics, and by a tendency of American politicians to make their country’s
‘exceptionalism’ an actual creed. Unabashed Western triumphalism
humiliated Russians and turned them resentful. In the meantime, millions of
ethnic Russians in newly sovereign states fretted that they might now be
treated as second-class citizens, and looked to the Kremlin for relief. As we
have seen, after the 1990s Russia’s answer was to gird up to fend off both real
and imagined enemies at home and abroad, and to counter Western intrusions
into what Moscow still believed was its own sphere of influence.
Although Putin’s criticisms of the West tended at first to be reactive, a
speech he delivered at the Munich Security Conference in 2007 was
aggressively proactive and set Moscow’s tone for the Russian–American
relationship. He reminded the audience that the ‘Cold War left us with live
ammunition’, referring to ‘ideological stereotypes [and] double standards’. A
unipolar world poses a danger for everyone, he went on, because it leads to a
lack of restraint on the part of the powerful. He condemned the US for
‘uncontained’ reliance on military force, overstepping boundaries to force its
policies on other countries, weaponizing space, and much more. Lavrov
repeated many of these charges a few days later.6 Just prior to Putin’s speech,
the US secretary of defense had implied that Russia was a potential enemy
and US politicians accused Russia of re-opening the Cold War – a presidential
election campaign was underway in the US and Russia was again a useful
target for vote-getting rhetoric. A new Cold War was already in motion.
There have been moments in Putin’s tenure when Russian–US relations
verged on improvement. In 2001, Putin immediately offered sympathy for the
9/11 attack and help in the American fight against international terrorism
and, in 2015, he again tried to persuade Washington to join Moscow in a
campaign against ISIS in Syria and Iraq. As Dmitri Trenin pointed out,
whether or not they were serious these initiatives were stymied by Western
assessments of Russia’s actions in Chechnya and Ukraine. A greater
opportunity for change came with the election in 2008 of Barack Obama
who, with Vice President Joe Biden, desired to normalize bilateral relations
with Russia. Compromises on START, Afghanistan and, temporarily, a slow-
down of US plans to deploy air-defence missiles in Eastern Europe soon
followed. Nevertheless, the ‘reset’ in Russian–US relations agreed by Hillary
Clinton and Lavrov in March 2009, didn’t last long. Washington’s European
missile defence system project revived, while the Magnitsky case and
rhetorical bombast in election campaigns on both sides pushed it aside.
Russia’s occupation of Crimea in 2014 sealed its fate.7 The coronavirus pan-
demic might have presented another opportunity for Russian–American
cooperation, if decades of public attitude shaping on both sides hadn’t
mitigated against it.
***
 New Cold War 241
The notion that they are in a new Cold War has gripped writers on Russian
foreign policy in recent years. Whereas most Western authors blame the
Kremlin for the new confrontation almost unconditionally, Stephen F.
Cohen reasoned that the deterioration of Russian–American relations was
largely a result of Washington’s indifference to Russia’s legitimate security
concerns.
Others, like Andrei Tsygankov, wrote that the West failed to recognize that
Russia would always fight back to protect its national interests even when it
is clearly the weaker of the competitors, and John J. Mearsheimer pointed to
the expansion of NATO as the villain in the piece. 8 These were lonely voices.
Mark Kramer treated the confrontation as a replay of traditional Great
Power rivalries, with China a stronger protagonist than Russia. Many
analysts, in fact, believe that the real post-Soviet Cold War is between the US
and China, not the US and Russia.9
The hyperbole of the new dichotomy was perhaps best represented in July
2020 by comments made to Lavrov by Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi,
who said that America has ‘lost its mind, morals and credibility’ and was
‘pushing egoism, unilateralism and bullying to the limit’. At almost the same
time, Pompeo told an audience in Philadelphia that America was unique
among nations, able to champion the ‘dignity of every human being made in
the image of God’ and represents to the world ‘the star that shines brightest
when the night is the darkest’. In this extraordinarily myopic speech, he went
on to fault China for harsh abuses of human rights and did not mention
Russia.10 Be that as it may, this chapter deals for the most part with the
Kremlin’s relationship with the American White House.

Moscow and Washington face off in 2018

In the midst of all the ‘collusion’ accusations raised against his team, Donald
Trump’s National Security Strategy of 2017 named Russia as a major threat
to ‘American power, influence, and interests’, and his former envoy to the
UN, Nikki Haley, informed students at Duke University that ‘Russia’s never
gonna be our friend’.11 On his part, Trump congratulated Putin after his
inauguration in May, 2018, and, according to the Russian media, said that he
hoped to establish better relations with Russia.12
In a September 2018 interview for the independent Novaia Gazeta, Trenin
assumed that Moscow and Washington would face each other in ‘hybrid
wars’ for some time and predicted that the forthcoming US mid-term elec-
tions would have a strong Russophobic theme to them.13 Although he was
right in that last regard, regularized links between upper-level officials from
both countries remained constant. These included senior military personnel.
Distrust of each other’s motives remained equally constant.
Diplomatic squabbles erupted on a regular basis, few of them major, many
of them petty.14 For instance, much ado about Trump’s controversial invita-
tion to Putin to visit the US was overtaken by Washington’s expulsion of 60
Russian embassy officials because of the Skripal affair, and Moscow’s
242 New Cold War
tit-for-tat retaliation. Reciprocal closures of consulates in Seattle and St.
Petersburg saw chances for a summit, if the proposal was ever serious, dim.15
A few days after the diplomatic wrestling match began, the US Treasury
Department added 24 more Russian individuals and 24 entities to its list of
sanctioned people and companies compiled under the ‘Countering America’s
Adversaries Through Sanctions Act’ (CAATSA) enacted in January 2017.
The new wave of sanctions represented a response to Russia’s meddling in the
2016 presidential election, whereas earlier ones referred to its activities in
Ukraine and Syria.16 By that time, the American list of sanctioned Russians
had grown to 569 people and entities.17
The silliness reached a peak when two dancers from the Bolshoi ballet were
refused entry to the US even though they were invited to perform at the
Lincoln Center, and pilots and crews with Aeroflot, the only Russian airline
with regular flights to the US, had difficulty obtaining visas.18 Early in 2019,
the US space agency, NASA, rescinded an invitation to Dmitry Rogozin,
head of the Russian space agency, even though NASA administrator Jim
Bridenstine was in Russia a few months before that to observe a two-man
crew space launch. In place since 2014, the entry embargo had been lifted
temporarily for the 2019 visit, and then revoked at the last minute. The sud-
denly renewed ban put future space cooperation in jeopardy.19 A few Western
political analysts saw the quickness of American willingness to penalize
Russia for any perceived threat and its increasingly inflamed rhetoric as coun-
terproductive; still more believed it necessary and even pushed Washington
towards direct confrontation.20 Russia (and China) made it clear that they
were preparing to defend themselves.21 The horrors of 9/11 seemed to have
been forgotten as American politicians and editorialists began insisting that
Russia was a greater threat than ISIL.22
The American unilateral withdrawal from the Iran nuclear accord and
subsequent imposition of new sanctions on Teheran was a turning point in
the new Cold War. Calling the US renunciation a ‘gross’ violation of the
norms of international law, and pledging to maintain a close working asso-
ciation with Iran, Lavrov set new lines in the sand.23 In this case, most Western
European countries agreed with Moscow. Speaking at Russia’s annual
Victory Day Parade in 2018, Putin again took a swipe at Washington by
remarking that ‘behind new threats, the same old ugly features are emerging:
selfishness and intolerance, aggressive nationalism and claims to
exceptionalism’.24
Not surprisingly, a Levada survey conducted in June found that Russians
saw the US as the country most hostile to them (78%), distantly followed by
Ukraine (49%) and the UK (38%). Belarus (49%), China (40%) and
Kazakhstan (32%) were considered the friendliest.25
All the hostility in the air notwithstanding, negotiations for a Trump visit
to Russia intensified. Bolton was in Moscow in late June to discuss the
­potential meeting and Trump himself regularly advocated such talks.26 The
meet was scheduled for 16 July, in Finland, just four days after a NATO
­summit in Brussels. No preconditions were required for this first official
 New Cold War 243
encounter between the two presidents.27 In the meantime, an American con-
gressional delegation of Republicans led by Alabama Senator Richard Shelby
spent a week in Russia, 30 June to 5 July, sat down with Lavrov, Volodin and
members of the Federation Council and claimed to have discussed many seri-
ous issues frankly and, Shelby said, laid the groundwork for ‘better relations’
– perhaps.28
All this became moot in August 2018, when Washington announced
another series of sanctions. Concluding that Russia violated the Convention
on the Prohibition of Chemical and Biological Weapons in the Skripal case,
the US government restricted American exports to, and financial transactions
with, Russia as a first step. A second stage, scheduled for a few months later
called for lesser diplomatic relations and a near cessation of trade. The latter
stage depended on Russia’s willingness to renounce all use of chemical weap-
ons and allow field inspections by UN experts.29 Moscow ignored these
demands and the new round went into effect in due course. In addition to the
economic restrictions outlined in Chapter 4, the sweeping bill called for a
commission to evaluate Putin’s personal wealth, and affirmed that the US
would never recognize the Crimean Peninsula as Russian. Worried about
actions that their own president might take, sponsors of the Bill also set a
two-thirds minimum Senate vote needed if he called for withdrawal from
NATO.30
Russia reacted typically, calling the proposed sanctions illegal and
‘unfriendly’. Considering that the demands made by legislators in Washington
were extraordinarily interventionist and unlikely to be heeded by any country
capable of withstanding them, the response was mild.31
Assistant Secretary of State A. Wess Mitchell laid the US position out to
the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in late August, 2018. Opening with
the statement that US diplomacy must be backed by ‘military power that is
second to none’, he then provided the Committee with a long list of sanctions
that, he declared, had seriously damaged Russian firms and at the same time
created the means for ‘Russia [to] live up to its commitments under the Minsk
Agreements. But in all of these areas, it is up to Russia, not America, to take
the next step.’ This had been the unaltered American stance since 2014.
Apparently, he wasn’t aware, or didn’t care, that Russia has no specific
obligations under the Minsk Agreement and that Ukraine does. Moreover,
while accusing Russia of meddling in US elections, quite correctly, his own
boast that ‘from the Caucasus to Central Europe we are promoting energy
diversification, fighting corruption, and competing for hearts and minds’
unwittingly acknowledged that the US was itself meddling everywhere on a
grand scale.32

The 2018 summit

Shortly before the Putin–Trump summit, special counsel Robert Mueller
issued indictments against 12 Russian intelligence officers for hacking the
Democratic Party’s computers during the 2016 presidential election
244 New Cold War
campaign. Twelve other Russians had been charged in February, though the
July batch of indictments was the first against Russian government agents. As
a result of this announcement, American media gurus flooded the airwaves
and print media with demands that Trump confront Putin aggressively; many
also expressing concern that Trump might give away something unwittingly.33
Neither side had high expectations: the US would have liked Russia to give
them a free hand with Iran and Russia hoped for a settlement on Ukraine
and perhaps even some sanctions relief. No such agreements were reached.
There was no transcript of their conversation and no major policy decisions
announced. A post-summit press conference provided viewers with an
extraordinary scene of Trump accepting Putin’s denial of any interference in
the US election campaign as true. The American political and media arenas
rang with outrage, while the Russian media, and Lavrov, revelled in Putin’s
apparent media victory.34
The gist of their conversation trickled out a few days after the summit
when Trump invited Putin to Washington, ‘so that we can start implementing
some of the many things discussed, including stopping terrorism, security for
Israel, nuclear proliferation, cyberattacks, trade, Ukraine, Middle East Peace
and North Korea’.35 The invitation sparked still more indignation in the US,
mostly from Democrats. Talk shows took on an almost frenzied tone and
congressmen launched discussions about further sanctions against Russia.
The outcry prompted Trump’s office to postpone the second meeting. Putin
then turned the issue around and said that, if conditions were right, he would
invite Trump to Moscow after his own visit to Washington.36

Mid-term elections in USA

Russiagate and the widespread conspiracy theory that Putin had put Trump
in office, were constant underlying themes in the rancorous mid-term US
political campaign.37 The clear Democrat Party victory in America’s House
of Representatives meant that Russia was going to be an even larger target
when the House changed hands in January 2019. There were signs of what
was coming already in November 2018: the US Treasury imposed a new
round of financial sanctions against Russian business interests in Crimea,
plans for a Trump–Putin side-line meeting in Paris were cancelled, and, as we
have seen, there was confusion over invitations to senior Russian business
people to attend the annual Davos Forum.38
The release in December 2018 of two detailed reports on Russian attempts
to influence the US 2016 election via social media sealed the fate of the
Russiagate saga. These studies, prepared by private cybersecurity companies
and university-based researchers for the US Senate intelligence committee,
described how Russian trolls used Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and other
social media to persuade voters to the detriment of Hillary Clinton and to
the advantage of Donald Trump. The investigations charged that the i­ nfluence
campaign was conducted by a company in St. Petersburg, the Internet
Research Agency (IRA), owned by Yevgeny Prigozhin, one of the Russians
 New Cold War 245
indicted in February.39 A spokesperson for the Kremlin belittled the reports
for failing to demonstrate how the Russian government might be responsible.40
As it happened, Putin and Trump met during a solemn ceremony in
November at the Arc de Triomphe and later at a working lunch with other
world leaders. Both said they would have a more substantial meeting later in
the month on the margins of the G-20 in Buenos Aires.41 That didn’t happen:
on 29 November, Trump abruptly cancelled the meeting with Putin because,
he said, Russia did not return ships seized from Ukraine during the Kerch
Strait crisis. They did speak briefly in Argentina and, according to Putin,
expressed opposing positions on the Sea of Azov affairs: ‘he has his own
position on these issues … I have mine’.42 A few days later, a senior US State
Department official told a meeting of the North Atlantic Council that ‘we
want the Russians to absorb the message that they need to release the
[Ukrainian] crews or there will be consequences and the pain will grow over
time’.43 As we have seen, the crews were released – a year later, as part of a
prisoner exchange with Ukraine.

The Mueller report

In a year-end grasp at some sort of accommodation, Putin sent a New Year’s
greetings letter to Trump saying that the Kremlin was open to a ‘wide-rang-
ing’ dialogue. There was no immediate reply.44 Nevertheless, the two presi-
dents were clearly relieved when, in April, the now-public Mueller report
proclaimed that there was no hard evidence of collusion between Trump’s
campaign team and Russia, though there were lots of contacts, and consider-
able evidence of Trump obstructing justice at home.45 Most Russian analysts
recognized that there would be no relief in the Russophobia of America’s
Democrats, who vowed to keep an investigation going. As Dmitri Trenin put
it in a tweet:

That the #Mueller investigation does not support allegations of Trump-

Kremlin collusion won’t lead to Russia becoming less toxic in US. Critics
won’t take no for an answer, &will double down, w/more sanctions. Also,
the election meddling charge stands.46

Indeed, Congress went on the attack again, making any idea that Russian–
US relations might improve a fantasy.
Nina L. Khrushcheva, a prominent Russian-American professor who
acknowledged that ‘normally [she] would not side with the Kremlin’, called
the American tendency to blame Russia for everything an American ‘Russian
derangement syndrome’ and predicted it would get worse if the Democrats
won the presidency. She wondered if the ‘Russophobia found in some seg-
ments of America’s political class and media has become pathological’.47
Whether her analysis is accurate or not, the name-calling on both sides make
the 2021 deadline for extending the New START the most important date in
Cold War history.
246 New Cold War
International interaction
As the post-Mueller dust settled, Trump and Putin held a one-hour telephone
conversation, in which they discussed Venezuela, North Korea, Ukraine,
trade and the potential for a new nuclear accord. Trump did not raise the
issue of Russian interference in the 2020 election, thereby angering Democrats
and giving the media something to expound upon. The Mueller report was
mentioned only in passing. The important thing, of course, was that the two
presidents were talking. Asked about Venezuela, Trump told reporters in
Washington that the Kremlin was not seeking to ‘get involved’ there, or so
Putin told him. They both called the conversation constructive.48
Constructive or not, it was already clear that Russia and Putin were back
in play as the bête noire of the next US election, more than a year away.
When Trump suddenly pulled US troops out of Syria, leaving their allies, the
Kurds, to face Turkish forces, ex-ambassador to Moscow Michael McFaul
called the decision a GOP ‘gift to Putin’.49 Not to be left out of the ‘Russia
did it’ game, Hillary Clinton startled the Democratic slate by tagging Green
Party candidate Jill Stein and Democratic nominee hopeful Tulsi Gabbard
‘assets’ being groomed by Russia. If, in fact, Russians were trying to
‘undermine American democracy’, as they are so often accused of doing,
their efforts looked pretty meagre beside the mud-slinging and conspiracy
theory harangues the Democrat and Republican parties and their third-party
funders fired at each other.
There were more important issues separating the two countries. In addi-
tion to their positions on Ukraine, Syria and Venezuela, Moscow and
Washington remained on opposite sides when it came to further NATO
enlargement (Montenegro [2017], North Macedonia, [2020], Bosnia and
Herzegovina, Georgia and Ukraine) and the independence of Kosovo,
Abkhazia and South Ossetia. They were competitors for influence in large
regions, such as Central Asia, the Middle East and parts of Latin America,
and found it all too easy to scapegoat each other whenever a major interna-
tional crisis broke out.

Russophobia in action
Interpol was dragged into the new Russia–US confrontation when last-min-
ute American pressure helped prevent Russian Aleksandr Prokopchuk from
becoming its president. Frontrunner for the post and one of four vice presi-
dents of Interpol, Prokopchuk faced intense lobbying from Washington,
London, the Baltic States and Ukraine, who successfully supported a South
Korean for the position. Hyperbole aimed at Prokopchuk implied that he
would govern Interpol in the interests of the Kremlin. An angry Moscow
called the action ‘unprecedented interference’ and pointed out that
Prokopchuk could not govern in Russia’s interest, even if he wanted to.
Interpol has 192 member countries, each with one vote for president; it has
no power to arrest, rather it gathers and distributes intelligence on crimes and
 New Cold War 247
individuals. Its 13-person executive committee, chaired by the president,
operates by consensus. A German secretary general runs its daily affairs.
Achieving the presidency of Interpol could have propaganda value for
Moscow, but not much else. Nevertheless, soon after the election, zealous
Putin critics abroad, such as William Browder and Garri Kasparov, began
lobbying Western governments to have Russia expelled from Interpol.50
In fact, few writers played a greater role than Browder when it came to
demonizing Russia and Putin in the North American court of public opinion.
In addition to his widely-read book on the Magnitsky Case, his addresses to
the US Congress and the Canadian Parliament, and multiple appearances on
television as an ‘expert’ on Russia, shaped thinking everywhere, especially
since there was rarely, if ever, anyone invited to speak with a contrary
perspective. Kasparov, self-exiled Russian citizen, former chess champion
and politician, who chairs the New York-based Human Rights Foundation,
rails everywhere against Putin. Another Putinophobe lionized in the West in
spite of his shady background and openly-expressed desire to foster revolution
in Russia, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, was invited to share his opinions on
Russia’s prospects with the American Council on Foreign Relations in April
2019.51
The former Russian prime minister and prominent oppositionist,
Kasyanov, has toured Canada and the US underscoring Putin’s villainy. In
2014, he was invited before the House of Lords EU External Affairs Sub-
Committee in London’s Houses of Parliament to be questioned on how the
EU should respond to Russian military intervention in Ukraine. None of the
Russian ‘liberals’ have had any trouble finding publishers in the West for their
anti-Putin scenarios. Whatever their credentials, the guiding factor in seeking
their opinions seems to be that they are Russian, or lived in Russia, and are
known to oppose Putin.52
Although what they have to say bear many truths, these efforts are uniquely
one-sided. Knowing beforehand almost exactly what their stance will be,
institutions that invite them to speak about Russia to legislative bodies,
influential think-tanks and academic forums, contribute to a witness-leading
manipulation of public opinion and perhaps even help shape foreign policy
in Western countries.
A reviewer for the prestigious American journal, Foreign Affairs, recently
encapsulated this phenomenon by complaining that Russia has not been
studied in the US to the extent that the USSR was. Instruction in the history
and language of Russia has almost disappeared, and ‘a great deal of U.S.
journalism on Russia suffers from hyperbole, paranoia, and clichés’.53 A
prominent Russian-American scholar of international affairs wrote in 2019
that the ‘high-intensity of Russophobia within the American media,
overblown even by the standards of previous threat narratives, could no
longer be explained by differences in national values or by bilateral tensions.
The new fear of Russia is reflected by domestic political polarization and
growing national unease over America’s identity and future direction’.54 Of
course, Russian media and politicians can be described in the same way, and
248 New Cold War
the Russian official line is presented more purposely and consistently than
the American one.55
Flaws in both the Browder and Khodorkovsky narratives noted by the
European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), in 2013 and 2019, failed to
interest Western pundits and media. In the latter case, the ECHR found that
the ‘complaint about Mr. Magnitskiy’s arrest and subsequent detention [was]
manifestly ill-founded’, and threw it out. The Magnitsky family, the com-
plainants, based their claim on Browder’s tale that Magnitsky’s arrest on tax
evasion charges was illegal and corrupt – it wasn’t. According to researchers
for Der Spiegel, Browder’s tale was riddled with contradictions and even lies.
A documentary film shot in 2016 by Russian Andrei Nekrasov and titled The
Magnitsky Act – Behind the Scenes sparked controversy. It was produced as
a joint project by Norwegian, German and Finnish film companies and pre-
miered in Oslo. Nekrasov, who was perceived as anti-Putin, at first accepted
the Browder narrative as the truth, then changed his mind after long inter-
views with Browder and presented Magnitsky as ‘an accomplice rather than
a victim’. Browder sued; scheduled screenings in the West were cancelled.56
It remains almost unseen.
In Khodorkovsky’s case, the ECHR determined in 2011 that his arrest in
2003 was not politically motivated and that he was therefore not a ‘prisoner
of conscience’.57 In 2019, a British judge reproached the Khodorkovsky
team for lying.58 In both earlier instances, the court noted Russian violations
of European Convention protocols during incarceration, while deeming
legitimate the reasons for the initial arrests. The ECHR confirmed these find-
ings in January 2020.59
Whether the challenges to Browder’s accusations are accurate, or not, or if
the decisions by European courts questioning his and Khodorkovsky’s
veracity are reality-based, the important thing here is that, by ignoring
accounts that don’t fit the conventional storyline, Western politicians and
mainstream media may lend them greater credence than they deserve.
Oppositionists living abroad upped their game in 2019. The VIIth Forum
of Free Russia, which meets in Vilnius, saw Russian civic activists from both
abroad and Russia gather and rail against Putin, calling his regime a
‘dictatorship’ and warning against the ‘fascistization’ of Russia. Kasparov
was there again, as was Ilya Ponomarev.60 Because the Forums are sponsored
in part by Lithuania’s foreign ministry, Russia regards them as integral to
that country’s anti-Russia agenda.
The willingness, even eagerness, on the part of some European and
American politicians to fault Russia for their own internal crises was exposed
when former National Security Adviser to Obama and ambassador to the
UN, Susan Rice, hinted that Russia might be partially behind the mass
demonstration that swept the US in May/June 2020 after police killed yet
another unarmed black man. The violent and divisive parts of the huge
rallies were ‘right out of the Russian playbook’, she told CNN in interview
on 31 May. She will be a member of Biden’s cabinet in 2021. Other prominent
political figures, such as Marco Rubio, took up the theme and blamed
 New Cold War 249
foreigners for the violence, while Trump designated the leftist anti-fascist
American movement, Antifa, a terrorist group, responsible for the violence
and looting. The lack of proportion and ‘out of touch’ extremes that such
assumptions exposed were discussed widely in Russia, and presumably else-
where.61 The tendency to blame foreigners for domestic ills is precisely the
practice for which the West condemn Russia.
The Russian MID took advantage of the American malaise by publishing
a list of police shootings of unarmed black citizens, and releasing a statement
that included the charge that, ‘the United States has certainly accumulated
systemic human rights problems: race, ethnic and religious discrimination,
police brutality, bias of justice, crowded prisons, and uncontrolled use of fire
arms and self-defence weapons by individuals, to name a few’.62 This could
have been written by Soviet agitatory in the 1960s, yet this time the Russian
propaganda agencies echoed judgements heard around the world and would
be hard to challenge as untrue.
The same could be said for a New York Times advertisement for a new
correspondent in Russia to cover ‘Vladimir Putin’s Russia’ that was described
in the ad as a country that

sends out hit squads armed with nerve agents against its enemies, most
recently the opposition leader Aleksei Navalny. It has its cyber agents sow
chaos and disharmony in the West to tarnish its democratic systems, while
promoting its faux version of democracy. It has deployed private military
contractors around the globe to secretly spread its influence. At home, its
hospitals are filling up fast with Covid patients as its president hides out in
his villa.

Hardly a description to inspire confidence that the subsequent news items

will be balanced. The MID called the advertisement ‘Russophobic’ and said
that it might not issue visas or accreditations to the paper’s Russia-based
staff because they were said in the ad to be living in ‘such inhumane
conditions’: ‘American journalists’ lives also matter, even if they work for the
New York Times’, spokeswoman Maria Zakharova intoned. 63
Russia, of course, had its own home-grown crises, epitomized by the
demonstrations in Khabarovsk and the Navalny poisoning. In the latter case,
the usual attempts to impugn foreigners gained no traction even in Russia,
and Western governments pounced. Merkel demanded explanations, and the
Kremlin said it would cooperate fully once it had copies of findings the MID
and PGO had requested from German doctors.64 Even as German doctors
insisted that Novichok had been administered to Navalny, the chief
toxicologist of the Omsk region, Aleksandr Sabaev, insisted that it could not
have been. By that time Navalny had emerged from the induced coma, was
disconnected from a ventilator and shortly thereafter was sending videos and
photos to followers in Russia. 65
It was left for observers to believe what they wished. That, of course, is
what the Cold War is all about.
250 New Cold War
NGOs as ‘foreign agents’
A signpost for Russia’s version of the new Cold War can be found in its
scattered application of the designation ‘foreign agent’. Civil society
organizations in Russia, NGOs, are subject to a Foreign Agents Law adopted
in 2012 by a government made wary by the eruption of domestic unrest over
electoral fraud in 2011. Large protests and demonstrations triggered fears in
the Kremlin that a Western-supported coloured revolution, or even a regime
change mission, was being prepared for Russia. Of the thousands of NGOs
in Russia, slightly more than half of which are involved in delivering social
services, 79 were registered as ‘foreign agents’ by 2018 because they received
financing from abroad. A few years earlier, over 300 were under investigation.
Even the Levada Centre, the country’s most respected and independent
polling agency, was ordered to register as a foreign agent because a small part
of its funding came from foreign entities, some of it indirectly.66 After three
years of appeals, a Moscow court concluded that the Centre was breaking the
law by refusing to register as a foreign agent and fined it the equivalent of
about $5,000.
Amendments to the law in 2017 and 2019 made it difficult for Russian
journalists to accept payments, or editors to print articles, from foreign
agencies. More tightening up came in 2020 when bills introduced changes to
NGO operations, restricting their rights to ‘freedom of expression, and
freedom to distribute and receive information’. Russian citizens designated as
foreign agents will be barred from holding state or municipal offices. In fact,
a law adopted on 25 December and signed by Putin the same week made it
possible to label any politically active, foreign-funded individual or
organization a ‘foreign agent’. For the first time, the Ministry of Justice
added individuals to the list, among them Lev Ponomarev. Some 20 NGOs
appealed these bills to both the Russian and European human rights
commissioners.67
International foundations that provide aid to NGOs involved in Russian
politics, or are directly involved themselves, are officially labelled ‘undesir-
able’. There are 13 of these.68
When the Russian Ministry of Justice placed the Washington-based
Free Russia Foundation on its ‘undesirable’ list in June 2019, the Prosecutor
General’s Office claimed it ‘threatened the constitutional system and secu-
rity of Russia’.69 A month later, the PGO added the Atlantic Council to the
‘undesirable’ group for the same expressed reason, and Russia’s media
labelled it a ‘rabidly anti-Russia think tank’ funded by US and UK arms
manufacturers.70 The presence of such anti-Putin persons as Anders
Åslund and former Ukrainian finance minister Natalie Jaresko on the
Council’s board may have been instrumental in this decision as, of course,
was the Council’s long record of publications and statements antithetical
to Russia.
The Russian Ministry of Justice placed America’s leading overseas propa-
ganda dispenser, RFE/RL, on its ‘foreign agent’ list in February 2020, where
 New Cold War 251

Table 6.1 R
 egister of foreign mass media functioning as a foreign agent, December
2020

Number Name of foreign media Date of designation

1 Voice of America [VOA] 12/05/2017

2 Idel.Realities [Idel.Realii; Volga regions] 12/05/2017
3 Caucasus.Realities 12/05/2017
4 Crimea.Realities [Krym.Realii] 12/05/2017
5 TV Channel Present Time [Nastoiashchee 12/05/2017
Vremia]
6 Tatar-Bashkir Service of RL [Azatliq Radiosi] 12/05/2017
7 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) 12/05/2017
8 Siberia.Realities 12/05/2017
9 Factograph [VOA] 12/05/2017
10 North.Realities 15/11/2019
11 Limited Liability Company, RFE/RL 11/01/2020
12 Czech news company, Medium-Orient 21/12/2020
13 Ponomarev, Lev Aleksandrovich 28/12/2020
14 Savitskaia, Liudmila [RFE/RL journalist] 28/12/2020
15 Markelov, Sergei Yevgenievich [RFE/RL 28/12/2020
journalist]
16 Kamaliagin, Denis Nikolaevich [Pskov editor] 28/12/2020
17 Apakhonchich, Daria Aleksandrovna [artist, 28/12/2020
activist]

Source: Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation, 28 December 2020, https://minjust.gov.

ru/ru/documents/7755/

it joined Voice of America (VOA), their joint TV operation Current Time

(Nastoiashchee Vremia) and eight other foreign-funded entities categorized
earlier. These latter include sites in the Russian Caucasus, Crimea and Siberia.
RFE/RL’s Radio Svoboda (Radio Liberty) filed documentation as a foreign
agent in January. RFE/RL and VOA are supervised by the US Agency for
Global Media which has an operating budget of well over $700 million pro-
vided annually by the US Congress. Its mission ‘is to inform, engage and
connect people around the world in support of freedom and democracy’.71
Like RT, which must register as a ‘foreign agent’ in the US, the RFE/RL and
VOA cannot claim to function independently of their home country’s foreign
policy (Table 6.1).

Spy capers
Speaking to the FSB Board in March 2019, Putin noted that attempts by
foreign intelligence agencies to operate in Russia had increased. He claimed
that 129 personnel officers and 465 agents were caught spying in 2018.72 In
fact, both ‘sides’ had become almost desperate to find spies, whether they
were real or not.
The end of the first Cold War seems to have gone unnoticed by American
and Russian security agencies. The FBI arrested 11 Russian ‘sleepers’ in June
252 New Cold War
2010. Within a month, they were exchanged for Russian citizens jailed in
Russia for spying on behalf of Western agencies. One of the exchangees was
Anna Chapman, a beautiful model serving as a Russian mole in the US;
another was Sergei Skripal.
A mere two months after Putin’s inauguration in 2018, US authorities
arrested Maria Butina, accusing her of infiltrating and trying to influence the
National Rifle Association (NRA), the most important unofficial national
lobby for Republicans. According to US reports she was a plant handled by
Aleksandr Torshin, a deputy governor of the Bank of Russia. Bail refused,
Butina was placed in a federal prison in Washington and charged with failing
to register as a Russian agent. How she was expected to influence the five
million-member NRA remained a mystery.73
After federal prosecutors admitted that they falsely accused her of offering
sex in exchange for a position within the Republican Party, they insisted that
the fact that representatives of the Russian government visited her in prison
six times and that Lavrov had complained about her case to Mike Pompeo
were evidence enough that she was an agent of the Russian government.74
Yet, surely, that was the job of Russian embassy officials and Lavrov. In
December, Butina made a deal with prosecutors: she pleaded guilty to one
conspiracy charge and of infiltrating the NRA as an agent of Russia. No
espionage charges were ever levelled against her, though the US media kept
calling her a ‘spy’, without ever clarifying what it was she was presumed to be
spying on.
When, in April 2019, she was finally sentenced to 18 months in prison (less
9 months already served), for being an unregistered lobbyist, the judge said
Butina’s actions endangered US national security, without defining how she
did so.75 Released in late October 2019, she returned home and, after several
offers of positions, chose to work for human rights commissioner, Tatyana
Moskalkova, defending the rights of Russians living abroad.
Butina was also named to the Public Chamber where, in November, she
recommended that Russia tighten up its laws on registering foreign agents to
include individuals who work in Russia ‘for foreign money’, performing
‘tasks set by other states’. Don’t make the laws as rigid as those in the US,
where she was jailed for ‘no political activity, no money, and no harmful
activity for the American state’, she added.76
Meanwhile, the FSB announced that, ‘during an espionage operation’, it
had arrested a US citizen named Paul N. Whelan for spying in Moscow.77
Details trickled out slowly. The Western media treated the incident as
retaliation for the Butina case, coming as it did so soon after she pleaded
guilty, and they were probably right. Whelan’s family said he was there for a
friend’s wedding; the US State Department demanded his return. The Russia
media described him as an operative who used social media to recruit
Russians with access to classified data.78 A large portion of his VKontakte
social network contacts were Russians with military and/or IT backgrounds,
over 20 of them. Asked about Whelan during his annual press conference,
Lavrov said ‘he was caught red-handed’. Whelan’s lawyers claimed he was set
 New Cold War 253
up, and he denied all charges.79 In June 2020, he was sentenced to 16 years for
espionage, amid rumours that he would be exchanged for one or more
Russians in American prisons.80
Doubtless, there were real spies at work. The Dutch expelled four Russian
diplomats in October 2018 for alleged cyberattacks against the OPCW in The
Hague, and two more in December 2020 for espionage.81 The first expulsion
coincided with accusations from British military intelligence that the GRU
had set an entire network of hackers loose to disrupt and spy on a wide range
of international targets, ranging from the US’s Democratic National
Committee in 2016 to the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) in 2017. The
GRU was also censured for employing Bad Rabbit ransomware to infect
organizations and consumers. The US indicted seven Russian intelligence
officers for conspiring to hack into computers used by WADA and the
OPCW, and also for conspiracies to commit wire fraud and money laundering.
Canada chimed in with similar finger pointing. Russian embassies rejected
the charges, calling them ‘orchestrated propaganda’ and a ‘witch hunt’ by the
US, the UK and their allies designed to scare domestic audiences with a new
‘Russian threat’.82
In 2019, Russian authorities convicted former head of the FSB 2nd
Department, Cybercrime, Col. Sergei Mikhailov, of high treason. Charged
with providing secret information to his American counterparts, he was
handed a sentence of 22 years. Three other men working for the Kaspersky
Lab cybersecurity firm received shorter sentences. One consequence of these
arrests was the end of the RF–US cooperation on cybercrime.83 In February
2020, a Mexican citizen was arrested in Florida and charged with conducting
surveillance on behalf of Russia. His target was a US government informant
who had provided the US with data on Russia’s intelligence services. Later in
the year, the FSB in Tomsk took a retired Russian scientist into custody on
suspicion of passing technical secrets to China.84
A more mysterious spy antic emerged in September 2019, when CNN
reported that Washington had ‘evacuated’ a ‘mole’ from Russia in 2017,
hinting that he had been well placed in the Putin Administration. Unverified
reports claimed that Oleg Smolenkov, an official with the Presidential
Administration’s Foreign Policy Directorate, and assistant to Yury Ushakov
when he was ambassador to the US, was the man in question. He is now
living in the US. Typically underplaying the incident, Peskov called the
American version of the tale ‘pulp fiction’.85
Just as Butina was arriving back in Russia, the Bulgarian foreign ministry
denounced a Russian diplomat for spying and asked Moscow to recall him.
Two more Russian diplomats were declared persona non grata (PNG) in
Sofia during the winter of 2020, and two from the Russian trade commission
were sent home in September. Polish authorities detained a Polish citizen in
Warsaw and charged him with spying for Russia. This latter event was the
latest in a tit-for-tat series that saw a Russian court sentence a Polish citizen
to 14 years for espionage and a Polish court giving a former government
employee three years for a similar offence.86 Not to be left out, Latvia arrested
254 New Cold War
one of its citizens in March 2020 and charged him with trying to recruit a
Latvian secret service officer to gather intelligence for Russia. This was the
fourth such case in Riga since 2018.87
Authorities in Ukraine arrested a man in March 2020 and accused him of
spying for Russia in the Mykolaiv shipyards. This arrest came one day after
Putin delivered a speech in Sevastopol in which he said, ‘unfortunately, we
are seeing a spy mania in certain partner countries, which start expelling
entire teams of our diplomats … without explanation’.88 A few weeks later,
Czech authorities declared two Russian diplomats PNG, accusing them of
purposely spreading false stories about plans to poison, with ricin, three
Czech mayors who had angered the Kremlin in various ways. The Russian
MID called the tale a ‘fantasy’ and the official suspected of carrying the ricin
said he had a suitcase filled only with ‘disinfectants and sweets’. It seemed
that the tale was spread as a result of a dispute between members of the
embassy staff, but the expulsions stood.89
The spy train did not slow down. In 2020, Norway declared a Russian
trade representative PNG in August, Austria expelled a Russian diplomat for
alleged industrial espionage a few weeks later and Slovakia sent three Russian
foreign service staff members home for ‘crimes’. Columbia declared two
Russian diplomats PNG in December. Russia retaliated in kind.90
There was a flurry of conjecture in the summer of 2020 when the FSB
arrested Ivan Safronov, a journalist who for ten years covered military and
military-industrial issues for Kommersant and spent a year doing the same for
Vedomosti. He had been working since May 2020 as a media adviser to the
head of Roscosmos, Rogozin. Police charged that he had gathered confidential
information on weapons sales to the Middle East and Africa and passed
them on to an unnamed contact (assumed to be a Czech) from a NATO
country. Few other details were available.91 Safronov, who had been in
Rogozin’s employ for only two months, pleaded not guilty to a charge of high
treason. Critics noted that anyone who worked for Rogozin would have been
very carefully vetted before he was hired, and even Rogozin said that Safronov
had no access to classified materials.92
The list kept growing. In October 2020, the FSB arrested two brothers who
were suspected of passing documents on to NATO agents in Estonia.
Detained in separate Russian cities, one of them was in the Russian armed
forces, the other lived in Estonia. They were charged with high treason. In
June, the FSB accused a Russian nuclear physicist of giving secret papers to
China, and then in October it denounced a Siberia-based retired scientist for
passing on technical information to the same source. In December, the
Moscow city court sentenced Moldovan citizen, Karina Turcan (Tsurkan), to
15 years for passing documents related to Russian energy supplies to
Ukrainian agents. Arrested in 2018, she had been a board member of
Moscow-based joint stock company Inter RAO energy group. The human
rights organization, Memorial, called her a political prisoner and supported
an appeal.93 Washington and Beijing were picking up foreign and domestic
spies too. As Sherlock Holmes would say, the game was afoot.
 New Cold War 255
Early in 2019, police arrested a prominent American businessman in
Russia. Michael Calvey was not considered a spy; rather, he was charged with
defrauding Vostochny Bank shareholders. In addition to the expected outcry
from Western business people and American threats to boycott the SPIEF,
members of the Russian economic elite, such as Kudrin and Gref, supported
Calvey. After two months in pre-trial detention, he was moved to house
arrest, and his assets in Russia were frozen.94 Asked about Calvey during the
2019 sessions of SPIEF, Putin insisted that the matter was out of his hands,
that the ‘law is the law’. He proclaimed that the case was the result of
America’s ‘unrestricted economic egoism’, which, in turn, was the source of
‘endless conflicts’ and trade wars.95 If there was wrongdoing it was more
likely the swampy nature of the Russian financial world that facilitated it.
The financial side of the case was settled in October 2020 with a payment of
some $32 million to Vostochny Bank from Baring Vostok. He was released in
November. The criminal case remained pending.

Space capers
Space matters were caught up in the new Cold War competition as well.
Earlier words of caution about decreasing levels of cooperation in space
came home to roost in the spring of 2020 when President Trump signed an
executive order allowing ‘commercial exploration, recovery and use of
resources in outer space’, with specific reference to the Moon. It called on
‘commercial entities’ to participate in the undertaking as partners of the
American government. The order claimed that outer space was not a ‘global
commons’ and that, therefore, the US could recover and use its resources in
any way it wished. This was a classic ‘first come, first served’ policy that the
Kremlin immediately referred to as ‘colonialism’, failing to mention that it
too had long-range plans to place a permanent base on the moon. Roscosmos
complained that ‘attempts to expropriate outer space and aggressive plans to
actually seize territories of other planets hardly set countries [on course for]
fruitful cooperation’ and that ‘everyone remembers the outcome’ of countries
seizing territories for their own benefit. Whatever the right or wrong of
Trump’s project, given that he had already supported the weaponization of
space, still more frontiers for dangerous competition opened up.96
In the meantime, a joint Russian–US space crew lifted off from the Baikonur
cosmodrome on 9 April 2020, after a period of isolation to avoid the corona-
virus. This launch was expected to be the final time that the US used Russian
rockets for space flight, as US private firms SpaceX (Elon Musk) and Boeing
were preparing their own launch sites and space craft.97 SpaceX launched
from Cape Canaveral successfully on 31 May with two US astronauts aboard,
thereby breaking Roscosmos’ monopoly on transporting astronauts to the
International Space Station (ISS), and also compelling it to modernize the
Russian space programme or fall behind. Recognizing the need to compete, in
October Roscosmos ferried one American and two Russian cosmonauts to
the ISS in half the time it usually takes, setting a new record.98
256 New Cold War
Space X launched again in November as part of NASA’s Commercial
Crew Programme with three American and one Japanese astronauts who
plan to stay in the ISS for six months.

Manipulating public opinion

As 2018 came to a close, a few new studies challenged the widely accepted
Western narrative on ‘Russian aggression’, ‘Russian meddling’ and specific
incidents such as the arrest of, and charges against, Butina. 99 That does
not mean the official narrative was shoved aside, for the minds of main-
stream pundits and politicians were long since made up. Nor did revision-
ists make headway insofar as the public was concerned. A Gallup poll
conducted in February 2019 showed that 73 per cent of American respon-
dents viewed Russia unfavourably, the most negative since the fall of the
USSR (Table 6.2).100
These opinions were matched in November in an annual survey conducted
by the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation which found 71 per cent of
respondents believing Russia was an enemy. Interestingly, while 60 per cent
also saw China as an enemy, the majority viewed China as a greater threat to
the US than Russia, especially in matters related to the economy. The threat
from Russia lay in its potential for cyberattacks, not in military aggression or
interfering in elections.101 Events of December 2020 may have proven this
judgement a correct one (see ahead).
While the Reagan Foundation poll was being conducted, US agencies
advised the Congressional Intelligence Committee that Russia was already
interfering in the next US presidential election by hacking election
infrastructure and weaponizing social media. The story energized Democrat
Party politicians and the US media, where talking heads repeated all the ear-
lier memes at length. Russia denied the allegations, again, calling it paranoia
and accusing Democrats of deploying Russophobia to strengthen their

Table 6.2 Gallup Poll on American attitudes towards Russia February 2019.

Americans’ Overall View of Russia

%Favourable %Unfavourable

1989 62 29
1991 66 25
1997 56 36
1999 60 38
2003 61 26
2009 40 53
2011 50 40
2015 32 70
2020 24 73

Source: Lydia Saad, ‘Majority of Americans Now Consider Russia a Critical Threat’, Gallup, 27
February 2019, https://news.gallup.com/poll/247100/majority-americans-consider-russia-criti-
cal-threat.aspx
 New Cold War 257
campaign. Trump denied it as well, once again rejecting advice from his own
intelligence agencies.102 Pompeo offered a $10 million reward ‘for information
leading to the identification or location of any person who, acting at the
direction or under the control of a foreign government, interferes with U.S.
elections by engaging in certain criminal cyber activities’, and named ‘Russia
and other malign actors’. Whether this pronouncement represented a real
fear that Russia was planning, or was even capable of, a massive disruption
of the US presidential election, or if it was yet another wild conspiracy the-
ory aimed at American voters, it was nonetheless odd and demonstrated how
deeply the ‘Russia threat’ paradigm had penetrated the American psyche.103
In the long run, in fact, it was Trump and segments of the GOP leadership
that diminished American democracy with their repeated accusations of
fraud, dozens of evidence-free lawsuits and attempts to overthrow ‘the will of
the people’. The notion of Russian ‘meddling’ almost disappeared.
At least one prominent analyst of Russia affairs cautioned against crediting
Russia with far more influence than it was capable of wielding:

If 2020 turns out to be a repeat of 2016, it will be so not because Putin

has devised a grandiose plot to bring down the United States or under-
mine democracy writ large but rather because Moscow is using whatever
limited means are at its disposal to bare its teeth at what it sees as a far
more powerful bully. And it doesn’t care a great deal about the specific
consequences, so long as the result is to make itself look stronger than it
really is.104

If Anna Arutuyan’s analysis was correct, then the Kremlin’s bluff was
working.
The Russian public opinion of the US, on the other hand, seemed to be
going through a transition of some sort. Although it was noted above that
the opinion of over two-thirds of Russians about the US had been a mirror
image of American view of Russia, a November 2019 Levada Centre poll
said that opinions of the US improved since May 2018, rising from 20 to 47
per cent favourable (it dropped somewhat in January 2020). The ‘Generation
Z’ study of 2019 also revealed that 52 per cent of young Russians believed
that relations between Russia and the West might one day be friendly, and at
the same time blamed the US’s ‘anti-Russian policy’ and ‘NATO’s aggressive-
ness’ for the current confrontation (Table 6.3).105
These results turned out to not be a fluke. In February 2020, another
Levada poll revealed that nearly 80 per cent of Russian respondents wanted
Russia and the ‘West ‘to be friends (11%) and partners (67%), and only 3 per
cent saw the West as an enemy; 16 per cent saw the West as a rival. Nearly
half (49%) had positive feelings towards the EU and 42 per cent felt the same
way towards the US. Russian analysts attributed this turnabout to ‘mass
fatigue with foreign policy confrontation and an unwillingness to fight with
anyone’.106
258 New Cold War

Table 6.3 Levada Poll results on Russian attitudes towards the US January 2020

Jan 2018 Feb 2019 Aug 2019 Nov 2019 Jan 2020

Very well 2 4 4 7 4
Mostly good 23 30 38 40 38
Mostly bad 32 29 25 26 28
Very bad 20 27 19 15 18
Difficult to answer 22 11 14 13 12

Q. What is your entire feeling in regards to the United states of Americas? (one answer)
Source: ‘Relations to Countries’, Levada Centre, 18 February 2020. https://www.levada.ru/
en/2020/09/30/attitudes-toward-countries-4/

Inexplicable rumours circulating in the US to the effect that Donald Trump

was an agent for Russia were given a boost in 2019 by media headlining the
fact that the American president seized all notes taken during his one-on-one
talks with Putin.107 These over-the-top denunciations were treated with
amusement in Russia. Strategic planners in Moscow must have been delighted
over the apparent chaos in American thinking about Trump and Russia, and
at the same time worried about the uncertainty such chaos spawned. Lavrov,
perhaps rightly, said the stories reflected ‘the lowering of standards of jour-
nalism for the American press’.108

Ides of March, 2019

Even if the annexation of Crimea in 2014 was the key starting point for the
current geopolitical rift between Russia and the West, the sea change in
Washington towards demonizing Russia and Putin was more directly related
to charges that Moscow dared to intervene in an American election in 2016.
The lingering suspicion on the part of Democrats that Trump could not have
won without Russian help was lent credence by then FBI Director James
Comey’s testimony to a US Senate hearing in 2017 to the effect that Russia is
the ‘greatest threat of any nation on earth, given their intent and capabil-
ity’.109 He predicted that Moscow would meddle again in American elections,
because ‘they know it worked’, and that became the order of the day.
In early January 2018, Ambassador Huntsman openly accused the Kremlin
of planning to disrupt US democracy, US Senator Ben Cardin charged Putin
with a ‘relentless assault against democratic values abroad’ and Democrats in
the US Senate released a 200-page report describing, to their satisfaction, a
Kremlin campaign against democratic institutions in Europe. Putin’s goal
there, it said, was to undermine NATO. Russian media fired back with
multiple allegations about American interference in Russia’s elections,
including a possibly decisive involvement in Yeltsin’s second round victory
over Zyuganov in 1996.110
When Stephen F. Cohen wrote in March 2019 that the West’s inclination to
demonize Russia was reaching a feverish pitch, he cited opinion pieces from
 New Cold War 259
the Washington Post and The Economist, written by people without any
‘substantive knowledge of Russia’ and retired US generals who harped on
the ‘Russian threat’ and called for more armaments everywhere.111
‘Russian aggression’, or Russia’s ‘malign’ influence, had become the
preferred and immediate explanation in the West for political crises in Europe.
Cohen credited ‘Russiagate’ and the Democratic Party’s obsessive urge to
find Trump guilty of ‘collusion’ with Putin as a major factor in the
Russophobic mood in America, which he assumed would only worsen as the
country prepared for its next presidential election. An essay written by Joe
Biden for the prestigious Foreign Affairs in 2018, titled ‘How to Stand Up to
the Kremlin’, added fuel to Cohen’s concerns.112
If Cohen’s perspective was the right one, then the transfer of American
B-52 bombers to the UK in March 2019 and frequent Cassandra-like warn-
ings from generals in NATO, Sweden, Ukraine, the Baltics and elsewhere that
Moscow was planning an invasion of – somewhere, anywhere – threatened to
become self-fulfilling.113 Trump’s overt attempt in 2019 to get Ukrainian
President Zelenskiy to dig up dirt on a potential rival for the US presidency
in exchange for military funding and a visit to the White House pleased the
Kremlin, because Republican defence of Trump’s behaviour included the
conspiracy theory that foreign meddling in the US presidential campaign on
2016 was launched from Ukraine, by Ukrainian operatives, and not by
Russians.114 Putin’s reaction to the Republican claim was gleeful: ‘Thank God
no one blames us for interfering in the US election anymore, now the blame
is on Ukraine. Let them figure it out between themselves.’115 The rhetorical
clamour from Moscow and Washington seemed caught in a time warp.
In the midst of all this noise, in May 2019 Pompeo and Lavrov met in Sochi
to discuss a wide range of bilateral and multilateral subjects. No breakthroughs
were apparent, though they agreed that relations should improve. At least the
issues were set out in the open. Pompeo called Russian interference in US
elections ‘unacceptable’, questioned Lavrov on the Whelan and Calvey cases,
and repeated that the US would not recognize Russia’s annexation of Crimea.
They disagreed on Venezuela. Lavrov noted their differences in the Middle
East and Ukraine, and welcomed cooperation on North Korea and
Afghanistan.116 Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

Modernizing Cold War. Digital wars

In June 2019, the New York Times revealed that the US was stepping up its
digital attacks on Russia’s power grid. This led to the first public discussion
of a digital competition that been underway since 2012. In 2015, US officials
accused Russia of cyberattacks against American and EU NPPs, water and
electrical systems, and the sanctions imposed on Russia in February 2018
were retaliation in part for ‘malicious’ cyberattacks. According to John
Bolton, the US efforts in 2019 were purposely aggressive and designed to
insert crippling malware in the Russia system both as a warning and also to
put the US in a position to conduct cyber strikes against Russia’s grid in the
260 New Cold War
case of a major conflict. Bolton, of course, described American cyberattacks
as self-defence; and similar Russian attacks as ‘acts of war’.117
Russia’s response to these reports was to proclaim that strategic parts of
the Russian economy had been the target of foreign cyberattacks many times
and, to date, they had been thwarted.118 Unfazed by Russia’s apparent deflec-
tion of cyberattacks, in June USAID launched what it called the ‘Countering
Malign Kremlin Influence Development Framework’ project, allocating mil-
lions of dollars to neutralize Russian disinformation. Accusing Russia of
‘weaponizing’ information, USAID administrator Mark Green called Russia
a ‘cunning predator’ while touting extensive programmes to weaponize infor-
mation himself. The Russian foreign ministry called this venture by the
USAID a ‘tool of ideological warfare and brainwashing’.119 Pots calling each
other’s kettles black.
Doing its bit, in May 2019 the US Department of Defense and Chiefs of
Staff released a 167-page paper titled ‘Russian Strategic Intentions’. Except
for its updated material on cyber and other technologies the overall theme of
the paper mirrored the old containment doctrine.120 Not to be outdone,
Russia’s International Affairs Council published a position paper expressing
similar viewpoints, with the US as the cyberattacking risk to peace.121 This all
sounded very familiar to those of us old enough to remember the Cold War
days of the 1960s.
Outward tensions did not prevent Moscow and Washington from resuming
cooperation on cybersecurity in January 2020, and conducting new rounds
of talks on arms control issues in Vienna. In the latter case, the two sides
hoped to reduce misunderstandings that could lead to conflict.122 This was
the second such meeting; the first was held in 2019, when the American
delegation was led by John J. Sullivan before he was named ambassador to
Russia.
All notions about expanding, or even continuing, cooperation on cyber
security were shattered after the US found that hackers had infiltrated key
federal agencies, nuclear laboratories and Fortune 500 companies in a sweep-
ing assault that began in the spring of 2020 and was discovered only in
December. According to American authorities, this was the most serious
hacking case in US history. Microsoft Corp. named Canada, Mexico, the UK
and several EU states as additional victims, because they often use the Texas-
based SolarWinds Inc.’s network management software.123 Although the US
media and Pompeo immediately accused the Russia state, and the US media
took that for granted, federal officials were less certain of the attack’s origins.
Trump hedged, presumably leaving yet another mess for Joe Biden to clean up.
Perhaps it was time for both sides to heed the rare wisdom expressed by
Paul R. Kolbe, who served with the CIA’s director of overseas operations for
a quarter-century. In a New York Times opinion piece, he pointed out both
sides had been doing this sort of thing for decades and ‘the United States is,
of course, engaged in the same type of operation at an even grander scale’
than the Russians. Kolbe called for serious negotiations instead of posturing
and blustering from both sides.124 Meanwhile, the State Department
 New Cold War 261
announced that it was closing its last two consulates in Russia, in Vladivostok
and Yekaterinburg.
Russia responded with a rash of accusations of its own. Rostelecom, the
largest digital server in Russia, reported in December that there had been
more than 200 ‘professionally executed’ cyberattacks on its strategically
important companies during 2020, double that of last year, and that more
than a third of them originated in the US.125 Whatever the accuracy or imme-
diate consequences of these pronouncements, it was plain that yet another
new Cold War theatre was opening wide.
In fact, the day after news of the huge hack on American sites hit the
global media, the Russian Security Council met to discuss, specifically,
‘neutralizing the threats to our country’s national security associated with the
development of military artificial intelligence technologies in the leading
armies of the world’. Although this was a scheduled meeting, the agenda was
clearly re-focused to fit the new circumstances, which some commentators
described as one step removed from war.126

Putin and Trump meet again

Plans for an hour-long session between the two presidents during the 2019
G-20 summit in Osaka, Japan, saw pundits on both sides of the Atlantic
trying to set the informal agenda. American politicians pressed Trump to
bring up the matter of Russian interference in US elections. Trump demurred,
and then made a joke of it when they actually met, while Putin continued to
deny the obvious.
By that time, the spectre of war between the US and Iran, semi-frozen civil
wars in Syria and Ukraine, expanding sanction regimes against Russia and
threats over the INF treaty were among the points of departure. Moscow
warned the US to keep out of Iran, Washington warned Russia to keep out
of Venezuela. Neither of these admonitions were idle ones.
On the eve of the G-20 summit, headlines trumpeted Putin’s remark during
an interview with the Financial Times to the effect that ‘the liberal idea has
become obsolete’. Few commentators in the West bothered to reference the
context; that is, a question asked of him about how to deal with waves of
immigrants and refugees sweeping over the USA and Europe, and how to
explain the growing gap between the ‘interests of the elites and the … majority
of the people’. Putin asserted that the ‘liberal’ response was to do nothing,
when it was clear that something needed to be done, and intimated that at
least Trump was trying to resolve the issue of border security, while not sup-
porting Trump’s idea of a wall or tariffs.127
Commentators who seized upon Putin’s words about the ‘liberal idea’ as
proof of his dictatorial inclination, tended to ignore the fact that French
President Macron said much the same thing. Macron pointed out as well that
Europe needed to engage with Russia, because Europe would be the theatre
of any military conflict between Russia and the US. ‘Pushing Russia away
from Europe’, he said, ‘is a major strategic error’.128
262 New Cold War
When, in August 2019, Trump mused that Russia should be readmitted to
the G-7, unstated Kremlin reservations were summed up best by Trenin, who
tweeted:

More Reasons: (1) Price is too high: RUS is most unlikely to join US in
its rivalry with China. (2) G8 format was always awkward for RUS. It
could not be leader, and would not want to be follower. (3) It makes
more sense for RUS to deal w/US, EU, JP separately than as group.129

Trenin, who did not speak officially for Putin or the government, had tweeted
the day before that ‘the G8 is history, will not be revived’. So, while the
Russian foreign ministry was open to discussing the matter, it was very
unlikely that they would join without China; and it was possible that Trump’s
‘suggestion’ was an attempt to get Russian backing in his tariff war with
China.
Hearings in the US Senate in December 2019 showed some division over
whether or not to impose still more sanctions against Russia. When it was
first introduced, the bill in question was for Russian meddling in the 2016
election and its ‘aggression’ in Ukraine. This time, it wasn’t even clear why
advocates of further sanctions wanted them, other than a vague reference to
prevention of Russian interference in the 2020 presidential campaign. By that
time, Washington had already imposed sanctions on hundreds of Russia-
connected industries and individuals outside of Russia. As we have seen, one
of their targets was Nord Stream-2. Trump’s hostility to the Russia-to-
Germany pipeline was linked to his anger at NATO for, in his words to John
Bolton in 2017, ‘NATO countries are paying billions to Russia. We’re out if
they make the pipeline deal’.130
The new sanctions, when they came in late December 2019, were attached
to the 2020 National Defense Appropriations Act. Its inclusion of people
and firms associated with Nord Stream-2 and TurkStream brought angry
responses from Germany and divided the EU more than Russia was alleged
to have done.131 The Act was not signed finally until the first week of January
2021, after the US Congress overrode Trump’s veto. The new sanctions
forced Norway’s DNV GL to withdraw from the project. Its role had been
to provide testing and verification services for equipment used on the pipe-
laying vessels. Representatives of all but three of the EU’s 27 members
objected to the American decision to broaden sanctions against the Nord
Stream-2, saying that the ‘extraterritorial use of sanctions [is] a breach of
international law’. Peskov termed the attack the pipeline a ‘variant of hybrid
warfare’. 132

A new American ambassador

Huntsman resigned as US ambassador to Russia in October 2019 and was
replaced within a month by Sullivan, an experienced Russia hand and deputy
secretary of state since 2017. The Russian media reacted cautiously and with
 New Cold War 263
little hope for any change in the relationships between their two countries.133
Perhaps they noticed Sullivan’s statement to the US Senate Committee on
Foreign Affairs, in which he admitted that the post would be difficult because
of the ‘litany of Russia’s malign actions that have severely strained our
­relationship’.134 Neither Huntsman nor his predecessor, Michael McFaul,
completed their three-year terms in Moscow. Sullivan was a senior member
of the Republican Party and briefly served as acting Secretary of State in
2018.
As he moved to Moscow, his outlook would have mirrored that of his
party, which were stated clearly in a foreign policy document released by the
Republican Study Committee in Washington in June 2020. Hoping to get out
ahead of the Democrats for the November presidential election, the
Committee endorsed classic Cold War fears and assumptions. The document,
titled ‘The RSC National Security Strategy: Strengthening America &
Countering Global Threats’, offered more than 130 ways and means to
protect ‘American leadership’ around the world and listed the US’s most
dangerous adversaries. China led the list with Russia and the ‘Putin regime’
following close behind. According to its self-avowed conservative authors,
‘It’s time for America to fully reclaim its role as the greatest force for good the
world has ever known’, even if that means imposing the ‘toughest sanctions
ever proposed’ on the ‘Chinese Communist Party, Russia and Iran’.
Interpretations of what the RSC meant by ‘good’ aside, if these proposals
ever became government policy, then they would entail acts of economic and
maybe even military wars.135

Coronavirus blame-casting
The coronavirus crisis of 2020 provided more echoes of Cold War, as Beijing,
Moscow and Washington sought scapegoats. Repeatedly calling it the ‘China
virus’ or ‘Wuhan virus’, Donald Trump adopted his usual blame-attribution
trick to deflect criticism of his incompetent handling of the catastrophe at
home. Indeed, G-7 foreign ministers were unable to issue a joint statement
after a meeting on 25 March because the US State Department wanted it to
include a reference to the ‘Wuhan Virus’. In their turn, media outlets in China
and Russian trolls launched ineffective disinformation campaigns about
where and how it started (e.g. in US military labs). Social-media accounts
and state-owned television in Russia and China also gave the impression that
their countries were leading the world in curtailing the crisis and providing
aid to countries in need.136 Suspicion of China as originator and of Russia for
misinforming about deaths from the virus at home also grew. Indeed, as the
infection came under control in China, Russia was the victim of a massive
second wave of the disease (see Chapter 9).
US acting Assistant Secretary of State for Europe and Eurasia, Philip
Reeker, charged that ‘Russian malign actors’ were spreading disinformation
about the disease and Putin responding by saying that fake stories circulating
in Russia were ‘organized from abroad’, presumably meaning the US.137 The
264 New Cold War
New York Times took the opportunity to discredit Russia, pronouncing in
April 2020 that ‘analysts say that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has
played a principal role in the spread of false information as part of his wider
effort to discredit the West and destroy his enemies from within’. It is true
that conspiracy theories about the origins of the coronavirus pandemic raged
everywhere, and from everywhere, but this evidence-free attempt to link some
of them directly to Putin was cited at length in the US’s Homeland Security
News Wire and so spread widely as if it were official intel.138
Moreover, it strains the credibility of American agencies that chastise
Russia for spreading disinformation about COVID-19 while the US president,
Breitbart News, FOX News, GOP fund-raising agencies and other groups
were downplaying the seriousness of the pandemic, touting hydroxychloroquine
as a cure, praising the efforts of the Administration to combat the disease as
tens of thousands of US citizens died from it, holding mask wearers in con-
tempt and ignoring the recommendations of their own health experts.139
Even as late as September, as the number of American deaths due to COVID-
19 passed 200,000, Trump awarded himself an A+ for his work in combatting
the disease.140
When an EU disinformation monitoring group, EUvsDisinfo, accused
Russia of spreading false information about COVID-19, Peskov called such
charges ‘Russophobic’ and ‘groundless’. In the age of social media, blame
attribution via Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, VKontakte (VK) and others
reached a wider audience than the competing messages of the first Cold
War.141 The pandemic had become another weapon to deploy in the new
Cold War.
A telephone conversation between Putin and Trump on 30 March resulted
in Russia sending a plane load with 60 tons of medical supplies to New York,
along with promises to maintain ‘personal contact’.142 Trump called it a ‘very
nice’ gesture, and the two countries apparently split the cost. While the
Administrations in Moscow and Washington congratulated themselves on
their willingness to cooperate in times of emergency, Navalny’s team
complained that Russia should not have sold supplies that Russia needed for
itself and Washington’s Democrats grumbled that Trump was too close to
Putin.143 The two presidents spoke by telephone twice more over the next ten
days, discussing the pandemic, cooperation in space and global energy
markets. On 7 May, they spoke of the 75th anniversary of the victory over
Nazi Germany. They talked then about improving bilateral cooperation in
settling regional conflicts, combatting terrorism and epidemics.144 As it turned
out, this was all talk.
The global pandemic gave major powers an opportunity to compete as
medical benefactors to needy countries during the pandemic. We have seen
that the G-20, including Russia, China and the US, allocated large sums of
money to combat the disease, helping Africa especially. China led the way
with huge amounts of medical supplies and teams to Italy, Iran, Serbia and
elsewhere. Given that the EU failed to respond adequately to appeals from
suffering members for medical materials, and was already torn by national
 New Cold War 265
isolationism in regard to refugees, and the US seemed to be playing follow the
leader, China avoided sustained blame as the derided source of the pandemic
– except in the US. Russia’s disbursement of medical equipment abroad (see
Chapter 5) and apparent, if illusory, control of the disease at home, left it
relatively untouched by international scorn while the world looked on in
bewilderment as the disease spread over the US. Some analysts predicted that
the handling of the pandemic could be seen as a game-changer, moving
China to the forefront in the new world order.145 Others disagreed, insisting
that China’s aggressive and irritating international propaganda was too
obvious and its mishandling of the virus in its earliest stages would come
back to haunt them.146
Putin and Trump conversed again several times in April, and Trump
offered Russia ventilators if they were needed. The Kremlin’s press office
called the offer ‘very positive’ and urged further cooperation. Just a few days
before that, the same Russian spokespeople called Trump’s decision to
suspend US dues to the World Health Organization (WTO) very ‘selfish’ and
harmful to the global effort to combat the pandemic.147
We have seen that Russia sent medical gear to many countries, including
the US. In that latter case, the always-ready-to-pounce New York Times
complained that the plane load of masks and ventilators acquired from
Russia was a ‘propaganda coup’ for the Kremlin. Not a very good one, it
turned out, for the ventilators were not used after reports surfaced that they
caused several fires in Russia.148 After another telephone call, in May, the US
donated 200 medical ventilators to Russia. The flights were met at Vnukovo
Airport by US Ambassador Sullivan, and both sides praised the gift. The
Russian ambassador to Washington told Russian TV that ‘we value the
American aid very highly’.149

Russia and the US presidential election, 2020

State and independent Russian media kept a close watch on the November
2020 election in the US, sometime ridiculing the process though also
explaining it accurately enough. Vedomosti carried a ‘photo gallery’ of
protests in American cities, showing the extremes on both sides of the ballot.
Several mainstream papers, such as state-owned Rossiiskaia gazeta and
independent Kommersant, reported Trump’s criticisms of Biden and the
Democrats on election day, without passing judgement. TV broadcasters
tended to emphasize the bitter accusations from both sides and predict post-
election anarchy. Trump’s shrill post-election charges that he won and the
election was rigged were highlighted, and Russian politicians claimed that the
US had lost the right to criticize political systems in other countries. Above
all, they pointed out that the sharp divisions in American society were home-
grown, not caused by Russia. Some Russians even took to accessing and
believing the bizarre anti-Trump conspiracy theories spread by QAnon via
VKontakte and Telegram, often in posts started by Russian émigrés in the
U.S. and elsewhere.150
266 New Cold War
When manic Trump supporters invaded the US Capitol building in January
2021, the Russian media carried photos of the chaos and commentary that
emphasized that the US was no longer in a position to deride the lack of
democracy in other countries. There were no attempts to condemn Trump for
his role inciting violence; rather, the breakdown of America’s electoral system
was highlighted. The government’s mainstream paper expressed concern for
what the ‘gloomy prologue to the inauguration’ and an angry Biden could
mean for Russia going forward. ‘At least they can’t blame us’ for this debacle,
some said, though they may have been speaking too soon.151
Prior to the crisis in Washington, commentary abounded on what would
be the fate of international agreements that Trump renounced and what
Biden’s victory would mean for Ukraine and Belarus.152 Even in November,
coverage implied that Washington had lost any moral high ground it might
have held when commenting on street demonstrations elsewhere in the world.
Lukashenka called the political situation a ‘mockery of democracy’ and
wondered if the EU and the OSCE would call for a re-election in the US as
they did for Belarus.153 Hypocritical as those comments were, they repre-
sented a common theme in many areas outside the US and Russia.
Donald Trump had already accomplished what Western pundits assumed
Putin was striving to do, that is, he shattered Western unity. He belittled his
NATO allies, scaled back America’s role in international conflicts, dropped
out of international agreements on global warming and nuclear prolifera-
tion, mocked the UN, and deployed tariffs against his country’s best friends.
The Russian leadership did not expect better relations with a Biden presi-
dency; rather, they assumed that Biden would be hostile, but open, and the
Kremlin preferred predictability.154 Shortly before the election, Biden wrote
another essay for Foreign Affairs, titled ‘Why America Must Lead Again’, in
which he referred to Russia twice as ‘a ‘kleptocracy’ and ‘aggressive’ in its
foreign policy: ‘We must impose real costs on Russia for its violations of
international norms and stand with Russian civil society.’ The Russian gov-
ernment, he said, ‘is brazenly assaulting the foundations of Western democ-
racy around the world’.155 Unless these words were primarily election
campaign gambits, the Biden victory did not bode well for Moscow, where
the MID worried that he would focus Washington’s anger against Russia
rather than China. Among the few encouraging words were Biden’s
expressed preference for an extension of New START and renewal of the
Iran nuclear deal.
Russia was tardy in congratulating Biden for his victory, waiting, Peskov
said, for the official results. These came with the Electoral College vote on 14
December and Putin sent congratulations the next day with a message that he
was ‘ready for interaction and contacts with you’.156 Trump refused to con-
cede and both he his supporters raged that the election was ‘stolen’. Explaining
why he was late, Putin said that he had to wait for the ‘end of this internal
political confrontation’.157
Answering the question of who was best for Russia, Trump or Biden,
Argumenty i fakty headlined: ‘Both are Worse’.158
 New Cold War 267
China matters
While the Trump Administration’s National Security Strategy warned in
2017 that Russia and China were together threatening ‘American power,
influence, and interests, attempting to erode American security and
prosperity’, traditional concerns in the West about the dangers of a Russia–
China alliance seemed to have lost pride of place in Washington to separate
bilateral spats with each country.159 China and Russia’s common approach to
international affairs raises few red flags, even though they share views on the
crisis in Venezuela, where they both are protecting huge investments, advocate
a multi-polar world and speak as one in the UN. They are partners in the
BRICS and the SCO, and have close military ties.
It is also true that Russia and China compete for influence in the same
sectors, especially Central Asia, but also in Africa and Latin America. In the
case of Central Asia, China pours money into the region in the form of large
loans (Tajikistan) and infrastructure projects, seeming to infringe on
Moscow’s self-proclaimed sphere of influence. Even so, the competition has
not prevented the Russia–China relationship from growing tighter. A long-
held assumption by Western and some Russian analysts that the association
is mainly one of convenience has been made too casually.160 Trenin’s conclu-
sion in June 2019 that the relationship had become an ‘entente’ rooted in a
‘basic compatibility of world views’ was more realistic and had a ring of
permanence to it.161
Russia is, of course, acutely aware of China’s growing presence in Central
Asia. Fully supportive of China’s Belt and Road project, and grateful that
China surpassed Germany as Russia’s leading individual trade partner, the
Kremlin was still not pleased by Beijing’s proposal to construct a rail line
through south Kyrgyzstan to Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, a corridor that
would open Central Asia up to Europe and bypass Russia. Above all the
railroad would raise China’s influence in the region at the expense of
Russian.162
The closer Russia–China rapport should not have come as a surprise.
Substantial upgrades to the Moscow–Beijing relationship were confirmed at
the 23rd inter-governmental meeting in November 2018.163 At that time,
Washington had levelled further sanctions on Russia and imposed a series of
tariff on Chinese goods. China retaliated, and an expensive trade war was
underway. Moscow and Beijing found relief in deals with each other. We have
seen that China opened its market to Russian poultry and dairy products,
and teams were organized for joint agricultural development in parts of
Northeast China and the Far East of Russia. A series of inter-governmental
meetings in Beijing resulted in further customs coordination and broadened
student exchanges. Negotiations that included Deputy Prime Ministers
Siluanov, Akimov and Golikova, Economics Minister Oreshkin and Industry
Minister Manturov preceded the meetings. Most of the Russian ministers
joined Medvedev in Beijing where he and President Xi oversaw final touches.
Russian commentators saw these negotiations as sanctions breakers.164
268 New Cold War
Whatever reservations Moscow had about Beijing’s intentions in Central
Asia, they were kept well-disguised during a three-day state visit by Xi to
Moscow in June 2019. He and Putin gushed over their partnership, boasted
of huge increases in bilateral trade, took a common approach to Iran and
Venezuela, cheered the success of energy pipelines and the agricultural proj-
ects linking them, and lauded their joint military exercises.165
In a televised interview in November 2019, Lavrov said relations between
Russia and China were at the highest level ever, and that they were
‘unconditional allies’ on international principles, such as the rules of the
WTO. On the latter file, he made clear reference to ‘dirty competition’,
meaning sanctions. Lavrov added that there were no plans in either country
for a military alliance.166 The lovefest was interrupted during the pandemic.
Trade faltered, train and plane traffic across the border stopped, tourism
trickled down to nothing and there was talk of delays in the delivery of
S-400s to China. But the interlude was brief.
Putin’s administration defended China while Trump tried to shift all blame
for COVID-19 on to Beijing, especially when the US cut off funding to the
WHO, chastising it for being too cosy with China at the onset of the
pandemic. In this instance, the EU’s foreign ministers took the same position
as Russia and China, saying that global cooperation was needed to fight the
infectious disease.167 As Russia and China moved cautiously out of first-wave
pandemic mode in the spring–summer of 2020, their close relationship
emerged intact, while the third party in the new Cold War grew more and
more self-isolated.
Indeed, responding to calls by President-elect Biden for a stronger
coalition against China on trade and economic fronts, Xi Jinping and
Putin confirmed that their strategic cooperation would resist any attempt
to divide them.168 The situation had shifted already in October. Asked at
Valdai if a military alliance between China and Russia was possible, Putin
answered that, while the two countries had reached ‘a high level of inter-
action in the field of military technical cooperation’, an alliance was not
yet planned: ‘But in principle, we are not going to exclude this. So, let us
see.’169

Final straws?
As the second half of 2020 opened, conspiracy theories were the order of the
day. The New York Times (26 June) turned to ‘anonymous sources’ to claim
that Russian intelligence officers secretly offered bounties to Taliban fighters
for dead coalition troops. The story ran rampant on Western print and TV
media, and Peskov told an NBC interviewer that the story was ‘100% bullshit’.
The Taliban also denied it. According to Trump, ‘nobody briefed or told me,
Pence, or Chief of Staff’ about the ‘so-called attacks on our troops in
Afghanistan by Russians’ and called the story fake news.170 The fact that both
the CIA and US Central Command later admitted that they had ‘no evidence’
that any payments by the GRU to fighters in Afghanistan were bounties for
 New Cold War 269
killing US troops didn’t stop American politicians from using the tale as part
of their ‘get tough on Russia’ agendas.171
The Americans had already come to terms with the Taliban, and had
partially withdrawn from Afghanistan. Taliban spokesmen pointed out that
they had been killing foreign troops for 20 years and needed no monetary
incentives for continuing to do so. Although the truth of the matter remained
unclear, employees at Russian embassies in London and Washington received
death threats and everyone continued to believe what they wanted to believe.172
Just as the bounty accusation faded into the background, intelligence
services in the US, UK and Canada accused Russian hackers (Cozy Bear,
APT29) of trying to hack into their coronavirus research. The UK’s National
Cyber Security Centre called it a ‘campaign of malicious activity’ conducted
‘almost certainly’ by units of Russia’s intelligence services. Russian rejected
the allegations. The CEO of Russia’s Direct Investment Fund, which provides
funds for Russia’s vaccine research programme, pointed out that the Oxford
project (one of the alleged targets) already shared information with its
Russian counterparts. 173 Russia had long since been testing its own coronavi-
rus vaccine and submitting data to the UK. These tests achieved some suc-
cess by the end of August (see Chapter 9).
The accusations may well have been true, however. We have seen that
cyber-espionage has become a major component of modern statecraft, and
therefore of the new Cold War. In any case, medical spying would be rendered
needless if such data were shared by international agreement. Unfortunately,
that would involve diplomacy, the lost art.174
All that aside, by mid-fall 2020, Moscow had become embroiled in several
serious affairs that neither of their two protagonists in the new Cold War
caused or were even featured in, though they certainly would take political
advantage of them. These situations were either self-induced, such as the
Navalny poisoning, or the culmination of long-festering conditions that
should have been avoided, such as the Belarusian mutiny against the
Lukashenka regime. Both had wide-ranging political and strategic
implications for Russia. The Navalny case served as a last straw to Western
governments and Russian liberals who were already angry about political
acts they blamed on Putin. The potential for a coloured revolution in Belarus
placed Moscow’s sphere of influence in jeopardy. The Navalny case brought
calls for more sanctions and talk of a ‘Navalny Act’ in the US.175 Among
Western leaders, only Donald Trump hesitated, saying, on 5 September, that
he had not yet seen any proof that the German version was true. The Kremlin
continued to deny the accusations vehemently, and Zakharova continued to
ask for evidence.
Both cases forced the Kremlin to choose between the lesser of two evils.
Among the foreign responses to Navalny were calls for Germany to give up
its support for the Nord Stream-2 project, European leaders threatened new
sanctions and NATO convened a special meeting to discuss the matter.
Among other things, NATO demanded that Russia open up its Novichok
programme to the OPCW. The Kremlin refused.176 The Russian National
270 New Cold War
Medical Chamber proposed a joint Russian–German medical investigation
of Navalny’s illness, and that went nowhere.177
It may be that, by the end of 2020, retirement in 2024 looked far more
attractive to Putin than it had at the first of the year. It would seem, anyway,
that he thought he had done his job on the world scene by 2020, telling the
Valdai Club in October:

I assure you, dear friends, we objectively assess our capabilities: intellec-

tual, territorial, economic and military – both today’s capabilities and our
potential. And while strengthening our country, looking at what is hap-
pening in the world, in other countries, I want to say to those who are still
waiting for the gradual fading of Russia: in this case, we are worried about
only one thing - how not to catch a cold at your funeral.178

An echo, perhaps, of Nikita Khrushchev’s famous remark to a gathering of

Western ambassadors in 1956: ‘whether you like it or not history is on our
side. We will bury you!’179 In Khrushchev’s case, it turned out that history was
not on his side; Putin’s side in history has not yet been determined.

Notes
1 Frances Fukuyama, ‘The End of History?’, The National Interest, Vol. 16 (1989),
pp. 3–18; Frances Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man. New York:
Free Press, 1992.
2 Francis Fukuyama, ‘Against Identity Politics. The New Tribalism and the Crisis
of Democracy’, Foreign Affairs, September/October 2018, pp. 90–115.
3 Jose Miguel Alonso-Trabanco, ‘The New “Twenty Years Crisis”: 2000–2020’,
Geopolitical Monitor. Backgrounder, 2 April 2020. See also Walter Russell Mead,
‘The End of the Wilsonian Era. Why Liberal Internationalism Failed’, Foreign
Affairs, January/February 2021.
4 Stephen Holmes, Ivan Krastev, The Light that Failed. Why the West is Losing the
Fight for Democracy. Cambridge, UK: Pegasus Books, 2020.
5 Victoria Nuland, ‘Pinning Down Putin’, Foreign Affairs, July/August 2020; on her
‘fuck the EU’ comment, see J.L. Black, Putin’s Third Term (2019), p. 95.
6 Putin, ‘Speech and the Following Discussion at the Munich Conference on
Security Policy’, Kremlin.ru, 10 February 2007, en.kremlin.ru/events/president/
transcripts/24034; ‘Sergei Lavrov: otvetim bez isterik’, Rossiiskaia gazeta, 21
February 2007, translation in REDA 2007, Vol. 1, pp. 135–142.
7 Dmitri Trenin, ‘What Does Russia Want from the United States?’ Carnegie
Moscow Center, 15 April 2020.
8 Andrei P. Tsygankov, Russia and America: The Asymmetric Rivalry. Cambridge,
UK: Polity, 2019; Stephen F. Cohen, War with Russia? From Putin & Ukraine to
Trump & Russiagate. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2019; John J. Mearsheimer,
‘Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West’s Fault. The Liberal Delusions That Provoked
Putin’, Foreign Affairs, September/October 2014.
9 See, e.g. Cheng Li, ‘A New Cold War? The Future of US–China Relations’,
Wilson Center. Context Series, 13 December 2012; Robert D. Kaplan, ‘A New
Cold War Has Begun’, FP (Foreign Policy), 7 January 2019; ‘Kissinger Says U.S.
and China in “Foothills of a Cold War”’, Bloomberg News, 21 November 2019.
Mark Kramer, ‘U.S.–Russian Relations and the “New Cold War” Metaphor’,
PONARS Eurasia, Policy Memo No. 547, November 2018. For a Russian view of
 New Cold War 271
this phenomenon, ‘Novaia kholodnaia voina’, Aktual’nye Komentarii, 12 June
2020.
10 ‘US has “lost its mind, morals and credibility”, China’s foreign minister tells
Russian counterpart’, South China Morning Post, 18 July 2020; Pompeo,
‘Unalienable Rights and the Securing of Freedom’, US Department of State,
16 July 2020, https://www.state.gov/unalienable-rights-and-the-securing-of-
freedom/.
11 See Haley speech live www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JnBhxM-a-M&feature=youtu-
be&t=2802, 5 April 2018; National Security Strategy of the United States of
America, December 2017, www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/
NSS-Final-12-18-2017-0905.pdf.
12 ‘Belyi dom: Tramp pozdravliaet Putina so vstupleniem v dolzhnost’ prezidenta
Rossii’, Kommersant, 7 May 2018.
13 Trenin, ‘Rossiia i SShA nakhodiatsia v sostoianii gibridnoi voiny. Eto vser’ez i
nadolgo’, Novaia Gazeta, 1 October 2018; on russophobia in the US, see Guy
Mettan, Creating Russophobia. From the Great Religious Schism to Anti-Putin
Hysteria. Atlanta, GA: Clarity, 2017.
14 See chapters in the special double issue, ‘The Foreign Policy Attitudes of Russian
Elites, 1993-2016’, Post-Soviet Affairs, Vol. 35, Issue 5–6 (2019).
15 ‘Belyi dom podverdil dannye o podgotovke vstrechi Trampa i Putina’, RBC.ru, 2
April 2018; ‘Trump Invited Putin For Meeting at White House, Kremlin Says’,
The Moscow Times, 2 April 2018.
16 U.S. Treasury Department, Resource Center, 6 April 2018, www.treasury.gov/
resource-center/sanctions/OFAC-Enforcement/Pages/20180406.aspx.
17 U.S. Department of State, ‘Ukraine and Russia Sanctions’, www.state/gov/e/eb/
tfs/spi/ukrainerussia/, accessed 14 October 2018
18 ‘Aeroflot obratilsia v MID i Mintrans iz-za problem s vydachei viz SShA politom’,
Vedomosti, 20 April 2018; ‘Russia Accuses U.S. of Building “Visa Wall” After
Bolshoi Dancers Denied Entry’, The Moscow Times, 21 April 2018.
19 ‘Russia Angered by NASA’s Revoked Invitation to U.S.’, The Moscow Times, 7
January 2019; ‘White House Temporarily Lifts Sanctions on Russia’s Space Chief
for U.S. Visit’, The Moscow Times, 19 October 2018.
20 For two very different perspectives, Emma Ashford, ‘How Reflexive Hostility to
Russia Harms U.S. Interests’, Foreign Affairs. Snapshot, 20 April 2018; Robert D.
Blackwell, Philip H. Gordon, ‘Containing Russia, Again. An Adversary Attacked
the United States – It’s Time to Respond’, Foreign Affairs. Snapshot, 18 November
2018.
21 For general discussion, see Edward Lozansky, ‘U.S.–Russia-China Big Three – or
WW III? Trump in Paris, “Russia is preparing for war,” China is in “preparation
for war”’, The Washington Times, 9 November 2018; ‘“Prepare for war’” XI
Jinping tells military region that monitors South China Sea, Taiwan’, South China
Morning Post, 27 October 2018.
22 On this, see Sakwa, Russia’s Futures, p. 200.
23 ‘Statement by Russian Foreign Ministry on …’, 8 May 2018, www.mid.ru/ru/for-
eign_policy/news//asset_publisher/cKNonkJEO2Bw/content/id/32122053,
24 ‘Voennyi parad na Krasnoi ploshchadi’, Kremlin.ru, 9 May 2018, Kremlin.ru/
events/president/news/57436.
25 ‘Rossiia-zapad’, Levada-tsentr, 14 May 2018, www.levada.ru/2018/05/14/rossita-
zapad-2/; ‘Vrag i Rossii’, Levada-tsentr, 10 January 2018, www.levada-
ru/2018/01/10/vragi—rossii/; ‘“Druz’ia” i “vragi” Rossii’, Levada-tsentr, 14 June
2018, www.levada.ru/2018/06/14/druzia-i-vragi/.
26 Kathrin Hille, Katrina Mansion, ‘US prepares for Trump–Putin summit as Bolton
visits Moscow’, Financial Times, 21 June 2018; ‘President Trump Is Planning a
July Meeting With Vladimir Putin’, Fortune/Bloomberg, 21 June 2018; ‘Bolton to
272 New Cold War
Discuss Putin–Trump Summit in Moscow Talks’, The Moscow Times, 27 June
2018.
27 Andrew E. Kramer, Eileen Sullivan, ‘Helsinki Summit Meeting Is Set for Trump
and Putin’, New York Times, 28 July 2018; Bolton, The Room Where It Happened,
op. cit., pp. 128–31.
28 ‘Glava MID Rossii vstretilsia s delegatsiei amerikanskikh kongressmenov’,
Kommersant, 7 July 2018; Anton Troianovski, ‘Republican law makers come to
Moscow, raising hopes there of U.S.–Russia thaw’, The Washington Post, 3 July
2018.
29 ‘Imposition of Chemical and Biological Weapons Control and Warfare
Elimination Act Sanctions on Russia’, US State Department, 8 August 2018,
www.state.gov/r/pa/ps/2018/08/285043.htm; ‘SShA vvedut sanktsii protiv Rossii
iz-za “dela” Skripalei’, Vedomosti, 8 August 2018.
30 ‘A Bill to strengthen the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, to combat interna-
tional cybercrime, and to impose further sanctions with respect to the Russian
Federation …’, S.3336, 115th Congress, 2nd Session, op. cit.; ‘86% of Large
Russian Companies Fear New U.S. Sanctions’, The Moscow Times, 6 November
2018.
31 ‘Kreml’ otreagiroval na reshenie SShA vvesti novye sanktsii’, Vedomosti, 9 August
2018.
32 ‘U.S. Strategy Toward the Russian Federation’, Senate Testimony by Assistant
Secretary of State A. Wess Mitchell, 21 Aug 2018, https://www.state.gov/p/eur/rls/
rm/2018/285247.htm. On US meddling, see Benjamin Denison, ‘Where U.S. Sees
Democracy Promotion, Russia Sees Regime Change’, Russia Matters, 29 July 2020.
33 See, e.g. Michael Kimmage, ‘The Surprising Promise of the Trump–Putin
Summit’, Foreign Affairs. Snapshot, 11 July 2018; Jonathan Chait, ‘Will Trump
Be Meeting with his Counterpart – Or His Handler?’, New York Magazine, 6 July
2018; Mike Eckel, ‘Big Weapons, Big Meeting: Could Trump, Putin Agree on
New Arms Control Deal?’, RFE/RL, 14 July 2018; ‘What To Expect From the
Helsinki Summit (Op-ed)’, The Moscow Times, 13 July 2018; ‘V khel’sinki
zaverzhilas’ vstrecha prezidentov Rossii i SShA’, Vedomosti, 16 July 2018. For
differing perspectives, Bob Woodward, Fear. Trump in the White House. New
York: Simon & Schuster, 2018, pp. 354–67, and Bolton, The Room Where It
Happened, pp. 152–8.
34 See, e.g. The Editorial Board, ‘Why Won’t Donald Trump Speak for America?’
New York Times, 16 July 2018; Editorial, ‘Trump just colluded with Russia,
openly’, Washington Post, 16 July 2016; Joe Lauria, ‘US Media is Losing Its Mind
over Trump–Putin Summit’, Consortium News, 16 July 2018; ‘Russian Officials
Hail Putin’s Success at Trump Helsinki Summit’, The Moscow Times, 17 July 2020
35 Tweeter: Donald J. Trump@realDonaldTrump, 9:24 AM-Jul 19, 2018.
36 ‘Putin priglasil Trampa v Moskvu’, Vedomosti, 27 July 2018; ‘Putin Invites Trump
to Moscow’, The Moscow Times, 28 July 2018.
37 For a detailed discussion of this, see Stephen F. Cohen, War with Russia? From
Putin and Ukraine To Trump and Watergate. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2019.
38 Henry Meyer, Ilkya Arkhipov, ‘Russia Puts Brave Face on Canceled Putin–Trump
Talks in Paris’, Bloomberg, 6 November 2018; ‘U.S. Sanctions Persons, Entities
Over Activities in Russian-Occupied Crimea’, RFE/RL, 8 November 2018; ‘SShA
ob’iavili o novykh sanktsiiakh protiv Rossii za Krym i Donbass’, Vedomosti, 8
November 2018; ‘Kreml’ nazval prichinu otmeny peregovorov Putina i Trampa vo
Frantsii’, Vedomosti, 7 November 2018.
39 Craig Timberg, Tony Romm, ‘New report on Russian disinformation, prepared
for the Senate, shows the operation’s scale and sweep’, The Washington Post, 17
December 2018. For the reports, see www.intelligence.senate.gov/publicatiuons/
reports.
 New Cold War 273
40 ‘Kremlin Rejects New U.S. Reports Alleging Russian Election Meddling’, The
Moscow Times, 18 December 2018.
41 ‘Putin nazval khoroshei besedu s Trampom v Parizhe’, Vedomosti, 11 November
2018; ‘Trump, Putin to meet at a working lunch in Paris on Nov 11’, Reuters.
World News, 7 November 2018.
42 Kirill Bulanov, ‘Putin rasskazal o provedennoi “na nogakh” besede s Trampom o
konflikte s Ukrainoi’, Vedomosti, 1 December 2018.
43 US Department of State, ‘On the Meeting of the North Atlantic Council’, 4
December 2018, www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2018/12/287872.htm.
44 ‘Putin, in New Year Letter to Trump, Says Moscow Is Open for Dialogue’, The
Moscow Times, 30 December 2018; Vladimir Soldatkin, ‘Putin tells Trump that
Moscow is open for dialogue’, Reuters, 30 December 2018.
45 See, e.g. ‘We Told You So: Russian officials React to Mueller report on Collusion’,
The Moscow Times, 25 March 2019; US Department of Justice, Report On the
Investigation Into Russian Interference In The 2016 Presidential Election, Volume
I, Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller, III, Washington, DC, March 2019, redacted.
46 DmitriTrenin @DmitriTrenin, 1:55 AM – 25 Mar 2019 from Sergiyev Posad,
Russia. See also Mark Galeotti, ‘Mueller Provides Scant Real Relief for Russia’,
The Moscow Times, 25 March 2019.
47 Nina L. Khrushchev, ‘Russian Derangement Syndrome’, Project Syndicate, 28
May 2020.
48 ‘Telefonnyi razgovor s Prezidentom SShA Donal’dom Trampom’, Kremlin.ru, 3
May 2019, Kremlin.ru/events/president/news/60469,; ‘Trump, Putin Discuss
Possible New Nuclear Accord – White House’, The Moscow Times, 3 May 2019;
Mark Landler, ‘Trump Says He Discussed the “Russian Hoax” in Phone Call
With Putin’, New York Times, 3 May 2019; ‘Trump Says Putin Not “Involved” in
Venezuela, Despite U.S. Claim’, The Moscow Times, 4 May 2019.
49 Michael McFaul, ‘Trump’s Gift to Putin. The President’s Privatized Foreign
Policy Is a Boon for Russia’, Foreign Affairs, November/December 2019, online
23 October 2019; on the Clinton–Gabbard farce, Mark Galeotti, ‘Putin’s “Useful
Idiots” Are Those Who call Others “Useful idiots”’, The Moscow Times, 22
October 2019;
50 See, e.g. Robert Fife, ‘Canada urged to help suspend Russia from Interpol’, Globe
and Mail, 23 November 2018; for a very different opinion, Mary Dejevsky, ‘The
West’s treatment of Russia over the Interpol presidency is dangerous and
disingenuous’, The Independent (UK), 22 November 2018.
51 Council on Foreign Relations, ‘Russia’s Democracy: What Happens After Putin?
Mikhail Khodorkovsky provides his perspective on the domestic political climate
in Russia, prospects for democratic change, and the future of U.S.–Russia
relations,’ 29 April 2019, https://www.cfr.org/event/russias-democracy-what-
happens-after-putin.
52 See, for example, the ever-angry Kasparov’s Winter is Coming. Why Vladimir
Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must be Stopped. New York: Public
Affairs, 2015; Bill Browder, Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder,
and One Man's Fight for Justice. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015; and Navalny,
‘How to Punish Putin’, New York Times, 20 March 2014. The Centre for European,
Russian and Eurasian Studies (CERES), University of Toronto, sponsored
Kasyanov’s tour.
53 Michael Kimmage, ‘The Wily Country. Understanding Putin’s Russia’, Foreign
Affairs, March/April 2020, a review essay.
54 Andrei P. Tsygankov, The Dark Double: US Media, Russia, and the Politics of
Values. New York: Oxford UP, 2019, pp. 889-90, and Tsygankov, ‘American
Russophobia in the Age of Liberal Decline’, Critique and Humanism, Vol. 49,
Issue 1 (2018), pp. 29–40.
274 New Cold War
55 For challenges to Browder, Alex Krainer, Grand Deception: The Truth About Bill
Browder, the Magnitsky Act and Anti-Russian Sanctions. Otto, SC: Red Pill Press,
2018.
56 Benjamin Bidder, ‘The Case of Sergei Magnitsky. Questions Cloud Story Behind
U.S. Sanctions’, Spiegel Online, 26 November 2019, in German in Der Spiegel, 23
November 2019. Browder’s responding complaint against Der Spiegel was rejected
by the German Press Council. European Court of Human Rights, ‘ECHR finds
multiple violations of the European Convention in case concerning Russian tax
adviser Magnitsky’, Decision. Article 5.1, https://hudoc.echr.coe.int/eng-press#{
%22itemid%22:[%22003-6486375-8551786%22]}. See also John Ryan, ‘Bill
Browder, a Billionaire Accused of Being a Fraud and Liar’, The ANZ Review, 1
July 2020; Mark Landler, ‘Film About Russian Lawyer’s Death Causes an
Uproar’, New York Times, 9 June 2016.
57 Michael Schwirtz, ‘European Court Partially Backs Kremlin in Khodorkovsky’s
Prosecution’, New York Times, 31 May 201.
58 Royal Courts of Justice. In the High Court of Justice. Business & Property Courts
of England & Wales. Commercial Court, Neutral Citation Number: [2019]
EWHC 2621 (Comm), Case No.: CL-2015-00829, 8 October 2019.
59 ‘Khodorkovsky Was Denied Right to Fair Russian Trial, Court Says’, The
Moscow Times, 14 January 2020; ‘European Court Rules Russia’s Khodorkovsky
Denied Fair Trial’, RFE/RL, 14 January 2020. The ECHR agreed that the trial
judge had not allowed a fair defence, but had not violated rules of impartiality, or
the principle of presumption of innocence.
60 For the Free Russia Forum, https://www.forumfreerussia.org/en/announce-
ments/2019-09-23/viii-forum-free-russia-november-9-10-vilnius/ffr/.
61 ‘Russia Reacts to U.S. Riots, Claims of Meddling’, The Moscow Times, 1 June
2020; Fedor Krasheninnikov, ‘Massovye besporiadki po-amerikanski i
po-rossiiski’, Vedomosti, 3 June 2020; Ilya Klishin, ‘Russians Watch the American
Protests as Clouds Gather at Home’, The Moscow Times, 3 June 2020; for the
CNN interview with Susan Rice, https://www.facebook.com/cnn/videos/9329442
63812266/?type=2&theater.
62 For the MID statement, 29 May 2020, https://www.mid.ru/ru/foreign_policy/
news/-/asset_publisher/cKNonkJE02Bw/content/id/4143459?p_p_id=101_
INSTANCE_cKNonkJE02B.w&_101_INSTANCE_cKNonkJE02Bw_language
Id=ru_RU.
63 ‘Job Description’, New York Times, https://nytimes.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/
en-US/INYT/job/Moscow-Russia/Russia-Correspondent_REQ-008536,
accessed 23 November 2020; for the Russian reaction, ‘NYT’s Russia Job Posting
“Russophobic”, Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Says’, The Moscow Times, 23
November 2020.
64 ‘Erklarung der Bundesregierung im Fall Nawalny’, Press release 306, https://www.
bundesregierung.de/breg-de/aktuelles/erklaerung-der-bundesregierung-im-fall-
nawalny-1781790; Darina Bukharova, ‘V Germanii zaiavili o sledakh isda gruppy
“Novichok” v organizme Naval’nogo’, Vedomosti, 2 September 2020; ‘Germany
Says Kremlin Critic Navalny Was Poisoned With Novichok’, The Moscow Times,
2 September 2020; ‘Russia launches investigation into Navalny “poisoning” case’,
OVD-Info, 26 August 2020.
65 ‘Glavnyi toksikolog Omskoi oblasti iskliuchil otravlenie Naval’nogo
“Novichkom”’, Vedomosti, 8 September 2020; Pavel Felgenhauer, ‘The Navalny
Poisoning and Russia’s Nerve Agent Politics’, Eurasia Daily Monitor, 10
September 2020.
66 See Daniel Treisman, ‘Why the Kremlin Hates Levada Center’, The Moscow
Times, 24 May 2013.
67 ‘Over 20 NGOs appeal to Russian ombudsman, Council of Europe …’, Interfax,
26 November 2020; Federal’nyi zakon, ‘O vnesenii izmenenii v otdel’nye
 New Cold War 275
zakonodatel’nye akty … mer protivodeistviia ugrozam natsional’noi bezopasnosti’,
25 December 2020, http://publication.pravo.gov.ru/Document/View/00012020123
00001?index=0&rangeSize=1.
68 Russian Ministry of Justice, ‘List of Foreign and International non-governmental
organizations whose activities are considered undesirable in the territory of the
Russian Federation’: http://minjust.ru/ru/activity/nko/unwanted.
69 ‘Amerikanskii fond “Svobodnaia Rossiia” priznan ugrozoi bezopasnosti RF’,
Interfax, 1 July 2019.
70 Mark Raczkiewicz, ‘Russia Labels Atlantic Council Think Tank In Washington
“Undesirable”’, RFE/RL, 26 July 2019; ‘Atlantic Council Response …’, 26 July
2019, https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/news/press-releases/atlantic-council-response-
to-the-decision-of-the-ministry-of-justice-of-the-russian-federation.
71 ‘RFE/RL Files Documents To Register As “Foreign Agent” With Russian Tax
Service’, RFE/RL, 24 January 2020; ‘Russia Adds U.S. News Site RFE/RL to
“Foreign Agent” Roster’, The Moscow Times, 13 February 2020; RF Ministry of
Justice, ‘Reestr inostrannykh sredstv massovoi informatsii, vypolniaiushchikh
funktsii inostrannogo agenta’, https://minjust.ru/ru/deyatelnost-v-sfere-nekom-
mercheskih-organizaciy/reestr-inostrannyh-sredstv-massovoy-informacii,
accessed 13 February 2020.
72 Putin, Board meeting of the Federal Security Service, Kremlin.ru, 6 March 2019,
Kremlin.ru/events/president/news/59978. These numbers were challenged in a
blog by Mikhail Zelensky and Denis Dmitriev, Meduza, 3 March 2019.
73 ‘Butina Case: Neo-McCarthyism Engulfs America’, Strategic Culture, 9 August
2018; Michelle Goldberg, ‘That Russian Woman’, New York Times International,
28–29 July 2018.
74 Sharon LaFraniere, ‘Prosecutors Admit They Wrongly Accused Russian of
Offering Sex for Republican Access’, New York Times, 8 September 2018;
‘Advokat Marii Butina rasskazal ob usloviiakh soderzhaniia svoei podzashchitnoi’,
BRC.ru, 21 July 2018.
75 For the opinion that she was a scapegoat used to retaliate for Russia’s interference
in the 2016 US election, see James Banford, “The Spy Who Wasn’t’, The New
Republic, 11 February 2019; see also Tat’iana Baikova, Dmitrii Laru, ‘Spisok
Butina: v GD prizyvaiut nakazat’ vinovnykh v areste rossiianki’, Izvestiia, 30
April 2019.
76 Vladimir Burnov, ‘Butina rasskazala, chto v SShA deistvuiut 4 zakona po inoag-
entam’, RAPSI, 26 November 2020.
77 ‘V Moskve zaderzhali amerikantsa po podozreniiu v shpionazhe’, Vedomosti, 31
December 2018; ‘Russia Detains American in Moscow Over Suspected Spying’,
The Moscow Times, 31 December 2018.
78 ‘Is Paul Whelan an Internet Spy?’, Rosbalt, 3 January 2019; ‘Russian news agency
says ‘U.S. spy” recently arrested in Moscow was caught “red-handed”’, Meduza,
3 January 2018.
79 For video of press conference, www.mid.ru/en/posledniye_dobavinenniye/-/asset_
publisher/MCZ7HQuMdqBY/content/idf/3476729; ‘Lavrov Holds Annual Press
Conference, Ridicules Idea that Trump is Russian Spy’, The Moscow Times, 16
January 2019; Nataliya Vasilyeva, ‘Lawyers: U.S. Spy Suspect Had Classified
Documents’, AP, 23 January 2019.
80 Aleksei Nikol’skii, Varvara Podrugina, ‘Osuzhdennyi za shpionazh Pol Uilan
vriad li otsidit ves’ srok’, Vedomosti, 15 June 2020; ‘Russian court finds ex-US
marine Paul Whelan guilty of espionage, sentences him to 16 years in prison’, RT,
15 Jun 2020; Vladimir Kuznetsov, Jake Rudnitsky, ‘Pompeo Slams Russia’s Jailing
of American in Secret Spy Trial’, Bloomberg, 15 June 2020.
81 Angelina Krechetova et al., ‘Niderlandy vyslali chetyrekh rossiian za podgotovku
kiberataki’, Vedomosti, 4 October 2018; for the December expulsions, Rossiiskaia
gazeta, 10 December 2020.
276 New Cold War
82 ‘“Orchestrated Propaganda:” Russia Reacts to Dutch Hacking Accusations’, The
Moscow Times, 5 October 2018; ‘Britain Accuses Russia’s GRU Military
Intelligence of Global Cyber Attacks’, The Moscow Times, 4 October 2018; ‘U.S.
Indicts 7 Russian Intel Officers in Alleged Doping Scandal Hack’, The Moscow
Times, 4 October 2018; Steven Chase, ‘Canada joins censure of Russian hacking’,
Globe and Mail, 5 October 2018. On Bad Rabbitt, see Hassane Oumsalem, ‘Bad
Rabbit Ransomware: What to Know and How to Prevent It’, Hitachi Systems
Security, Inc., 27 October 2017.
83 Jack Stubbs, Svetlana Reiter, ‘Insight – Treason charges against Russian cyber
experts linked to 7-year old accusation’, Business Insider (Reuters), 26 February
2017.
84 ‘Russian Scientist Accused of Passing Tech Secrets to China – Reports’, The
Moscow Times, 1 October 2020; Brittany Shammas, ‘Mexican national arrested
in Florida on accusation of spying for Russia’, Washington Post, 19 February
2020.
85 Jim Sciutto, ‘Exclusive: US extracted top spy from inside Russia in 2017’, CNN.
com, 10 September 2019; ‘Kreml’ podtverdil, chto “tsennyi agent” SShA rabotal
v administratsii prezidenta’, Kommersant, 10 September 2019.
86 ‘Bolgariia vyslala rossiiskogo diplomata iz-za podozrennii v shpionazhe’,
Vedomosti, 28 October 2019; ‘Poland Captures Suspected Russian Spy, Media
Reports’, The Moscow Times, 28 October 2019; ‘Bulgaria expels Russian diplomat
over espionage case’, EURACTIV Network, 29 October 2019; ‘Bulgaria Set to
Expel Two Russian Diplomats Over Espionage’, The Moscow Times, 24 January
2020; ‘Bolgariia vysylaet dvukh sotrudnikov torpredstva Rossii’, Vedomosti, 23
September 2020.
87 ‘Latvia arrests “spy” working for Russia’, EU Observer, 3 March 2020; ‘Latvia
Arrests Spy Working for Russia’, The Moscow Times, 3 March 2020.
88 Putin, ‘Meeting with public from Crimea and Sevastopol’, Kremlin.ru, 18 March
2020, en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/63021.
89 ‘Czechs Expel Russian Diplomats Over Poison Plot Hoax’, The Moscow Times
(AFP), 5 June 2020.
90 ‘Explainer: Russia’s Recent Tit-for-Tat Diplomatic Expulsions’, The Moscow
Times, 1 September 2020; ‘CMI soobshchili o vysylke dvukh rossiiskikh
diplomatov iz Kolumbii za shpionazh’, Kommersant, 22 December 2020.
91 Yuri Litvinenko, Ksenia Boletskaya, Aleksey Bela Liauw, ‘Byvshemu zhurnalistu
“Vedomostei” Ivanu Safronovu pred’iavili obvinenie v gosizmene’, Vedomosti, 7
July 2020; ‘Russia’s Space Chief Adviser and Ex-Journalist Detained for Treason’,
The Moscow Times, 7 July 2020.
92 ‘Colleagues Rally Behind Russian Former Journalist Detained for Treason’, The
Moscow Times, 7 July 2020; Pavel Felgenhauer, ‘Russia Journalist Community
Stands up to FSB’, Eurasia daily Monitor, 9 July 2020.
93 ‘Two men arrested in Russia on suspicion of treason’, RAPSI, 6 October 2020;
‘Brotherly treason’, RT, 6 October 2020; Anne M. Simmons, ‘Russia Charges
Scientist With Passing Information to China’, The Wall Street Journal, 16 June
2020; ‘Russian Scientist Accused of Passing Tech Secrets to China – Reports;’,
The Moscow Times, 1 October 2020; ‘Moscow City Courts sentenced Karina
Turcan to 15 years in prison in espionage case’, RAPSI, 29 December 2020.
94 Dar’ia Korzhova, Anna Tret’iak, Aleksei Nikol’skii, ‘Osnovateliu investfonda
Baring Vostok pred’iavili obvinenie’, Vedomosti, 21 February 2019; ‘U.S. Investor
Michael Calvey Released, Put Under House Arrest in Moscow’, RFE/RL, 11
April 2019; ‘Moscow Court Freezes Calvey’s Assets’, The Moscow Times, 7
October 2019.
95 ‘Plenary session of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum’, Kremlin.
ru, 7 June 2019, www.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/60707.
 New Cold War 277
96 Donald Trump, ‘Executive Order on Encouraging International Support for the
Recovery and Use of Space Resources’, 6 April 2020, https://www.whitehouse.
gov/presidential-actions/executive-order-encouraging-international-support-
recovery-use-space-resources/; ‘Peskov prokommentiroval ukaz Trampa o prave
SShA na dobychu resursov na Lune’, Interfax, 7 April 2020; Roscosmos website,
‘Plans to seize other planets’ territories damage cooperation’, 7 April 2020, http://
en.roscosmos.ru/21369/; ‘Russia Compares Trump’s Space Mining Order to
Colonialism’, The Moscow Times, 8 April 2020.
97 Daniel Obergaus, ‘The US Hitches Its Final Ride to Space From Russia – for
Now’, Wired, 8 April 2020.
98 Christopher Rickleton, ‘New Crew Reaches ISS in record Time’, The Moscow
News, 14 October 2020; ‘Soyuz rocket reaches ISS in record time’, BBC News, 14
October 2020.
99 See, e.g. Ted Galen Carpenter, ‘NATO Partisans Started a New Cold War With
Russia’, The American Conservative, 27 December 2018; Aaron Maté, ‘New
Studies Show Pundits are Wrong About Russian Social-Media Involvement in
US Politics’, The Nation, 28 December 2018; Michael Tracy, ‘In defense of Maria
Butina. It seems entirely plausible that her biggest crime was networking’,
Spectator USA, 21 December 2018; Tim Black, ‘Russia-mania takes over the
world. In 2018, there were few things Western elites didn’t blame on Russia’,
Spiked, 27 December 2018; Stephen F. Cohen, ‘The Long History of US–Russian
“Meddling”’, The Nation, 6 March 2019.
100 Lydia Saad, ‘Majority of Americans Now Consider Russia a Critical Threat’,
Gallup.com, 27 February 2019.
101 Annual Reagan National Defense Survey, ‘Americans Now View China as
Greatest Enemy’, 26 November 2019, reagan-institute-2019-defense-survey-
release-final.pdf. The survey was conducted in 0ctober with a sampling of 1,000
adult US citizens.
102 ‘Lawmakers Are Warned That Russia is Meddling to Re-elect Trump’, New York
Times, 20 February 2020; ‘Russia is Helping Trump in 2020 Election, U.S. Intel
Says – NYT’, The Moscow Times, 21 February 2020; ‘Russia denies backing
Trump’s re-election as critics blast reported meddling’, Reuters UK News Break,
21 February 2019 (reprinted also in The Moscow Times); Bob Fredericks, ‘Trump
denies Russians are meddling to help him win 2020 election’, New York Post, 21
February 2020.
103 Maggie Miller, ‘State Department Offers $10M reward for foreign election inter-
ference information’, The Hill, 6 August 2020; Shaun Tandon, ‘U.S. Offers $10M
reward Against Russian Election Interference’, The Moscow Times (AFP), 6
August 2020.
104 Anna Arutunyan, ‘There is no Russian Plot Against America. The Kremlin
Electoral Interference is All Madness and No Method’, Foreign Affairs, 5 August
2020; for the counter view, Alina Polyakova, ‘The Kremlin’s Plot Against
Democracy’, Foreign Affairs, September/October 2020.
105 ‘Otnoshenie k stranem’, Levada-tsentr, 17 December 2019, https://www.levada.
ru/2019/12/17/otnoshenie-k-stranam-5/. Russia’s ‘Generation Z: Attitudes and
Values, pp. 68–71.
106 ‘4 in 5 Russians View West as a Friend – Poll’, The Moscow Times, 18 February
2020; Angelina Galanina, ‘Zapad stanovitsia blizhe’, Kommersant, 18 February
2020; ‘Otnoshenie k stranam’, Levada-tsentr, 18 February 2020, www.levada.
ru/2020/02/18/otnoshenie-k-stranam-6/.
107 Sophie Tatum, ‘Washington Post: Trump concealed details from meetings with
Putin’, CNN.com, 13 January 2019; Carla Baranauckas, ‘Trevor Noah Breaks
Down Why The Idea of Trump being a Russian Spy is Preposterous’, Huffington
Post, 15 January 2019; The Editorial Board, ‘Donald Trump: The Russia File’,
278 New Cold War
New York Times, 14 January 2019; Paul Robinson, ‘Worst Secret Agent Ever’,
irrussianality, 15 January 2019.
108 Lavrov’s annual press conference, www.mid.ru/en/foreign_policy/news/-/asset_
publisher/cKNonkJEO2Bw/content/id/3476729, 16 January 2019; ‘Lavrov Holds
Annual Press Conference, Ridicules Idea That Trump is Russian Spy’, The
Moscow Times, 16 January 2019.
109 Clark Mindock, ‘FBI Director James Comey says Russia is “greatest threat of
any nation on earth”’, The Independent, 3 May 2017; see also CNBC.com, 3 May
2017, and Tim Weiner, The Folly and the Glory: America, Russia, and Political
Warfare, 1945–2020. New York: Henry Holt, 2020.
110 See e.g. Byron Tau, ‘Senate Democratic Report Alleges Russia Seeks to
Undermine West’, The Wall Street Journal, 10 January 2018; Ben Cardin, ‘Never
has a president ignored such a clear national security threat’, The Washington
Post, 10 January 2018; Andrew Desiderio, ‘Huntsman: US–Russia Relations
“Done” if There’s 18 Meddling’, Daily Beast, 9 January 2018; ‘Duma accuses
foreign agents of meddling in Russia’s affairs ahead of election’, RT, 10 January
2018. On Yeltsin’s victory in 1996, see, e.g. cover story, ‘Yanks to the Rescue. The
Secret Story of How American Advisers Helped Yeltsin Win’, Time Magazine, 15
July 1996.
111 Stephen F. Cohen, ‘The Cold War Ides of March’, The Nation, 20 March 2019.
In a rare criticism of Russophobia in the US, the Washington Times made it clear
that Russia had no reason to trust Washington, see Julia Gorin, ‘Can Russia trust
the wily West?’, Washington Times, 11 December 2019. Stephen Cohen died in
September, 2020, aged 81.
112 Joseph R. Biden, Jr., Michael Carpenter, ‘How to Stand Up to the Kremlin’,
Foreign Affairs, January/February 2018. See also his, ‘Why America Must Lead
Again’, Foreign Affairs, March/April 2020.
113 David Cenciotti, ‘U.S. B-52 Bombers Belonging to Task Force Deployed to UK
Perform “Theater Familiarization Flights” Across Europe’, The Aviationist, 19
March 2019; Harry Howard, ‘Watch out, Putin! Huge American B-52s that can
carry nuclear weapons land at RAF base as part of largest US bomber deploy-
ment to the UK since Iraq war’, Daily Mail, 17 March 2019.
114 See Republican and FOX News responses to witness statements before the
inquiry conducted by the US Congress, ‘Permanent Select Committee on
Intelligence, joint with the Committee on Oversight and Reform, and the
Committee on Foreign Affairs’, November 2019. The inquiry board included 13
Democrats and nine Republicans, with equal time to question.
115 ‘Putin response to a question at the Russia Calling! Investment Forum’, Kremlin.
ru, 20 November 2019, en.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/62072/.
116 Lavrov, ‘Vstrecha s Gossekretarem SShA M. Pompeo, Sochi, 14 Maia 2019 goda’,
http://www.mid.ru/ru/foreign_policy/news/asset_publisher/cKNonkJE02Bw/
content/id/3645867; Pompeo, ‘Remarks With Russian Foreign Minister Sergey
Lavrov Before Their Meeting’, www.state.gov/secretary/remarks/2019/05/291629.
htm.
117 Bolton, The Room Where It Happened, pp. 174–80, 181–2; David E. Sanger,
Nicole Perlroth, ‘U.S. Escalates Online Attacks on Russia’s Power Grid’, New
York Times, 15 June 2019; Nicole Perlroth, David E. Sanger, ‘Cyberattacks Put
Russian Fingers on the Switch at Power Plants, U.S. Says’, New York Times, 15
March 2018.
118 ‘Russia Thwarts U.S., Cyber Attacks on its Infrastructure – News Agencies’, The
Moscow Times, 17 June 2019.
119 For the Russian response, ‘Comment by the … Administrator of the United
States Agency for International Development’, 6 July 2019, www.mid.ru/ru/­
foreign_policy/news/-/asset_publisher/cKNonkJE02Bw/content/id/; ‘USAID
Administrator Mark Green’s remarks on Countering Malign Kremlin Influence’,
 New Cold War 279
5 July 2019, www.usaid.gov/news-information/press-release/jul-5-2019-adminis-
trator-mark-greens-remarks-countering-malign-kremlin-influence. See also
Pavel Sharikov, ‘Will Russia’s Efforts to Prevent the Weaponization of
Information Succeed?’ Russian Analytical Digest, No. 259, 30 November 2020,
pp. 12–14.
120 US Department of Defense, Russian Strategic Intentions. A Strategic Multilayer
Assessment (SMA) White Paper, May 2019, https://www.politico.
com/f/?id=0000016b-a5a1-d241-adff-fdf908e00001.
121 Natalia Romashkina, ‘Strategic Instability in the Era of Information and
Communication Technologies: Crisis or the New Norm?’, Russian International
Affairs Council, 7 November 2019.
122 ‘US–Russia Hold New Strategic Talks on Arms Control’, New York Times, 16
January 2020.
123 David E. Sanger, Nicole Perlroth, ‘Billions Spent on U.S. Cyberdefenses Failed
to Detect Giant Russian Hack’, New York Times, 16 December 2020; David E,
Sanger, Nicole Perlroth, Eric Schmitt, ‘Scope of Russian Hack Becomes Clear:
Multiple U.S, Agencies Were Hit’, New York Times, 16 December 2020; Ben Fox,
‘U.S. cybersecurity agency says major hack of federal systems poses “grave”
threat’, Globe and Mail, 18 December 2020; Robert Fife, Steven Chase, ‘Canada
hit by major cybersecurity attack’, Globe and Mail, 19 December 2020.
124 Paul R. Kolbe, ‘With Hacking, the United States Needs to Stop Playing the
Victim’, New York Times, 23 December 2020.
125 Vladimir Kozlov, ‘The pandemic causes a spike in cyber-attacks on Russian com-
panies’, bne intellinews, 14 December 2020.
126 ‘Soveshchanie s postoiannymi chlenami Soveta’, Kremlin.ru, 18 December 2020,
Kremlin.ru/events/president/news/64678; Dmitri Trenin, ‘An “Act of War?”
Avoiding a Dangerous Crisis in Cyberspace’, Carnegie Moscow Center, 21
December 2020; Paul R. Kolbe, ‘With Hacking, the United States Needs to Stop
Playing the Victim’, New York Times, 24 December 2020.
127 Lionel Barber, Henry Foy, Alex Barker, ‘Vladimir Putin says liberalism has
“become obsolete”’, Financial Times, 27 June 2019. Barber is Editor of the FT
and Foy is its Moscow Bureau Chief. Barker was in Osaka for the G-20. For full
transcript of Putin’s remarks, http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/60836.
128 ‘Discours du Président de la République á la conférence des ambassadeurs’,
Élysée, 27 August 2019.
129 DmitriTrenin @DmitriTrenin-Aug 20, -21, -25, https://twitter.com/DmitriTrenin/
status/1165556361062682624.
130 Todd Prince, ‘U.S. Senate Hearing Exposes Partisan Differences Over New
Russian Sanctions’, RFE/RL, 4 December 2019; Patricia Zengerle, ‘U.S. senators
try again to pass Russia sanctions bill’, Reuters, 13 February 2019; Bolton, The
Room Where It Happened, pp. 142–3.
131 Leonid Bershidsky, ‘U.S. Sanctions a Russian Pipeline Too Late to Stop It’,
Bloomberg Opinion, 13 December 2019.
132 Vera Eckert, ‘EU “highly concerned” by U.S. stance on Nord Stream pipeline’,
Reuters, 14 August 2020; Charles Kennedy, ‘U.S. Sanctions On Nord Stream 2
Upset European Lawmakers’, Oilprice, 14 August 2020; Tsvetana Paraskova,
‘Russia Cries War As U.S. Tries To Kill Nord Stream 2’, Oilprice.com, 21
December 2020; ‘Norwegian company refused to certify Nord Stream 2’, RBC.
ru, 2 January 2021, www.rbc.ru/business/02/01/2021/5ff096349a794791d35
7ed31.
133 Gennadii Petrov, ‘V Vashingtone vystupili za “chestogo i priamogo” posla v RF’,
Nezavisimaia gazeta, 30 October 2019.
134 ‘Statement of John J. Sullivan. Nominee to be U.S. Ambassador to the Russian
Federation. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, October 30, 2015’, https://
www.foreign.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/103019_Sullivan_Testimony.pdf.
280 New Cold War
135 For the full 120-page report, https://rsc-johnson.house.gov/sites/republicanstudy-
committee.house.gov/files/%5BFINAL%5D%20NSTF%20Report.pdf.
136 Mark McKinnon, ‘China, Russia add COVID-19 hoaxes to their disinformation
arsenals’, Globe and Mail, 28 March 2020; Mark J. Schwartz, ‘Russia Blamed for
COVID-19 Disinformation Campaigns’, Bank Info Security, 23 March 2020;
Ti-Ting Lien, ‘Why China’s COVID-19 Disinformation Campaign Isn’t Working
in Taiwan’, The Diplomat, 20 March 2020.
137 ‘Coronavirus: Russia denies spreading US conspiracy on social media’, BBC.
com News, 23 February 2020; ‘Putin Says Fake Coronavirus Rumors “Organized
From Abroad”’, The Moscow Times, 4 March 2020
138 Homeland Security News Wire, http://www.homelandsecuritynewswire.com/
dr20200414-putin-s-long-war-against-american-science; William J. Broad,
‘Putin’s Long War Against American Science’, New York Times, 14 April 2020.
139 See, e.g. Nick Robins-Early, Hayley Miller, Jesselyn Cook, ‘How Quack Doctors
And Powerful GOP Operatives Spread Misinformation to Millions’, HuffPost,
28 July 2020; Michael D. Shear et alia, ‘Inside Trump’s Failure: The Rush to
Abandon Leadership Role on the Virus’, New York Times, 18 July 2020.
140 Acot-Acot, ‘As the US nears 200,000 coronavirus deaths, Trump says he gives
himself as A+ on pandemic response’, COVID-19 World News, 21 September
2020.
141 EUvsDiSiNFO, ‘The Kremlin and Disinformation about Coronavirus, 16 March
2020, euvsdisinfo.eu/the-kremlin-and-disinformation-about-coronavirus/;
‘Disinformation on the Coronavirus – Short Assessment of the Information
Environment, ibid., 27 March 2020; ‘Kremlin denies evidence of Russian COVID-
19 Disinformation Campaign’, 19 March 2020, coronavirus-disinfo/30498024.
html.
142 ‘Telefonnyi razgovor s Prezidentom SShA Donal’dom Trampom’, Kremlin.ru, 30
March 2020, Kremlin.ru/events/president/news/63086; ‘Russia Plane Heads to
U.S. With Supplies for Virus Fight’, The Moscow Times, 1 April 2020; U.S.
Department of State, ‘U.S. Purchase of Needed Supplies From Russia’, Press
Statement, 1 April 2020, https://www.state.gov/u-s-purchase-of-needed-supplies-
from-russia/.
143 See tweets by Leonid Volkov https://twitter.com/leonidvolkov/sta-
tus/1245594577249038337; Al’ians vrachei, https://twitter.com/alyansvrachey/
status/1245614889726398464.
144 ‘Putin, Trump discuss anti-coronavirus efforts, situation on global oil market –
Kremlin’, Interfax, 7 May 2020.
145 See, e.g. Kurt M. Campbell, Rush Doshi, ‘The Coronavirus Could Reshape
Global Order’, Foreign Affairs, 18 March 2020; Andrew Korybko, ‘The
Coronavirus: Crown Jewel of the New World Order or Crippling Blow to
Globalization?’ Global Research, 19 March 2020.
146 See, e.g. Michael Green, Even S. Medeiros, ‘The Pandemic Won’t Make China
the World’s Leader. Few Countries Are Buying the Model of the Message From
Beijing’, Foreign Affairs, 15 April 2020.
147 ‘Russia, U.S. Should Help Each Other During Pandemic Kremlin’, The Moscow
Times, 18 April 2020; ‘U.S. Ready to Send Ventilators to Corona-Hit Russia,
Trump Says’, The Moscow Times, 18 April 2020;
148 ‘Russia coronavirus test sent to more than 30 countries’, Interfax, 8 April 2020;
‘Turning the Tables, Russia Send Virus Aid to U.S.’, New York Times, 4 April
2020.
149 ‘U.S. To Send Ventilators to Russia Amid Surge in Coronavirus Cases’, RFE/RL,
17 May 2020; ‘U.S. Plane With 150 Donated Ventilators Lands in Russia’, The
Moscow Times, 4 June 2020.
150 Felix Light, ‘QAnon Gains Traction in Russia’, The Moscow Times, 30 November
2020; ‘Protesty v SShA posle vyborov prezidenta. Fotogaleria’, Vedomosti, 5
 New Cold War 281
November 2020; ‘Tramp nazval nepravomernymi zaiavleniia Baidena o pobede
do resheniia suda’, Rossiiskaia gazeta, 7 November 2020; ‘Tramp nazval neza-
konnymi zaiavleniia Baidena o pobede do resheniia suda’, Kommersant, 7
November 2020; ‘“More Divided Than Ever”: Russia Reacts to U.S. Election’,
The Moscow Times, 5 November 2020; Sonam Sheth, ‘Vladimir Putin wasted no
time in weaponizing Trump’s election conspiracies to spread Russian propa-
ganda’, Business Insider, 23 November 2020.
151 Michael Mainville, ‘Russia Sees U.S. Democracy “Limping” After Capital
Stormed’, The Moscow Times, 7 January 2021; Igor Dunaevsky, ‘Chto predvesh-
chaet inauguratsiia v rezhime ChS dlia prezidentstva Dzhozefa Baidena’,
Rossiiskaia gazeta, 8 January 2021; ‘Chislo pogibshikh v bespriadkakh v
Vashingtone vyproslo do piatiu’, Vedomosti, 8 January 2021. See also Pippa
Norris, ‘It Happened in America. Democratic Backsliding Shouldn’t Have Come
as a Surprise’, Foreign Affairs. This Week, 7 January 2021.
152 Tatyana Stanovaya, ‘A Farewell to Trump? Russia’s Elite Braces for U.S.
Elections’, Carnegie Moscow Centre, 21 October 2020.
153 ‘Lukashenko nasval izdevatel’stvom nad demokratiei prezidentskie vybory v
SShA’, Vedomosti, 7 November 2020.
154 Anna Arutunyan, ‘The Russian Media May Like Trump. It Doesn’t Mean the
Kremlin Does’, The Moscow Times, 5 November 2020; ‘Moscow for Trump:
metropolitan social media users support the current president’, Moscow Daily
News, 3 November 2020;
155 Joe Biden, ‘Why America Must Lead Again’, Foreign Affairs, March/April 2020.
See also ‘Biden and Russia’, The Bell, 24 October 2020.
156 ‘The Kremlin said that Putin will congratulate the US president after the official
results’, TASS, 9 November 2020; ‘Pozdravlenie Dzhozefu Baidenu s pobedoi na
vyborakh Prezidenta SShA’, Kremlin.ru, 15 December 2020, Kremlin.ru/events/
president/news/64660.
157 ‘Putin ob’iasnil, pochemu eshche ne pozdravil Baidena s pobedoi’, Vedomosti, 22
November 2020; Andrey Baklitskiy, ‘Will the U.S. Election Herald the Return of
Arms Control?’, Carnegie Moscow Center, 3 November 2020.
158 ‘Oba khuzhe. Kto luchshe dlia Rossii – Tramp ili Baiden?’, Argumenty i fakty, 4
November 2020.
159 National Security Strategy of the United States of America, December 2017, pp.
47, 51, www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/NSS-Final-12-18-2017-
0905; Hilary Appel, ‘Are XI Jinping and Vladimir Putin Partners? Interpreting
the Russia–China Rapprochement’, PONARS Eurasia. Policy Memo 603, July
2019.
160 See Leon Aron, ‘Are Russia and China Really Forming an Alliance?’, Foreign
Affairs. Snapshot, 4 April 2019; ‘The junior partner’, The Economist, 27 July
2019, pp. 15–18. For a challenge to the mainstream narrative, Andrea Kendall-
Taylor, David Shullman, ‘A Russian–Chinese Partnership Is a Threat to U.S.
Interests’, Foreign Affairs. Response, 14 May 2019.
161 Dmitri Trenin, ‘Russia, China Are Key and Close Partners’, Carnegie Moscow
Centre, 5 June 2019; see also Andrei Tsygankov, ‘The Global Economic Reshuffle:
USA, China and Russia’, Valdai Club, 14 May 2019.
162 For a discussion, see Paul Goble, ‘China’s Plan for Railway to Uzbekistan is
Transforming Central Asian Geopolitics’, Eurasia Daily Monitor, 21 March 2019;
and Jeff Sahadeo, ‘Springtime for Central Asia? Belts and Roads, Partnerships,
and Risks amid Global Realignment’, The New World Disorder, Chapter 4, pp.
77–101.
163 See a detailed Russian perspective, Alexander Lukin, China and Russia: The New
Rapprochement. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2018. Lukin is the head of the
Department of World Economy and International Affairs at Moscow’s Higher
School of Economics.
282 New Cold War
164 Dmitry Butrin, ‘Rossiisko-kitaiskoe prodvizhenie. Sanktsii i torgovye voiny
pomogli Moskvy i Pekina’, Kommersant, 8 November 2018;
165 “Press statements following Russian–Chinese talks’, Kremlin.ru, 5 June 2019,
http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/60672.
166 ‘Lavrov: Rossiia i Kitai ne budut zakliuchat;’ voennyi soiuz’, TASS, 1 November
2019.
167 ‘Russia Slams Trump’s Decision to Cut WHO Funding as Coronavirus Rages’,
The Moscow Times, 15 April 2020; Euobserver, ‘EU warns against anti-Chinese
virus blame games’, 23 April 2020, https://euobserver.com/tickers/148157.
168 ‘Telephone conversation with President Xi Jinping’, Kremlin.ru, 28 December
2020, en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/64758; Rachel Zhang, ‘China–Russia
ties won’t be broken, declare Xi and Putin in signal to Biden’, South China
Morning Post, 29 December 2020.
169 Putin, ‘Zasedanie diskussionnogo kluba “Valdai”’, Kremlin.ru, 22 October
2020, Kremlin.ru/events/president/news/64261.
170 Charlie Savage, Eric Schmitt, Michael Schwirtz, ‘Russia Secretly Offered Afghan
Militants Bounties to Kill U.S. Troops, Intelligence Says’, New York Times, 26
June 2020; ‘MID nazval vbrosom stat’iu NYT o deiatel’nosti Rossii v
Afganistane’, Vedomosti, 27 June 2020; @realDonaldTrump, 28 June 2020,
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1277202159109537793.
171 Charlie Savage, Eric Schmitt, Rakmini Callimachi, Adam Goldman, ‘New
Administration Memo Seeks To Cast Doubts About Suspected Russian
Bounties’, New York Times, 3 July 2020; Ben Aris, ‘US intelligence memo admits
there is “no evidence” of Russian payment of bounties to Afghans for killing US
soldiers’, BNE Intellinews, 7 July 2020; David B. Rivkin Jr., George S. Beebe,
‘Why we Need a little scepticism, and more evidence, on Russian bounties’, The
Hill, 5 July 2020; Alan MacLeod, ‘In “Russian Bounty” Story, Evidence-Free
Claims From Nameless Spies Became Fact Overnight’, FAIR (Fairness &
Accuracy in Reporting), 3 July 2020; Courtney Kune, Ken Dilanian, ‘U.S. com-
mander: Intel still hasn’t established Russia paid Taliban “bounties” to kill U.S.
troops’, NBC News, 14 September 2020.
172 Russia in USA @RusEmbUSA, 26 June 2020, https://twitter.com/RusEmbUSA/
status/1276692847698337792; Ebony Bowden, ‘Intelligence officials cast doubt
on Times’ Russia–Taliban bounty scheme: report’, New York Post, 29 June 2020;
for Peskov on NBC News, YouTube, 29 June 2020, https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=bBMcvjxuNJo; Mark Galeotti, ‘The “Talibangate” Claims About
Russian Bounties Still Don’t Add Up’, The Moscow Times, 3 June 2020.
173 Paul Waldie, Michelle Carbert, ‘Russian hackers tried to steal coronavirus vac-
cine research from Canada, U.S. and Britain, intelligence agencies say’, Globe
and Mail, 17 July 2020; Julian E. Barnes, ‘Russia Is Trying to Steal Virus Vaccine
Data, Western Nations Say’, New York Times, 16 July 2020; ‘UK, U.S. and
Canada Accuse Russia of Vaccine Research Hacking’, The Moscow Times, 17
July 2020; ‘Russian Envoy Denies Moscow Helped Hackers Target Virus
Vaccine’, The Moscow Times, 18 July 2020; ‘Developments in Oxford Vaccine
Officially Shared With Russia, No Need to “Steal” Them – RDIF Head’, Sputnik,
16 July 2020.
174 For detailed discussions, Russell Buchan, Cyber Espionage and International
Law. London: Hart, 2018; Ben Buchanan, The Hacker and the State: Cyber
Attacks and the New Normal of Geopolitics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2020.
175 See, e.g. Bret Stephens, ‘U.S. Should Pass A Navalny Act’, New York Times
International, 19–20 September 2020; Michael Carpenter, Vlad Kobets, ‘What
Russia Really Has in Mind for Belarus and Why Western Leaders Must Act’,
Foreign Affairs, 8 September 2020.
176 See Madeline Chambers, ‘Calls mount for Germany to rethink Nord Stream 2
pipeline after Navalny poisoning’, Reuters, 3 September 2020; ‘North Atlantic
 New Cold War 283
Council meets to address assassination attempt on Alexey Navalny’, NATO
News, 4 September 2020, https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/news.htm; Anna
Smolenko, ‘Russia Defies West as NATO Urges Cooperation Over Navalny’, The
Moscow Times, 4 September 2020; ‘V Kremle otsenili riski ostanovki stroitel’stva
“Severnogo potoka-2”’, Vedomosti, 7 September 2020.
177 ‘Rossiiskie vrachi predlozhili kollegam iz FRG sozdat’ sovmestnuiu gruppu po
Naval’nomu’, Vedomosti, 5 September 2020.
178 Putin, ‘Zasedanie diskussionnogo kluba “Valdai”’, Kremlin.ru, 22 October
2020, kremlin.ru/events/president/news/64261. Putin spoke via video from
Novo-Ogarevo.
179 Khrushchev’s statement, ‘My vas pokhoronim’, angered many ambassadors and
they left the room, but it could also have been interpreted by the simultaneous
translator as ‘we shall outlive you’, or ‘outlast you’, which might not have been
so provocative.
7 The re-militarization of Russia, and
the end of arms control?

Introduction
From the moment of his appointment as prime minister on 9 August 1999,
two days after the outbreak of the second Chechen war, the Russian armed
forces again became a major instrument of Russian foreign policy. While this
had always been true during the Soviet era, the military arm had slipped badly
in effectiveness and credibility during the latter part of the 1980s and through-
out the chaotic 1990s. It lost the first Chechen war. Since then, unhesitant
NATO expansion eastward and foreign reactions to further war in the North
Caucasus confirmed for Putin early on that Russia was, and would continue to
be, under psychological and perhaps even military siege from the West. With
no reliable allies, the state of Russia’s weaponry and its military capabilities
regained priority as components of the Kremlin’s international relationships.
After the Russian economy was rejuvenated and state revenues guaranteed
by a reorganized system of taxation, modernizing the military moved to the
top of the agenda for the Russian government, temporarily setting aside the
earlier stress on societal needs. Putin made this clear in an address to the
Federal Assembly in 2006, when he complained that Russia’s defence spend-
ing as a share of GDP was less than either that of France or Britain, and that
the US’s ‘defence budget in absolute figures is almost 25 times larger than
Russia’s’. Musing on the role of the army, he said it should be ‘professional
and mobile’ and able ‘to fight in global, regional and also in several local
conflicts if necessary’. Touching on another theme common to most of his
addresses, Putin said:

A huge number of young men of conscript age today suffer from chronic
disease and have problems with drinking, smoking and sometimes drugs
as well. I think that in our schools we need not just to educate our young
people but also see to their physical and military-patriotic development.
We need to restore the system of pre-conscription military training and
help develop military sports.1

It is worth recalling that in Putin’s own school days, young Soviet males in
Class 10 took a compulsory course on military-patriotic education.2
DOI: 10.4324/9781003158646-8
 The re-militarization of Russia 285
Preparations for war fighting was but one of the objectives related to the
military throughout Putin’s first two decades in office: government spending
on armed forces personnel and procurement had always to be considered
carefully, so too was the constant question of nuclear and other arms control
treaties. Other issues, ranging from the debilitating practice of hazing to
endemic corruption in the military, were also on the agenda.

Spending
Spending on the military grew exponentially from 2005, rising from 3.6 to
over 5 per cent of Russian GDP by 2016, after which it decreased slightly.3
Budget allocations had grown especially sharply while the military sector
underwent sweeping reform and structural reorganization in 2008–9, driven
in part by obvious weaknesses exposed by the Georgia campaign.4 The later
cuts in defence expenditures were due to Putin’s preference for domestic
development in his fourth term, perhaps to ensure his legacy. According to
SIPRI, Russian military allocations had already dropped by 20 per cent in
2017 and by the end of 2018 Russia had slipped to sixth place – from third
– among the top defence spending countries. At $61.4 billion, it lagged
behind the USA ($649 bln), China ($250 bln), Saudi Arabia ($67.6 bln),
India ($66.5 bln) and France ($63.8 bln).5 This amount did not take into
account the fact that Russia buys and develops all its weaponry internally,
and pays for them in rubles; and it spends more on research and develop-
ment, separately from the defence budget, than most other countries.6 It
seemed at the time that Russia’s ventures in Ukraine and Syria during Putin’s
third term were enough and, on the assumption that certain strategic goals
had been achieved, the inclination in the Kremlin was to turn inward.
Military allocations were also victims of Western economic sanctions and,
for a while, low oil prices.
The spending tide turned again in 2019 when, SIPRI reported, Russia
moved into fourth place in global defence apportionments. This expenditure
made up about 3.4 per cent of global spending, far behind the US and China,
and took up 3.9 per cent of Russia’s GDP (Table 7.1).7
Talk of further spending on the military spread again in Russia after
Washington released details of a massive 2020 budget for defence, which
totalled $740 billion. The omnibus bill included some direct specific chal-
lenges to Russia, such as embargoes related to Nord Stream-2 and TurkStream,
$300 million for Ukrainian security, and sanctions against Turkey for pur-
chasing Russia’s S-400s (see ahead).8 The bill did not become law until the
first week of 2021, when the US Congress overrode Trump’s veto. Some of
the onus on Russian military production was lifted by the government’s deci-
sion in December 2019 to write off up to a third of the debt owed by the mili-
tary industry complex. The bailout was designed to make it easier for the
industry to meet crucial production deadlines and, it was hoped, ensure that
the armed forces would reach the long-standing goal of 70 per cent modern
weaponry and equipment, especially for ground forces.9
286 The re-militarization of Russia

Table 7.1 Global Military Spending, 2019

SIPRI list of 15 countries with highest shares of (in percentages)

world military expenditures in 2019

United States 38
China 14
India 3.7
Russia 3.4
Saudi Arabia 3.2
France 2.6
Germany 2.6
United Kingdom 2.5
Japan 2.5
South Korea 2.3
Brazil 1.4
Italy 1.4
Australia 1.4
Canada 1.2
Israel 1.1
Others 19

Arms control treaties targeted

Particularly important to military planning in Russia was the fate of a num-
ber of arms control treaties signed by Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald
Reagan in the 1980s and subsequent extensions or nullifications of each of
them (see ahead). The unilateral abrogation of the ABM Treaty by George
W. Bush in 2002, the disputes over and eventual mutual cancellation of the
Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) by 2016 and uncertainty
about the future of the New START (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty) were
all incentives for Russia to raise its nuclear defence profile. The fact that
Russia and the US together possess more than 90 per cent of the world’s
nuclear weapons, about 8,000 warheads between them, means that these trea-
ties have immense significance for the entire world. Cancelled arms control
agreements will leave fingers on triggers of new and more dangerous weap-
ons, even nuclear weapons, that could too easily be pulled.10
The fate of the Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) Treaty typified the
arms control conundrum. Signed in November 1990 by NATO and the
Warsaw Pact, the CFE set ceilings on the numbers of troops and equipment
either side could maintain close to each other’s borders, and allowed verifica-
tion. Overtaken by the break-up of both Warsaw Pact and the USSR, the
CFE was nonetheless ratified by its 30 signatories and came into force in
1992.
Subsequent arguments about alleged violations by, and in, Russia, Ukraine,
Armenia and Azerbaijan preceded a major conference in Istanbul in 1999.
After much deliberation, all participants agreed on wide-ranging amend-
ments to the CFE. But these were never ratified by NATO governments who
demanded that Russia withdraw all troops from Georgia and Moldova first.
 The re-militarization of Russia 287
Russia complied in the case of Georgia, but not completely in the case of
Moldova (Transdniestria). In its turn Russia, demanded that the US not con-
struct a vast missile defence system in Europe that, it said, would violate the
Treaty. Moscow complained also that further NATO expansion violated the
Treaty. With no accommodation forthcoming from either side, and the estab-
lishment of US military bases in Bulgaria and Romania in 2006, Russia sus-
pended its part in the CFE in 2007 and by 2015 withdraw altogether. From
behind the Kremlin’s wall, the fate of the CFE illustrated the West’s indiffer-
ence to Russia’s security concerns. So, too, did the US’s unwillingness to
reconsider its plans (touted disingenuously since 2002 as a defence vs. ‘rogue’
states such as Iran) to surround Russia in the West with a Europe-based mis-
sile defence system, which was turned over to NATO when it became operable
in 2016. Whether or not the Kremlin’s assessments of the European missile
defence story and NATO enlargement are correct, its perception of both have
been key factors in shaping Russia’s defence policies.

Conscripts
Regular pronouncements about creating an army of contract soldiers (kon-
traktiki) notwithstanding, by 2020 about 70 per cent of army personnel were
still conscripts drawn from all males between the ages of 18 and 33. Many
individuals who have financial resources, important personal contacts or real
(or fake) health problems avoid the call-up, assuring that conscripts on aver-
age represent the least advantaged of Russia’s young men. Putin claimed in
2019 that, eventually, conscription would be phased out completely and that
the Russian army would be filled with professionals, but change will take
time. At about the same time, Defence Minister Shoigu announced that the
number of kontraktiki in the armed forces had reached 400,000 and would
grow to a half million by 2025.11 That would still represent only about one
half of army personnel.
At least one of the reforms didn’t seem to take, that is, preventative mea-
sures against pervasive hazing (dedovshchina), the sometime brutalization or
extortion of military recruits. Attempts to ameliorate these practices, which
have led to deaths and suicides, failed even though since 2008 conscripted
soldiers have served for only one year, as opposed to the traditional two years.
In that year, a new military educational system and stiffer punishments for
hazers were introduced, but dedovshchina is still practiced by bullies close to
finishing their own one-year term, and the NCOs do little to prevent it.12 The
Union of Committees of Mothers of Russian Soldiers (Materey Rossii) esti-
mated that nearly 40 per cent of soldiers’ deaths are due to suicides, not com-
bat, while the army says that most of these are the result of traffic accidents,
safety violations and plane crashes. The Mothers of Russian Soldiers NGO
works to expose human rights violation in the military, making the question
of hazing a political one.
***
288 The re-militarization of Russia
In a rare interview, granted in September 2019, Shoigu told the Moskovskiy
komsomolets that Putin’s greatest long-term accomplishment in the military
field was countering the West’s decision to expand NATO eastward in the
1990s so as to ‘destroy and enslave Russia’. With Putin at the helm, he said,
‘Russia awoke and began pushing back, rebuilding its military with great sac-
rifice to resist Western domination and managing to build a multipolar
world’.13 These comments were delivered during an event that would have
been thought inconceivable in 2000; that is, a massive military manoeuvre
conducted in the Central Military District with Chinese, Indian, Pakistani
and Central Asian troops participating.
NATO now holds military exercises based on an assumption that Russia
poses a danger to the Baltic States and the Alliance’s ‘entire eastern flank’, a
flank that abuts Russia. Both sides indulge in what is loosely called ‘hybrid’
warfare, a term used to cover anything ranging from war by proxy, propa-
ganda, or cyberattacks, plus financial aid to opposition movements and indi-
viduals, and support for colour revolutions.14 The cold warrior notion of a
‘Russian threat’, another phenomenon almost unthinkable in 2000, is back in
vogue.
Given from where it started, the resurgence of the Russian military has
been a success story for Putin and most Russians – to the extent that polls
taken in 2019 showed that the army was the country’s most trusted institu-
tion (see Chapter 1). In fact, Stephen Blank, an American scholar of military
matters, rightly called the reform one of ‘Putin’s most important legacies’,
because it represented a ‘systematic overhaul of the entire state administra-
tion and the national economy’.15
Two events in June 2020 exposed issues of image and strategic policy fac-
ing the Russian military and the Russian government. In the first place, when
the postponed annual Victory Day parade was finally carried out, on 24 June,
to non-existing crowds, some 14,000 troops from 13 countries marched,
showcasing both vintage equipment and some of the latest military weap-
onry. Putin stood with be-medalled veterans and presidents of several former
Soviet republics. Macron and Xi, who had been scheduled for the first event,
could not attend because of the pandemic. Thus, a propaganda opportunity
for Putin to gain public support for his looming constitutional vote was lost.
A second disappointment came when the American delegation to strategic
stability talks in Vienna (22 June) failed to consider a short-term extension of
New START.16
Those talks started out oddly. The US delegation, led by Marshal S.
Billingslea, arranged chairs at the table with flags of China on them, photo-
graphed them and then jeered when no Chinese representatives showed, even
though China had always said they would not participate.17 The Russian del-
egation leader, Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov, had already given
an interview in which he said that Russia ‘had no trust’ in the US, so this
strange act could not have inspired much confidence before the meeting got
underway.18
 The re-militarization of Russia 289
Strategic issues
As new waves of sanctions flailed the Russian state and people in 2018, China
sent a high-level military delegation to Moscow, led by its newly appointed
defence minister, Wei Fenghe. Though the official reason for the delegation’s
visit was to participate in the Moscow International Security Conference,
Wei made it clear to Shoigu that ‘the Chinese side has come to show Americans
the close ties between the armed forces of China and Russia’.19 Since China
was in the throes of a trade war with the US, spoken expressions of mutual
support were important to both Moscow and Beijing.
In that connection, in September 2018 the US launched its 60th sanctions
package since 2011, this time against China for buying fighter jets and missile
systems from Russia in violation of earlier US sanctions against Russia’s
Arms Export Agency (Rosoboronexport). Ryabkov complained that impos-
ing sanctions had become America’s new national sport.20 In the opinion of
Rosoboronexport, these sanctions were also an American ploy to undermine
competition in the arms trade sector.
At about the same time, a scheduled Russian naval exercise in the
Mediterranean off the coast of Syria was placed in an awkward position
because of warnings from Donald Trump that he was going to launch missile
strikes against Syrian targets in response to an alleged chemical release in
Douma. The Russian ambassador to Lebanon threatened to shoot them
down.21 Loose talk of war between Russia and the United States made this a
very tense moment.
The Syrian civil war grew more complicated for Russia after Israeli fighter
jets fired cruise missiles against Iranian airfields in Syria. The on-going
shadow war between Israel and Iran pitched a country with which Russia was
friendly (Israel) against another with which it is a semi-ally (Iran). In the
middle diplomatically, Russia was in the middle strategically as well, for in
April 2019 Moscow reached a deal with Damascus for a 49-year extension of
its lease on the Tartus naval base.22
In 2020, Russia’s MoD signed an agreement with Sudan to build a perma-
nent naval base on that country’s Red Sea Coast. The agreement for a ‘logisti-
cal and support’ centre near Port Sudan has a 25-year lease, with automatic
10-year renewals unless one side objects. The Russian navy will be able to
keep four ships at the base at a time, and some 300 military and civilian per-
sonnel. Russia already has military advisers on the ground in Sudan, with
which it signed a military cooperative agreement in 2019.23
In the air, Russian long-range bombers continued to conduct flyover drills
in international airspace close to the US border in Alaska and Canada’s
Yukon and Northwest Territories. These were intercepted and escorted by
US fighter jets without incident, though politicians made much of them.24
The West and Ukraine complained in June when Russia conducted a large-
scale military exercise in Crimea, just as the Pentagon was urging NATO
defence ministers to raise the level of their military commitments in Eastern
290 The re-militarization of Russia
Europe. Ukrainian analysts interpreted the Crimea drills, which saw over 100
Russian warplanes participate, as a precursor to further aggression against
their country. These events in June 2018 overlapped with NATO’s own large-
scale military exercise labelled Saber Strike in Poland and the Baltic States.25
The infringement, or near infringement, of each other’s air space and
waters continued to present awkward situations for Russia and the US well
into 2020.

China joins up
Not to be outdone, Russia’s largest war game since the 1980s was spread over
five days in September, when some 3,200 Chinese troops joined Russian
armed forces in Vostok-2018. Conducted in the central and eastern military
districts, the exercise confirmed earlier statements about deepening military
ties between Moscow and Beijing.26 Altogether some 300,000 troops, 1,000
aircraft, parts of two fleets and all of the country’s airborne units partici-
pated. Commentators in Moscow pointed to NATO’s build-up on Russia’s
western flank as one of the reasons for its manoeuvres. The MoD was also
testing its ability to move large numbers of troops and equipment over long
distances. The Russian navy was involved in Vostok-2018 too, holding drills
on the Bering Sea, close to Alaska and Norway.
China’s role also signalled that Moscow’s shift to the East had gone well
beyond economic considerations and confirmed that hopes in Russia for
accommodation with the West were fading away. In addition to military
drills, security cooperation compelled Russia to make its most sophisticated
weapons systems available to China, even extending to joint support in cyber
space and intelligence gathering.
Although China’s part in Vostok-2018 was deemed slight by some, its role
in bilateral naval drills since 2012 have been extensive by any measure. For
example, the Belt and Road summit held in Beijing in April 2019 coincided
with more combined Russia–China naval drills, dubbed ‘Joint Sea 2019’.
These exercises took place in the Sea of Japan, the Sea of Okhotsk, the
Yellow Sea, the East China Sea and the South China Sea and, although they
spoke of ‘anti-pirating’ training, it was plain that the operations were aimed
at countering the American military presence in the region.27
At the end of 2019, Russia, China and Iran held joint naval drills in the
Indian Ocean and the Sea of Oman, which is part of an important interna-
tional water route for oil tankers.
Russia’s first long-range air patrol with China in the Asia-Pacific region
sparked controversy because it drew warning shots from South Korean
fighter planes. South Korea and Japan both scrambled jets to intercept two
Russian Tu-95 strategic bombers, two Chinese H-6 bombers and a Russian
A-50 early warning plane, alleging that the mission violated their air space.
Russia denied the charge. The incident also revealed growing tensions
between Japan and South Korea, as they offered different interpretations of
territorial air spaces.28 Facing unrest in Hong Kong, China responded by
 The re-militarization of Russia 291
saying that it would increase military cooperation with Russia, ‘enriching
[their] comprehensive strategic partnership of coordination for a new era and
playing a significant role in maintaining global strategic stability’.29
China also let it be known that Russia was helping it construct an early
warning missile system, made up of land-based radars, space-based satellites
and data research centres. When completed, China will join Russia and the
US as the only countries with comprehensive systems. This did not mean a
military alliance, however. Dmitri Trenin put it this way: ‘the two militaries
are becoming more familiar with each other. They are taking part in joint
training; making their weapons systems more compatible; and syncing their
communications, logistics, tactics, and military doctrines.’30 Pushed together
by what they perceive as hostile actions from the US in the Pacific and NATO
in Eastern Europe, Russia and China formed the strategic partnership that
Western policymakers have long dreaded.31

Other strategic operations

Just as Zapad-2017 drew forecasts from the West that the number of troops
involved would be far more than Russia’s MoD promised and that Russia
was preparing to invade the Baltic States, Vostok-2018 prompted warnings
from security pundits that Russia was planning to take over the entire Arctic.
These, and other large-scale Russian military exercises (with the exception of
smaller snap drills), are all planned and announced at least a year in advance.
They are scheduled on a rotating basis: Vostok (East), Zapad (West), Tsentr
(Centre), and Kavkaz (South), correlating to Russia’s military districts, and
the number of troops and materiel expected to participate is released well
before the events. As of 2020, there have been no surprises.32
September’s Tsentr-2019 included 128,000 soldiers, 20,000 pieces of mate-
riel, 600 planes and 15 warships, all training for ‘anti-terrorist’ operations.
The exercises included anti-missile operations, reconnaissance and troop
management. As mentioned above, troops from China, India, Pakistan,
Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan took part. Eight training grounds in
Russia and one in each of the participating countries were involved.33 The
drill was advertised as preparation for an Islamicist insurrection in Central
Asia, although the participation of more than 20 Chinese warplanes, includ-
ing heavy bombers, and subsequent Chinese commentary suggested that its
sub-text was to showcase Moscow–Beijing joint military capabilities.34
Shortly thereafter, the Russian Ministry of Defence began a large-scale
exercise in the Arctic to test Russia’s nuclear forces. Named Grom
(Thunder)-2019, the three-day drill comprised nuclear submarines, aircraft,
over 200 missile launchers and about 12,000 troops, spearheaded by the
nuclear-powered battle cruiser Piotr Velikii. Ground and submarine missile
launchings over Russia’s European Arctic and its Far East tested Russia’s
command structure.35 Videos of various launches were shown to the public as
Putin continued to speak in favour of renewing New START. In February
2020, Emergency Measures Minister Yevgeny Zinichev told reporters that he
292 The re-militarization of Russia
had scheduled a series of Crisis Management Centres for construction in the
Arctic to provide security for ships on the Northern Sea Route.36
In the interim, over Tokyo’s objections, Russia continued to build up mili-
tary infrastructure on the Kuril Islands. Deployment of warplanes and a mis-
sile defence system in 2018 were part of the militarization of the island chain,
as was an announced plan to construct a naval base there. These moves were
made necessary, Moscow said, because Japan purchased two Aegis Ashore
sites (missile defence systems) from the US.37
There were some direct clashes that threatened the military equilibrium.
For instance, the quarrel between Russian and Ukrainian naval vessels on the
Sea of Azov ended any chance of tensions easing between the two countries.
In late November 2018, a Russian vessel rammed a Ukrainian naval tugboat
and fired on two small Ukrainian artillery ships, wounding several crew
members, and then seized the ships and 24 crew members. Moscow charged
that the ships had entered Russian territorial waters illegally and accused
Poroshenko of deliberate ‘provocations’ driven by his desperate attempts to
win the forthcoming presidential election. With the Russian annexation of
Crimea, ‘territorial waters’ took on quite different meanings for Ukraine and
Russia when it came to the Sea of Azov. Each side charged the other with
criminal actions, the EU and NATO called for restraint and insisted on
Ukraine’s right to passage. Russian jet fighters (Sukhoi Su-25s) and helicop-
ters flew over the scene. As accusations and counter-accusations swelled,
Poroshenko declared 30 days of martial law in 10 regions close to the Russian
border, accused the Russians of preparing to invade Ukraine and placed his
army on full alert.38
Unsure of how far Poroshenko’s desperation would take him, the Russian
MoD deployed another S-400 air defence battalion to Crimea, making four
in all, and announced plans to construct a new missile early-warning radar
station there. Its navy blocked Ukrainian shipping to its main ports on the
Sea of Azov, Mariupol and Berdyansk.39 Russian submarine crews held naval
and surface-to-air missile drills in the Black Sea region, and in December
fighter jets were deployed to Crimea.40 In May 2019, the International
Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS) demanded that Russia return the
ships and crews to Ukraine.41 Although ITLOS has no enforcement abilities,
the decision provided a test of Moscow’s willingness to ease tensions with
Kyiv. The ships were returned – six months later (Figure 7.1).
In early 2020, Putin observed another Russian naval exercise on the Black
Sea from the deck of a missile cruiser.
Chief of General Staff Valerii Gerasimov laid out Russia’s current strategic
approach in March 2019. He noted that modern conflict features politics,
diplomacy and informational pressures, along with demonstrable military
power. Russia needs to defend itself against precision air- and space-based
weapons, he continued, claiming that modern weaponry in Russia’s nuclear
sector had reached 82 per cent. Calling for time-line targets for producing new
types of weapons and labelling the US and its allies ‘aggressive’, Gerasimov
went on the criticize them for conducting overt and covert regime change
 The re-militarization of Russia 293

Figure 7.1 Sea of Azov, strategic site.

Source: NATO Association of Canada.

policies in Iraq, Libya, Ukraine and Venezuela. ‘Colour revolutions’, ‘fifth col-
umn’ tactics and precision air strikes need to be countered by the creation of a
set of pre-emptive measures designed to neutralize threats to Russia’s secu-
rity.42 Gerasimov repeated Shoigu’s earlier statement that the percentage of
Russian servicemen under contract would reach nearly half a million by 2025.
Neither assertion about weapons nor kontraktiki could be verified.

Buzzing – dangerous games

An outburst of ‘buzzing’ incidents between Russian and US air and sea units
raised tensions again in 2019, just as they had done for a spell in 2016. In
June, US and Russian warships came within 100 feet of each other in the
Pacific, both insisting they had to take emergency manoeuvres to prevent an
accident. A few days earlier the US Navy accused Russia of challenging an
American plane over the Mediterranean – three times.
Another such incident took place early in 2020, when a Russian Navy ship
veered dangerously close to a US Navy destroyer in the North Arabian Sea.
Russia’s defence ministry blamed the US vessel. Perhaps an even more dan-
gerous incident came in February when a US armoured vehicle pushed a
Russian military heavy jeep off a road in north-eastern Syria, creating an
eyeball-to-eyeball scenario with armed men. Cooler heads prevailed, but sit-
uations such as these could easily escalate into situations no one wanted, or
almost no one.43 In August, Russian naval ships conducting a drill ordered
294 The re-militarization of Russia
American fishing boats out of an area of the Bering Sea where the US has
exclusive fishing rights. This may not have been buzzing, but the Russian
ships and planes were using live ammunition.

Arms race and arms sales

As NATO continued to build up its forces in Eastern Europe, and Poland
purchased Patriot missile defence systems from the US, Putin stressed
Russia’s evolving defence capacity. A long-threatened but downplayed new
arms race could no longer be ignored.
Shortly after the annual presidential address to the Federal Assembly in
2018, in which Putin described new and imposing weaponry developed for
the Russian military, with emphasis on its nuclear capabilities and missile
defence, Russia released video footage of a test launch of a new anti-ballistic
missile. One of the weapons referenced in the 1 March 2018 speech, the
Sarmat (Satan-2) purports to have a range of about 11,000 kms (7,000 miles)
and could cross the North Pole to reach the US. 44 If it were actually under
production and deployed, the Sarmat would have violated the INF.
The US reaction was typified by a statement by John Hyten, US Strategic
Command, before the Senate Committee on Armed Forces: Russia ‘is devel-
oping hypersonic glide vehicles’ while the US’s nuclear assets are ‘operating
beyond their designed service life’.45 His appeal for more funds to build big-
ger and more deadly weapons by juxtaposing with Russia (and China) was
old hat, but more dangerous now as diplomacy took a backseat to nationalist
hyperbole everywhere. Later in the year Trump signed a $717 billion defence
bill for 2019, the largest in the country’s history prior to the amount for 2020,
again dwarfing the combined expenditures budgeted by Russia and China.
In the meantime, NATO conducted its largest military exercise in decades,
Trident Juncture, moving 60,000 or so troops, 10,000 vehicles, 250 aircraft
and 645 ships from 29 NATO countries plus Sweden and Finland, to various
locations in Norway. Its purpose, NATO’s Secretary General Stoltenberg
said, was to test NATO’s response force against a ‘fictional near-peer’ invader
in the North, that is, Russia. Launched in August, the gigantic deployment
was completed in early November.46 Russia and Belarus sent observers.
The Russian Navy tested missiles in international waters off Norway’s
coast during the final week of Trident Juncture and, in February 2020, con-
ducted more missile drills near Norway’s most northern pipeline. Both exer-
cises were, presumably, testing abilities to block NATO’s access to the Baltic
Sea, the North Sea and the Norwegian Sea. Notices were provided to airmen
(NOTAM) so as to prevent civilian planes and ships from entering zones
where live shooting might take place.47 Not to be outdone, in May 2020 the
US Sixth Fleet sent four warships into the Barents Sea, accompanied by one
ship from the UK. The anti-submarine exercise included surveillance planes.
They were monitored by Russia’s Northern Fleet who referred to the US/UK
group as a ‘NATO naval strike force’. Norway welcomed NATO presence in
the international waters, but did not participate in the exercise.48
 The re-militarization of Russia 295
Gerasimov publicized a successful test of a second hypersonic cruise mis-
sile in October. The Tsirkon was test-fired from the frigate Admiral Gorshkov
in the White Sea and hit a target 450 km away in the Barents Sea, he said,
travelling at hypersonic speed. It had been tested from the same ship on a
ground target earlier in the year. More tests are planned and, if successful,
the missile can be deployed on submarines and surface ships.49
The oft-promised new weapons kept coming as well. The first mass pro-
duced 5th- generation Su-57 fighter jets entered service in December, 2020,
and test flights for the combat drone, Okhotnik (Hunter), were scheduled for
early 2021. With protection of the Northern Sea Route in mind, the Central
Scientific-Research Institute for Precision Machine Engineering re-opened
an old Soviet lab for testing weaponry under Arctic conditions, also in
December.50

INF saga and arms control

Tension over the INF accelerated to the extent that, in October, 2018, Trump
announced that the US would withdraw from the Treaty signed by Gorbachev
and Reagan in 1987 if Russia did not return to ‘full and verifiable compli-
ance’.51 That treaty prohibited the production, storage and testing of ground-
based missiles whose range is from 500 to 5,500 km.
American and Russian officials exchanged accusations of violations and
Russia promised retaliation if, and when, the US pulled out. The US
claimed that Russia was producing the 9M729 missile (NATO classification
– SSC-8) and violating long-range maximums of the treaty. Russia insisted
that it was not. Moscow invited Mike Pompeo to a public exhibition of the
missile test; he declined. In its turn, Russia argued that the US’s Aegis
Ashore missile defence system, its Mk-41 (Mark 41) Vertical Launching
Systems sited in Romania and Poland, and parts of its drone system, vio-
lated the treaty.
US Secretary of State Bolton, who later took credit for planning the
‘defenestrating’ of the INF, travelled to Moscow for discussion.52 This time,
the issue for Washington was not so much Russia’s alleged violations, but
rather clauses in the INF that prevented the US from deploying such weap-
ons to the Pacific to counter an arms build-up by China, which is not bound
by the bilateral treaty. China’s accumulation of missiles that would easily
violate the INF treaty was a main, if unstated, reason why the US wanted
either out, or to have the INF membership broadened. Indeed, ten coun-
tries, none of them European, have missiles with ranges beyond the INF
limitations.53
Bolton and Putin agreed that points of contact should be encouraged, and
Bolton hinted that a new, better treaty might be the answer. That said, on 6
December 2018 Pompeo demanded that Russia comply with the INF within
two months or the US would withdraw. After Moscow ignored Washington’s
demands, the US announced the start of withdrawal proceedings. The
Kremlin responded by suspending Russian participation in the Treaty, and
296 The re-militarization of Russia
said that Russia would start working on new missiles, including hypersonic
ones.54 Under Article XV of the treaty, the sides had six months to reach a
compromise. The demise of yet another control mechanism prompted
88-year-old Mikhail Gorbachev to write a long Op-Ed piece for the New
York Times urging statesmen on both sides of the Atlantic to avoid a new
arms race.55
Putin took the issue up in the 2019 address to the Federal Assembly, accus-
ing the US of ‘directly and crudely’ violating the INF with its ‘launchers in
Romania’, and warning that Russia would be ‘forced to create and deploy
weapons’ if the US placed missiles in Europe. He would prefer disarmament
talks, he said, ‘but we will no longer knock on a closed door’.56 The INF had
become a cornerstone of the international non-proliferation regime. Once it
disappeared, Moscow and Washington’s still wide-ranging cooperation on
nuclear arms control went with it, leaving the field open for dangerous and
expensive arms race activity.57 The New START treaty, due to expire in
February, 2021, was the last hope.
An immediate consequence of the INF suspension was a statement by
Poroshenko that Ukraine would begin testing missiles ‘capable of hitting tar-
gets deep in the rear of the enemy’, in the Chernihiv region, close to Russia
and Belarus. The US began manufacturing previously banned ground-
launched cruise missiles (GLCM) while the INF was suspended, but not yet
formally cancelled.58 Both represented threats to Russia’s national security
interests. Russia also continued to roll out new weapons.
The subject was central to discussions Lavrov held with NATO’s Stoltenberg
at the Munich Security Conference in February 2019, where, Lavrov insisted,
the NATO leader failed to provide ‘a single thread of evidence’ that Russia
was violating the INF Treaty. Zakharova was harsher, saying that Stoltenberg
‘lies without even blushing’.59 That episode boded ill for the future of the
New START treaty.60 In fact, at the SPIEF-2019 Putin opened his address to
representatives of the world’s media by blaming the US for violating the INF
– again citing the deployment of missile launchers on land, in Romania and
Poland. ‘We can choose not to renew’ the START, he said, if ‘no one is willing
to talk about it with us’.61 He also attacked the notion of positioning weap-
ons in outer space.
NATO was not swayed. In June 2019, the Alliance threatened to ‘respond’
if Russia did not destroy its new nuclear-capable cruise missile system.
Although the nature of the promised response was vague, the US’s final with-
drawal from the INF treaty was clearly one of them, and it did so on 2 August
2019. Russia continued to insist that it had not been violating the treaty;
NATO continued to insist it had.62 Less than three weeks later, the US tested
its ground-launched cruise missile with a range well over the limit required by
the INF. Putin ordered a ‘symmetrical response’.63 An arms race was under-
way. New START was the final remnant of the Gorbachev–Reagan arms
control initiatives, and Putin complained again in December that Washington
had not responded to his proposal that that treaty be extended for another
five years.64
 The re-militarization of Russia 297
Putin urged the US to de-escalate the spiralling arms competition. Speaking
at the economic conference in Vladivostok in September, he said that Russia
would go ahead and produce missiles previously banned by the INF Treaty, but
would not deploy them unless the US did so first. He was especially concerned
about rumours that Washington would site missiles in Japan and South Korea.65
In late October, Putin proposed again to de-escalate the arms race in
Europe by calling for a reciprocal moratorium on missiles banned previously
by the INF and offered stronger verification tools for NATO’s consideration.
As an incentive, he again said that Russia would not deploy 9M729 missiles
to Russia’s western borders if the NATO countries followed suit. The answer
was the same as in the two earlier offers.66

Strategic consequences
While both sides tested missiles previously forbidden by the treaty, Russia
moved a missile system (BAL) to a location on the Sredny Peninsula on the
Barents Sea less than 70 km from Norway’s Globus radar system at Vardo.
The Norwegian system, which is part of NATO’s anti-missile system, was
being enhanced at that time. Norway’s foreign ministry objected to Russia’s
deployment; Russia’s foreign ministry said that it was part of counter-mea-
sures against both the NATO upgrade and the abolition of the INF.67 The
Bal system (Styx to NATO) includes four mobile units, is equipped with anti-
ship cruise missiles and can be used against both land and sea targets.
Making matters worse, Donald Trump began hinting that he would like to
withdraw the US from the Open Skies Treaty, which was agreed in 1992, and
came into effect in 2002 with 35 member states. That treaty allows signatories
to conduct surveillance flights anywhere after giving 72-hour notice. Trump
acted on his threat in May 2020, announcing that the US would withdraw and
blaming Russia for ‘repeatedly’ violating the treaty. The main point of conten-
tion was Russia’s refusal to allow US flights along the Abkhaz and South
Ossetian border. The treaty forbids flights along the borders of third coun-
tries, but the West does not recognize those areas as independent countries.
In a press statement, Pompeo called Russia a ‘serial violator’ of its arms
control obligations, and claimed that it used Open Skies imagery as a means
to target ‘critical infrastructure’ in the US and Europe. The Russian MoD
countered that the treaty allows all signatories to request copies of all images
and that the overflights are governed by strict mutual rules and quotas.68
Ryabkov declared that Russia would stay in the Open Skies Treaty with the
remaining signatories, though he would have to wait and see what other
NATO countries that are party to the treaty decide. In light of the US ten-
dency to pull out of treaties unilaterally, the Open Skies officially on 22
November, chances for a renewal of New START dimmed, even though
national security adviser Robert O’Brien said that US would enter into ‘good
faith negotiations with Russia on nuclear arms control’.69 The US wants
Chinese participation in the last-named treaty, but that too seemed unlikely
given the way Chinese–American relations were heating up in 2020. If START
298 The re-militarization of Russia
is not renewed, then Putin’s fourth term as president will be part of an era in
which international arms control mechanisms disappeared, and the global
security system unravelled. Much will depend on the approach taken by the
Biden presidency.
As Russian anxiety over the fate of New START grew, Putin approved a
document outlining norms for the use of nuclear weapons by Russia’s armed
forces. These criteria were not unchanged from those laid out in the Russian
military doctrine of 2010. They can be used in response to an attack on it or
its allies with the use of nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruc-
tion or in case of aggression with conventional weapons, if ‘the very existence
of the state is threatened’. Among the list of dangers that could prompt a
nuclear response were the build-up of nuclear delivery vehicles by an enemy
near Russia’s borders, the deployment of missiles and high-precision and
hypersonic weapons, shock drones or energy weapons.70 This was the first
such detailed explication of ‘first use’ published in Russia and, although there
was no change in basic policy, it was clear that the document was intended as
an answer to similar publications in the West and also to play a part in the
negotiations over New START. No countries were named in the document,
so it could be applied to threats from both east and west.
Arms control talks between Russia and US started again on 22 June 2020,
with little chance of China taking part. In late September, Ryabkov rejected
the US condition that China be covered by the arms control treaty and that
verification protocols be more intrusive. A few weeks later, Putin proposes a
one-year extension of START, without pre-conditions, to provide time for
‘substantial negotiations’. Washington called the proposal a ‘non-starter’,
having earlier rejected the original suggestion of a five-year extension. The
US side proposed a cap on all types of nuclear warheads, a pre-condition that
Russia would not accept.71

Arms out of control

Suggestions from US ambassadors in Germany and Poland, in 2020, that the
US should consider transferring some of its nuclear weapons from Germany
to Poland, suggest that the notion of reasoned balance of power was fading
into the wilderness.72 Apparently, arms control was on the agenda during the
July 2018 Putin–Trump summit in Helsinki and, although little was said pub-
licly about it, later reports from Russia indicated that Putin presented Trump
with several proposals related to nuclear arms management. These included
the extension of New START, with various inspection guarantees, a re-affir-
mation of the INF Treaty and discussions about keeping weapons out of
space. New START was agreed in 2010 as a follow-up to START I, START
II (Russia withdrew in response to US unilateral abrogation of the ABM
Treaty in 2002) and the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty (SORT), 2002,
usually called the Treaty of Moscow. The treaties cut the number of strategic
nuclear missile launchers each side could retain by half and expanded the
existing verification system. For the most part, they worked.
 The re-militarization of Russia 299
Putin clarified the Russian official line in December 2018. During his
annual press conference with journalists from around the world, he said that
‘we are now witnessing the collapse of the international arms deterrence sys-
tem’, and went on to blame the US for starting the process by its unilateral
withdrawal from the ABM treaty. He predicted it would do the same with
New START, leading ‘to a global nuclear catastrophe’.73 According to RT in
February 2020, the US rejected a Russian proposal for a formal meeting on
extending the treaty by demanding pre-preconditions, such as persuading
China to join. Whatever the reasons why meetings were not held, it was clear
that time was running out.74 With this reality in mind, on the 10th anniver-
sary of signing New START the Russian ministry of foreign affairs again
proposed to its US counterpart that the two countries extend the treaty so as
to ‘guarantee the predictability of the situation in the nuclear missile sphere,
and contribute to maintaining strategic stability’. The message pointed out
that there had been over 300 mutual inspections over that decade and some
20,000 notifications exchanged. The treaty worked, the MID said, and Russia
hoped for a ‘speedy positive response’.75 It didn’t get one.
When, in 2018, Russia’s Avangard unlimited-range intercontinental missile
tested successfully, Putin called it ‘unstoppable’.76 Russian military officials
boasted that the Avangard could reach a speed of Mach 27, which, if true,
could make it impossible to intercept.77 On the other hand, without the INF
as an obstacle, the US could test GLCMs of its own. Given that several
Republicans urged Trump also to ‘unsign’ the Comprehensive Nuclear Test
Ban Treaty (NTBT), strategic nuclear arms control seemed to be limping to
the finish line.78
Some of Russia’s hyperbole about new weaponry may have been prompted
by nervousness. The US was already conducting war games in Europe in
which troops were trained to respond to an ‘enemy’ deploying nuclear weap-
ons, and Russia was named specifically. In one case, the US secretary of
defense witnessed a ‘mini-exercise’ in which the ‘scenario included … a war
with Russia, and Russia decides to use a low-yield limited nuclear weapon
against a site on NATO territory’.79 This admission came during a briefing at
which the Pentagon was bidding for funds to greatly enhance the US nuclear
weapons arsenal.
Much the same was going on in Russia, less quietly than in the US. Putin
reviewed a task force of military vessels on the Neva River in St. Petersburg
in July 2018, as the country celebrated Navy Day. He promised the military
branch 26 new warships that year, and in April 2019 unveiled the longest
nuclear submarine in the world, the Belgorod. The sub measures 184 metres
and is capable of carrying six Poseidon nuclear underwater drones.80 Soon
after, Russia’s annual Victory Day marchpast featured Yars mobile intercon-
tinental nuclear missile launchers and S-400s, tanks and thousands of
troops, but no foreign luminaries other than Kazakhstan’s Nazarbaev, and
no examples of the new weaponry touted earlier. The day was also marked
by memorial processions in many Russian cities where thousands of people
carried pictures of relatives killed in the ‘Great Patriotic War’. Called the
300 The re-militarization of Russia
‘Immortal Regiment’, these processions raise patriotic feelings and keep
memories of great sacrifices alive.81
Excitement over Russia’s submarine fleet cooled suddenly on 1 July when a
fire broke out in one of the country’s nuclear-powered submarines within
Russia’s territorial waters in the Arctic Ocean. Fourteen crew members of the
Losharik died from smoke or toxic fume inhalation. The incident evoked
memories of the Kursk tragedy in 2000, when a nuclear submarine sank, tak-
ing its entire crew of 118 down with it, and Putin’s new government grappled
with telling the truth. At that time, the Navy and nationalist politicians first
blamed the West, until a public backlash forced them to reveal that flaws in
Russia’s navy apparatus were to blame.82 This time, Putin met immediately
with Shoigu, who acknowledged on TV that it was fire in the battery flat that
caused the disaster and provided full details of the accident to the media. He
guaranteed that the nuclear power unit was sealed off, insisted that the sub-
marine could be repaired by a deep-water submersible, and offered extensive
restitution to grieving families.83
Meanwhile, the due date for the renewal of New START approached, and
warnings that an unrestrained nuclear arms race would follow if the treaty
expired were lost in the haze brought on by the coronavirus pandemic and
looming economic collapse.84 Perhaps as a sign of what might come in a less
constrained world, Russia’s most-advanced nuclear-powered submarine, the
Knyaz Vladimir, entered service on 12 June 2020, in a naval ceremony featur-
ing commander-in-chief of the navy, Admiral Nikolai Evmenov. This was the
first of four strategic submarine missile carriers of the Borei series at various
stages of construction at the Sevmash shipyard in Severodvinsk, Arkhangelsk
Oblast. Four more are planned.85

Weaponizing space
The issue of weapons in space grew more pressing in January 2019 when
Trump unveiled a plan to develop space-based weapons to shoot down mis-
siles, claiming that this was necessary because of growing capabilities in Iran,
China, North Korea and Russia. The Russian MoD cautioned that the new
US version of ‘Star Wars’ might launch an arms race in space. Since 1985, the
US is the only country to vote against an annual UN resolution, ‘Prevention
of An Arms Race in Outer Space’ (PAROS), that has been supported by
Russia, China, Canada and almost every other UN member.86 Although it
would never say so, the Kremlin cannot afford to allocate funds to a retalia-
tory programme in space affairs, let alone to an arms race, and at the same
time maintain the socio-economic projects authorized by Putin.

Weapons sales
Russia moved into second place in global arms sales in 2017, and stayed there
through 2020, though its market was cut by Trump’s renewed sanctions
against Teheran, which listed six Russian defence sector entities for ‘violating’
 The re-militarization of Russia 301
American non-proliferation rules for Iran, Syria and North Korea. Among
other things these sanctions disrupted Rosoboronexport’s arms deals with
India, where banks halted lines of credit to Russian companies after the US
threatened to close all operations with firms that maintained ties with arms
manufacturers in Russia. A projected deal to sell helicopters to the Philippines
fell through for the same reason.87
Russia also lost money in small arms sales to the US. About 80 per cent of
Russian-made conventional arms and ammunition are exported to the US
and Europe annually, and most of these sales dried up in 2019. To ease the
financial pain, Kalashnikov proposed amendments to Russian gun laws so as
to increase sales domestically – with limited success.88 Kalashnikov decided
to open up a plant to produce assault rifles in Korwa, India, where over
700,000 units of the AK-203 were scheduled for production in March 2019.
(The AK-203 is an advanced version of the AK-47 assault rifle, the most
widely-used firearm in the world.)89
Not entirely deterred by US sanctions, during his visit to Russia in May,
Modi and Putin firmed up a deal in which India agreed to purchase four regi-
mental S-400 anti-aircraft systems for $5 billion, with ammunition and spare
parts. Over American objections, the deal was agreed formally in October
2018 while Putin was in New Delhi for an annual summit.90 Shortly thereaf-
ter, Indonesia disregarded American threats of sanctions and confirmed a
purchase of Russian Su-35 combat aircraft. The US had already sanctioned
China for similar weapons acquisitions from Russia.91 That said, in 2019,
China signed contracts for the purchase of 103 helicopters, among them 18
military transporters, valued at over $2 billion.92
The deal to deliver two S-400 batteries to Turkey, for approximately $2.5
billion, met a stumbling block in March 2019 when the US resuscitated its
two-year-old negotiations to sell Patriot anti-missile defence systems to
Ankara. A main condition from Washington was that Turkey give up the
S-400 acquisition. Washington and Brussels argued that the S-400 was
incompatible with NATO standards, even though NATO members Greece,
Bulgaria and Slovakia already have Russian-made S-300s. Even after the
Pentagon warned of dire consequences, Turkey refused to renege on the
agreement. Delivery of the systems began in July, 2019. A year later,
Rosoboronexport signed a contract to supply Turkey with a second set of
S-400s. The US State Department condemned the sale again in October,
2020, after Turkish armed forces conducted its first test of the system and, in
December, the US levelled its first sanctions against a NATO ally.93
Egypt also remained a major market for Russian arms, signing a contract
for ‘over two dozen’ Russia heavy jet fighters, the Su-35, in March 2019.
These were to be delivered in 2020–21.94 Egypt is the largest importer of
Russian arms in Africa. Algeria is close behind. In September 2019, defence
officials in Algiers signed contracts for 16 Su-30 heavy jet fighters and 14
MiG 29M fighters for the Algerian air force. When delivered, these purchases
will total nearly 60 Russian air force planes bought by Algeria since 2007.
The new contracts were worth about $2 billion to Russian manufacturers.95 A
302 The re-militarization of Russia
few weeks later, Russia delivered its second planeload of weapons to the
Central African Republic, in return for mining rights. The deliveries were
otherwise free, and approved by the UNSC as part of an effort to defeat
Islamic rebels in that country.96
Saudi Arabia, the world’s leading importer of arms, received its first batch
of heavy flamethrower systems from Russia in April 2019. In addition to the
‘Sunburn’ flamethrowers, constructed on the framework of the Soviet T-72
tank, the deal Riyadh signed in 2017 included ‘eventual’ delivery of S-400s,
Kornet-EM anti-tank missiles, AGS-30 automatic grenade launchers and
Kalashnikov AK-103 assault rifles.97 In that same month, Russia completed
its deliveries of Su-35s to China, bringing the total to 30 such planes sent in
three lots of ten since 2017. It was as a result of that first delivery that the US
imposed sanctions against the Chinese military equipment branch.98 Russia
transferred its first unit of S-400s to China in 2018, but a rumoured sale of
the same missile defence systems to Serbia never materialized because
Washington threatened sanctions against Belgrade if it bought them.99
When Washington imposed more sanctions against Russian arms manu-
facturers in May 2019, they targeted the Gatchina surface-to-air missile
training centre, a precision weapons maker and a Moscow machine-building
plant that makes missiles for S-400s, and prevented any US company from
dealing with them.100 As it happened, Moscow rejected a request from Iran
that it sell them the advanced missile defence systems, fearing, we can assume,
that such a transfer would exacerbate the already tense situation in the Middle
East, or perhaps choosing to preserve its good ties with Israel.101
There were some limited discussions of Russia delivering the vaguely-
promised S-400s to Saudi Arabia during Putin’s visit to that country in
October 2019, but nothing specific was made public. Saudi Arabian oil facili-
ties had only recently been the victim of a devastating attack for which
Yemeni rebels took credit, while most Western commentators blamed Iran.102
By that time, Russia had shipped either S-300s or S-400s to China, Iran,
Egypt, Turkey and Syria and deployed them to home bases in Crimea and
Kaliningrad, and to its base in Dushanbe, Tajikistan.
Russia remained a top arms supplier to Southeast Asia, completing a deal
in late 2019 to send a dozen Yak-130 combat training jets to Vietnam, to
which it also sold fighter jets, ships and submarines.103 These planes have also
been acquired by Algeria, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Laos and Belarus.

The CSTO
The Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) has been Russia’s main
military association since 1992. Its membership has fluctuated. The original
members were Russia, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and
Uzbekistan. Azerbaijan, Belarus and Georgia joined the next year. Since
then, Uzbekistan has been in and out. Georgia and Azerbaijan withdrew in
2000. Uzbekistan withdrew for the second time in 2012. The CSTO’s
expressed purpose in its early years was to fight international terrorism, drug
 The re-militarization of Russia 303
trafficking and ‘Islamic fanaticism’, all threats emanating from Afghanistan.104
In 2002, it was formalized as a military alliance between five of the originals
plus Belarus. It is registered at the UN as a regional organization.
In November 2018, a CSTO Security Council meeting in Astana agreed to
create ‘observer’ and ‘partner’ designations for non-members, supported
Russia’s actions in Syria and adopted a common stance on the INF ques-
tion.105 As we have seen, there was talk of Azerbaijan re-joining the CSTO,
and even of Armenia making concessions related to Nagorno-Karabakh. If
these talks were ever serious, they never materialized.
Outward calm was misleading. The constant threat of war between the two
Caucasus states over Nagorno-Karabakh threatened the stability of the
CSTO, whose decision to select a representative of Belarus, and not from
Armenia, in 2018 as the organization’s next general secretary caused some
circles in Yerevan to talk of withdrawal. Armenia had already been angered
by Belarusian overtures to Azerbaijan, to which Lukashenka may have dis-
closed confidential CSTO information, and was concerned with Russia’s
large arms sales to Baku. Relations between Minsk and Yerevan became
heated, and Moscow, which had kept out of the dispute, found having to
choose between two important allies well before the crises of 2020 shattered
that outward calm.106 At that time, civil uproar in Belarus and actual war in
the South Caucasus, which Armenia lost with no assistance from Russia or
the CSTO, weakened Russia’s southern and western border security for the
first time since the Chechen wars.
It was not yet clear how Yerevan’s humiliating loss to Baku in 2020 will
affect the CSTO. After the fact, domestically embattled Pashinyan asked
Moscow to strengthen its military ties with Armenia. The MoD has some
important long-term decisions to make.

NATO
Asked by David Frost in March 2000 what he thought of NATO, Putin
answered, ‘Russia is part of European culture, and I cannot imagine my own
country in isolation from Europe and from the so-called civilized world.
Therefore, I can hardly imagine NATO as an enemy.’ Suggesting that Russia
could even become a member of NATO, but only as an ‘equal partner’, he
added that he would continue to object to NATO’s expansion eastward.107
Western analysts, strategists and politicians believe now that a desire to sow
division within NATO is central to Russia’s military policy.
The fact is, Russia’s relationship with NATO has been a determining fac-
tor in Russian foreign, military and even domestic policy. The signposts in
this relationship were set out in the 1990s when Russia watched helplessly
as NATO moved eastward, absorbing former Warsaw Pact states and Soviet
Republics. This situation was made more threatening by the fact that
Russian authorities believed that Soviet acquiescence to the reunification
of Germany in 1990 and East Germany’s accession to NATO came with a
pledge that NATO would expand no further to the East. Rightly or wrongly,
304 The re-militarization of Russia
the perception of broken faith informed Russian military and foreign pol-
icy decisions for the next quarter-century.108
When one Western analyst wrote recently that the enmity between Russia
and NATO was not pre-ordained, and that, rather, it was caused by ‘Putin’s
actions, not NATO enlargement’, she ignored, or was ignorant of, the impor-
tance of Russian perception of what the expansion meant from the begin-
ning. In Soviet times NATO was presented to Russians by the Soviet state,
and by NATO itself, as a dangerous enemy. There was no reason why
Russians should change their thinking about NATO overnight in the 1990s.
Any enlargement of the Alliance eastward while Russia was at its weakest
point could not help but be seen then as aggression against their homeland.
The doyen of Soviet and Russian foreign policy in the 1990s, Yevgeny
Primakov, recognized this as early as November 1993. Director at that time
of the Foreign Intelligence Service (FIS), he reported that NATO expansion
eastward would create a ‘psychological storm’ in Russia, and also a buffer
zone in reverse, isolating Russia from continental Europe.109 At that time,
Western politicians either did not believe his cautionary tale or, more likely,
did not care.
Russia and NATO had formalized relations as early as 1997 when a
‘Founding Act on Mutual Relations’ created a Permanent Joint Council.
This body was replaced in 2002 by the NATO–Russia Council, on which
Russia could participate in most of NATO’s deliberations, but had no right
of veto. These associations were sometimes useful for the Russian MoD, but
for the most part consisted of its delegates being told what NATO was going
to do while its own concerns were ignored. Defence Minister Sergei Ivanov
voiced Russian frustration in 2006 when he complained that ‘the expansion
of NATO’s military infrastructure and its approach to the borders of Russia
cannot fail to cause us concern’. He was especially worried about NATO’s
plans for a ‘global ABM system in Poland’ and the patently false explanation
that their purpose was defence against ICBMs from North Korea and Iran,
neither of which had such weapons at that time.110
More than a decade of negotiation, rumour and confusion related to
Ukraine’s potential for accession to NATO, and the future of Russia’s Black
Sea Fleet, reached a climax in 2008 at a NATO–Russia Council meeting in
Bucharest. The meeting was held just a few weeks after the US Congress
adopted a resolution offering ‘strong support’ to Georgia and Ukraine for
accession to NATO.111 As we saw in Chapter 1, Putin made a rare appearance
at that Council session and warned ‘the appearance on our borders of a pow-
erful military bloc … will be perceived by Russia as a direct threat to our
security’. He made it clear that Russia would respond aggressively if either of
the two countries were admitted to NATO.112 He was not taken seriously,
though he should have been. In fact, just a few months later Russian forces
crossed into Georgia and, though the incursion’s immediate cause was
Georgia’s sudden invasion of South Ossetia, which involved overrun of an
OSCE/UN-mandated Russian peace-keeping corps, it was also a response to
the threat of further NATO expansion. Yet, it took Russia’s annexation of
 The re-militarization of Russia 305
the Crimean Peninsula in 2014 to give NATO cause to pay attention and also
a renewed raison d’état, for it revived scenarios involving the traditional
‘Russian threat’.
Preparing for a NATO summit in July 2018, US Secretary of Defense
James Mattis released a plan that would require the Alliance to have 30
land battalions, 30 air fighter squadrons and 30 navy ships ready to deploy
within 30 days of being put on alert. According to one US official the pur-
pose of the initiative was to counter Russia’s alleged efforts to ‘shatter’
NATO. The collective NATO military personnel strength was already more
than double the number of Russian active duty forces, but somehow its
generals assumed that Russia planned to invade the Baltic States and
Poland.113 Moscow’s MoD continued to call this assumption absurd, and
made it clear then and later that Russia’s armed forces were prepared to
defend themselves against any incursion from NATO members. This was
especially true as the long-standing international system of nuclear arms
control began to evaporate.114
That 2018 summit of NATO leaders in Brussels marked what may have
been a turning point in the NATO–Russia confrontation. After criticizing
NATO for some weeks prior to the event, the US president came to the meet-
ings urging members to increase their defence spending to 4 per cent of their
GDP, brandishing threats to withdraw if they did not comply. Most Alliance
members had not even reached the traditional target of 2 per cent. Trump
denigrated Germany as a ‘captive of Russia’, referring to its reliance on
Russian gas, thereby making the Nord Stream-2 an unexpected talking point
at the summit. European leaders now had to at least consider NATO’s future
without the US and the notion of an exclusively European army was revived.
Most of them, however, assumed Trump’s statements to be typical political
bombast and expected the storm to blow over soon enough.
Ukraine’s President Poroshenko was at the summit and Georgia’s Prime
Minister Mamuka Bakhtadze arrived at NATO Headquarters soon after-
wards. Supportive of Georgia’s eventual admission, NATO members made it
clear that Ukraine had a lot of reforms to enact before it had a chance.
Nevertheless, both countries were given tentative approval from NATO and
the final Summit Declaration again accused Russia alone of failing to imple-
ment obligations under the Minsk agreement.115 Putin responded by again
referring to the possible inclusion of Ukraine and Georgia in the Alliance as
a ‘direct threat to Russia’ that would have ‘consequences’, which is exactly
what he told NATO in 2008.116 In Georgia’s case, the fate of Abkhazia and
South Ossetia were key to the issue of membership; so too was the Kremlin’s
assumption that it was being ‘encircled’ by NATO.117
Soon after the summit, a NATO manoeuvre took place in Latvia.
Organized explicitly to defend against a simulated invasion of Eastern Europe
by Russia, the training session was led by Canadian forces. The scenario
included Latvian personnel dealing with pre-invasion cyberattacks and disin-
formation programmes. Nemesis-2018 was Latvia’s largest military operation
since the country re-established its independence in 1991.118
306 The re-militarization of Russia
The 4th annual Noble Partner 2018 exercise that brought troops from the
US and seven other NATO countries, plus Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia,
for a three-week joint training operation on Georgian territory in August,
heightened existing tensions. Some 3,000 troops, one-third of them American,
participated with tanks and other armour. The Georgian-based exercise coin-
cided with a smaller Russian and Serbian tactical drill in the Leningrad
region of Russia. About 800 troops, 200 of them Serbian, took part in coun-
ter-sabotage and reconnaissance drills.119 NATO–Georgia drills continued in
2019. Secretary General Stoltenberg attended some of them in March and
praised Georgia as the most important non-NATO contributor to the
Alliance’s undertakings in Afghanistan and elsewhere, and pronounced that
it warranted NATO support if it was attacked by Russia.120
Tempers flared in the summer of 2019 over checkpoints between Abkhazia
and Georgia, prompting Putin to approve a proposal to fund the moderniza-
tion of the breakaway republics’ armed forces.121 Apparently, Russia had
increased the number of its troops stationed in Abkhazia and South Ossetia
to 10,000 and integrated them, plus the 10,000 Russian troops in a military
base in Armenia, into its Southern Military Command. In its turn, Georgia
committed itself to participation in NATO’s Defender-Europe-20 military
exercise, part of which was held on Georgian territory.122 This exercise, which
included 20,000 US troops and thousands of military vehicles transported
mostly to sites in Poland and the Baltic States in March 2020, was the largest
movement of US troops across the Atlantic in a quarter century.123
NATO member countries continued to arm Ukraine. For example, the
Canadian arms manufacturer, PGW Defence Technologies, boasted of a
contract to send long-range sniper rifles valued at about $700,000 to the
Ukrainian Ministry of Defence, along with maintenance and training sup-
port.124 A steady flow of modern armaments began after the US approved
commercial supplies of lethal weapons to Ukraine in 2017. Presumably pay-
ments for the weapons were drawn from loans also offered by Western coun-
tries. Such weapon deliveries and training programmes, conducted since
2016, were always justified at home as help to Ukraine in its ‘war against
Russian aggression’. In practice, the weapons are used to kill Ukrainian citi-
zens in the Donbas.
Towards the end of Trident Juncture, the sabre rattling continued in the
form of an Iron Wolf exercise in Lithuania, with troops from seven NATO
countries participating, and a joint NATO–Georgia naval operation on the
Black Sea.125
NATO had suspended military and civilian cooperation with Russia in
2014 and, by 2019, senior military officials on both sides were expressing con-
cern that there were no diplomatic mechanisms in place to prevent an acci-
dental – or intentional – confrontation between them.126 The lack of diplomatic
contact was evidenced in remarks tendered by Ambassador Huntsman, when
the US deployed two Nimitz-class aircraft carriers to the Mediterranean.
Making it clear that this was intended as a message to Russia, he boarded the
carrier strike group and called it ‘200,000 tons of diplomacy’.127
 The re-militarization of Russia 307
Following the demise of the INF Treaty, NATO rejected Putin’s offer to
suspend the deployment of previously banned missiles if NATO would do
the same in Europe. While the arms race accelerated in the fall of 2019, Putin
again criticized NATO expansion as a threat to Russia, adding that he hoped
that NATO’s ‘common security interests’ with Russia (terrorism, local wars,
proliferation of weapons of mass destruction) would prevail at the NATO
summit then underway in London. Although Macron’s earlier remarks about
NATO suffering from ‘brain death’ and Trump’s railing about other member
countries not spending enough on defence may have encouraged Putin, the
status quo prevailed.128
With the pandemic raging, in May 2020 the Russian MoD again offered to
suspend all remaining military drills for the rest of 2020, if NATO would
follow suit. NATO rejected this suggestion too, calling it a propaganda stunt,
so Russia went ahead with its scheduled training agenda. Shoigu told
Shephard, a military-business media site based in the UK, that Russian train-
ing activities in 2020 would be more frequent than in 2019 and would focus
deeper inside the country and on the Arctic.129 Russian military planners had
hoped, especially, to see NATO manoeuvres on the Black and Baltic Seas
curtailed. They also voiced concern over a NATO drill in the Barents Sea that
emulated strikes against Russia, and US nuclear-capable strategic bomber
flights over Ukraine.130
The promise to hold drills deeper inside Russia didn’t hold up for long.
Shortly after the All-Russia Vote in July, Shoigu announced large-scale snap
drills in the Southern and Western military districts. These involved about
150,000 troops, 400 aircraft and 100 naval ships, some taken from the
Northern and Pacific fleets. The Black and Caspian Seas were among the
theatres for the drills, which served as preparation for the revised Kavkaz-2020
war games.131
Launched on 21 September, Kavkaz-2020 activated about 80,000 person-
nel in the Southern Military District. Fighter jets conducted air defence drills
at fields in Crimea, and the Krasnodar, Stavropol and Rostov Regions, with
military units from Armenia, Belarus, China, Myanmar and Pakistan par-
ticipating. Observers came from Azerbaijan, Indonesia, Iran, Kazakhstan,
Tajikistan and Sri Lanka. The Russian and Iranian navies practiced combat
manoeuvres and precision firing at sea targets on the Black and Caspian
Seas.132 Kavkaz-2020 included more troops, drones, jets and artillery, and the
S-400, than the previous one, held in 2016.133
One day after the exercise ended on 26 September, Azeri forces attacked
Armenian-occupied territories around Nagorno-Karabakh.
The August 2020 electoral crisis in Minsk had raised the spectre of Russian
troops deploying to Belarus, beyond the numbers posted there already in
accordance with the Union Treaty (see Chapter 5). This posed a strategic
problem for NATO because Russia’s military access to Belarus would under-
mine NATO’s ability to defend its Baltic members.134 As it happened, Russian
troops arrived in Belarus in late August to take part in ARMI2020, a sched-
uled 10-day military competition that, in addition to the hosts and Russia,
308 The re-militarization of Russia
included teams from Armenia, Vietnam, Serbia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.135
Later in the month, Russian and Belarusian forces conducted an annual mili-
tary exercise titled ‘Slavic Brotherhood’ in Brest, close to the border with
Poland. The previous year’s host, Serbia, dropped out at the last minute, after
what its defence minister called ‘terrible’ pressure from the EU, which it hopes
to join.136
Two days later, 12 September, Ukraine, the US and eight other countries
launched a joint military drill in Yavoriv, Ukraine, also close to Poland’s bor-
der. More war games were hosted by Belarus in October, this time for the
CSTO members. Simulated warfare seemed to be underway everywhere in or
near East and East-Central Europe.
***
There was some good news at the end of 2020. The Russian Navy was
scheduled to participate in a joint exercise that includes NATO members off
the coast of Pakistan in February 2021. Pakistan, the US, Britain, China,
Japan, Turkey, the Philippines, Malaysia, Sri Lanka and Indonesia will also
take part. Though SCO, ASEAN and BRICS member countries are already
associates of Russia, this will be Russia’s first joint action with some of
NATO’s armed forces since 2011.137 Whereas it is clear that the EU, the US
and Russia do not want war against each other in the South Caucasus or
anywhere else, by the end of 2020 the European and Eurasian military vista
looked as if the protagonists were poised on their starting blocks. In any
case, the events of 2020 put the Russian armed forces on alert to a greater
degree than they were even in 1999, and it was also much better prepared
than it was during that earlier time. This was yet another point of concern
for the Russian people.

Notes
1 Vladimir Putin, ‘Annual Address to the Federal Assembly’, 10 May 2006, in
REDA 2006, Vol. 1 (2008), pp. 35–47.
2 On this, see A.F. Eliseev, Vospitanie soveksogo patriotizma i sovetskoi natsionalnoi
gordosti. Moscow: Vysh. Shkol, 1952.
3 Gudrun Persson, ed. ‘Russian Military Capability in a Ten-Year Perspective –
2016’, Sweden: FOI Report No. FOI-R-4326-SE, p. 2. For background, Nathan
Toohey, ‘Russia’s defense spending grows to third largest in the world’, The
Moscow News, 17 February 2012.
4 For detailed background, see Bettina Renz, Russia’s Military Revival. Cambridge,
UK: Polity, 2018; on Russia’s military weaknesses in Georgia, Roger McDermott,
‘Russia’s Conventional Armed Forces and the Georgian War’, Parameters, Vol.
39, No. 1 (2009), pp. 65–80.
5 SIPRI Fact Sheet. April 2019, ‘Trends in World Military Expenditure, 2018’,
www.sipri.org/sites/default/files/2019-04/fs_1904_milex_2018.pdf; SIPRI, ‘Global
military spending remains high at $1.7 trillion’, 2 May 2018. See also Fred Weir,
‘To pay for a “Russia first” agenda, Putin takes axe to military spending’, The
Christian Science Monitor, 8 May 2018.
6 Michael Kofman, ‘Russian defense spending is much larger and more sustainable
than it seems’, Defense News, 3 May 2019.
 The re-militarization of Russia 309
7 ‘Russia Returns to Top 5 Defence Spending Countries Worldwide – Think Tank’,
The Moscow Times, 27 April 2020.
8 US National Defense Authorization Act (N DAA), FY2020 NDAA Summary,
https://www.armed-services.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/FY20%20NDAA%20
Conference%20Summary%20_%20FINAL.pdf, accessed 12 December 2019;
‘$740Bln U.S. Defence Bill Targets Russian Pipelines’, The Moscow Times, 10
December 2019.
9 On this, Roger McDermott, ‘Putin Agrees to Major Write-Off of Russia’s Defense
Industry Debt’, Eurasia Daily Monitor, 19 February 2020.
10 See Ernest J. Monitz, Sam Nunn, ‘The Return of Doomsday: The New Nuclear
Arms Race—and How Washington and Moscow Can Stop It’, Foreign Affairs, 6
August 2019.
11 ‘Military Service – Contract Service’, GlobalSecurity.org., accessed 20 February
2020; Dmitry Gorenburg, ‘The Russian Military under Sergei Shoigu: Will the
Reform Continue?”, PONARS Eurasia, Policy memo 253, July 2013; Vladimir
Isachenkov, ‘Russian defence ministry boasts about revived military power’, AP
News, 11 March 2019.
12 Aleey Zhabin, ‘More Than a Decade After Military Reform, Hazing Still Plagues
the Russian Army’, The Moscow Times, 18 February 2020; ‘High Suicide Rate
Plagues Russian Military, Lawmaker Says’, The Moscow Times, 19 February
2020; ‘Dedovshchina vykhodit iz stroia’, RBC.ru, Gazeta, No. 192 (3147), 29
November 2019.
13 ‘Sergei Shoigu rasskazal, kak spasali rossiiskuiu armiiu’, MKRU [Moskovskiy
komsomolets], 22 September 2019.
14 On this, see Ofer Fridman, Russian ‘Hybrid Warfare’: Resurgence and Politicisation.
New York: Oxford UP, 2018, and Roger N. McDermott, Russia’s Electronic
Warfare Capabilities to 2025. International Centre for Defence and Security,
Estonian Ministry of Defence, 2017; see also Andrew Monaghan, ‘The “War” in
Russia’s “Hybrid Warfare”’, Parameters, Vol. 45, No. 4 (2015–16), pp. 65–74.
15 Stephen Blank, ‘Modernization of the Russian Armed Forces – Achievement,
Plans, Objectives’, American Foreign Policy Council, April 2018, www.academia.
edu., rusmil-6-2018.docx.
16 ‘SShA ne predlagali Rossii kratkosrochnoe prodlenie Dogovora o SNV’,
Kommersant, 24 June 2020; Jonathan Brown, ‘Russia Stages Grand WWII Parade
Ahead of Vote on Putin Reforms’, The Moscow Times, 24 June 20/20; ‘Putin
prinial parad Pobedy na Krasnoi ploshchadi’, Vedomosti, 24 June 2020.
17 ‘China rebukes US envoy for photo stunt at nuclear talks with Russia’, The World
(Reuters), 22 June 2020; Alice Tidey, ‘US–Russia nuclear talks: Washington con-
demns “no-show” China at Vienna summit’, Euronews, 22 June 2020.
18 ‘Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkin: ‘“We Have No Trust, No
Confidence Whatsoever” in America’, The National Interest, 29 May 2020. The
interview was conducted by the journal’s editor, Jacob Heilbrunn.
19 Quoted in ‘Chinese Defense Minister Says China will “Support” Russia Against
Americas’, Asia Times, 4 April 2018.
20 ‘Russia Says U.S. Is Playing with Fire by Imposing 60th Sanctions Package Since
2011’, The Moscow Times, 21 September 2018; ‘Kreml’ nazval deistviia SShA
“sanktsionnoi isterikoi”’, RBC.ru, 21 September 2018.
21 ‘Russian Naval Exercises Scheduled Off Syrian Coast Amid Expected U.S.
Airstrike’, The Moscow Times, 11 April 2018.
22 ‘Moscow Close to Finalizing Deal to Lease Syria’s Tartus Port For 49 Years’,
RFE/RL, 21 April 2019.
23 Pavel Felgenhauer, ‘Russia to Build Naval Base in Sudan’, Eurasia Daily Monitor,
19 November 2020; ‘Russia Signs Deal to Open Naval Base in Sudan’, The
Moscow Times, 9 December 2020.
24 ‘Strategicheskii patrul’ deistvoval s razmakhom’, Krasnaia Zvezda, 14 May 2018.
310 The re-militarization of Russia
25 ‘Russia Conducts Massive Military Drills in Crimea’, The Moscow Times, 8 June
2018; Sergey Zgurets, ‘Military exercises in Crimea: What is Russia preparing
for?’ UNIAN, 7 June 2018.
26 ‘Vostok-2018 exercise to be unprecedented in scale – Russian defense minister’,
TASS, 20 August 2018; ‘Russia Starts Biggest War Games Since Soviet Fall, Near
China’, The Moscow Times, 11 September 2018.
27 Bertil Lintner, Chiang Mai, ‘Eye on America, China-Russia flex naval muscles’,
Asia Times, 5 April 2019; Alexander Gabuev, ‘Why Russia and China are
Strengthening Security Ties’, Foreign Affairs. Snapshot, 24 September 2018.
28 ‘Russian–Chinese Air Patrol in Asia-Pacific Draws Fire from S. Korea Jets’, The
Moscow Times, 16 July 2019; ‘Russia Denies It Apologized to S. Korea Over
Alleged Airspace Breach’, The Moscow Times, 17 July 2019; ‘Chemical corrosion.
Relations between Japan and South Korea are fraying alarmingly’, The Economist,
20 July 2019, p. 33.
29 State Council Information Office of the People’s Republic of China, ‘China’s
National Defense in the New Era’, Pt. VI, 24 July 2019, http://english.gov.cn/
archive/white_paper/2019/07/24/content_281476780919912.htm.
30 Dmitri Trenin, ‘How Cozy Is Russia and China’s Military Relationship?’, The
Moscow Times, 12 November 2019.
31 On this, see Dmitry Gorenburg, ‘An Emerging Strategic Partnership: Trends in
Russia–China Military Cooperation’, Russian Military Reform, 29 April 2020.
32 Elizabeth Buchanan, Mathieu Boulégue, ‘Russia’s Military Exercises in the Arctic
have More Bark than Bite’, FP (Foreign Policy), 20 May 2019; for controversy
over Zapad-2017, J.L. Black, Putin’s Third Term, p. 228.
33 ‘Minoborony anonsirovalo ucheniia s uchastiem 128 tys. Voennykh’, RBC.ru, 20
August 2019; ‘Troops to Hold Mass Military Drills at War Games, Russia
Announces’, The Moscow Times, 20 August 2019.
34 For a general description in English, Pavel Felgenhauer, ‘Russia Completes
Massive Tsentr 2019 War Games With Enhanced Chinese Participation’, Eurasia
Daily Monitor, 26 September 2019.
35 Thomas Nilsen, ‘Russia announces massive trans-Arctic nuclear war games’, The
Barents Observer, 14 October 2019; ‘Massive Nuclear War Games Start in Russian
Arctic’, The Moscow Times, 15 October 2019.
36 Sergey Sukhanin, ‘Completing the Arctic Shield: Russian Activities on Wrangel
Island’, Eurasia Daily Monitor, 9 April 2020.
37 ‘Japan’s deployment of U.S.-developed Aegis Ashore missile defense system could
take six years 14 May 2018’, The Japan Times, 30 July 2018; ‘Russia Rejects
Japan’s Protests Over Military Buildup on Disputed Islands’, The Moscow Times,
10 October 2018.
38 ‘Kyiv Says Russia Attacked Ukrainian Navy Ships, Seized Three in Black Sea’,
RFE/RL, 25 November 2018; ‘Russia and Ukraine Clash Over Kerch Strait,
Explained’, The Moscow Times, 26 November 2018; Yuri Laptev, ‘Martial Law in
Ukraine: A Rehearsal for War’, Eurasia Daily Monitor, 12 December 2018.
39 ‘Russia to Build New Missile Early-Warning Radar Station in Crimea’, The
Moscow Times, 29 November 2018.
40 ‘Russia Deploys Fighter Jets to Crimea Amid Ukraine Tensions’, The Moscow
Times, 17 December 2018.
41 ‘UN Maritime Tribunal Rules Russia Must “Immediately” Release Ukrainian
Sailors, Ships’, RFE/RL, 25 May 2019; ‘Russia Must Release Detained Ukrainian
Sailors – Maritime Tribunal’, The Moscow Times, 25 May 2019.
42 Andrew E. Kramer, ‘Russian General Pitches “Information” Operations as a
Form of War’, New York Times, 2 March 2019; ‘Russia’s Geopolitical Rivals
Preparing for High-Tech Wars in Space – Gen Staff’, Sputnik, 2 March 2019. See
also Kier Giles, ‘Russia’s “New” Tools for Confronting the West. Continuity and
 The re-militarization of Russia 311
Innovation in Moscow’s Exercise of Power’, Chatham House, Russia and Eurasia
Programme, March 2016.
43 For a video of the road incident 20 February 2020, https://www.rt.com/
news/481277-syria-russia-us-collide/.
44 ‘Russia Tests New Anti-Ballistic Missile Designed to Protect Moscow from
Attack’, The Moscow Times, 2 April 2018; ‘Poslanie Prezidenta Federal’nomu
Sobraniiu’, Kremlin.ru, 1 March 2018, kremlin.ru/events/president/news/56957.
The test was the Sarmat’s second successful trial.
45 ‘Statement of John H. Hyten, United States Strategic Commander before the
Senate Committee on Armed Services, 4 April 2017’. www.armed-services.senate.
gov/imo/media/doc/Hyten_04-04-17,pdf
46 NATO Newsroom, ‘NATO Secretary General briefs on exercise Trident Juncture’,
www.nato-int/cps/ua/natohq/index.htm, 24 October 2018; Dmitry Gorenburg,
‘NATO’s Trident Juncture Exercise as a Deterrence Signal to Russia’, Russia
Matters, 1 November 2018.
47 ‘Russian Warships to Hold Missile Drills Near Norway’s Gas Pipeline to Europe’,
The Moscow News, 4 February 2020; Thomas Nilsen, ‘Russian navy drill outside
Norway ended without smoke’, The Barents Observer, 18 August 2019.
48 Thomas Nilsen, ‘U.S. Sixth Fleet enters the Barents Sea with missile defense
destroyer’, The Barents Observer, 4 May 2020.
49 ‘Fregat “Admiral Gorshkov” vypolnil pusk giperzvukogo rakety “Tsirkon” iz
Belogo Moria’, TASS, 7 October 2020; ‘Russia Successfully Test-Launches
“Tsirkon” Hypersonic Missile’, The Moscow Times, 7 October 2020.
50 ‘Russia reopens Soviet-era laboratory to test weapons in Arctic conditions’,
Devdiscourse.com, 24 December 2020, and Reuters.
51 US State Department, ‘Russia’s Violation of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear
Forces (INF) Treaty’, Fact Sheet, 4 December 2018, www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/
ps/2018/12/287868.htm; Morgan Chalfant, ‘Pompeo: US to leave nuclear treaty in
60 days unless Russia complies with terms’, The Hill, 4 December 2018.
52 John Bolton, The Room Where It happened, op. cit. pp. 159–64.
53 David E. Sanger, William J. Broad, ‘A Cold War Arms Treaty Is Unraveling. But
the Problem is Much Bigger’, New York Times, 9 December 2018; ‘Russia Warns
of Retaliation After Trump Says U.S. Is Exiting Nuclear Treaty’, The Moscow
Times, 21 October 2018; Tal Axelrod, ‘Trump confirms US will withdraw from
key arms control treaty’, The Hill, 20 October 2018; ‘Kremlin Says U.S. Plan to
Quit Flawed Nuclear Pact is Dangerous’, The Moscow Times, 23 October 2018;
‘INF Is Just Another Unenforceable Treaty (Op-ed)’, The Moscow Times, 6
December 2018; Pavel Felgenhauer, ‘Termination of the INF Treaty: The End of
Arms Control?’ Eurasia Daily Monitor, 6 December 2018; Paul Robinson, ‘Arms
Race’, Irrationality, 7 December 2018.
54 Putin, ‘Vstrecha s Sergeem Lavrovym i Sergeem Shoigu’, Kremlin.ru, 2 February
2019, kremlin.ru/events/president/news/59763; Dmitry Stefanovich, ‘The INF Treaty
Has Been Nixed. What’s Next? (Op-ed)’, The Moscow Times, 11 February 2019.
55 ‘Opinion. Michael Gorbachev: A Nuclear Arms Race Has Begun’, New York
Times, 25 October 2018; Gorbachev, ‘V iadernoi gonke ne budet pobeditelei’,
Vedomosti, 12 February 2019, reprinted in English in The Moscow Times, 14
February 2019.
56 Putin, ‘Poslanie Prezidenta Federal’nomu Sobraniiu’, Kremlin.ru, 20 February
2019, kremlin.ru/events/president/news/59863.
57 See Sarah Bidgood, ‘Trump Accidentally Just Triggered Global Nuclear
Proliferation’, FP (Foreign Policy), 21 February 2019; Editorial Board, ‘Don’t
Tear Up This Treaty’, New York Times, 15 December 2018; Tom Nichols,
‘Mourning the INF Treaty. The United States Is Not Better for Withdrawing’,
Foreign Affairs. Snapshot, 4 March 2019.
312 The re-militarization of Russia
58 ‘Poroshenko anonsiroval ispytaniia raketnogo oruzhiia u granitsy s Rossiei’,
RBC.ru, 13 March 2019; ‘Poroshenko: Ukraine Freed of Obligation Not to
Develop Powerful Long-Range Missile Systems’, Ukrainian News, 6 March; Steve
Trimble, ‘U.S. to Revive GLCM Fabrication Before INF Treaty Withdrawal’,
Aviation Week, 8 March 2019.
59 ‘Diplomat says NATO chief failed to show any proof of Russia’s INF
“Violations”’, TASS, 21 March 2019; Eurasia Diary, 21 March 2020. The
Congressional Research Service report, Russian Compliance with the Intermediate-
range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty: Background and Issues for Congress, Updated
February 8, 2019, 48pp., was surprisingly deficient in hard evidence.
60 Andrey Baklitskiy, ‘Arms Control is Dead. Long Live Arms Control’, Carnegie
Moscow Center, 21 March 2019.
61 ‘Putin Says Russia Prepared to Drop Arms Control Treaty If U.S. Not Interested In
Renewal’, RFE/RL, 6 June 2019; Putin, ‘Meeting with heads of international news
agencies’, Kremlin.ru, 6 June 2019, en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/60675.
62 ‘MID Rossii zaiavil o prekrashchenii deistviia Dogovora o RSMD po initsiative
SShA;’, Vedomosti, 2 August 2019; ‘NATO Calls on Russia to Destroy New
Missile, Warns of Response’, The Moscow Times, 25 June 2019.
63 Putin, ‘Soveshchanie s postoiannymi chlenami Soveta Bezopasnosti’, 23 August
2019, kremlin.ru/events/president/news/61359; ‘Russia Accuses U.S. of Stoking
Tensions with Post-INF Missile Test’, The Moscow Times, 20 August 2019; ‘Putin
Orders Reciprocal Russian Response to U.S. Missile Test’, The Moscow Times, 23
August 2019.
64 ‘Bol’shaia press-konferentsiia Vladimira Putina’, Kremlin.ru, 19 December 2019,
kremlin.ru/events/president/news/62366
65 Putin, ‘Plenaroe zasedanie Vostochnogo ekonomicheskogo foruma’, Kremlin.ru,
5 September 2019, kremlin.ru/events/president/news/61451.
66 ‘Statement by Vladimir Putin on additional steps to de-escalate the situation in
Europe after the termination of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty
(INF Treaty)’, Official translation, Kremlin.ru, 26 October2020, en.kremlin.ru/
events/president/news/64270.
67 Russian Federation Ministry of Defence, ‘The Northern Fleet has deployed the
Bal missile system in position on the Sredniy Peninsula’, 8 July 2019, function.
mil.ru/news_page/country/more.htm?id=12245818@egNews; ‘Russia Deploys
Missile System 70km From Norway’s Vardo Radar’, The Barents Observer, 8 July
2019; Thomas Nilsen, ‘US and Norway upgrade eye on border to northern
Russia’, The Barents Observer, 16 November 2018.
68 U.S. Department of State, Michael R. Pompeo, Press statement, ‘On the Treaty on
Open Skies’, 21 May 2020, https://www.state.gov/on-the-treaty-on-open-skies/; David
E. Sanger, ‘Trump Will Withdraw From Open Skies Arms Control Treaty’, New York
Times, 21 May 2020; ‘Kosachev nazval nelepym reshenie SShA vyiti iz Dogovora po
otkrytomu nebu’, Rossiiskaia gazeta, 22 May 2020; Yevgeny Razumny, ‘Rossiia ne
vyidet iz dogovora ob otkrytom nebe vsled za SShA’, Vedomosti, 22 May 2020.
69 ‘White House Official: Trump To Seek Extension Of New START Arms Treaty
with Russia’, RFE/RL, 22 May 2020; Pavel Luzin, ‘The Doomed Treaty: Russia’s
Position on Prolonging New START’, Eurasia Daily Monitor, 18 May 2020.
70 Ukaz Prezidenta Rossiiskaia Federatsii, ‘Ob Osnovakh gosudarstvennoi politiki
Rossiiskoi Federatsii v oblasti iadernogo sderzhivanii’, 2 June 2020, publication.
pravo.gov.ru/Document/View/0001202006020040.
71 Putin, ‘Soveshchanie s postoiannymi chlenami Soveta Bezopasnosti’, Kremlin.ru,
16 October 2020, Kremlin.ru/events/president/news/64238; Zachary Cohen,
Jamie Crawford, Kylie Atwood, ‘Trump’s national security adviser call Putin
response to arms-control talks a “non-starter”’, CNN Politics, 16 October 2020;
‘Michael R. Gordon, ‘Russia Rebuffs Trump’s Arms-Control Proposal’, The Wall
Street Journal, 1 October 2020.
 The re-militarization of Russia 313
72 Steven Pifer, ‘US nukes in Poland are a truly bad idea’, Brookings, 18 May 2020;
Alexandra Brzosowski, ‘Debate to relocate US nuclear weapons to Poland irks
Russia’, Euractiv.com, 20 May 2020.
73 ‘Bol’shaia press-konferentsiia Vladimira Putina’, Kremlin.ru, 20 December 2018,
kremlin.ru/events/president/news/59455.
74 RT, 27 February 2020. See also Andrey Baklitskiy, The Prospects for U.S.-Russia
Arms Control. Washington: CSIS, 2020.
75 ‘Zaiavlenie MID Rossii …, 8 April 2020, www.mid.ru/ru/press_service/spokes-
man/official_statement/-/asset_publisher/t2GCdmD8RNIr/content/id/4096810.
76 Putin, ‘Poslanie Prezidenta Federal’nomu Sobraniiu’, Kremlin.ru,1 March 2018,
kremlin.ru/events/president/news/56957; ‘Meeting with Government members’,
26 December 2018, Kremlin.ru/events/president/news/59518; Steven Simon,
‘Hypersonic Missiles Are a Game Changer’, New York Times, 2 January 2020.
77 ‘Official Reveals Russia’s Avangard Hypersonic Missile Speed’, Sputnik, 28
December 2018.
78 For useful discussions, Robert Legvold, ‘Death of the INF Treaty’, Valdai
Discussion Club, 20 December 2018, and Ernest J. Moniz, Sam Nunn, ‘The
Return of Doomsday’, Foreign Affairs, 6 August 2019, op. cit.
79 US Department of Defense. ‘Transcript: Department of Defense Background
Briefing on Nuclear Deterrence and Modernization’, 21 February 2020, https://
www.defense.gov/Newsroom/Transcripts/Transcript/Article/2090986/depart-
ment-of-defense-background-briefing-on-nuclear-deterrence-and-modernizati/
source/GovDelivery/.
80 ‘Putin Unveils World’s Longest Nuclear Submarine at Shipyard Ceremony’, The
Moscow Times, 23 April 2019; ‘Putin poobeshhchal 26 novykh korablei rossiis-
komu flot v etom gody’, RBC.ru, 29 July 2028.
81 Dar’ia Korzhova, ‘V Rossii prokhodit aktsiia “Bessmertnyi polk”’, Vedomosti, 9
May 2019.
82 On the Kursk and its implications for Russian foreign policy and the backlash at
home, see J.L. Black, Vladimir Putin and the New World Order, Lanham, MD:
Rowman & Littlefield, 2004, pp. 77–80, 196–99.
83 Putin, ‘Vstrecha s Ministrom oborony Sergheem Shoigu’, Kremlin.ru, 4 July
2019, kremlin.ru/events/president/news/60913; Pavel K. Baev, ‘Another Russia
Sea Tragedy: Unlearned Lessons Obscured by Secrecy’, Eurasia Daily Monitor, 8
July 2019.
84 See, e.g. Colleen Moore, Ben Freeman, ‘Nuclear Arms Nightmare: Don’t Let
New START Die’, The National Interest, 8 April 2020; Daryl G. Kimball, ‘Prevent
the outbreak of another global security threat. Extend New Start’, Bulletin of the
Atomic Scientists, 8 April 2020.
85 Aleksandr Emelyanenkov, ‘“Kniaz’ Vladimir” otkryl sdatochnuiu programmu
“Sevmasha” v 2020 godu’, Rossiiskaia gazeta, 12 June 2020; Vladimir Soldatkin,
‘Russian nuclear-powered sub enters service amid arms control fears’, Reuters, 12
June 2020; Thomas Nilsen, ‘Naval Chiefs at Russian submarine ceremony ignore
coronavirus safety rules’, The Barents Observer, 12 June 2020.
86 Federation of American Scientists, ‘Prevention of an Arms Race in Outer Space’,
fas.org.programs/ssp/nukes …, accessed 6 September 2020; Karl Grossman, ‘The
Next Frontier: Trump and Space Weapons’, Worldbeyondwar.org, January 2019.
87 ‘Global arms industry: US companies dominate the Top 100; Russian arms indus-
try moves into second place’, SIPRI, 10 December 2018; Manu Pubby, ‘US sanc-
tions rain on India-Russia defence parade’, The Economic Times (India), 5 May
2018; ‘Russia Downplays New U.S. Sanctions as Revenge for “Failed” Syria
Strikes’, The Moscow Times, 10 May 2018; ‘Philippines to Buy U.S. Helicopters,
Not Russian, Over Sanctions Fears’, The Moscow Times, 7 December 2018. For
the sanctions, see US Department of the Treasury, www.treasury.gov/resource-
center/sanctions/SDSN-List/Pages/default.aspx.
314 The re-militarization of Russia
88 ‘Russian Arms Makers Lost $760M Due to U.S. Sanctions, Official Says’, The
Moscow Times, 1 March 2019.
89 ‘V Indii otkrylsia zavod po proizvodstvu avtomatov Kalashnikova’, Vedomosti, 3
March 2019.
90 ‘Rossiia i Indiia soglasovali usloviia postavki’ S-400 na $6 mlrd’, Kommersant, 29
May 2018; ‘India Signs $5Bln Deal to Buy Russia’s S-400 Missile System, Despite
U.S. Pressure’, The Moscow Times, 5 October 2018; Pavel Felgenhauer, ‘Selling
Russian Arms in New Delhi: Seeking Revenue and Influence’, Eurasia Daily
Monitor, 11 October 2018.
91 Robertus Wardi, ‘Defense Ministry Wants Sukhoi Fighter Jets, Despite US
Sanctions Risk’, Jakarta Globe, 10 August 2018.
92 Aleksei Nikolsky, ‘Kitai zakupil v Rossii vertolety na summu boleee $2 mlrd’,
Rossiiskaia gazeta, 23 October 2020.
93 ‘Rossiia in Turtsiia zakliuchili vtoroi kontrakt na postavku 3RC S-400’,
Rossiiskaia gazeta, 23 August 2020; ‘Turtsiia otvetila na soobshcheniia ob otkaze
ot amerikanskikh system PVO’, RBC.ru, 1 March 2019; ‘Turkey Weighs New
U.S. Call to Delay Buying Russian Missiles’, The Moscow Times, 14 May 2019;
David Gauthier-Villars, Ann M. Simmons, ‘Turkey Receives Russian Missiles
System, Risking U.S. Sanctions’, The Wall Street Journal, 15 July 2019; Mathew
Lee, ‘US sanctions NATO ally Turkey over Russian missile defence’, Canadian
Press, 14 December 2020.
94 ‘SMI uznalo o pokupke Egiptom neskol’kikh desiatkov rossiiskikh Su-35’, RBC.
ru, 18 March 2018.
95 Ivan Safronov, ‘Alzhir kupil rossiiskie istrebiteli na summy okolo $2 mlrd’,
Vedomosti, 9 September 2019.
96 ‘Russia Delivers New Batch of Weapons to Central African Republic’, The
Moscow Times, 27 September 2019.
97 ‘Russia Delivers Flamethrower Systems to Saudi Arabia – Reports’, The Moscow
Times, 9 April 2019.
98 Franz-Stefan Gady, ‘Russia Confirms Delivery of 10 Su-35 Fighter Jets to China
by Year’s End’, The Diplomat, 29 August 2018; ‘Russia Completes Delivery of
Su-35 Fighter Jets to China for $2.5Bln’, The Moscow Times, 17 April 2019.
99 Arthur Lyons, ‘US threatens to sanction Serbia over Russian S-400 missile sys-
tem purchase’, Voice of Europe, 14 November 2019.
100 ‘U.S. Sanctions Russian Arms Makers Over Alleged Iran, N. Korea and Syria
Dealings’, The Moscow Times, 22 May 2019.
101 Zainab Fattah, Ilya Arkhipov, ‘Russia Rejected Iran S-400 Missiles Request
Amid Gulf Tension’, Bloomberg, 30 May 2019.
102 ‘Putin i korol’ Saudovskoi Aravii obsudili voenno-tekhnicheskoe sotrudnich-
estvo’, Kommersant, 14 October 2019.
103 Ivan Safronov, Aleksei Nikolskii, ‘V’etnam zakliuchil kontrakt na rossiiskie
uchebno-boevye samolety Iak-130’, Vedomosti, 29 January 2020; ‘Vietnam
Orders $350M Combat Training Jets From Russia’, The Moscow Times, 29
January 2020.
104 See Black, Vladimir Putin and the New World Order, Chapter 10.
105 See Declaration. Collective Security Council. Collective Security Treaty
Organization, 8 November 2018, Astana, odkb-csto.org/documents/detail.
php?ELEMENT_ID=14225.
106 Eduard Abrahamyan, ‘Internal Discord in CSTO May be Pushing Armenia to
Leave Russia-Led Alliance’, Eurasia Daily Monitor, 29 November 2018.
107 Putin, ‘Interv’iu v efire programmy “Zavtrak s Frostom” na telekanale “Bi-bi-ci”’,
Kremlin.ru, 5 March 2000, kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/24194.
108 NATO representatives deny that any such promise was made, but documents
de-classified in December 2017 suggest otherwise, see Svetlana Savranskaia,
Tom Blanton, ‘NATO Expansion: What Gorbachev Heard’, National Security
 The re-militarization of Russia 315
Archive, 12 December 2017, Briefing Book, #613, https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/
briefing-book/russia-programs/2017-12-12/nato-expansion-what-gorbachev-
heard-western-leaders-early; Dave Majumdar, ‘Newly Declassified Documents:
Gorbachev Told NATO Wouldn’t Move Past East German Border’, The National
Interest, 12 December 2017; Jack Matlock, ‘The One Place NATO Could Turn
for Help’, New York Times, 20 April 2020. As US ambassador to the USSR,
1987–91, Matlock was privy to these discussions.
109 See the FIS Report, ‘Opravdano li rasshirenie NATO?’, Nezavisimaia gazeta, 26
November 1993; J.L. Black, Russia Faces NATO Expansion. Lanham, MD:
Rowman & Littlefield, 2000, pp. 8–9. For the ‘recent’ view that blamed Putin, see
Kimberly Marten, ‘NATO enlargement: evaluating its consequences in Russia’,
International Politics, 16 April 2020, on-line.
110 ‘Defence Minister Expresses Concern at NATO “Expansion”’, Interfax-AVN, 2
December 2006, REDA 2006, Vol. 1, p. 158.
111 ‘S.Res. 439 – A resolution expressing the strong support of the senate for the
North Atlantic Treaty Organization to enter into a Membership Action Plan
with Georgia and Ukraine’, 14 February 2008, https://www.congress.gov/
bill/110th-congress/senate-resolution/439/text.
112 ‘Vladimir Putin vystupil na zasedanii Soveta Rossiia–NATO’, Kremlin.ru, 4
April 2008, en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/44078, plus following Q&A
press conference.
113 ‘U.S. pushes NATO to ready more forces to deter Russian threat’, Reuters, 5 June
2018, reprinted in The Moscow Times, 5 June 2018.
114 See Pavel Felgenhauer, ‘Moscow Increasingly Ready for Major Military
Confrontation’, Eurasia Daily Monitor, 21 March 2019.
115 ‘Secretary General: NATO is united in support for Georgia’s security’, www.
nato.int/cps/en/natohq/news_157482.htm, 18 July 2018; Ihor Kabanenko,
‘NATO Brussels Summit: Key Outcomes and Implications for Ukrainian
Interests’, Eurasia Daily Monitor, 18 July 2018.
116 Putin was speaking to a meeting of Russian ambassadors and permanent repre-
sentatives, Kremlin.ru/events/president/news/58037, 19 July 2018.
117 See Sean T. Crowley, ‘NATO “Encirclement” May Be Creating a New Crisis with
Russia’, National Interest, 2 August 2018.
118 ‘Namejis 2018 military exercise underway’, The Baltic Word, 20 August 2018.
119 ‘Joint Russian–Serbian military exercise starts’, rs.n1info.com/a411708/English/
NEWS/Joint-Russian-Serbian-military-exercise-starts.html; Noble Partner 2018,
120 Giorgi Menabde, ‘NATO Again Demonstrates Strong Support for Georgia’,
Eurasia Daily Monitor, 1 April 2019.
121 ‘Russia to Fund Abkhazian Military Modernization Amid Growing Tensions’,
The Moscow Times, 23 September 2019; ‘Iuzhnaia Osetiia so svoei storony takzhe
prikazala postroit’ blokpost v khode poslednei eskalatsii na granitse’, OC Media,
1 September 2019; ‘Tensions Are Flaring Between Georgia and Russia-Backed
South Ossetia. Here’s What’s Happened’, The Moscow Times, 2 September 2019.
122 Giorgi Menabde, ‘Russia Boosts Its Military Contingent in Georgia’s Occupied
Territories’. Eurasia Daily Monitor, 19 February 2020.
123 ‘US troops arrive in Germany for “Defender Europe 20” military maneuvers’,
DW (Deutsche Welle), 19 February 2020; see also NATO, ‘About Defender-
Europe-20’, https://shape.nato.int/defender-europe.
124 ‘Canada’s firm to deliver $770,000 in sniper rifles to Ukraine’, UNIAN, 14
August 2018; David Pugliese, ‘Winnipeg firm wins $1M deal to send sniper rifles
to Ukraine that could be used against Russian-backed forces’, Ottawa Citizen, 13
August 2018; ‘Kanadskaia firma postavit Ukrainie snaiperskie vintovki pochti
na $800,000’, Vedomosti, 14 August 2018.
125 NATO Newsroom, ‘NATO Secretary General briefs on exercise Trident
Juncture’, www.nato-int/cps/ua/natohq/index.htm, 24 October 2018.
316 The re-militarization of Russia
126 ‘MID RF zaiavil o polnom prekrashchenii sotrudnichestva Rossii i NATO’,
Kommersant, 15 April 2019; ‘Russia Has Ceased “All” Cooperation with NATO,
Foreign Ministry Says’, The Moscow Times, 15 April 2019; Robert Burns, ‘The
chill in US–Russia relations has some worried about stumbling into a military
conflict’, The Military Times, 14 April 2019.
127 Frederik Pleitgen, ‘In the Mediterranean, US aircraft carrier operations serve as
floating American diplomacy’, CNN.com, 23 April 2019.
128 ‘Putin Criticizes NATO Expansion as Alliance Holds London Summit’, The
Moscow Times, 3 December 2019; Putin, ‘Soveshchanie s rukovodstvom
Minoborony i predpriatii’, Kremlin.ru, 3 December 2019, kremlin.ru/events/
president/news/62228; Elena Chernenko, Vladimir Solov’ev, ‘Raketyu srednei i
men’shei mirnosti’, Kommersant, 25 September 2019.
129 Eugene Gerden, ‘Russia maintains training tempo after NATO rebuffs “offer” to
freeze drills’, Shephard, 12 May 2020.
130 Vladimir Isachenko, ‘Russian general chafes at “provocative” NATO drills’, AP,
1 June 2020, https://apnews.com/4bf995f782fc4fd7d331622ec0074f83; ‘Russia
Scales Down Military Drills Near NATO Borders in 2020 Official’, The Moscow
Times, 2 June 2020.
131 ‘Russia’s Putin Orders Massive Snap Military Drills’, The Defence Post, 17 July
2020, also in The Moscow Times, 17 July 2020.
132 ‘Russia launches Kavkaz-2020 drills’, TASS, 20 September 2020; Dimitri Simes,
‘Russia, China, Iran, and Others Begin Joint Military Drills in Southern Russia’,
CNSNews.com, 23 September 2020; Maxime Popov, ‘Russia’s Season of War
Games United West-Weary Allies’, The Moscow Times, 23 September 2020.
133 Roger McDermott, ‘Russian Military Tests “Mobile Echelon” in Kavkaz 2020’,
Eurasia Daily Monitor, 28 October 2020; Pavel Felgenhauer, ‘Russia Watches as
Karabakh War Reaches Decisive Turning Point’, Eurasia daily Monitor, 29
October 2020.
134 See, e.g. Frederick W. Kagan, ‘A knife at NATO’s throat: Why Belarus matters to
the US’, The Hill, 20 August 2020.
135 Ministerstvo oborony Respubliki Belarus’, ‘The opening ceremony of the
ARMI2020 competitions was held at Brest’, 23 August 2020, https://www.mil.by/
ru/news/spec_proect/104613/; ‘Russian Troops Take Part in Belarus War Games’,
The Moscow Times, 28 August 2020.
136 Milica Stojanovic, ‘Serbia Quits Joint Military Exercise, Citing “Terrible EU
Pressure”’, Balkan Insight, 10 September 2020; ‘Ukraine–U.S. Military Exercises
Begin as Russia Holds Drills in Belarus’, Reuters, 17 September 2020.
137 ‘BMF Rossii vpervye za desiat’ let provedet sovmestnye s NATO ucheniia’, RIA
Novosti, 10 December 2020; ‘Russian Navy to Join NATO Countries Joint
Exercises in 10-Year First’, The Moscow Times, 15 December 2020.
8 Quality of life
Media, mind and behaviour

Introduction
Although the Russian Constitution guarantees a diversity of ideologies and
religions, and forbids a state or compulsory ideology (Chapt. 1, Art. 13.2),
the amendments offered to the public in 2020 legitimized a de facto conserva-
tive ideology by defining family as a union of man and woman, Russian as
the state-forming language and Russian territory as indivisible. The revised
Basic Law renders certain historical facts, or myths, about World War II
unchallengeable, and prioritized Russian law above international treaties.
These constitutional changes do not represent a single ideology in the usual
sense of the term; rather, they confirm in law practices and sentiments that
grew ever stronger over Putin’s first twenty years in high office. They exem-
plify outgrowths from the ‘besieged mentality’ that has been common to
Russian state thinking for at least a century.
Manifestations of the ‘besieged mentality’ have been easy to track in
Russian foreign policy since the 1990s. Less obvious products of history are
post-Soviet struggles over control of information distribution, the direction
of science and education, and progress in the fields of human rights. These
contests are driven, in part, by individuals and institutions competing to
manipulate the thinking of Russians and, on the part of the church and state,
to shield the public from ‘alien’ ideas coming to them from abroad.
The dilemma of corruption may appear to be completely separate from
matters related to ideologies, yet various forms of corruption provide the
state and public with challenges that touch almost every aspect of Russian
behavioural life. The contests noted above are fuelled, sometimes, by long-
standing habit-forming corrupt practices and those practices nurture atti-
tudes that, some say, are characteristic of the Russian world.1

Media
Control of information dissemination was one of the most powerful weapons
wielded by the CPSU to shape and monitor Soviet society and, it is fair to
say, the introduction of glasnost (openness/publicity) by Gorbachev in the

DOI: 10.4324/9781003158646-9
318 Quality of life
late 1980s was the most significant of the irreversible concessions that brought
the USSR down. Well aware of this, the state, the oligarchs and organized
crime fought bitterly for control of the message in the 1990s. Oligarchs, such
as Berezovsky and Gusinsky, purchased huge stakes in the print and TV sec-
tors to help push their economic and political agendas. Bribes became a main
source of revenue for poorly-paid journalists, editors and managers, as they
did for employers and workers in other walks of life. Energy companies (e.g.
LUKoil, Gazprom) bought controlling shares in the mainstream press when-
ever they could. Reporting the truth on the wars in Chechnya, economic chi-
canery or on political campaigns again became dangerous undertakings.
Journalists, editors, columnists and talk show hosts were murdered by orga-
nizations and individuals whose nefarious activities they threatened to reveal.
In fact, 16 journalists were killed in 2000 alone, five more went missing and
73 others had been attacked physically. They fell prey to war, various criminal
or military organizations, or perhaps oligarchs whom they threatened with
exposure.2 Many of the revelatory newspapers that emerged and flourished
during Gorbachev’s perestroika floundered for want of readers by the mid-to-
late 1990s, or were bought out by oligarchs who wanted to manage the
headlines.
In 1994, Yeltsin transformed the state TV and radio company inherited
from the USSR (Gosteleradio) into a closed joint stock company called
Russian Public TV (ORT). Although the state maintained 51 per cent of
ORT, Berezovsky, then owner of Nezavisimaia gazeta and Kommersant, held
controlling shares on its board of directors. He, along with Moscow’s Mayor
Luzhkov (who had his own television channel) and other oligarchs, turned
the media into a battlefield for rival political factions and businesses. The
absence of any real libel laws made slanderous side-taking by TV and print
commentators the norm.
In 2000, Berezovsky used his effective hold on the ORT to denigrate Putin’s
opponents and help him win his first presidential election. Within months of
his electoral victory, Putin launched an attack against ‘organized crime’,
meaning the media empire controlled by Berezovsky’s rival, Gusinsky, owner
of Media-MOST, TNT, Ekho and several newspapers. Gusinsky was arrested
in July. Freed a month later, he handed his holdings to Gazprom-Media to
pay a debt. A pattern was set.
Berezovsky’s place in the sun didn’t last long either. In that same year, he
resigned his seat as a Duma deputy to protest Putin’s assault on the oligarchs
and tried, unsuccessfully, to form his own political party. No longer benefit-
ing from parliamentary immunity and charged with millions in taxes unpaid
by his companies, including Avtovaz, Russia’s largest automobile manufac-
turing company, Berezovsky fled the country. In January 2001, Putin met
with mass media leaders, telling them that media freedom was not in danger
and that he welcomed constructive criticism. That remained to be seen.
Newspaper and TV station closures were regular fare during Putin’s first
term, and police raids against NTV in 2001 triggered the first large street ral-
lies in support of freedom of the press, orchestrated then by Yabloko. 3
 Quality of life 319
The government consolidated its hold on messaging in August that year
when it formed a single government media enterprise called the Russian
Television and Radio Broadcasting Network, absorbing all its existing owned
or controlled companies.
By 2002, Russia had six nation-wide TV channels, two owned by the state,
one by the city of Moscow and one by a joint stock company (ORT). The
other two were privately-owned. The ORT was renamed Channel One. These
national channels were later reduced to three. There were hundreds of smaller,
regional and local channels, about half of them owned by the state or by
state-owned enterprises, such as Gazprom. The previously independent poll-
ing group VtsIOM was taken over by the government in 2002. In 2005, the
Public Chamber was handed the task of monitoring media freedoms and in
that same year Russia Today (Rossiia Segodnia), the TV channel known now
as RT, was launched to serve as Russia’s main overseas propaganda tool.4
Putin spoke on behalf of press freedom again in 2005, at the same time
making it plain that ‘reverting’ to control of the mass media by oligarchs was
‘out of the question’.5
All the while, the state gradually strengthened its grip on the message, or at
least a major part of it, which was one of the reasons why Reporters without
Borders ranked Russia 140th of 167 countries in its index for press freedom
in 2005. It was in 2006 that paid assassins murdered journalist Anna
Politkovskaia outside her apartment, probably because she was preparing to
submit a report on atrocities committed by Russian soldiers in Chechnya.
Putin called the act ‘disgusting’, and promised to find the culprits.6 But it
wasn’t until 2014 that five men were sentenced for the crime. She was the 42nd
journalist killed in Russia since the early1990s.
Of the changes in the relations of the media to the state, a law passed in
2014 preventing foreign investors from owning more than a 20 per cent stake
in any Russian media outlet was especially important. Driven by the propa-
ganda war between Russia and the West over the Ukraine crisis, the law was
adopted by the Duma (430–2) without debate. Critics outside the Duma wor-
ried that the legislation would limit diverse opinion further than was already
the case, and also make it difficult for smaller audience media to survive.
Given that as recently as August 2020, 69 per cent of Russians still get their
news and interpretation from TV, the state’s role in that medium is central,
even if that number is well down from the more than 90 per cent it was a
decade ago.7 Seeing doesn’t mean that viewers always believe the TV message.
Trust in televised news hovers around 47 per cent, and the younger genera-
tion (under 35) tends to turn to social networks, video blogs and the Internet.
Social media is, in fact, the second-largest source of information for Russians,
at 39 per cent. Newspapers have dropped to 13 per cent and now lies behind
radio (15%) as sources of information.8 Interpretations of domestic political
matters and international events offered by Russian TV and Internet often
differ dramatically.
These Levada numbers were corroborated by a survey conducted by FOM,
which found in October 2020 that 48 per cent of Russians depend on TV for
320 Quality of life
news and 44 per cent rely on the Internet. A Russian analyst commented that,
therefore, there are two communities of Russians living side-by-side who
view ‘our life completely differently’.9 A clear demonstration of this came
late in the year when a Levada survey showed that people who received their
news from television, primarily the older generation, tended to accept the
state’s version of the Navalny poisoning as a staged event; a younger genera-
tion of Internet users tended not to believe the official version.10

Internet interplay
Surveys conducted in November 2018 by the HSE’s Institute for Statistical
Studies showed that 83.7 per cent of Russians use the Internet sometimes,
and 60.6 per cent go online almost every day, which means that most Russians
have access to the same information, commercial operations and socializing
systems that users have in the West. More than half of the regular users were
under the age of 40. These numbers have grown and, according to HSE’s data
in 2019, Russia was behind only Japan in its share of the world’s Internet
users on social media. A Levada Centre survey put daily users up to 65 per
cent by November that year. 11
Well aware of this, the state has tried to manipulate the Internet. After a
Moscow court denied a final appeal by the messenger service Telegram,
whose founders Nikolai and Pavel Durov refused to turn over its encryption
codes to the FSB so that it could scan private conversations of users after a
2017 bomb blast in a St. Petersburg Metro station, Roskomnadzor began
blocking that service. Calling the agency’s and court rulings ‘censorship’,
Pavel Durov pledged millions of dollars to create tools for users to circum-
scribe government restrictions. In connection with the action against
Telegram, several Google IP addresses were blocked, including Gmail and
YouTube. Some major banks and online stores were also caught up in the
clumsy sweep.12 The case represented one of personal privacy versus state
security, a problem faced by most countries in the age of social media.
As it happened, the government action against Telegram represented far
more bark than bite. The messenger service was still used regularly by offi-
cials, media personnel and legislators; and even the government utilized it to
broadcast information about COVID-19. Accepting reality, and moderate
concessions by the Durovs, Roskomnadzor lifted its bans against Telegram in
June 2020.
The fact that YouTube reaches the same number of urban viewers between
ages of 18 and 44 as state-owned TV, and that oppositionist political figures
employ it regularly, means that more restrictive legislation could have a seri-
ous impact on the political discourse in Russia.13
This was found to be true as users experienced multiple disruptions of their
services when the state regulator blocked millions of IP addresses, prompting
international human rights organizations to call on Russia to stop attacking
internet freedom. Ignoring such complaints, the Duma adopted a law to
block websites that defame the ‘honour, dignity or business reputation of a
 Quality of life 321
citizen’.14 Scattered and usually peaceful demonstrations on behalf of inter-
net freedom led to brief detentions for over 20 people in Moscow in April
2018. Leaders of obscure organizations, such as the Black Bloc (anarchist), a
Freedom of Speech group and the Association of Popular Resistance, were
among the detainees, who now gained some free media attention.15
Authorities insisted that they were trying to develop national Internet serv-
ers independently of the current global system dominated by the US, and
replace Western software (e.g. Microsoft) to regain ‘internet sovereignty’.
Putin launched this campaign in 2015, hoping to provide security for the
Russian Internet structure and data by creating top-of-the-line domestically
produced software. Legislation submitted to the Duma in December 2018
authorized Roskomnadzor’s oversight of the Internet, and all major Russian
tech companies agreed to participate. The law required providers to install
technology that would enable the government to block banned online sources
and monitor their compliance with traffic routing regulations.16 Critics saw
the amendments as a means for the state to control the dissemination of
political ideas in Russia, while its supporters saw them as a way to keep the
country’s Internet exchange independent of ‘aggressive’ American cybersecu-
rity strategy and relatively secure from use by terrorists.
The draft bill, dubbed the ‘Yarovaya Law’ after its main advocate, Irina
Yarovaya, passed its first reading in the Duma in February 2019 (334–47) and
Putin signed it into law in May. Centralized control of all national traffic on
the Internet enables Roskomnadzor to guard against being cut off from the
World Wide Web, and also makes it easier to block banned – or opposition
– websites.17 To make the government’s case stronger, Peskov told reporters
that Russian sites were subject to cyberattacks regularly from the US and
Europe; indeed, major US agencies boasted that this was true.18
Still, a large number of Russia’s citizens opposed the law.19 Protests to
protect RuNet from potential isolation from global systems spread quickly,
many of them orchestrated by a public organization, RosKomSvoboda, and
the Libertarian Party which together launched a campaign titled Digital
Internet Defence. Even the Presidential Council of Development of Civil
Society and Human Rights objected to the authority the new regulatory
regime gave to bureaucrats to shut down on-line sites.20 The outburst of pro-
test forced the Kremlin to delineate carefully the types of perils that might
prompt enforcement of the law: a threat to the network’s integrity, equip-
ment failure, a major hacking attack or a ‘destabilising external threat’.
Roskomnadzor would have the authority to take control of the Internet if
any such menace materialized.
All protests notwithstanding, the ‘sovereign internet’ law came into effect
on 1 November 2019.
The Duma adopted yet another internet-restricting bill (322–78) in March
2019. Legislation banning ‘disrespect’ of authorities and ‘fake news’ exposes
online news agencies to fines if they broadcast insults against state symbols
and government institutions, or disseminate ‘false information that is socially
significant under the guise of accurate reporting’. Fake information that
322 Quality of life
includes threats to health or property, or encourages public disorder, will be
prosecuted. As we saw in Chapter 1, authors of insults directed against
authorities in general, and the president in particular, are now subject to
fines. Charges can be avoided if the offending materials are taken down
within 24 hours. Critics argued that the wording of the bill left the way open
for action against free speech activists, demonstrators and opposition com-
mentators. Lawyers for Kommersant, Vedomosti, RBC and others called the
law a means to pressure the media to conform. Authorities detained at least
30 of the 15,000 people who showed up at a rally against the law in Moscow.21
This law was one of the reasons why Reporters Without Borders dropped
Russia to 149th of 180 countries on its press freedom list for 2019.22
In 2018, the Duma softened penalties for ‘extremist’ social media posts,
decriminalizing some offences and providing lesser penalties (fines, adminis-
trative detentions) for first-time offenders. The existing legislation had called
for sentences of up to five years in prison.23 Among other bills made into law
in December 2018 was one that blocked websites that encouraged children
to commit life-threatening acts illegal; another decree gave Rosmolodezh,
the federal youth agency, the right to block websites it believes are harmful
to young people.24 The MVD, Roskomnadzor and the tax service already
had this right. Government control over the Internet was expanding
exponentially.
The Internet was targeted again just prior to elections set for September
2019 when Roskomnadzor ordered Facebook, Google and Twitter not to
carry political ads during the Day of Silence just prior to an election or on
election day, or face charges of meddling in Russia’s internal affairs. Twitter
was later fined for failing to comply with Russia’s data storage laws. Most
Russians approved this regulation by their government.25 In late December,
2020, the Duma adopted bills that would allow the state to restrict, or even
block, US social media platforms such as Twitter, YouTube and Facebook if
they refused to remove ‘discriminatory’ labels on accounts from Russian
media outlets and by some Russian officials. Repeated failure to remove
banned content could lead to large fines levied against Internet providers and
sites. The bills had not yet been signed by Putin as the year ended.

Print & TV media

While the near monopoly Russian television once held as the primary source
of information for most Russians is shrinking, it is still the dominant news
provider. On the domestic side, Putin and his policies get by far the most
individual TV time because he is the president. On the foreign affairs side, the
role of state TV is to present and explain the government’s perspective – not
to challenge it. Dmitry Kiselev, director of RT and deputy director of Russian
state TV, left no doubt of this when he told reporters in 2015 that his goal was
to protect the interests of the state and that the era of ‘detached journalism’
was over.26
 Quality of life 323
Russia’s international media hit a few roadblocks in 2018. For example, the
RT news network went off the air in Washington as a result of its new status
as a ‘foreign agent’, but continued to broadcast in a number of other US cit-
ies. In 2019, the UK’s media regulator fined RT for breaching impartiality
rules while reporting on the Skripal case. Moscow retaliated by amending its
laws so it could fine foreign media for similar violations. Russia’s Constitutional
Court ruled in January 2019 that the law limiting external ownership of
media in Russia to 20 per cent was legal, for its purpose was to protect the
state’s information security.27
That law resulted in an exodus of large foreign publishers, as had the 2017
law allowing prosecutors to label media with funding from abroad as ‘foreign
agents’. In June 2019, an amendment to the existing law made it still more
difficult for firms from abroad to distribute publications in Russia. They must
now be registered with Roskomnadzor. Russian journalists continue to face
physical trials too. For instance, a popular television anchor was murdered in
Nizhny Novgorod in July 2018. Denis Suvorov had been investigating Russian
mercenaries in Syria.28 As usual, oppositionists blamed the Russia state, as
some did in the death of well-known journalist and critic of Putin, Sergei
Dorenko, even though all the evidence showed that he died of a heart attack
while driving his motorcycle.
In April 2019, two journalists for Kommersant wrote, quoting ‘sources’,
that Valentina Matviyenko might soon resign her position as speaker of the
Federation Council and would be replaced by Sergei Naryshkin, head of the
Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR). A month after this was denied by all con-
cerned parties, which was no guarantee that the stories were not true, the two
veteran reporters (one of whom was Ivan Safronov) were let go for ‘reporting
rumours as facts’. Their story was called a violation of editorial standards by
the editor-in-chief. Within an hour the entire political department of
Kommersant, 10 people, resigned; and the next day 203 employees signed an
open letter charging that the paper’s action was part of a ‘clampdown on
freedom of speech’.29 Although nothing more happened at Kommersant, the
story cast a pall over domestic reporting in Russia.
The shroud grew murkier when, in June 2019, a journalist known for inves-
tigating corruption at Moscow’s City Hall was arrested and charged with
drug-dealing. The Ministry of the Interior published photos showing, it
claimed, drugs found in Ivan Golunov’s flat. His lawyer said that they were
falsified and also that his client was beaten up at the police station. The min-
istry denied the accusations, while Mayor Sobyanin called for an ‘objective’
evaluation of the case. Golunov was a regular contributor to Riga-based
Meduza and author of exposés on, among others, relatives of the deputy
mayor of Moscow. Meduza is an independent Russian-language (with an
English version) news site run by a group of former Lenta.ru employees
headed by Galina Timchenko. On the face of it, the circumstances of the
Golunov case sounded like a frame-up sent as a warning to Russia’s world of
investigative journalism.
324 Quality of life
Within hours, hundreds of single-person pickets began lining up outside
the Ministry building. Up to 15 of them were briefly detained, many of them
prominent members of the independent trade union of journalists.30 The
newspaper publishing community fought back. Three mainstream newspa-
pers, Kommersant, RBC and Vedomosti, carried the same headline ‘I/WE
ARE IVAN GOLUNOV’ in large print, and even Putin ally Valentina
Matviyenko questioned the police action. After celebrities spoke out in his
defence, tens of thousands signed a petition and a massive demonstration
was scheduled. The ministry ordered Golunov’s release. The public and inde-
pendent media finally won a round.
The division between Russia’s independent journalists and the official
media was on display at a conference in Moscow on media freedom and
safety for journalists. Hosted by the OSCE and the MID, the audience
included journalists, legislators and diplomats, who delivered wide-ranging
and sometimes rancorous speeches from the podium and the floor. Lavrov
complained of Western restrictions against RT and Sputnik, some Russian
media people complained of Russian restrictions against them, others com-
plained about rival media sites as either too conformist or too oppositional,
while the OSCE representative called for more legislation to protect journal-
ists in Russia. Golunov spoke to the meeting, complaining that officialdom
never listened. One disgruntled editor labelled the Foreign Ministry spokes-
woman, Maria Zakharova, Russia’s ‘troll-in-chief’.31 No one seemed happy.
All in all, the one-day conference was both revealing and refreshing,
though perhaps not in the way many participants had hoped.32 Nothing said
at the conference prevented Putin from signing legislation in November 2019
making it possible to label individual journalists ‘foreign agents’, expanding
laws that already had NGOs and human rights organizations vulnerable to
such charges. Russian authorities claimed that the new law was needed to
counter Western propaganda by proxy; Russian critics saw it as further
restrictions to freedom of speech in Russia.33
The most dramatic, and horrendous, journalist protest came in October
2020, when the editor of an independent website (KozaPress), Irina Slavina,
set herself on fire in front of a police station in Nizhny Novgorod. She left a
message asking her readers to ‘blame the Russian Federation’. Police had
searched her apartment the day before her self-immolation, and had opened
cases against her for disrespecting authorities and spreading ‘fake news’.34

Vedomosti sold
Russia’s independent media suffered a hitch when, in March 2020, the popu-
lar daily Vedomosti was sold, along with Russia’s Harvard Business Review.
Part of the BNM, a joint stock company owned by Demyan Kudryavtsev,
Vladimir Voronov and Martin Pompadour, they were purchased by publisher
Konstantin Zyatkov and businessman Aleksei Golubovich, manager of
Arbat Capital. Vedomosti was founded in 1999 and operated independently
with support from Finnish, British and American co-owners until 2015, when
 Quality of life 325
the law limiting foreign ownership forced them to leave. Kudryavtsev pur-
chased it then and maintained its independent character. Whereas both the
new owners said they would not alter the editorial policies of the paper, for-
mer Vedomosti personnel assumed the nature of the paper would change for
the worse, and take on a more ‘patriotic’ tone.35
Management changes (new editor-in-chief and editorial director) soon
evoked criticism from former staff members and also the publisher of The
Moscow Times, Derk Sauer, who tweeted, ‘As the founder of Vedomosti I am
deeply worried by recent developments. The future of this great newspaper is
in danger.’36 His words proved prescient, for the first direct action taken by
acting editor-in-chief Andrei Shmarov was to delete items criticizing Putin,
Igor Sechin and Rosneft’s attempts to prop up Venezuela’s oil industry.37 A
scandal erupted over this act of censorship and the sale was delayed, tempo-
rarily, until it was finalized in June. On Shmarov’s confirmation, five senior
deputy editors resigned. His close association with Rosneft and open willing-
ness to censor items, including one that highlighted the Kremlin’s attempts to
ensure a “yes” in the looming All-Russia Vote, sent a chill through the Russian
independent media world.38
When the FSB detained Ivan Safronov (see Chapter 6), activists linked the
arrest to state pressure against the media. His career as a journalist was con-
troversial in that he was fired from Kommersant, and then left Vedomosti fol-
lowing the first meeting conducted by Shmarov. While his many supporters
complained on social media that the charges were related to his reporting on
arms deals and corruption in the military-industrial industry, police insisted
the arrest was a result of his apparent connection with certain NATO person-
nel and had nothing to do with his activity as a journalist. Former colleagues
at Kommersant and Vedomosti spoke publicly in Safronov’s defence, and the
papers issued statements in his support.39 Even writers for state-owned RT
and Sputnik, and pro-Kremlin Vzgliad demanded explanations and hinted
that the action might be an FSB set-up.40
One group of ex-Vedomosti editors and journalists responded to the politi-
cal pressure by launching a new platform called VTimes after Shmarov pre-
vented Vedomosti from printing criticisms of Putin. The new site promised
‘independence, honesty, responsibility, respect for the reader, careful fact-
checking. And no taboo topics’. Its founders said they left Vedomosti because
that paper had given up on ‘the principles of quality journalism’.41 Clearly,
the independent media world was prepared to fight back.

Education, science and the arts

Education
Sweeping education reforms were undertaken in Putin’s first and fourth terms
as president. In 2001 a plan to modernize Russian education included a larger
budget allocation, a renewed emphasis on vocational training, and the intro-
duction of unified state examinations (USE). The State Council was charged
326 Quality of life
with creating a national education council and assisting the Ministry of
Education in setting national education standards, among them standardized
university admission protocols. To attract more teachers, wages were doubled
over the next two years, and again in 2005, and male teachers were allowed to
avoid conscription. According to then deputy minister for welfare,
Matviyenko, federal expenditures on education that year were higher than on
defence.42
Seventeen years after the first post-Yeltsin plan to modernize Russia’s edu-
cation sector, the HSE and Kudrin’s Centre for Strategic Research put for-
ward a sweeping reform programme for every level of the academic system,
from pre-school development to technological innovation for schools, science
and research. Early development would include support services for all chil-
dren up to age 3 (special needs to age 6). Innovations would mean digital
teaching replacing textbooks, Internet access for everyone and 40 new centres
for Sirius, or summer camps for bright kids. Infrastructure improvement, new
or repaired buildings, buses, labs and recreational facilities were also on the
agenda, which highlighted more scholarships, better language training, and
state-of-the-art techniques at the university level. Costs for the project were
calculated at about ₽8 trillion ($128 bln). Although improvements were cer-
tainly made, the ambitious pedagogical scheme was stalled by the temporary
loss of energy revenues in 2019–20 and, of course, the pandemic that kept
students and staff out of the classroom for the winter and spring of 2020 and
on-line in the fall (see Chapter 9).
Following up on part of the reform project in 2018, the Labour Ministry
introduced a programme to teach retirees how to use the Internet, especially
for paying bills and maintaining documents online. Courses to train ‘digital
curators’ to handle the teaching were established at vocational centres.43
There was a hiccup in university-level education when the Federal Service
for the Supervision of Education and Science (Rosobrnadzor) revoked the
accreditation of the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences
(Shaninka) for, it claimed, shortages in lecture hall space, second-rate instruc-
tors and weak curriculum. Critics believed with reason that the university’s
association with British institutions persuaded the government agency to
censor it. The precedent set in 2016 when the European University in St.
Petersburg lost its certification, also for obscure reasons, confirmed that ‘lib-
eral’ atmospheres in some universities were an anathema to government
agencies.44 Although accreditation for the European University was restored
in August 2018, its temporary loss shook higher education circles.
Even Moscow’s HSE, an institution founded in 1992 by economists who
hoped to bring Russia into the modern age, came under state scrutiny. Many
of its students, whose invitation to Lyubov Sobol to speak on a student talk
show was suspended by university management, protested openly in support
of fellow student Yegor Zhukov (see Chapter 3). One result of this confron-
tation was an amendment to the HSE’s internal regulations to make it an
‘obligation not to make political statements’ in the name of the HSE or on
behalf of an ‘indefinite circle of students or employees’. The admonition was
 Quality of life 327
smoothed over with promises to curb corruption and provide greater student
administrative support (printing, transportation).45
More in line with current ‘ideology’ was continued government support for
patriotic education and related student events in the General (Secondary)
School system.46 These efforts intensified in 2019 when Security Council head
Nikolai Patrushev announced that delinquent youth could be sent to mili-
tary-patriotic camps and called for volunteer bloggers to help inculcate patri-
otic and spiritual values in Russia’s youth.47 In keeping with amendments to
Russia’s constitution, in May 2020 patriotism and military history were
added to secondary school curricula.48 Critics saw this as a return to Soviet-
style vospitanie (upbringing), in which schools were expected to graduate
‘good citizens’, in that case young communists.49
The education and cultural sectors all found themselves with new ministers
after the ‘January Revolution’. New Education Minister Sergei Kravtsov was
a math teacher, with long experience in the Russian Academy of Education
and the Education Ministry, and as overseer of Russia’s new USE. He had
been served as head of Rosobrnadzor’s monitoring agency for education
since 2013. Culture Minister Lyubimova had a reputable career as a televi-
sion and movie producer, and was acting director of the ministry’s film
department. They both have wide-ranging administrative experience in their
respective fields and, on the face of it, readily satisfy Putin’s desire for bureau-
cratic efficiency.
The new Science and Higher Education Minister, Valery Falkov, launched
his tenure by cancelling a law adopted in February, 2019, that required scien-
tists to seek formal approval from ‘superiors’ before meeting with foreign
colleagues and to file reports on that meeting afterwards.50 That was a good
start.

Coronavirus disruption
As it did in most other countries, the pandemic forced Russian schools and
universities to close and, on 16 March, Falkov recommended that universities
turn to distance learning, for which special training courses were arranged.
Compliance was at first erratic, but soon became universal. After some
nation-wide discussion, state exams, diploma defences and entrance exams
were not cancelled. Instead, they were conducted online according to their
original timetables.51
Russian schoolchildren went on a three-week ‘vacation’ from 23 March
and this was later extended to the end of the normal school year. The USE
was held in June with no apparent major problems and, on 27 July, Kravtsov
announced that schools would open on 1 September, and that ‘all [safety]
requirements will be taken into account in order to protect our children and
teachers as much as possible’. This decision was confirmed in mid-August for
all levels, including universities.
In September, Kravtsov published a summary of what he expected from
the school system. Stressing that children need to learn ‘skills for life, for a
328 Quality of life
future profession’ and not simply memorize formulas and rules, he empha-
sized the value of science, math, technology and language. Echoing the old
Soviet ‘good citizenship’ purpose, he wrote that the principal task of schools
was ‘to form a modern person responsible for his actions, respecting the state,
possessing basic knowledge, striving for development, able to work in a team,
honest, decent, hardworking’. He announced the creation of an ‘All-Russian
Pedagogical Council’, under his ministry, to aid in training teachers, and to
make sure that all schools have access to the Internet and other information
networks. The objective, Kravtsov pronounced, was to bring Russia into the
top ten countries in the world in terms of general education, research and
development. He offered no suggestions as to how much his ambitious pro-
jections would cost or how long it would take.52
The coronavirus wasn’t paying attention to these grand schemes. As
Moscow’s daily caseload climbed precipitously in the fall, Sobyanin added a
week to the annual fall break for schoolchildren and urged parents to keep
them at home. 53 Grade 6–11 pupils in Moscow reverted to distance learning
until mid-December. In November, Rosobrnadzor postponed December’s
final test required of Grade 11 students for admissions to the HSE to April
2021, nationwide, and the final interview in the Russian language for Grade
9 to February 2021.54 Schools and universities in Moscow and St. Petersburg
changed over to distance learning (see also Chapter 9).

Science
One of the most serious consequences of the troubled 1990s was that more
than half a million scientists left the country in search of positions with bet-
ter living conditions, better laboratories and guaranteed wages. The migra-
tion included physicists, biologists, chemists and computer programmers. In
2004, Putin told the Russian Science and High-Tech Council that the number
of scientists in Russia had decreased by about 50 per cent between 1990 and
2002, most of them gone by 1994. He was trying to remedy the situation.
Young scientists who demonstrated on the streets for pay raises and improved
working conditions in 2001–2 had achieved some success. The annual budget
for 2002–3 more than doubled allocations for science and scientific per-
sonal.55 In 2005, the president signed decrees providing substantial grants to
young scientists and their tutors; and salaries for all scientists were doubled
as of January, 2006. The brain drain slowed.
The Innovation Centre at Skolkovo was given a boost in 2018 when
Dvorkovich was elected co-chair of its development fund. Although left out
of the new government, his long-standing links with personnel in it was
expected to help raise Skolkovo’s status and fund-raising capacity.56 Set in
motion in 2010, as part of President Medvedev’s modernization programme,
Skolkovo was intended as a Russian version of the Silicon Valley, that is, a
new technology innovation town (Innogorod) funded by both the state and
private corporation investments. The government offered special tax incen-
tives to investors and both tax and residency concessions to its foreign and
 Quality of life 329
Russian scientists. The town itself enjoyed unique self-governing privileges.
Its board of directors includes prominent Americans. The Innogorod houses
some 500 Russian graduate students each year, with exchange privileges with
top US universities.57

Arts
The world of arts was relieved in September 2019 when theatre director Kirill
Serebrennikov was freed after two years in custody. While the case against
him for embezzling large amounts of money in government funds intended
for theatre projects remained in the hands of prosecutors, the move signalled
an impending end to the long and messy affair. Travel restrictions imposed as
part of his bail condition in April were lifted as well, as were similar condi-
tions set for two of his former colleagues in the Gogol Centre.58
Widespread public support for Serebrennikov from within the arts and
theatre scene may have been a factor in gaining his release. In September
2019, similar backing erupted after actor Pavel Ustinov was sentenced to
three and a half years in prison for, allegedly, injuring a policeman during
one of the many street rallies in Moscow in August. Ustinov denied any such
action, and a number of Russian celebrities and journalists came to his
defence. Single pickets gathered in front of the presidential administration
building in Moscow and videos in support of him flooded Russian social
media in much the same way it did in defence of Ivan Golunov earlier.59 They
both were freed.
Serebrennikov and three other officials with the Seventh Studio were back
in court in the spring of 2020, and were found guilty of embezzling state
funds allocated for a project in 2011–14. Presumably, this action was part of
the post-All-Russia Vote clampdown. The defendants called the charges ‘far-
fetched and absurd’. This time public outcry was muted because of the pan-
demic, though artistic celebrities in Russia and from abroad continued to
support the defendants.60 Despite the prosecution’s demand that they spend
years in prison, they were given suspended sentences and ordered to pay fines.
Another victory for protesters, of sorts.

Human & civil rights

Putin participated in two events in December 2018 linked closely to human
and civil rights in the country. The first was the unveiling of a statue honour-
ing Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, whom he praised for exposing the totalitarian
nature of the USSR. He added a political message of his own by describing
the famous writer as a ‘great patriot’ who abhorred ‘any manifestations of
Russophobia’.61
Meeting with the Council for the Development of Civil and Human Rights
on that same day, he called for a moment of silence to commemorate
Lyudmila Alekseeva, well-known defender of human rights who had recently
died, aged 91, calling her ‘courageous’ for ‘defending justice’. Putin asked the
330 Quality of life
Council to promote the development of civil society in Russia – and also to
defend the rights of Russian citizens wherever they happen to be. He attended
her funeral and spoke glowingly of her again. 62
Putin’s statements did not slow human and civil rights abuses against indi-
viduals connected to the Moscow electoral crisis of July–August 2019. Nor
did they inhibit armed FSB officers from raiding the offices of human rights
organizations, such as Justice Initiative and Astreya, that defend Russian citi-
zens at the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). They confiscated
telephones and photographed passports; no reasons for the raids were given.63
The Russian presidential Human Rights Council (HRC) objected to some of
these measures, which may explain the dismissal of long-time head of the
council, Mikhail Fedotov, purportedly because he had reached the age of
70.64 UR member Valerii Fadeev replaced him. Other HRC members who
were openly critical of the authorities during the Moscow electoral crisis
were replaced as well. These included the head of Agora, a human rights
group, an electoral law specialist and an NGO environmental activist. Agora
was the agency that defended Ivan Golunov. 65
Their places were taken by individuals who fit more comfortably into the
power vertikal and, as we saw in Chapter 3, civil rights abuses and exploita-
tion of the law by law enforcement continued unabated.

LGBT woes
The Russian human rights centre, Memorial, kept human rights issues in the
forefront by appealing to the UN Human Rights Council in July 2019 that it
‘draw attention to Russia’s permanent refusal to comply with its international
obligations’. Memorial asserted that new laws restricted freedoms of speech
and assembly, and permitted intolerance of LGBT people.66 It estimated that
there were at least 297 political prisoners in the country and that there had
been ‘no less than 377 hate crimes against LGBT’ persons over the previous
five years. Given that the number of demonstrations demanding that political
prisoners be released, opposing the suppression of civil rights in Crimea
(Tatars), and alleging human and civil rights abuses by the authorities were
rising, the appeal was timely, if not noticeably effective.67
Some of the problems faced by the LGBT community in Chechnya in
2019–20 have been noted already. Suffice to add here that when Moscow’s
team of investigators arrived in Grozny in 2017 to verify stories of rabid
discrimination that had gone international, officials there insisted that the
tales were false and proclaimed their own tolerance, even to vowing that
they would allow a gay parade. The protestations rang pretty hollow, and
the investigations intensified. Observers who assumed that the homopho-
bic attitudes in the North Caucasus could be blamed entirely on Islam
were set back by Orthodox Patriarch Kirill’s regularly repeated anti-gay
pronouncements.68
The plight of LGBT activists in Russia was by no means confined to the
Caucasus. In July 2019, for example, a lesbian activist was murdered near her
 Quality of life 331
home in St. Petersburg. Yelena Grigorieva had been featured on a website
that encouraged hunting down and killing gays as a game. Although state
authorities blocked ‘PILA. Gomofobnaia igra’ (Saw. Homophobia Game),
the damage had been done. This act of violence came at a time when Russian
public acceptance of LGBT rights had reached its highest level in 14 years, at
47 per cent acceptance.69 Later that summer a Russian journalist and a dozen
activists were detained in St. Petersburg for picketing against law enforce-
ment’s tendency to keep silent about crimes against the gay community.
An LGBT activist named Anna Dvornichenko fled Russia in October 2019
and was granted asylum in the Netherlands. She told reporters that authori-
ties in Rostov-on-Don had ignored threats to her life and even threatened to
prosecute her for ‘gay propaganda’.70 Gay pride events had been banned in
Russia since the Duma adopted a law in 2013 against distributing ‘gay propa-
ganda’ to children, and the Orthodox Church continued to rage against gays
and lesbians. In fact, it was a proposal from the Patriarch that caused the
notion that marriage is between man and woman to be enshrined in January’s
amended Constitution. A draft bill amending the Family Code so as to ban
gay marriages came to the Duma as quickly as mid-July 2020.71
According to the SOVA Centre the number of hate crimes against the
LGBT community rose in 2019, while hate crimes generally and acts of vio-
lence against ethnic and religious minorities declined.72
In June 2020, LGBT activists in Moscow staged one-person pickets against
charges laid against one of their colleagues in Komsomolsk-on-Amur who
was facing a six-year sentence for posting artwork deemed pornographic by
the authorities. Over 40 protesters were picked up in Moscow and St.
Petersburg. Some solo-picketers held placards opposing the anti-gay amend-
ment, others posted non-sexualized photos of themselves in little or no cloth-
ing, and artwork copying the work for which Yulia Tsvetkova was arrested.
The movement in her support was also a protest against conservative views
protected by the newly amended Russian Constitution.73
Those conservative sentiments appeared to give right-wing groups leave to
harass LGBT individuals on the streets. In Yekaterinburg, for instance, men
in Cossack uniforms bullied people they thought were gay during September
2020’s Pride Week in Yekaterinburg, while anti-gay groups organized a ‘tra-
ditional values’ week with a family parade and an Orthodox Christian fair.74

Women on the march and ‘family values’

A particularly sensitive area of Russia law was strained in mid-2019 when
women’s groups took to the streets in a surge of long-festering anger over a
bill adopted in 2017 decriminalizing some forms of domestic violence. Public
resentments against the already very controversial bill, including a petition
signed by over a quarter of a million people, single pickets and an unauthor-
ized ‘sisters’ march’, were triggered by charges laid against three teen-aged
sisters who killed their abusive father. The Khachaturyan sisters, Krestina,
Angelina and Maria, faced up to 20 years in prison.
332 Quality of life
The case opened up a wide-ranging discussion of the worst ramifications
of the earlier law that, in addition to the UR-dominated Duma, was sup-
ported by patriarchal organizations, the Orthodox Church, and some right-
wing ‘male power’ movements. An example of the last-named is ‘Male State’,
a group that conducted anti-Khachaturyan pickets in September 2018. They
were countered by militant women’s associations. At one demonstration in
August 2019, about 1,000 people gathered on Lenin Square in St. Petersburg
to show support for the sisters, who were still on trial. Organized by ‘For
Justice for Women Forced to Defend, and for the Law on Domestic Violence’,
participants waved signs carrying phrases like ‘Patriarchy kills’ (Patriarkh
ubivaet).75 Activists were out picketing on the sisters’ behalf again in
December, in Moscow, after the Investigative Committee finished its work
with no change in the original charges. Protesters tied ribbons on the
Patriarchal Bridge (Patriarshiy Most) in Moscow. The demonstrators also
objected to the draft Law on the Prevention of Domestic Violence, published
on 30 November, which ‘preserved the family’ but did little to protect victims
of domestic violence.76
Endemic domestic abuse in Russia was spotlighted earlier when the ECHR
ruled in favour of one Russian woman, Valeriia Volodina, and began hearing
more than a dozen pending cases from Russia.77 This situation was another
where the attitudes of young Russians differed greatly from an older, more
conservative generation that tends to see such cases as examples of Western
values eroding traditional ‘Russian’ family values. A Levada Centre survey
conducted in September showed that nearly one-third (31%) of Russians had
experienced domestic violence either first hand or indirectly and over 40 per
cent supported the Khachaturyan sisters, showed why the issue had become
a national cause.78 Backed by women’s and human rights groups, in December
2019 UR Deputy Oksana Pushkina and others introduced a draft bill to
overthrow the 2017 law and recriminalize first-time domestic abuse. It stalled
in the Federation Council.79
The 2017 bill had powerful advocates. As many as 181 Russian Orthodox
Church and parents’ organization sent an open letter to Putin demanding
that the 2017 law not be overturned, and in November 2019 the Minister of
Justice insisted to the ECHR that the ‘magnitude of the problem’ [domestic
violence] in Russia was ‘quite exaggerated’.80 For her trouble, Pushkina, a
former TV personality and vice-chair of the Duma’s Committee on Family,
Women and Children, received death threats.81
Some of the protests appeared to have succeeded. Russian prosecutors
dropped the charges against the Khachaturyans in January 2020. The PGO
re-opened the case in July 2020.82 It may have been no coincidence that this
decision came just two weeks after the All-Russia Vote confirmed Putin’s pro-
posed changes to the Constitution that favoured a socially conservative
approach to the law.
The organization Male State (Muzhskoe gosudarstvo) is merely one of the
misogynistic groups Russian women must confront. Formed in 2016, when
foreigners flocked into Russia to see World Cup events, it quickly grew to
 Quality of life 333
include some 150,000 members and 25 local branches by objecting to Russian
women forming liaisons with foreigners. Behaving as morality vigilantes, the
movement purports to preserve ‘Russia traditional morals, traditional values
and moral principles’. They advocate a national patriarchy and oppose gen-
der equality. In short, their goal is to ensure male domination of all sectors
of Russian life. Russia’s Investigative Committee arrested one of Male State’s
founders in 2018 and charged him with excessive misogyny in texts and
images he posted on Vkontakte.83
While Male State represents the extreme, and the Constitution guarantees
equal rights to men and women, the labour market is often a difficult one for
women. There are still jobs that are closed to females, and women are still the
main caretakers of the home and children, even when they are employed full
time elsewhere.
Many old Soviet laws that kept women out of hundreds of types of jobs,
such as truck or train drivers, crews of ships, automobile mechanics and serv-
ing in certain sectors of the armed forces remain in force, in practice if not
always in law. This situation began to change after women won several impor-
tant cases in which they sued organizations for not allowing them even to
apply for jobs, in one case as a ship captain. The Ministry of Labour and
Social Protection in 2019 reduced the discriminatory rules by 80 per cent as
of 1 January 2021.84
In preparation for this law to come into effect, Russian Railways started to
train women as engine drivers, and the Moscow Metro hired its first female
drivers in January 2021. The Anti-Discrimination Centre Memorial (ADC)
took up the women’s cause by starting an ‘All Jobs for All Women’ campaign
(#alljobs4allwomen), hoping to put an end to the entire list of proscribed
employment for women.85
A number of family-related legislative measures, such as cash payments for
poor families with multiple children or children with disabilities, and lower
taxes as families grew in numbers, were expected to ease family tensions. In
practice, they tended to keep women in the home, for their purpose was to
make procreation less daunting. Special grants for larger houses, mortgage
and transportation relief all were touted to persuade Russians to have larger
families. ‘We have done and will continue to do everything to strengthen fam-
ily values’, Putin said in his 2019 address to the Federal Assembly.86 In Russia,
as everywhere else, ‘family values’ can be interpreted in different ways.
Indeed, in July 2020 the Federation Council began discussing a large pack-
age of draft bills to amend the Family Code in order to, it claimed, ‘strengthen
the institution of the family’, taking into account the amended Russian
Constitution. As we have seen, the bills included a ban on same-sex couples
and sex-changing people from marrying and adopting children. There were
more new rules involving adoptions: children cannot be returned to orphan-
ages three years after adoption; a child can be selected [for adoption] only
after a court decision (a list of 11 grounds is established for recognizing the
child as being left without parental care); relatives have priority rights in
adoption; brothers and sisters must be adopted jointly; and the views of
334 Quality of life
children over 10 years of age must be considered when under temporary
guardianship.
Whereas most Russian specialists in the field of family law, and adoption
agencies, approved these criteria, LGBT activists objecting to its discrimina-
tion against same-sex couples and transgender people were lining up with
single pickets even before the bill was debated. Several picketers were
detained.87
We have seen that the coronavirus pandemic touched all facets of Russian
life, and the world of domestic violence was no exception. Lost jobs and self-
isolation brought an increase in domestic violence, made worse by the shut-
down of Moscow’s few women’s shelters and most medical abortion services.88
The Orthodox Church called for a ban on abortion and, although to date no
such ban has been enacted, in October 2020 Mishustin called on regional and
municipal governments to ‘re-assess’ abortion prevention strategies. He
promised increased funding for legal, psychological and medical insurance
programmes to persuade women not to abort. From the state’s perspective,
the issue was a demographic, rather than a religious, one. In their turn,
Pushkina and other Duma deputies asked Golikova to speed up the passage
of measures to protect victims of domestic abuse, to no avail.89
In April 2020, the Duma acted on at least one piece of legislation impor-
tant to families by allocating sums from government reserves specifically to
make up for income lost by parents with three or more children due to the
pandemic, and also to cover a certain percentage of payments on housing
loans. The law allocated child benefits automatically until 1 October 2020
and, because of the uptick in coronavirus cases in that month, payments were
extended at that time to the end of March 2021. 90

The dilemma of crime and corruption

The USSR and its successor, the Russian Federation, are described regularly
as ‘mafia’ states, or kleptocracies, or both, and ex-pats such as Alena Ledeneva
have written at length on the way mafia-type practices have dominated the
way in which Russian politics and business work.91 Fabian Burkhardt calls
these labels too simplistic and Richard Sakwa sees them as a means for justi-
fying the ‘personal demonization of Putin’.92
Author Karen Dawisha explained the resilience of corruption in Russia as
a consequence of nefarious practices ignored by the CPSU in the late 1980s
when its leading members began to salt away state assets so as to guarantee
their own financial futures. The subsequent takeover of the state’s wealth and
power by oligarchs and siloviki established a kleptocracy, she wrote, that nei-
ther Medvedev nor Putin could challenge effectively. Sakwa took exception
to her doomsday portrayal, but did not deny the overarching presence of
corruption.93 Whatever the case, such labels as ‘mafia’ and ‘kleptocracy’ have
stuck.
During the Soviet era, members of the Communist Party made up the
single class of great privilege and, although there was not a lot of hard wealth
 Quality of life 335
to spread among rank-and-file officials, they controlled all access to personal
favours. Myriad perquisites, positions, goods and services were traded in
kind, and the system of blat, or an exchange of favours, was daily practice.
Offering and accepting bribes (vziatki) in return for concessions in the educa-
tion, legal and business spheres was a commonly accepted way of getting
things done. Bribe taking therefore came naturally to the post-Soviet Russian
world. So, too, did the notion of a krysha (roof), a human scaffolding that
encompasses legal and illegal enterprises and individuals for mutual profit,
clans or ‘families’ unified for material gain, power and self-protection.
The breakdown of the legal system in the 1990s, forced privatization and
continued use of ‘telephone justice’, which saw judges picking up the phone
and asking a superior for a decision based on politics or blat instead of the
law, facilitated the growth of money laundering, large-scale fraud and embez-
zlement. The fact that underpaid law-enforcement officers were among the
officials most susceptible to bribes meant that crime usually paid.
For small business, the protection racket was a growth industry. In big
business, raiding (raiderstvo) became the bane of successful operations. The
term describes situations where corrupt officials imposed large and dispro-
portionate tax requirements on companies, forcing them into bankruptcy.
They were then bought up by complicit competitors.94 Russia refused to ratify
Article 20 of the UN’s Convention against Corruption, which it signed in
2006, because the Article referred to the ‘illicit acquisition of personal
wealth’. In Russia, those ‘acquisitions’ were, of course, in the hands of oli-
garchs and siloviki who dominated positions of power and influence and sat
on the boards of government-favoured companies.
Small-scale criminal operations, organized crime and corruption are diffi-
cult categories of anti-social activity to separate, and perhaps they should not
be. It is attempted here for the purpose of simplifying the picture. It is worth
bearing in mind that research conducted by the Levada Centre’s head, Aleksei
Levinson, in 2019 showed that while the general public abhorred corruption
it also believed it to be a natural phenomenon about which they could do
little. The public also believed that headline arrests of senior officials may not
be a matter of law and order in action; rather, they might be products of
personal vendettas and internal struggles for power.95
Putin was well aware of the damage organized crime and corrupt law
enforcement caused to Russia’s transition to modernization. In addition to
lost billions in taxes and ruined businesses, the image of Russia as corrupt
slowed foreign investment. As early as March 2001, he handed the Security
Council a specific mandate to fight corruption, which at that time was blamed
on the liberal reformers of the 1990s and the oligarchs who had benefitted
most from their poorly thought-out ‘reforms’. Putin signed an anti-corrup-
tion law in 2003, and the Duma created a Commission to Combat Corruption
to monitor the law’s results. Anti-corruption campaigns became almost
annual events.
Public opinion surveys conducted in 2006 that still placed police at the top
of bribe takers forced Putin to admit that his wide-ranging anti-corruption
336 Quality of life
drives were not working very well.96 There were too many foxes guarding the
hen house. In April 2009, a Levada Centre survey revealed that 58 per cent of
respondents thought it impossible to fight corruption in Russia.97
Medvedev discovered this during his one-term presidency, when curbing
corruption was given priority. Shortly before achieving office he told an audi-
ence at an All-Russia Civics Forum that ‘corruption has an enormous scope
today. The fight against it must become a national programme … Russia is a
country of legal nihilism. No other European country has a similar level of
disrespect for the law.’98 He made it clear that corruption was the fault of
Russians themselves, a product of Russian history and not something foisted
on them by outsiders. For that time, this was an extraordinary admission.
Calling bad and inefficient policing in Russia a ‘chronic disease’, Medvedev
signed a law in 2010 that reduced law enforcement staff by half and ordered
training programmes to raise the qualifications of police personnel. All offi-
cers were dismissed and then rehired after they completed a re-certification
course; senior officials (Generals) were fired, stiffer penalties were ordered for
police guilty of crimes, and Russian businesses were barred from forming
their own security forces.99 The government revised national strategies for
fighting corruption and established anti-corruption committees everywhere,
while media headlines raved about thousands of major and minor arrests,
fines and demotions. These tended to be the tip of the iceberg.100
On the rare occasions that the most senior officials were singled out, politi-
cal infighting was often the driving force behind accusations, though ‘abuse
of office’, fraud, embezzlement and bribe taking were easily demonstrable. A
ministerial dismissal was usually followed by sweeps of entire sectors for cor-
rupt officials. This was the case after Minister of Defence Anatoly Serdyukov
was fired in December 2012, and when Economic Development Minister
Aleksei Ulyukaev was taken into custody in 2016. Upper-level regional offi-
cials, such as governors and mayors, were especially vulnerable. They were
fired by the dozens over the years. So, too, were customs officials, including
the head of the Federal Customs Service in 2016. Among mayors, the big
catch in 2010 was Yuri Luzhkov, Sobyanin’s long-time predecessor in Moscow.
Like Serdyukov, Luzhkov held lesser positions in Russia after he was removed
from high office and he was not formally charged. His wife, Yelena Baturina,
fled to London. Notorious as Russia’s richest women who amassed a fortune
in real estate and development deals while her husband was in office, she
represented the epitome of the oligarchic class that most Russians felt still
ran the country’s economy.
In 2020, the Petersburg Politics Foundation published the results of studies
that showed that security forces had increased their scrutiny of governors
and mayors ten-fold since 2010. More than 80 per cent of the high officials
under investigation were accused of at least one crime against state authority
while in office (abuse of authority, misuse of budget, bribery, and so on). It
may well be that charges laid against many of the mayors and governors were
politically motivated, but the possibility of them being guilty is equally
probable.101
 Quality of life 337
The criminal world
Whatever the role of organized crime in the incidents of bribery and embez-
zlement, it is important to be aware of what Mark Galeotti calls ‘Russia’s
Super Mafia’, that is, the Vory. In a book on the subject, he pointed out that
organised crime had become ‘regularised, corporately minded and integrated
with elements of the state’. In addition to regular criminal activities, if any of
it can be said to be regular, the Vory compromise assassins, smugglers of EU
goods for businesses, Chechen gangs, political links and sources of cheap
labour. Drug trafficking and large-scale fraud in construction projects are
huge operations. The Vory is everywhere.102
So are the police. MVD Minister Vladimir Kolokoltsev told an interviewer
for Argumenty i fakty in November 2018 that the number of murders in
Russia had dropped by 27 per cent over the previous five years, and that the
crime rate was also down substantially. Kolokoltsev also noted that 80 police
officers were arrested in 2017 for drug possession or dealing. The police force
itself numbered 895,000 people, he said, a decrease of nearly a half million
since 2013. Better technology and training has made up for the big difference
in personnel, he added.103
At least one change for the better had come in 2015 when the Duma
adopted procedures for depriving former and even current members of
their parliamentary immunity. In 2018, for instance, police apprehended
billionaires Ziyavudin and Magomed Magomedov, the latter a former sena-
tor, who were suspected of embezzling large sums of money from state
budget funds and organizing a criminal operation. A more startling case
occurred when Rauf Arashukov, a sitting senator representing Karachay-
Cherkessia, was arrested for an old murder and participation in a ‘criminal
community’. He was detained within the chamber, which voted away his
immunity.104
In the broader realm of crime and punishment, the Justice Ministry
approved a new programme for setting monetary rewards for informants who
helped solve a crime. These ‘snitching’ incentives worried oppositionists who
saw them as a return to one of the more unsavoury practices of the Soviet
era, when neighbours and colleagues informed on each other for cash and
favours.105
Normally privileged security forces are no longer immune from arrest
either. The Investigative Committee charged seven FSB officers in July 2019
for robbing a businessman as he deposited a large sum of money in a
bank.106 The FSB image was tarnished further later in the year, when two
former Alpha unit officers were accused of forming a criminal group and
carrying out contract killings after leaving the service.107 To all intents and
purposes, the organized crime dimension of post-Soviet Russia seems to
have grown more professional, more selective in its targets and perhaps
more lethal in its willingness to eliminate competition or critics. Among
other things, this development made Navalny and other anti-corruption
activists prime targets.
338 Quality of life
Eternal corruption
Corruption in the form of bribe-taking and embezzlement by officialdom and
big business have been Putin’s bête noire throughout his decades in office. This
was the area where the general population felt he had let them down the most.
Ranked 135th of 180 countries on Transparency International’s Corruption
Perceptions Index for 2017, it appeared that repeated and aggressive attempts
to stifle corruption in Russia, especially within officialdom, had failed.108
Yet various official anti-corruption bodies remained constantly busy. To
quote the Russian Prosecutor General Yuri Chaika:

… in the first nine months of 2018, according to the results of prosecutor’s

checks, 188 thousand violations of anti-corruption legislation were
revealed. To eliminate them, prosecutors submitted more than 50 thou-
sand representations, … At the request of prosecutors, 47.8 thousand offi-
cials were punished in a disciplinary manner. According to the materials of
prosecutor’s inspections, 2.5 thousand criminal cases on corruption were
initiated.109

Three months later, the PGO announced that 1,303 officials were dismissed
in 2018 for hiding information about their assets and incomes, conflicts of
interest or violating anti-corruption regulations. This number represented
about 100 more dismissals than in the previous year.110
These extraordinary totals were made believable by blaring headlines
drawing attention to cases in which officials, business people, professionals
and even elected representatives were convicted of fraud, embezzlement,
bribery and tax evasion. Broadened criteria for the publication of names of
persons (public shaming) dismissed for various corruption-related offences,
also forbade them from holding office for five years even if they were later
cleared of the alleged offence.111 From time to time, Russian TV carried vid-
eos of stacks of money and jewellery discovered in apartments of corrupt
senior officials. One could say that it was the scale of the task itself, not
Putin’s indifference, that made curbing corruption so difficult. In fact, the
PGO reported in December that bribery cases increased in 2018 by 10 per
cent over the previous year, and that over 7,000 individuals were charged with
corruption crimes that year.112
In that same year, law enforcement caught several officials from the MVD
bribing auditors to end an investigation of the Department of Economic
Security, and arrested the former head of the North-West Directorate of
Rostekhnadzor for misappropriation. A regional court handed a judge from
the Rostov district a seven-year sentence for fraud and a Moscow court gave
ex-investigator Roman Boldyrev and lawyer Kirill Kulyavtsev ten years each
in penal colonies for corruption. Two vice-mayors of Sochi and three lawyers
were charged in 2018 with taking large bribes for construction projects. Two
years later, the Investigative Committee disclosed that the total of bribes
taken in Sochi amounted to 120 million rubles.113 The list goes on.
 Quality of life 339
As more and more such cases came before the public, the investigators
themselves came under attack, presumably by organized crime or individuals
tied to specific cases. For example, an investigator with the IC was shot and
killed outside her flat in October. Yevgenia Shishkina had already been
threatened several times and her car was set afire earlier in the year.114
A bombshell press release from the Audit Chamber in May revealed that
spending violations in the defence and space industries had doubled over the
previous year, costing some ₽1.3 trillion ($20 billion) in misspent funds.
Police arrested senior state contractors for the Vostochny Cosmodrome con-
struction site for embezzlement and prosecutors claimed to have launched
criminal cases against some 1,000 officials and contractors. The scandals
were on-going. As recently as October 2020, the FSB took the director of
the Vostochny spaceport, Roman Bobkov, into custody on charges of
fraud.115 Given the importance of the Cosmodrome, built in the Amur
region to replace the Baikonur site in Kazakhstan, these were depressing
findings for Putin.
In the spring of 2019 a government resolution approved a system for map-
ping out the levels of corruption in the various components of the Federation.
It provided a methodology for conducting opinion polls in the regions, divid-
ing questions into ‘everyday’ and ‘business’ categories, setting aside questions
on politics, religion and social activity. Military and state personnel were
excluded from participation in these surveys, whose focus was on the burden
of bribes in the lives and businesses of Russians.116 On nearly the last day of
the year, the government awarded the ruble equivalent of $690,000 to a pri-
vate company for the purpose of organizing discussions around the country
on anti-corruption and the development of civil society – round tables, lec-
tures, seminars, forums and conferences.117 This work, of course, was inter-
rupted by the pandemic.
Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK) was back in the headlines
as well. After publishing a video in August 2018 that charged the National
Guard’s food contractors with stealing some $29 million, he was embroiled in
a series of lawsuits, winning one when head of the guard, Zolotov, lost a
defamation suit against him, and losing another in 2019.118 The state dug
further into Navalny’s affairs in late October, 2019, when the Moscow
Arbitration Court ordered him, Sobol and the FBK to pay over $450,000
each for libel against the Moscow Schoolchild catering company. His bank
accounts had already been frozen because of a criminal investigation for
alleged money laundering.119 As we saw in Chapter 3, his flat and further
assets were seized in 2020 purportedly as a result of the catering case, yet
maybe in reaction to his accusations against Putin in the attempted assassina-
tion affair.
In connection with money laundering, a publication by the Organized
Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) in March 2019 linked
Russia’s Troika Dialog investment bank to a number of Western banks,
mostly in Scandinavia and the Baltics, which, it claimed, laundered billions
of Russian dollars.120 The report ranked Russia fourth behind China, Mexico
340 Quality of life
and Malaysia in illegal outflows from false invoicing. While the European
banking system was shaken, the reaction among Russia officialdom was
muted (‘we’ll look into it’). Moscow was concerned that the OCCRP is
funded by the US Department of State, USAID and other Western NGOs.121
In spite of myriad cases in which bribe takers were arrested or demoted in
2018, Russia was dropped a few more spots by Transparency International in
2019, which ranked it 138th of 180 countries. The organization blamed weak
political and civil rights, cronyism and the absence of true checks and bal-
ances for Russia’s continuing problems with corruption.122 According to sur-
veys conducted by the Levada Centre in April 2019, Russians appreciated the
arrests of senior officials, but knew little about the cases even though they
were widely broadcast; they also did not believe (78%) that upper echelon
officials and politicians declared their incomes and assets honestly, and con-
tinued to feel that corruption was endemic and impossible to curtail.123

Sectoral corruption
With its enormous wealth-generating potential, the energy sector is a natural
breeding place for corruption. Here is where the most senior owners and
directors appear untouchable, while lesser position holders and smaller pri-
vate enterprises bear the brunt of state publicized anti-corruption campaigns.
Still, in March 2019, the former head of Rosgeology, Ruslan Gorring, was
charged with massive fraud related to illegal allocations of land.124 Soon
thereafter, police arrested Dmitry Mazurov, CEO of Russia’s largest indepen-
dent oil refiner, New Stream, for multi-million-dollar fraud. The company
was forced into bankruptcy and its assets in the UK seized. Although the
company re-appeared within a few months partnered with Sberbank and
SOCAR, Azerbaijan’s state-owned energy company, the case – and other
similar ones – threw Russia’s refinery industry into disarray, especially when
it came to finding non-state investors.125
Of all the sectors where corruption was rife, the military remained the top
contender. In March 2019, Chief Military Prosecutor Valery Petrov told the
annual board meeting of his office that corruption crimes in the military had
increased fourfold since 2017. Nearly 3,000 military officials were charged
with offences in 2018 alone.126
The transport sector was not far behind as a wellspring for corruption. An
investigation opened in August into a possible embezzlement scheme that
may have drawn up to ₽200 billion from the largest Russian Railways con-
tractors, the 1520 Group. A central figure in the bribe-taking case, former
MVD anti-corruption Colonel Dmitry Zakharchenko, was sentenced to 13
years in June. Police arrested several of his relatives and colleagues as well,
and the later investigation involved searches for documents in several of the
1520 Group offices.127
Former high officials were now at risk too. In 2019 alone, an ex-minister of
finance for the Moscow region was extradited from France and charged with
taking bribes. Charges of money laundering were laid against a former head
 Quality of life 341
of the Moscow region, and the minister of open government affairs under
Medvedev and the former presidential envoy to the Far East were both
charged with embezzlement and fraud. Even officials still near the top of
their sector were no longer immune. In August, Medvedev forced the deputy
head of the Russian Pension Fund, Aleksei Ivanov, to resign because he was
under investigation for massive bribery violations. He and a senior employee
of Technosery were arrested in July. Ivanov had been an adviser to the
Pension Fund, Rosleskhoz and other businesses.128
The coronavirus pandemic did not slow the battle against dishonest offi-
cialdom. Indeed, arrests made during the height of the pandemic in Russia
demonstrate the extent and permanence of the dilemma of corruption.
For example, in April 2020, the deputy head of the MVD’s Investigative
Department and two other senior investigators were charged with abuse of
office. Details were sparse, but bribery was clearly part of the investigation.129
Court cases were underway at the end of the month against a former presi-
dent of Globex Bank for embezzling €12 million, a Moscow court sentenced
the first deputy of CB Design Bureau to three years for embezzlement, and
another court was still hearing an appeal from Pavel Grudinin, director of
the Lenin state farm and CPRU presidential candidate, who was accused of
stealing ₽1 billion from shareholders as the year ended. A court in Moscow
handed the former deputy president of Vneshprombank, Yekaterina
Glushakova, a six-year sentence in a penal colony for embezzlement.130 Police
detained the deputy head of the Ministry of Education and Science, Marina
Lukashevich, and an official from Rosstrudnichestvo, Mikhail Popov, in July
2020, charging them both with fraud of over ₽40 million.131 The parade of
miscreants seemed never to slow.
***
As the list of the caught grew, there was little evidence to show that the
dilemma of corruption was resolved. This too was a sign of failure that could
determine the nature of Putin’s legacy.
Corruption handicapped the development of an actively free media
because wealthy oligarchs were just as anxious to manage the message as the
state was. They bought newspaper and television facilities, and columnists, to
further their political and economic interests and supported the government’s
efforts to restrict messaging on the Internet and various forms of social
media. In that latter circumstance, the Russian people won their point and
access to the Internet remained readily available. Key parts of the print media
also endure as independent, if not widely read, while social media and the
blogging world thrive.
Human and civil rights advocates run afoul of authorities regularly, but
remain active and vocal. Fighters for women’s rights in Russia are likely to
become even more prominent in 2021 and will take to the streets (like their
counterparts in Belarus) more frequently and with more specific targets.
Driven in part by the increase of domestic abuse during the pandemic,
they and LGBT activists will have to confront both the newly amended
342 Quality of life
Constitution and the Orthodox Church. Changes wrought in 2020 have
made the obstacles they face more formidable.
The field of education has been victimized by the ‘January Revolution’ in
that secondary school curricula now must reflect patriotic themes and univer-
sities are monitored for too liberal programmes. Re-introducing ideology to
the classroom, no matter how subtly, will make the post-2020 learning experi-
ence quite different from that of the 1990s and even the intervening years,
and draw Russia still further away from the West, with which interpretations
of historical events have again become a point of departure.

Notes
1 A.M. Almakaeva, O.V. Volchenko, ‘Dinamik sotsial’nogo kapitala v Rossii’,
Monitoring obshchestvennogo mneniia: Ekonomicheskie i sotsial’nye peremeny, No.
4 (2018), pp. 273–92; ‘Acceptance of Corruption Has Grown in Russia Under
Putin, Report’, The Moscow Times, 16 October 2018.
2 ‘Sixteen Journalists killed in Russia in 2000’, ITAR-TASS, 13 January 2001, in
REDA 2000, Vol. 1 (2001), pp. 245–6.
3 ‘V Moskve proshel miting v zashzhitu NTV: vystupali “Menty” i “Neschastnyi slu-
chai”’, Lenta.ru, 31 March 2001. The names refer to rock groups that played at the
rally. ‘V nachalo bylo veskoe slovo Prezidenta’, Rossiiskaia gazeta, 16 January 2001.
4 For background, Julia Ioffe, ‘What is Russia Today? The Kremlin’s propaganda
outlet has an identity crisis’, Columbia Journalism Review, September/October
2010.
5 ‘Putin Insists That State Will Not Control Mass Media’, ITAR-TASS, 5 May
2005, in REDA, 2005, Vol. 1, op. cit., pp. 334–5.
6 Russian Federation President Information Office, ‘Vladimir Putin Answers
Questions on the Murder of Anna Politkovskaya’, 10 October 2006, part of an
interview with Suddeutsche Zeitung, just prior to a state visit to Germany.
7 ‘Preferred News Sources of the Russian Population’, Russian Analytical Digest,
No. 258, 9 November 2020. Data provided by the Levada Centre.
8 Denis Volkov, Stepan Goncharov, ‘Rossiiskii media-landshaft 2019’, Levada-
tsentr, 1 August 2019, https://www.levada.ru/2019/08/01/21088/; ‘Preferred News
Sources …’, op. cit.
9 ‘Spravedlivost’ i nespravedlivost’, FOM, 6 October 2020, https://fom.ru/
TSennosti/14469; Paul Goble, ‘On Social Justice, Russia Now Split into Two
Nations, “TV Russians” and “Internet Russians”, Shelin Says’, Window on Eurasia,
13 October 2020.
10 ‘Otravlenie Alekseia Naval’nogo’, Levada-tsentr, 24 December 2020, www.levada.
ru/2020/12/24/chto-rossiyane-dumayut-ob-otravlenii-alekseya-navalnogo/.
11 ‘Dinamika pol’zovaniia inyernetom’, Levada-tsentr, 5 December 2019, www.
levada.ru/2019/12/05/dinamika-polzovaniya-internetom/12/05/2019; ‘Over 60%
of Russians use Internet every day, research shows’, TASS, 6 December 2018;
‘Russia: number of internet users 2013–1019’, Statista, 18 September 2019,
annual updates; for general background, see Peter Rollberg, Marlen Laruelle, eds.
Mass Media in the Post-Soviet World: Market Forces, State Actors, and Political
Manipulation in the Informational Environment after Communism. Stuttgart:
Ibidem-Verlag, 2018. Distributed by Columbia UP.
12 ‘Google prokommentiroval soobshcheniia o blokirovke ego ir-adresov’,
Vedomosti, 22 April 2018; ‘Google Services Blocked in Russia Following Telegram
Ban’, The Moscow Times, 23 April 2018; Seraphim Hanisch, ‘Russian move to
block Telegram creates wider access problems for Russian Internet users’, The
Duran, 26 April 2018.
 Quality of life 343
13 Neil MacFarquhar, ‘To Speak Freely, Russians Turn to YouTube’, New York
Times International Weekly, 22–23 June 2019.
14 ‘International Rights Groups Implore Russia to “Unblock” Telegram’, The
Moscow Times, 1 May 2018; ‘Russian Lawmakers Pass Law Censoring Internet
Defamation’, The Moscow Times, 12 April 2018.
15 Human Rights Watch, ‘Russia: Assault on Internet Freedom, Cyber Security’, 30
April 2018, https://www.hrw.org/news/2018/04/30/russia-assault-internet-free-
dom-cybersecurity; on some of the protest agencies, Nadezhda Azhgikhina, ‘A
New Organization is Battling Russia’s Culture of Impunity’, The Nation, 24 April
2017.
16 See Marlene Laruelle, ‘Isolation and Reconquista: Russia’s Toolkit as a
Constrained Great Power’, Russia Matters, 12 December 2018. For the legisla-
tion, Russia Legislative Support System, No, 608767-7, ‘On Amendments to
Certain Legislative Acts of the Russian Federation (in terms of ensuring the safe
and sustainable operation of the Internet on the territory of the Russian
Federation)’, sozd.parliamenbt.gov.ru/bill/608767-7, 17 December 2018.
17 Federal’nyi zakon ot 01.05.2019, No. 90-F3, publication.pravo.gov.ru/Docment/
View/0001201905010025; ‘Suverennyi runet: kak on budet rabotat’ i chem eto
grozit pol’zovateliam’, The Bell, 19 December 2018; ‘Russia Moves to Grant
Government the Power to Shut Down the Internet, Explained’, The Moscow
Times, 12 February 2019.
18 ‘Kremlin says cyber-attacks against Russia perpetually initiated from US terri-
tory’, TASS, 27 February 2019; Chris Mills Rodrigo, ‘Kremlin: US territory being
used to launch cyber-attacks against Russia’, The Hill, 27 February 2019.
19 ‘V Rossii nastali tsifrovye vremena. Eksperty obsudili posledstviia razvitiia inter-
net v RF’, Kommersant, 29 April 2019.
20 See ‘Derzhat’ “tsifrovuiu oborony”’, Novaia gazeta, 9 March 2019, and Denis
Grekov, ‘Russia is Censoring More than Just the Internet’, The Moscow Times, 21
March 2019; Fred Weir, ‘“Fake News” in Russia: State censorship elicits an out-
cry’, Christian Science Monitor, 20 March 2019.
21 Gosudarstvennaia Duma, https://twitter.com/dumagovru, 6 March 2019;
Angelina Krechetova, ‘Gosduma priniala zakon o blokirovkakh za feikovye
novosti i oskorblenie vlasti’, Vedomosti, 7 March 2019; ‘Russia Passes Legislation
Banning “Disrespect” of Authorities and “Fake News”’, The Moscow Times, 7
March 2019; ‘Online Sovereignty’, The Moscow Times, 11 March 2019; ‘Russian
Bills Banning “Fake News”, Insults Head to Putin for Signature’, RFE/RL, 13
March 2019; Maria Lipman, Tanya Lokot, ‘Disconnecting the Russian Internet:
Implications of the New “Digital Sovereignty” Bill’, PONARS Eurasia, 21
February 2019.
22 Reporters without Borders, 2019 World Press Freedom Index, Index Details,
https://rsf.org/en/ranking_table, accessed 17 April 2019; ‘Russia Drops to 149th
out of 180 Countries in World Press Freedom Index’, The Moscow Times, 17
April 2019.
23 Zakonoproekt No. 558351-7, ‘O vnesenii izmenenii v Kodeks Rossiiskoi Federatsii
ob administrativnykh pravonarusheniiakh’, sozd.parliament.gov.ru/bill/558351-
7, 19 December 2018. For a discussion, see Alexander Verkhovsky, ‘Prosecuted
“for Words”: Will Putin’s Amendment Have a Liberalizing Effect?’, PONARS
Eurasia, 16 October 2018.
24 ‘Russia’s Youth Agency Granted Right to Block Websites’, The Moscow Times, 26
March 2019; ‘Putin podpisal zakon o blokirovke saitov, pobuzhdaiushchikh detei
k soversheniiu prestuplenii’, TASS, 18 December 2018,
25 Ruchi Gupta, ‘After Facebook and Twitter, Russia Puts Google on Notice’,
Market Realist, 12 August 2019; ‘Roskomnadzor predostereg Google i Facebook
ot vmeshatel’stva vo vnutrennie dela Rossii’, Vedomosti, 6 September 2019;
‘Russia Says Facebook, Google Must Ban Political Ads During Moscow Election’,
344 Quality of life
The Moscow Times, 7 September 2019; ‘Russian Court Fines Twitter $63,000 over
Data Law’, The Moscow Times, 13 February 2020.
26 See Vivian S. Walker, ‘State Narratives in Complex Media Environments: The
Case of Ukraine’, Institute for the Study of Diplomacy, Georgetown Universitry,
Case 331, 2015. On Kiselev, J.L. Black, ‘Setting the Tone: Misinformation and
Disinformation from Kyiv, Moscow, Washington and Brussels in 2014’, in Black
and Johns, eds. The Return of the Cold War (2016), p. 181.
27 ‘Restricting Foreign Ownership of Media is Legal, Russia’s Top Court Rules’, The
Moscow Times, 17 January 2019; ‘KS predpisal utochnit’ normu ob ogranichenii
uchastiia inostrantsev v rossiiskikh SMI’, Vedomosti, 17 January 2019; ‘Russia to
Amend Law to Fine U.K. Media After London Fines RT’, The Moscow Times, 1
August 2019.
28 ‘Russian journalist Denis Suvorov killed in Nizhny Novgorod’, European
Federation of Journalists, 26 July 2018.
29 The open letter was published on Facebook: Aleksandr Chernykh, ‘Obrashchenie
kollektiva “b” k chitateliam’, https://www.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=2
305865136159882&id=100002092548468; ‘200 Russian Journalists Protest
“Clampdown on Free Speech” After Kommersant Firings’, The Moscow Times,
21 May 2019; Maksim Ivanov, Ivan Safronov [and 3 others], ‘Spikerov delat’ iz
etikh liudei. U Valentiny Matvienko i Sergeia Naryshkina mogut smenit’sia obia-
zannosti’, Kommersant, 17 April 2019; Kirill Bulanov, Kseniia Boletskaia,
‘Zhurnalisty “Kommersanta” pokinut izdanie iz-za stat’i o Matvienko’, Vedomosti,
20 May 2019.
30 ‘Two activists and an activist were detained at a rally in support of Ivan Golunov’,
OVD-Info, 7 June 2019; ‘Dozens Protest Russian Investigative Reporter’s Arrest’,
The Moscow Times, 7 June 2019.
31 This was a commonly-used characterization of Zakharova, see Konstantin
Benyumov, Emily Tamkin, ‘Meet the Woman Who Is Proudly Russia’s Troll-In-
Chief’, Buzz Feed News, 22 October 2018.
32 OSCE, ‘Conference on Freedom of the Media and Safety of Journalists in the
Russian Federation and in the OSCE Region: Challenges and Opportunities in
the Digital Age’, 6 November 2019, https://www.osce.org/representative-on-free-
dom-of-media/436247. For a summary, Evan Gershkovich, ‘At Russian Media
Freedom Conference, Discord Reigns’, The Moscow Times, 7 November 2019;
33 Gos. Duma, Zakonoproekt No. 345523-7, ‘O vnesenii izmenenii v Zakon
Rossiiskoi Federatsii “O sredstvakh massovoi informatsii …’, 21 November 2019,
https://sozd.duma.gov.ru/bill/345523-7; Irina Chevtaeva, Maksim Ivanov, ‘Kto
mozhet byt’ priznan inostrannym agentom’, Vedomosti, 21 November 2019;
Alexander Marrow, ‘Russian Parliament Backs Law to Label Individuals “Foreign
Agents”’, Reuters, 21 November 2019; ‘Russia expands use of “foreign agent”
label’, The Bell, 23 November 2019.
34 Ivan Nechepurenko, ‘Russian Journalist Sets Herself on Fire and Dies, Blaming
Government’, New York Times, 2 October 2020; ‘ “Blame the Russia Federation
for My Death”, Journalist Writes Before Self-Immolation’, The Moscow Times, 3
October 2020.
35 Kseniia Boletskaia, ‘U “Vedomostei” poiaviatsia novye vladel’tsy’, Vedomosti, 18
March 2020; ‘Vedomosti Owner Kudryavtsev Agrees on Sale Deal’, The Moscow
Times, 18 March 2020.
36 Derksauer@derksauer, 23 March 2020, https://twitter.com/derksauer/
status/1242144969638412288.
37 ‘Paper’s New Editor Deletes Column Criticizing Rosneft Head’, The Moscow
Times, 13 April “2020.
38 ‘The sale of Vedomosti is being delayed’, Open Media (Otkrytye media), 29 April
2020; ‘The end of the road for Vedomosti’, The Bell, 21 June 2020.
 Quality of life 345
39 ‘Sud arestoval eks-zhurnalista Safronova po delu o gosizmene’, RAPSI, 7 July
2020; ‘Colleagues Rally Behind Russian Former Journalist Detained for Treason’,
The Moscow Times, 7 July 2020.
40 Pavel Felgenhauer, ‘Russian Journalist Community Stands up to FSB’, Eurasia
Daily Monitor, 9 July 2020.
41 ‘Journalists from censored paper launch independent rival’, The Bell, 24 October
2020; for the VTimes website, see vtimes.io.
42 Irina Nevinnaia, ‘Pravitel’stvo nauchilos’ tzsenit’ uchitelei’, Rossiiskaia gazeta, 6
September 2001; see also ‘Teachers’ Wages to Double’, REDA 2003, Vol 1 (2004),
pp. 352–3.
43 ‘Russia Establishes New Profession to Teach Retirees How to Use the Internet’,
The Moscow Times, 9 November 2018.
44 ‘Education Watchdog Revokes License of Top Russian University’, The Moscow
Times, 22 June 2018; ‘Another Independent University Comes Under Fire’, The
Moscow Times, 25 June 2018.
45 Vysshaia shkola ekonomiki, Vyshka dlia svoikh, ‘What will change in the HSE
rules’, 17 January 2020, https://www.hse.ru/our/news/333129951.html.
46 Burcu Degirmen-Dysart, ‘Patriotic Education in Contemporary Russia.
Sociological Studies in the Making of the Post-Soviet Citizen’, Europe–Asia
Studies, Vol. 70, No. 9 (2018), pp. 1355–80.
47 ‘Russia to Re-Educate “Brainwashed” Youth in Patriotic Camps’, Russian Insight,
13 March 2019; ‘Russia’s Security Chief Warns of “Satanic” and Opposition
Influence on Youth’, The Moscow Times, 15 May 2018.
48 Bill No. 9606545-7, ‘On Amendments to the Federal Law “On Education in the
Russian Federation”’, sozd.duma.gov.ru/bill/960545-7, a draft submitted to the
Duma on 21 May 2020; ‘Putin Adds Patriotism, War History to School
Curriculum’, The Moscow Times, 22 May 2020.
49 On this, see J.L. Black, ‘Perestroika and The Soviet General School. The CPSU
Loses Control of the Ideological Dimension of Vospitanie’, Canadian Slavonic
Papers 33:1 (March 1991), 1–18.
50 ‘Minobrnauki otmenilo prikaz o pravilakh obshcheniia rossiiskikh uchenykh s
inostrantsami’, Interfax, 10 February 2020.
51 Maria Agranovich, ‘Gosekzameny i zashchity diplomov ne budut otmeniat’ iz-za
koronavirusa’, Rossiiskaia gazeta, 9 April 2020.
52 ‘Sergei Kravtsov rasskazal, kakie izmeneniia zhdut rossiiskie shkoly’, Rosssiiskaia
gazeta, 30 September 2020.
53 ‘Koronvirus. 2 nedeli shkol’nykh kanikul’, Rossiiskaia gazeta, 29 September
2020; ‘The Mayor’s Office recommends returning to “remote”, and Muscovites
over 65 not to leave their homes’, RAPSI, 25 September 2020; Sergey
Sobyanin’s, ‘V zone riska – deti o pozhil’ye moskvichi. O perekhode na udalen-
nyiu rabotu’, 1 October 2020, https://www.sobyanin.ru/v-zone-riska-i-o-
perehode-na-udalyonnuyu-rabotu.
54 Kseniia Kolesnikova, ‘Shablonov.net. Datu itogovogo sochineniia v shkolakh
mogut perenesti’, Rossiiskaia gazeta, 15 November 2020. An interview with the
head of Rosobrnadzor.
55 ‘Yurii Osipov: Biudzhet nauki rastet’, Rossiiskaia gazeta, 15 August 2002. Osipov
was then president of the Academy of Sciences.
56 Evgenia Kryuchkova, ‘“Skolkovo” poluchilo vtorogo rukovoditelia’, Kommersant,
18 May 2018.
57 For more detail on Skolkovo, see Black, The Russian Presidency of Dmitry
Medvedev, pp. 100–3; and Skolkovo’s news website, sk.ru/news.
58 ‘Russian Theater Director Serebrennikov Goes Free After Court Returns Case’,
The Moscow Times, 11 September 2019; for background, see text and sources in
Black, Putin’s Third Term, op. cit., pp. 242–3
346 Quality of life
59 Elena Fomina, ‘Pal’, Efremov, Kukushkin: kto iz artistov vstupilsia za Pavla
Ustinova’, Stil’, 17 September 2019; ‘Russian Actors Launch Flashmob in
Support of Colleague Jailed Over Moscow Protests’, The Moscow Times, 17
September 2019.
60 Yuri Litvinenko, Anastasia Kornia, ‘Prokuror poprosil prigovorit’ Serebrennikova
k 6 godam kolonii’, Vedomosti, 22 June 2020; ‘Prokuror zaprosil shest’ let kolonii
dlia rezhissera Kirilla Serebrennokova’, RAPSI, 22 June 2020; ‘Serebrennikov
Trial: Russia Finds Prominent Director Guilty in Fraud Case’, The Moscow
Times, 26 June 2020.
61 ‘Monument to Alexander Solzhenitsyn unveiled in Moscow’, Kremlin.ru, 11
December 2018, en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/59371; ‘Putin Hails
Solzhenitsyn as “True Patriot” On Centenary Of His Birth’, RFE/RL, 11
December 2018.
62 ‘Session of the Council for the Development of Civil and Human Rights’,
Kremlin.ru, 11 December 2018, en.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/
59374.
63 ‘Armed FSB Officers Search Office of Russian Rights Group’, The Moscow Times,
14 August 2019’
64 Decree No. 51 ‘On Fedotov MA’, 21 October 2019, en.kremlin.ru/events/
administration/61868.
65 Andrei Pertsev, ‘Might Before Rights: Russia Shakes Up Its Human Rights
Council’, Carnegie Moscow Center, 23 October 2019.
66 Memorial. Human Rights Center, ‘UN Human Rights Council urged to pay
attention to Russia’s permanent refusal to comply with its international obliga-
tions’, 2 July 2019, https://memohrc.org/ru/news_old/sovet-oon-po-pravam-
cheloveka-prizvali-obratit-vnimanie-na-postoyannyy-otkaz-rossii.
67 ‘Na Krasnoi ploshchadi zaderzhali protestuiushchikh protiv presledovaniia
krymskikh tatar’, Vedomosti, 10 July 2019; ‘Crimean Tatar Protesters Detained
on Moscow’s Red Square’, The Moscow Times, 10 July 2017; Russia’s Political
Prisoner Population Grew Sixfold in 4 Years – NGO’, The Moscow Times, 9 July
2019; Institute of Modern Russia, ‘Russia’s Political Prisoners: The Updated
List’, imrussia.org, accessed 6 September 2020.
68 ‘Head of Orthodox Church Compares Homosexual Marriage to Nazism’, The
Moscow Times, 29 May 2017; ‘Top Moscow University Official Resigns After
Anti-Gay Remarks’, The Moscow Times, 25 May 2017; ‘V Chechne panika i sabo-
tazh’, Novaya gazeta, 21 May 2017.
69 ‘Otnoshenie k LGBT-liudiam’, Levada-tsentr, 23 May 2019, www.levada.
ru/2019/05/23/otnoshenie-k-lgbt-lyudyam/; ‘Russian LGBT Activist Killed After
Being Listed on “Saw”-Inspired Gay Hunting Site’, The Moscow Times, 23 July
2019; ‘“She Was Not Afraid to Tell the Truth”: Russia Reacts to LGBT Activist’s
Gruesome Killing’, The Moscow Times, 24 July 2019; ‘Rossiiskaia LGBT-set”, 23
July 2019, https://vk.com/wall-497578_87811.
70 ‘Rostovskaia feministka i LGBT-aktvistka sbezhala iz Rossii’, 28 January 2020,
http://www.donnews.ru/Rostovskaya-feministka-i-LGBT-aktivistka-sbezhala-iz-
Rossii_103517; ‘Russian LGBT Activist Receives Dutch Asylum After Police
Threats’, The Moscow Times, 30 January 2019.
71 ‘Putin Proposes to Enshrine God, Heterosexual Marriage in Constitution’, The
Moscow Times, 3 March 2020; ‘Russia Moves to Ban Gay Marriage’, The Moscow
Times, 15 July 2020.
72 Natalia Yudina, ‘Criminal Activity of the Ultra-Right. Hate Crimes and
Counteraction to Them in Russia in 2019’, SOVA Centre, 5 February 2020.
73 ‘Na piketakh v podderzhku LGBT-aktivistki Iulii Tsvetkovskoi nachalis’ zader-
zhaniia’, OVD-Info, 27 June 2020; Samantha Berkhead, ‘Russian Women Rally
Behind Feminist “Political Prisoner”’, The Moscow Times, 6 July 2020. On
Svetkova’s work, see ‘Body and Soul’, The Economist, 17 October 2020, p. 74.
 Quality of life 347
74 ‘Cossacks took to the streets of Yekaterinburg to catch gays’, URA.ru (Sverdlovsk
region), 7 September 2020, ura.news/news/1052448643; ‘Russian “Cossacks” Hunt
Down LGBT Youth During Pride Week’, The Moscow Times, 8 September 2020
75 ‘V Peterburge prokhodit miting v podderzhku sester Khachaturian’, Livejournal
(Varlamov.ru), 4 August 2019, https://varlamov.ru/3543698.html; Lilit Sargsyan,
‘Zhenshchinu, oborniaiushchiesia ot nasilkiia’, Novaya gazeta, 6 July 2019;
‘Russian Judge Denies Reprieve For Sisters Who Killed Abusive Father’, RFE/
RL, 26 June 2019; ‘Russian Court releases two sisters from detention facility’,
TASS, 27 September 2018.
76 Dar’ia Kozlova, Svetlana Vidanova, ‘Na mostu sester’, Novaia gazeta, 14
December 2019. See also ‘Russia is failing in its obligations to protect women
from domestic and sexual violence’, Equality Now, 20 October 2029, https://www.
equalitynow.org/russia_domestic_and_sexual_violence.
77 European Court of Human Rights, Third Section, ‘Case of Volodina v. Russia.
(Application no. 41261/17)’, Judgement, 9 July 2019, https://hudoc.echr.coe.int/
eng#{%22itemid%22:[%22001-194321%22]}; Andrew Higgins, ‘Abused Women
Go Beyond Russia for Justice’, New York Times International, 20–21 July 2019.
78 Levada Tsentr, ‘Domashnee nasilie’. 13 September 2019, https://www.levada.
ru/2019/09/13/domashnee-nasilie; ‘Domestic Violence Affects 1 in 3 Russians,
Poll Says’, The Moscow Times, 13 September 2019.
79 Samantha Berkhead, ‘Russia Faces Up to Its Dark Domestic Violence Problem’,
The Moscow Times, 13 December 2019; Sovet Federatsii, ‘Proekt zakona o pro-
filaktike semeino-bytovogo nasiliia’, 29 November 2019, http://council.gov.ru/
services/discussions/themes/110611/.
80 Aleksandr Chernykh, ‘Pravitel’stvo zashchishchaet muzhchin ot zhenshchin’,
Kommersant, 19 November 2019; Otkrytoe pis’mo prezidentu Rossii V.V. Putinu.
Dokument. ‘My protiv priniatiia Zakona o profilaktike domashnego nasiliia!’,
Regnum, 15 October 2019.
81 For a detailed discussion, see Alexey Yurtaev, ‘Inside the fight over Russia’s
domestic violence law’, Open Democracy, 17 February 2020, https://www.opende-
mocracy.net/en/odr/russia-domestic-violence-law/.
82 ‘General’naia prokuratura utverdila obvinitel’noe zakliuchenie po delu sester
Khachaturnian’, TASS, 12 July 2020; ‘Russian Prosecutors Uphold Khachaturyan
Sisters Murder Charges’, The Moscow Times, 13 July 2020; ‘Prosecutor General’s
Office approved indictment in case of Kachaturyan sisters’, RAPSI, 13 July 2020.
83 Kyril Avramov, ‘Russia’s Virtual Moral Police; Toxic Subculture in Pursuit of
Purity’, The Globe Post, 27 March 2029; ‘Russian “Male State” leader faces crimi-
nal charges over extreme misogyny’, RT, 5 October 2018.
84 Official Internet Portal. Legal Information, Order No. 55594, 18 August 2019,
http://publication.pravo.gov.ru/Document/View/0001201908150010?index=0&ra
ngeSize=1.
85 ‘The Campaign #alljobs4allwomen: Protection of the Labour Rights of Women’,
ADC, https://adcmemorial.org/en/about-adc/kampaniya-alljobs4allwomen-zash-
hita-prav-zhenshhin-na-trud/, accessed 11 March 2020; ‘Moscow Metro Hires
First Women Train Drivers’, The Moscow Times, 4 January2021.
86 Putin, ‘Poslanie Prezidenta Federal’nomu Sobraniiu’, Kremlin.ru, 20 February
2020, Kremlin.ru/events/president/news/59863. See especially, Theresa Hornke,
‘Russia’s Family Policy’, Russian Analytical Digest, No. 249, 20 March 2020, pp.
10–14; and Andrea Chandler, Democracy, Gender and Social Policy in Russia. A
Wayward Society. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
87 Valeria Mishina, ‘Detei doveriat sud’iam’, Kommersant, 11 July 2020; ‘Senatory
predlozhili zapretit’ smenivshim pol usynovliat’ detei i zakliuchat’ brak’, Kommersant,
14 July 2020; see timeline in OVD-Info, 18 July 2020, https://ovdinfo.org/
news/2020/07/18/v-moskve-i-peterburge-zaderzhali-uchastnikov-piketov-protiv-
zakona-o-semeynom.
348 Quality of life
88 Piotr Sauer, ‘When Your Home isn’t a Safe Space. Russian Women Fear Rise in
Domestic Violence as Coronavirus Quarantine Starts’, The Moscow Times, 30
March 2020.
89 ‘Deputaty predlozhili srochnye mery bor’by s domashnim nasilidem na izoliatsi’,
RBC.ru, 22 April 2020; ‘Human rights activists said they stopped abortion in
Moscow. Authorities deny it’, Dozhd, 22 April 2020, https://tvrain.ru/news/v_
moskve_prekratili_delat_aborty_v_period_povyshennoj_gotovnosti-507390/.
The women’s organization was Nasiliyu.net (No to Violence). ‘Putin Orders
Government to Improve Abortion Prevention Efforts’, The Moscow Times, 27
October 2020.
90 ‘Resheniia, priniatye na zasedanii Pravitel’stva 23 aprelia 2020 goda’, 23 April
2020, government.ru/news/39565/; Tatiana Zamakhina, ‘Avtomaticheskoe
nachislenie vyplat na detei prodliat do marta’, Rossiiskaia gazeta, 21 October
2020.
91 Alena V. Ledeneva, How Russia Really Works. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2006, and
Russia’s Economy of Favours: Blat, Networking and Informal Exchange. New
York: Cambridge UP, 1988.
92 Richard Sakwa, ‘Is Russia really a Kleptocracy?’, Times Literary Supplement
(TLS), 4 February 2015; Fabian Burkhardt, ‘The Institutionalization of
Personalism? The Presidency and the President after Putin’s Constitutional
Overhaul’, Russian Analytical Digest, No. 250, 9 April 2020, pp. 5–10.
93 Karen Dawisha, Putin’s Kleptocracy. Who Owns Russia? op. cit.. For the rebuttal,
see Sakwa, ‘Is Russia Really a Kleptocracy?’, op. cit.
94 See J.L. Black, ‘The Dilemma of Corruption in Russia’, in Black and Johns,
From Putin to Medvedev. Continuity or Change? (2009), pp. 74–97; and Anton
Kazun, ‘Stopping the feast in times of plague: fighting criminal corporate raid-
ing in diverse Russian regions’, Post-Soviet Affairs, Vol. 36, issue 4–5 (2020),
pp. 416–33.
95 Aleksei Levinson, ‘Ne bor’ba s korrupstiei, a “ikh razborki”’, Vedomosti, 28
March 2019.
96 Cited in Ben Aris, ‘Anti-Corruption Drive Takes Off’, Russia Profile, 4 March
2007; Valerii Vyzhutyovich, ‘Kormlenie z dolzhnosti’, Rossiiskaia gazeta, 10
November 2006.
97 VTsIOM survey cited in RIA Novosti, 27 April 2009; Anna Nemtsova, ‘In
Russia, Corruption Plagues the Higher-Education System’, The Chronicle of
Higher Education, 22 February 2008.
98 ‘Dmitrii Medvedev: Glavnoe dlia nashy strany – eto prodolzhenie spokoinogo i
stabil’nogo razvitiia’, Rossiiskaioa gazeta, 15 February 2008.
99 Edict No. 1468, 24 December 2009, in Rossiiskaia Gazeta, 6 March 2010; Russian
Federation President, Information and Press Department, Press Release, 14 May
2010.
100 For descriptions, see Black, Russian Presidency of Dmitry Medvedev, pp. 191–6,
and Putin’s Third Term, pp. 251–7.
101 ‘Vziatochnik tipichnei krovopiitsy’, Novaya gazeta, 14 July 2020;
102 Mark Galeotti, The Vory. Russia’s Super Mafia. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2018.
103 ‘Glava MVD Vladimir Kolokol’tsev: “Vor dolzhen sidet’ v tiur’me”’, Argumenty
i Fakty, 7 November 2018.
104 Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation, ‘As part of the criminal case
on the embezzlement of natural gas of PJSC Gazprom, the investigation is inter-
rogating a number of defendants’, 30 January 2019, https://sled.ru/news/
item/1294651/; ‘Russian Senator Detained on Murder Charges Inside Parliament’,
The Moscow Times, 30 January 2019; Tatyana Stanovaya, ‘Senator’s Arrest
Exposes Cannibalization of Russia’s Vertical Power’, Carnegie Moscow Center, 6
February 2019.
 Quality of life 349
105 ‘MVD razreshili platit’ informatoram’, Kommersant, 21 August 2018; ‘Russian
Police to Reward Informants Up to $150K Under New Plan’, The Moscow
Times, 23 August 2018.
106 ‘Zaderzhannykh sotrudnikov FSB podozrevaiut v razboinom napadenii’,
Vedomosti, 5 July 2019; ‘5 Russian Security Officers Arrested for Robbery’, The
Moscow Times, 6 June 2019.
107 Main Investigation Department, Investigative Committee, ‘In Moscow, the
investigation seeks the arrest of three accused of committing a number of mur-
ders in the capital’, 16 December 2019, https://moscow.sledcom.ru/news/
item/1424979/; ‘2 Elite Russian officers Charged with Killings in Moscow’, The
Moscow Times, 27 December 2019.
108 Corruption Perceptions Index, 2017, www.transparency.org/news/feature/
corruption_perceptions_index-2017.
109 ‘“Dlia nas vazhno kachestvo nadzornoi deiatel’nosti”. Genprokuror Iurii Chaika
– o protivodeistvii korruptsii’, Kommersant, 12 December 2018.
110 General’naia prokuratura Rossiiskoi Federatsii, ‘Bolee 1300 chinovnikov uvo-
leny v sviazi s utratoi doveriia za sovershenie korrupsionnykh pravonarushenii’,
26 March 2019, www.genproc.gov.ru/smi/news/genproc/news-1578650/; ‘More
Than 1,300 Russian Officials Fired for Corruption in 2018 – Prosecutors’, The
Moscow Times, 27 March 2019.
111 See, e.g. ‘Bolee 1,7 tys chinovnikov byli uvoleny iz-za korruptsii za poslednie pol-
tora goda – GP’, RAPSI, 10 August 2018; ‘Prezident RF utochnil normy o vede-
nii reestra korruptsionerov’, RAPSI, 29 December 2017.
112 ‘Genprokuratura otchitalas’ o roste chisla vsiatok’, www.rbc.ru/society/09/12/20
18/5c0c5b119a79473b48669f02?from=main.
113 ‘Ex-investigator and lawyer received 10 years in prison for bribery’, RAPSI, 6
December 2018; ‘Prodlen arrest eks-glavy upravleniia Rostekhnadzora po delu o
khishchenii 5.6 mlrd rub’, RAPSI, 6 December 2018; ‘Summa vziatok v dele
sochinskikh vitse-merov sostavila 120 mln rublei’, Kommersant, 17 October 2020.
114 ‘V Podmoskov’e zastrelili sledovatelia po osobo vazhnym delam’, RBC.ru, 10
October 2018; ‘Police Uncover Multimillion Dollar Fraud in Russia’s Forex
Market’, The Moscow Times, 10 October 2018.
115 ‘Russia’s Vostochny Cosmodrome Bosses Jailed for Mass Corruption’, The
Moscow Times, 26 February 2018; ‘Vynesen prigovor v otnoshenii byvshego
nachal’nika “Dal’spetsstroia” Iuriia Khrizmana i ego souchastnikov’, sledcom.
ru/news/item/1205442/, 26 February 2018; ‘Over $150M Embezzled in
Construction of Russia’s Far East’, The Moscow Times, 20 November 2018;
‘Vostochny spaceport scandals continue’, RT, 24 October 2020.
116 Dmitry Butrin, ‘Konturnaia karta korruptsii’, Kommersant, 3 June 2019.
117 Kristina V. Arianina, ‘Russia Continues Anticorruption Efforts in 2019’, The
National Law Review, 23 January 2019, and AntiCorruption Blog.
118 ‘Russian Court Orders Navalny to Take Down Corruption Investigation Into
National Guard’, The Moscow Times, 6 February 2019; ‘Miniust priznal fond
Navaln’nogo inostrannym agentom’, Vedomosti, 9 October 2019.
119 ‘Arbitrazhnyi sud Moskvy postanovil vzyskat’ s FBK pochti 88 mln rublei po
isku pishchevogo kombinata’, OVD-Info, 28 October 2019; ‘Kremlin Critic
Navalny and Allies Hit With $1.4M Lawsuit Payout’, The Moscow Times, 28
October 2019.
120 ‘Delo “Troiki” ili ne tol’ko “Troiki”’, Vedomosti, 5 March 2019; ‘Russia Officials,
State Media Meet Explosive ‘Troika Landromat’ Report With a Shrug’, The
Moscow Times, 6 March 2019; Leonid Bershidsky, ‘The Troika Laundromat
Shows How Not to Combat Money Laundering’, The Moscow Times, 6 March
2019.
121 See the OCCRP website, ‘About US’, www.occrp.org/en/about-us.
350 Quality of life
122 Transparency International, ‘Eastern Europe & Central Asia: Weak Checks and
Balances Threaten Anti-Corruption Efforts’, 29 January 2019, https://www.
transparency.org/news/feature/weak_checks_and_balances_threaten_anti_cor-
ruption_efforts_across_eastern_eu; ‘Russia Ties Lebanon in 2018 Corruption
Perception s Index – Transparency International’, The Moscow Times, 29 January
2019.
123 ‘Korruptsiia v vysshikh echelonakh vlasti’, Levada tsentr, 7 May 2019, https://
www.levada.ru/2019/05/07/korruptsiya-v-vysshih-eshelonah-vlasti/05/07/2019.
124 ‘Eks-zamdirektora “Rosgeologii” pred’iavili obvinenie v osobo krupnom mosh-
ennichestve’, Vedomosti, 9 March 2019.
125 Rauf Mammadov, ‘High-Profile Arrest Is Latest Sign of Dysfunction in Russian
Refinery Sector’, Eurasia Daily Monitor, 23 July 2019.
126 General’naia prokuratura Rossiiskoi Federatsii, ‘V Moskve sostoialos’ zasedanie
kollegii Glavnoi voennoi prokuratury po itogam raboty organov voennoi proku-
ratury v 2018 godu’, 21 March 2019, genproc.gov.ru/smi/news/genproc/
news-1575160/.
127 Aleksei Nikol’skii, Alisa Shtykina, Ol’ga Adamchuk, ‘V Moskve nachalis’ obyski
po delu o khishcheniiakh u krupnogo podriadchika RZhD’, Vedomosti, 14
August 2019; ‘Russian Anticorruption Officer Gets 13 Years In Prison on Bribery
Charges’, RFE/RL, 10 June 2019.
128 Ekaterian Eremenko, ‘Sud arestoval zamestitelia glavy PFR Ivanova’, Vedomosti,
12 July 2019; Aleksandra Chunova, ‘Medvedev uvolil zamglavy PFR Ivanova’,
Vedomosti & Kommersant, 20 August 2019.
129 ‘Sud arestoval general MVD Aleksandra Krakovskogo’, RAPSI, 3 April 2020.
130 ‘Glavnye anonsy 27 aprelia–3 maia’, Kommersant, 26 April 2020; RAPSI, 24
April 2020; on Glushakova, RAPSI, 28 April 2020.
131 Artyom Hirsch, ‘Zamglavy Minobrnauki zaderzhali po delu o moshennichestve
na 40 mln rublei’, Vedomosti, 3 July 2020.
9 Quality of life
Pandemic, body & soul

Introduction
Russians had already faced a decade or more of permanent chaos in their
government and major disruptions in the quality of their lives or, as we call
it, standard of living, when Putin first took office as president in 2000. Urban
dwellers had grown accustomed to the ever-present sight of nouveau riche
flaunting wealth and the equally ever-present sight of poverty, a condition in
which a large percentage of the population languished. Lost savings accounts,
raging inflation, high unemployment and economic despair had been daily
fare for millions of citizens since the mid-1980s. At the end of 1999, Speaker
Gennady Seleznev told the Duma that 57 per cent of the people of Russia
lived below the subsistence level. Rosstat claimed in 2000 that life expectancy
for males was 61 and for females 72, though reality may have been worse than
these discouraging figures. The ‘shock therapy’ provided by Yeltsin and his
team had produced lots of shock, but no therapy.1
There seemed to be no middle road between the newly rich and newly poor.
Putin noted this while still acting-president in February 2000, telling Russians
in a long open letter that ‘our priority is to overcome our poverty’, calling
Russia a ‘rich country of poor people’.2 He vowed then to overcome this
paradox. Not long after his election a month later, the government adopted
laws raising the minimum wage and guaranteeing pensions, and also initiated
legislation to provide compulsory arbitration in the case of strikes, help curb
corruption and fight organized crime. The old Soviet labour code, created
when almost everyone worked for the state, was replaced in December 2001
with protocols for contract relations, work conditions, dismissals and strikes.
These and other edicts and bills launched a sequence of legislation acts
designed to improve the daily lives of Russians, and bring some kind of order
into the extraordinary societal disarray where Soviet rules and practices still
clashed with new norms.3
The government had to combat a sense of hopelessness driven by blatantly
corrupt oligarchs, politicians, law enforcement, courts and even school
administrators. Any leader who offered a real chance at stability, security and
a functional economy, would have been welcomed. At the time, Putin was
that leader and for most of his first two decades a substantial majority of

DOI: 10.4324/9781003158646-10
352 Quality of life
citizens believed that he could, and did, create positive change. However, as
the ashes cooled from the crises of 2020, many Russians began wondering if
his early promise could ever be fulfilled.

Coronavirus pandemic and its over-arching implications

Although the COVID-19 was a global phenomenon, it came to Russia at a
time when the country was already shaken by proposed amendments to its
Constitution, and an economic downturn due to the oil price crisis. The
pandemic had a hugely disruptive impact on Russia’s domestic economy and
its foreign trade. It wreaked havoc on daily life, forcing Russians to endure
hardships through loss of employment, collapse of small businesses and, of
course, the ever-present health hazard. The long-term economic consequences
of the pandemic for Russia will not be determined for some time, though its
political consequences may be seen sooner. The implications of the infectious
disease, and its management, for the Russian psyche will take even longer to
discern.
Beijing identified, for the public, the first case of coronavirus on 7 January.
On the 23rd, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced that the
disease did not yet represent an international emergency situation. Taking no
chances, Mishustin set up a special coronavirus headquarters three days after
that, and ordered Rospotrebnadzor to draw up a national plan to prevent the
spread of the disease in Russia. Its border with China closed before the
month was out.
The plan didn’t work very well. The border was porous and the first
confirmed cases in Russia were reported on 31 January, when two Chinese
tourists were diagnosed, and the first home-grown case was discovered on 2
March. Because numbers remained low, on 17 March Putin told the first
meeting of a coordinating council to combat the spread of the infection that,
thanks to steps taken early, ‘we were able to contain the massive penetration
and spread of the disease in Russia’.4 Within a week, confirmed cases began
rising.
Before that, the government suspended work visas for Chinese citizens and
used facial recognition techniques to pick up Chinese citizens in hotels, bars
and public transportation, angering the Chinese Embassy in Moscow.
Laboratories began developing an anti-coronavirus vaccine jointly with
Chinese clinics anyway, and quarantine centres were set up in the Tyumen
region for Russians evacuated from health risk areas in China.5 In July 2020,
Russia announced that it had completed clinical trials of a COVID-19 vaccine
on humans, the first country to make such a claim. Yelena Smolyarchuk,
research director at the Centre for Clinical Research on Medications,
Sechenov University, Moscow, proclaimed the trials effective. She added that
volunteers were released and then remained in isolation for 28 days. The head
of the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) said that more than 200
million doses of coronavirus vaccine would be produced before the end of the
year.6 The Ministry of Defence also declared it had developed a ‘safe’ vaccine
 Quality of life 353
after clinical tests on a group of 18 volunteers, though no details were revealed
about the level of its effectiveness (see ahead).7
In the meantime, by the end of March the Russia–China border closings
were mutual and the irritations forgotten. Russia has 14 land neighbours, so
its vulnerability to human carriers coming in from abroad is greater than
most other countries. Dealing with this, by the end of February Russia had
closed down train and air traffic to Iran, South Korea, China and Hong
Kong, train service from Moscow to Nice, and suspended tours to Italy. In
fact, most of Russia’s victims in the first few weeks had contracted the disease
in Italy. Russian passengers on infected cruise ships were quarantined, as
were Russian citizens arriving from China and elsewhere. A major food
distributor in Russia (Magnit) suspended imports of fruit and vegetables
from China, and thousands of business trips to China and several other
countries were postponed.8
From early March onward, both the print and televised media spilled over
with daily analyses and warnings, protective advice and counts of coronavirus
cases in Russia and abroad.
When, at the end of February, Sobyanin announced plans to shut down
the city if the epidemic hit it hard and banned all events of more than 5,000
people for a month, cynics accused him of plotting to prevent demonstrations
against Putin’s constitutional changes. Yet, when he and regional Governor
Andrei Vorobyov put the city and region on ‘high alert’ on 5 March and then
closed them down at the end of March, the political critics were silent.9 A
new coronavirus hospital designed for 1,300 beds as part of an existing hos-
pital opened at the end of March.10 Scheduled religious processions were
cancelled and school attendance made optional; Russia banned further
export of surgical masks, ventilators and hazmat suits.
All border crossings slammed shut as of 30 March. In April, Putin
postponed the 75th Victory Day parade, held each year on 9 May to
commemorate victory over Nazi Germany.
The Russian administration soon discovered how quickly the number of
cases could climb. The first sign of real trouble came in mid-March when the
official number of cases doubled in one 24-hour period, and nearly doubled
again over the next two days. The caseload reached 2,300 at the end of March,
and then sky-rocketed with huge daily jumps that brought the official number
of cases to 106,498, with slightly over 1,000 deaths by the end of April. It was
never clear how accurate these totals were, a fact noted on 24 March by
Sobyanin who told Putin that the ‘real number’ was probably much higher. In
the early weeks, some of the coronavirus cases were reported as pneumonia.
Sobyanin confused the issue further in early May, when he blogged that the
‘real number of infected’ in Moscow was 2 per cent of the city’s inhabitants,
which could mean up to 250,000 people, and a few days later he contradicted
the official number of cases in the city, 92,676, saying it was more likely
300,000.11
On 13 May, the Moscow Department of Health issued a detailed statement
refuting the charge that it underestimated the mortality rate of COVID-19 in
354 Quality of life
the city, saying that it calculated the number only after autopsies proved that
coronavirus was the cause of death. Over 60 per cent of these mandatory
autopsies of suspected COVID-19 victims showed alternative causes of the
actual death, e.g. heart attacks, pneumonia, cancer, renal failure. Thus, it con-
cluded, these individuals died with COVID-19, not of COVID-19. Peskov, dis-
ingenuously, told CNN that the low number of deaths was a result of Russia’s
‘effective’ medical system. None of these explanations prevented Western pun-
dits from railing about Russian ‘lies’ related to the pandemic, the MID
responded by demanding a retraction from the New York Times.12 Few in
Russia or abroad doubted that there were many more deaths related to corona-
virus than the nearly 10,000 officially reported at the end of June, the 20,000 by
the end of September, or the 30,000 by the end of October. By December,
Rosstat acknowledged that actual numbers of deaths were closer to 186,000,
giving it the third-largest known death toll, behind only the US and Brazil,
though per capita its rate is about the same as other European countries.13
Face masks were mandatory in Moscow as of 12 May and people had to
wear them plus gloves in shops, shopping centres, chemists, offices and on all
public transport, including in taxis. Municipal authorities asked individuals
over the age of 65 to stay at home. These restrictions were extended regularly
until mid-June. Although Moscow, the Moscow region, St. Petersburg and
Nizhny Novgorod had the most coronavirus cases, in that order, by mid-April
the disease had spread to all parts of the Federation.
New coronavirus infections rose exponentially in the spring, soaring well
beyond the rate of the previous months. By the end of May, the number of
infections hovered close to 400,000 and surpassed 850,000 at the end of July.
In May, Russia was the second-most-infected country; by July it had fallen
back to fourth, behind the US, Brazil and India.
Although the Kremlin was slow to recognize the danger, it acted forcefully
when the message finally sunk in. On 14 March, Putin created a new special
working group within the State Council to combat the spread of the virus
and placed Sobyanin in charge. The next day, Mishustin and his vice premiers
announced a ₽300 billion ($4 billion) plan to ease the impact of the epidemic
on citizens, including quarantined people, and the economy. They promised
a system of on-line notification and a telephone hotline to provide Russians
with full information, and formed a Coordinating Council to work with the
State Council’s working group. Mishustin chaired the Council, with Golikova
and Belousov as his deputies. Sobyanin sat as vice-chair and liaison with
Putin’s working group.14 Sobyanin became the face of Russia’s official strug-
gle against the pandemic.
The federal government announced a ‘high alert’ for all component
subjects on 19 March, and closed two terminals at Sheremetevo Airport. The
RDIF said it would invest in developing coronavirus tests. At the same time
that Russian schools took a three-week ‘vacation’, in March, Russian
prisoners, students and military personnel were put to work producing
medical masks. The city closed tourist sites, such as Lenin’s tomb, resorts,
sanatoriums and children’s camps to the public, but no one (we assume) took
 Quality of life 355
up Kadyrov’s suggestion that people who violate a coronavirus quarantine
and infect others ‘should be killed’.15 The Orthodox Church kept its doors
open to services until 29 March. Sobyanin announced a full self-isolation
regime in Moscow for all residents, regardless of age, starting the next day.16
It wasn’t clear how this edict was to be enforced, though it added that an ever-
tightening monitoring system would gradually be put in place.
The ‘non-working week’ (see Chapter 4) was later extended, as was
Moscow’s lockdown, and on 1 April Putin signed legislation that imposed
severe penalties for anyone spreading false information about the coronavirus
and breaking quarantine rules. Other bills provided easier access to
medications. As the number of cases grew, all non-essential business in
Moscow was suspended. Grocery stores and pharmacies stayed open, and
the government, hospitals, protective gear manufacturers and the defence
sector continued to work. All construction and maintenance work was sus-
pended, as were car-sharing services.17
On 28 May, Putin and Sobyanin presided over the opening of a new hospital
on the outskirts of Moscow designed specifically for coronavirus patients. The
Demikhov clinical hospital was constructed in 30 days, has an 800-bed capac-
ity, its own oxygen supply system and can conduct 10,000 tests per day.18 Signs
that the state assumed the pandemic was not about to disappear were edicts at
the end of the month extending the ban on large gatherings in Churches,
Synagogues and Mosques and a change in Russia’s electoral law to allow citi-
zens to vote electronically or by mail-in. This latter law included referenda.
Even as Russia’s caseload rose, non-work restrictions eased as of 12 May.
Industrial and construction companies re-opened, though the service sector
remained locked down. Putin ordered the cabinet and coronavirus task force
to draft an action plan for recovery, extended the authority of governors
while the pandemic persisted and assigned ‘final say’ on when to lift restric-
tions to doctors.19 Moscow’s municipal authorities eased restrictions on busi-
nesses in Moscow on 1 June and on the self-isolation regime a week later.20
Limited international air travel restarted on 15 July.
In response to a Levada survey conducted in late April, about a third of
Russian families admitted to wage cuts or salary payment delays, or both. A
quarter of respondents still feared dismissal. Workers in the private sector
were considerably worse off than those who were employed by the state when
it came to wage arears, wage reductions, or lost jobs.21

Public response
Doctors who distrusted data issued by the government on the number of
cases began publishing a List of Memory of colleagues, ‘doctors, nurses,
technicians’ who died from the disease, the first of which appeared on 28
April and included 74 names.22 Within three weeks, the List of Memory
counted 444 medical service personnel. Alla Samoilova, head of
Roszdravnadzor, calculated the number of physicians who died of coronavi-
rus to that time at 489.23 Putin created Roszdravnadzor in 2004 to serve as the
356 Quality of life
federal watchdog over Russia’s healthcare system. It is subordinate to the
Ministry of Health.
State-owned pollsters showed that the population supported Putin’s anti-
pandemic policies in general (74% – VTsIOM), yet grumblings bubbled to the
surface. Complaints that local officials or banks were ignoring assurances –
even orders – from Putin of financial assistance for individuals and small
businesses, were common. So too were objections from medical personnel
about deficiencies in equipment, unreasonable schedules and unpaid wages.24
Logistical problems became part of the national news. Ambulance crews in
Siberia threatened strikes because promised bonuses didn’t show up, nurses
quit because they were overworked and underpaid, ventilators blew up and
caused fires. More than 100,000 people signed a petition from a union of
medical workers, Deistvie (Action), demanding that bonuses be paid and
criteria for determining recipients be expanded. Mishustin acknowledged
that monies allocated by the central government were not distributed
properly, or even at all, by local authorities, and Putin demanded immediate
action on payments by the ministry of health.25 Western media, such as the
New York Times, played up the healthcare problems in Russia, especially
when three doctors ‘mysteriously’ fell from windows. Russian respondents
suggested that the US media look to their own pandemic management
system, and pointed out that all three doctors who fell, jumped or, as cynics
implied, were pushed, were greatly overworked and had contracted the dis-
ease themselves.26
Worsening the situation, in a 165-page guidebook on treatment of COVID-
19, the Russian Ministry of Health continued to recommend the use of the
discredited anti-malaria drug, hydroxychloroquine (GCX), both as a
treatment for infected patients and as a preventative measure for people over
the age of 65.27 While not presenting it as a cure, and warning of possible
dangerous side-effects for heart patients, the ministry insisted that there had
been no adverse effects of the drug on patients in Russia. Many Russian
doctors objected, heralding yet another element of uncertainty in Russian
society.28 The recommendation for GCX in Russia came at about the same
time Trump advocated its use in the US, against the advice of American
medical experts.
More confusion was sowed directly from the top. On 20 April, Putin
claimed that the spread was slowing while cautioning that the pandemic was
yet to peak in Russia. During his fifth public address on the coronavirus, on
28 April, Putin extended the lockdown in two-week segments for the next two
months. At the end of May, he again announced that the peak of new cases
finally was passing and re-scheduled the previously postponed military
parades for late June.29 On 1 June, all non-food shops and some service sector
businesses re-opened in Moscow and walks outside using a schedule system
for apartment buildings and all parks except for Zaryadye Park were
permitted. The ban on foreigners entering the country eased on 25 June, if
only for needed specialists. This concession was the results of requests from
business associations and the diplomatic corps.30
 Quality of life 357
Hydroxychloroquine’s moment having passed, the ministry of health
started treating patients with a new anti-COVID-19 drug, registered as
Avifavir, on 11 June. Clinical trials showed that it reduced the days a person
was infected and cut the period of high fever.31 Russia, China, Japan and the
US also registered drugs to deploy against the virus.32 In early August, the
MoD claimed that its tests on an anti-COVID drug had been completed
safely. There was a lingering suspicion that Russia was rushing drugs into
production merely to demonstrate that it could get there first.
Nearly six months after COVID-19 was acknowledged as a pandemic in
Russia, the major restrictions, including self-isolation, closed shops and
social gatherings, were cautiously lifted and, on 24 June, thousands of troops
marched on Red Square, sans face masks. On that same day Putin announced
that existing special payments to health care workers and social workers
would be extended to mid-September, because of the continuing threat of
infection. Bonus payments in place since 8 April were tax-free and, since
there were delays and tales of corrupt officials seizing some of the allocated
funds in the regions, Putin ordered that all appropriate payments be accounted
for by the end of June. He also signed a law providing an additional one-time
payment to Russian citizens who were ‘parents, adoptive parents, guardians,
trustees of children under the age of 16’, of ₽10,000 for each child. Clearly,
the pandemic was by no means over in Russia, and Putin was covering his
tracks.33
Moscow’s indoor dining, fitness clubs, swimming pools and public sports
and recreation facilities re-opened on 1 July. Cinemas and theatres unsealed
a month later. Masks were still mandatory in stores and on public transport,
but not on the streets. On the other hand, Aeroflot, which had planned to
resume international flights on 1 August, and since late May had been selling
tickets for hundreds of flights, postponed air connections to 87 countries
until 31 August, leaving only the UK, Turkey, Tanzania and Switzerland as
possible destinations by air. The airline promised automatic reimbursements,
as the air travel industry suffered another serious kick while it was down.34
Flights to Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and South Korea resumed in
September; and to Serbia, Cuba and Japan over the next two months.

Second wave
A general sigh of relief came too soon. A second wave surfaced with a
vengeance and the number of cases in October quickly surpassed, by far, the
peaks of the spring.35 Early in the month, Putin order the creation of a
Security Commission charged with establishing a nationwide system for pre-
venting the spread of infectious diseases, and named Medvedev its chair.36
The Commission’s existence passed almost unnoticed by the public, while
ominous records were set repeatedly, reaching peaks of 635 single-day deaths
and 29,935 single day-cases on 24 December.37 The total number of cases
passed two million at mid-November, and three million in late December.
The late fall surge was such that several hospitals across the country stopped
358 Quality of life
admitting patients with other illnesses, and Peskov reported a serious scarcity
of doctors in the regions.
As early as 9 November, Health Minister Mikhail Murashko warned the
government’s Coordination Council that the health care system was just
barely coping with the new surge of coronavirus cases. Hospital bed
occupancy had reached 80 per cent, or higher, he said, and the ministry had
called out 25,000 medical students and 16,000 in-residency programme per-
sonnel to bolster medical staffs throughout the country.38 A month later, he
proposed reinstating a ban on domestic travel, and republics were granted
permission to limit internal border crossings.
Sobyanin acknowledged the sharp upturn in infections, again advised
citizens over 65 not to leave their homes and ordered businesses to transfer 30
per cent of their employees to work from home. This advice became an order
on 26 November. He reminded Muscovites to wear masks and gloves in
public places. Grade 6–11 pupils in Moscow reverted to distance learning
until mid-December. Two temporary hospitals for coronavirus patients
re-opened in October.
At the national level, Rospotrebnadzor reinstated a nationwide order
requiring all citizens to wear masks in public places and limiting all
entertainment and restaurants services to the hours between 6:00 a.m. and
11:00 p.m.39 Predictions that the second pandemic wave would hit the regions
harder than the first one, and harder than Moscow, proved correct, and
evoked wide-ranging frustration and anger because of shortages of hospital
beds and medical personnel. People groused that the Kremlin lifted
quarantines in the spring for political reasons. Social media carried videos of
bodies wrapped in black bags and broadcast complaints from doctors from
such disparate areas as the Altai Republic, Kalmykia and Dagestan, all
casting blame on the central authorities for playing down the pandemic after
the spring. In November, schools in Ulyanovsk and Sakhalin went exclusively
on-line, Buryatia imposed its second full shutdown and Ivanovo ran out of
space in its morgues. These stories were typical.
The Murmansk region was the most heavily hit in the Arctic. Local anger
was fuelled by the fact that nearly two-thirds of Russian medical people
already disbelieved official statistics on coronavirus cases, and doubt among
regional doctors was even higher.40 Moreover, by November nearly 60 per
cent of respondents told Levada Centre pollsters they would refuse to be
vaccinated against COVID-19. Since 92 per cent said they wear a mask in
public and 62 per cent approved the actions taken by their government, it
may be that they did not trust the haste in which the antidote was being
prepared.41
Perhaps aware that Donald Trump’s handling of the pandemic cost him
his job, Putin ordered the government to provide 5 trillion rubles to the
regions, ‘immediately’, to cover free medicines for coronavirus patients and
allocate another 10 trillion (circa $13 bln) for transport services, purchasing
PPEs, and improving the ‘material and technical base and testing’. The
money was to be used to fight the coronavirus and ‘not for anything else’.42
 Quality of life 359
This announcement was made during a video-conferenced meeting with the
government and broadcast on national TV, so no one could doubt who made
the decision. Whether blame for the disease’s dramatic resurgence ultimately
would fall on Putin, Sobyanin or local officials in the political arena remained
uncertain.
Putin told the ‘Russia calling!’ audience on 29 October that the ‘overall
[pandemic] situation is really better’ and there would be no ‘nationwide
shutdown’; rather, there would be targeted measures that would allow busi-
nesses to stay open if they showed ‘social responsibility’.43 This statement
represented a dangerous denial. In fact, China took the spike in Russian
cases so seriously that it suspended entry even for Russians ‘with valid
Chinese visas and residence permits, involving work, resolving personal
issues and family reunification’.44 The city of Moscow tightened up. The
Mayoral decree of 10 November that switched all schools and universities to
distance learning also prohibited catering establishments from serving people
in-house at night, kept spectator numbers in theatres and concert halls to 25
per cent of capacity, and ordered sport events to exclude spectators. Children’s
day camps and other in-door group activities were suspended.45
More significantly, the MoD constructed four medical centres for the sole
purpose of treating coronavirus patients, two in the Astrakhan region and
the others in Pskov and Severomorsk, and a special clinic for children also in
Pskov. Built over a period of six months, they were completed in October and
November and will be permanent. Two of them will eventually be transferred
to South Sakhalin. Well-equipped with modern technology and doctors, or
so Putin claimed, they will remain under the Ministry of Defence. More are
planned for the regions.46
Asked about Russia’s preparedness for the pandemic at his 2020 year-end
press conference, Putin admitted that Russia had an ‘ocean of problems’,
but, in comparison to other countries, it was able to produce 277,000 beds ‘in
fairly quick time’, 40 special-purpose hospitals, 30 of them built ‘quickly’ by
the MoD and 10 by the regions, and train or re-train more than a half million
medical personal to work in the field.47 True or not, Putin was going to have
to wear the pandemic, so he was fortunate that the next presidential election
in Russia was four years away.

Vaccine nationalism
In August, the WHO appealed for a global vaccine pact, i.e. the COVAX
Global Vaccine Facility, warning that ‘vaccine nationalism’ would lead to an
extraordinary imbalance in world recoveries from the pandemic. COVAX is
led by Gavi, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI)
and the WHO. Its purpose is to guarantee fair access to vaccines.48 Even the
conservative Rand Corporation published a report in November outlining
the negative consequences of vaccine nationalism, among them the obvious
inequitable access to vaccines. The corporation’s support for ‘international
sharing’ of vaccines was mostly concerned with the huge costs to the
360 Quality of life
economies of wealthy countries if the pandemic was not brought under
control everywhere. Still, it drew attention to the issue, and was reported in
the Russian media.49
A week prior to that appeal, on 12 August, the Russian Ministry of Health
announced that it had registered the world’s first coronavirus vaccine. Called
‘Sputnik-V’, the vaccine was developed at the Gamaleya Research Institute
of Epidemiology and Microbiology in Moscow. An injection solution would
be available for the public by 1 January 2021, it said.50 Reaction in the West
was immediately sceptical because the Russia vaccine had not completed the
standard Phase 3, in which it is compared to a placebo in thousands of peo-
ple.51 The WHO said it would need to see the results of further tests. Russia
insisted that its research was rooted in decades of scientific work on vaccines
and viruses that helped it create a successful Ebola vaccine, and claimed to
have already received orders from 20 countries. According to Britain’s The
Lancet, the Russia vaccine passed its early trial tests in late August, produc-
ing antibodies with ‘no serious adverse events’.52 Phase 3 trials began in
September.
Health Minister Murashko repeated on 31 August that the first mass
deliveries of the ministry’s Sputnik V would begin at the end of September.
This too was greeted with doubt in the West and a certain amount of apathy
in Russia, where the vaccine went first to health workers and teachers and
was then extended to the civilian population in January 2021.53
Earlier, Putin told reporters that one of his daughters was injected and
Aleksandr Gintsburg, chief of the Gamaleya Institute, said that he and the
institute’s scientists had all been inoculated with the vaccine.54 On the other
hand, a survey conducted among more than 3,000 Russian doctors found
that 66 per cent felt that there was still insufficient data on its effectiveness
and 52 per cent said they were not personally prepared to take it.55 Meanwhile,
two anti-coronavirus drugs were approved in mid-September. These variants
of Favipiravir were available at pharmacies as of 21 September. They were
developed in Japan and manufactured in Russia and are touted for speeding
up recovery time.56 Eventually, the truth of Putin’s Russian roulette-type
gambit will be in the pudding.
Putin boasted of Sputnik V in his video address to the UN General Assembly
and said that Russia was ‘ready to share our experience … including supplies
to other countries’. He offered to provide doses ‘free of charges’ to any
employee of the UN and its branches.57 Producers of the earlier drug, Avifavir,
which went through clinical trials in Russia and Japan, announced that sup-
plies had already been delivered to six countries and 17 more had requested
the drug. An announcement by the RDIF named the recipient countries:

Avifavir will be delivered to Argentina, Bulgaria, Brazil, Chile, Colombia,

Ecuador, El Salvador, Honduras, Kuwait, Panama, Paraguay, Saudi
Arabia, Serbia, Slovakia, South Africa, UAE and Uruguay.
The drug has already been delivered to Belarus, Bolivia, Kazakhstan,
Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. 58
 Quality of life 361
By mid-November, 50 countries had signed up to buy or locally produce
Sputnik V, among them the first EU member (Hungary) to agree to carry out
trials of the vaccine. South Korea’s GL Rapha contracted to produce 150
million doses annually. India’s Hetero will produce 100 million doses.
Purchase orders came from Brazil (50 mln), Mexico (32 mln), Nepal and
Egypt (25 mln each).59 On 23 November, the manufacturers of Sputnik V
claimed 95 per cent effectiveness, and Golikova promised that mass vaccina-
tions would begin in 2021.60
Russian researchers still work closely with their Chinese counterparts. A
Russian pharmaceutical company, Petrovax, participated in China’s large-
scale clinical trials and reported in September that volunteers showed no
side-effects after taking a vaccine (AD5-nCOV) co-developed with Chinese
clinics. The Moscow company called for more volunteers after the first test
and claimed to have vetted more than 3,000 candidates for more trials. If its
vaccine is approved in concert with all international standards, it says it can
produce five million doses per month.61
Putin announced a second vaccine in mid-October. The Novosibirsk
Vector Centre registered EpiVacCorona after successful clinical trials on 100
volunteers, and scheduled plans for post-registration trials with 40,000
volunteers from areas across the country. The vaccine entered civilian
circulation in December, at about the same time that up to 80,000 Russian
soldiers were scheduled for vaccination with Sputnik V. Altogether, about
400,000 military personnel will be vaccinated, Shoigu said.62
The city of Moscow opened a vaccination station for at-risk groups on 5
December. These included teachers, healthcare and social service workers. In
preparation for the launch, municipal officials acquired specialized
warehouses and refrigeration facilities, and organized staff training
programmes.63
The ‘race’ was on. An important announcement on 9 November by the
US’s Pfizer and Germany’s BioNTech, that their vaccine was more than 90
per cent effective in preventing COVID-19, was followed almost immediately
by the claims from the Russian Health Ministry that Sputnik V was equally
or more effective.64 Both products were still in Phase 3, and everyone hoped
that both manufacturers are correct. The UK approved Pfizer’s vaccine on 2
December and ordered 40 million doses; Kazakhstan started producing
Sputnik V on 22 December.
Belarus launched its vaccination programme with Sputnik V on 28
December, Hungary received its first 6,000 doses that same day and Algeria
prepared for a half million does to arrive in January 2021. Orban’s office said,
however, that Hungary will fill most of its requirements with supplies from
the EU or China, because Russia’s production capacity is deficient. In turn,
Skolkovos’s Hadassah Clinic announced that it would bring the Pfizer and
Moderna vaccines to Russia as soon as possible.65
The vaccination campaign in Russia was handicapped by the fact that it
was not universally supported by the country’s medical professionals.
According to a poll conducted by the RF Medics Network, some, perhaps
362 Quality of life
many, were reluctant to participate and preferred a foreign, as opposed to
home-grown dose. Inoculated Russians will be provided with immunity
passports.66
Domestically produced Sputnik V is given free inside Russia. It is
compulsory for front-line workers (doctors, teachers and social workers) and
on a voluntary basis for everyone else.67

Quality of life
Seeds of social (dis)satisfaction
A social downslide began well before 2020. According to a Levada Centre
survey conducted in January 2018, ‘the most disturbing problems’ facing
respondents were rising prices (63%), poverty (47%), unemployment (40%)
and corruption (38%). Foreign affairs crises, including sanctions, didn’t seem
to bother them at all.68 Another survey, conducted a few weeks after the
presidential election and published in May, placed the ‘unequal distribution
of wealth’ at the top of grievances.69 In that connection, Forbes lists of bil-
lionaires for 2018 and 2019 had Russia ranking fifth, with 98 billionaires in
2019. No matter that this number paled against the US’s 607 billionaires,
China’s 338 and Germany’s 152, the impression that Russia was run by its
oligarchic billionaires was a persistent none.
Promises made in his address to the Federal Assembly in March to allocate
$162 billion spending for healthcare, education and infrastructure over the
next six years were met with as much scepticism as hope, because of similar
pledges in 2012. Analysts questioned these ambitions, and his overarching
goal of lowering poverty levels, when the government published cost esti-
mates in February 2019.70 Indeed, the May survey noted above showed that,
while Russians were pleased with his performance in the international arena,
they still viewed much of Putin’s domestic policy as problematic, especially in
the areas of social safety networks, healthcare, pensions and wage disparities.
On the other hand, it is a fact of Russian life that more than half the popula-
tion believe in a fully paternalistic state, and that state support was both a
right and a necessity. A major study by the Academy of Science’s Institute of
Sociology in 2012 put this number at 52 per cent. The healthcare system and
labour market were the crucial areas for popular concern; in the latter case,
fair wages were the most desired goal.71 The pandemic was soon going to
underscore these issues.
Medvedev’s report to the Duma on government activities in 2018
maintained that there were 19 million people living in poverty in Russia,
down 400,000 from the previous year. He declared that the decrease came
from an increased minimum wage and adjusted social benefits.72 Poverty lev-
els were also featured in Putin’s 2019 and 2020 addresses to the Federal
Assembly. In the first instance, he proposed a ‘social contract’, guaranteeing
that the state would alleviate poverty that ‘always literally crushes a person’.73
In contrast to 2018, when he emphasized new military technology, Putin’s
 Quality of life 363
2019 address focussed on societal needs. A year later, he proposed changes to
the Constitution to set Russia’s minimum wage at or above the subsistence
line and to annually adjust pensions by the rate of inflation.74
In making recommendations for constitutional amendments, Putin was
likely aware that a Levada poll conducted in August 2019 showed that rising
prices again topped Russian ‘concerns’, followed closely by a lingering fear of
poverty and corruption. Unemployment, access to medical care and a
widening chasm between rich and poor in the country came next in that
order. After twenty years with Putin behind the presidential desk, public
worries about daily life had not changed very much, even though the quality
of their lives had greatly improved. Other issues, such as the spread of drug
abuse and HIV/AIDS and the potential for a general economic crisis, were all
well ahead of limitations on democratic freedoms. The explosive question of
retirement ages was almost absent from the responses.75 Numbers represent-
ing anger at corruption, the lack of justice in the courts and repression by the
siloviki were up, if not by much.
As the constitutional amendments were working their way through the
system, newly appointed Prime Minister Mishustin ordered revisions in the
state budget to boost welfare payments and pensions, and increase state
investment in the economy.76 The budget adjustments were carried out
expressly for implementing promises made by Putin in his ‘January
Revolution’ address to the Federal Assembly. The problem, of course, was
that in order for Putin to fulfil his 2018 promise to halve poverty in Russia by
2024, a higher rate of economic growth was necessary. The collapsing ruble,
plummeting oil prices and coronavirus issues made Mishustin’s task seem
impossible at that time.77 The question for Russia was whether the populace
would continue to acquiesce.
***
Putin’s 2018 commitments for his fourth term covered the entire spectrum of
social needs in Russia and set high expectations for overall improvements in
the quality of Russian life. When these economic pledges were jeopardized by
a new surge of sanctions against Russia’s business class, the public seemed
less concerned than one might have anticipated. As one Russian analyst
wrote, ‘citizens are more willing to accept the authorities’ picture of the
world’ when the problem is seen as a result of actions taken by ‘Western
enemies’. Russia’s ruling elites are strengthened by sanctions, he argued,
because the state helps them and the people tend to stand firm.78 That was
probably an accurate assessment for 2018, yet it may not still reflect reality as
2021 comes around.
Ministry of Economics reports in late 2018, showing that unemployment
rates had dropped to 4.7 per cent and that real wages were growing, were
encouraging, if somewhat misleading. Diminishing consumer confidence
brought a slowdown in retail and catering organizations, and lower than
expected yields in grains and vegetables caused food prices to rise.79 Moreover,
the ministry’s data were debunked publicly by Rosstat numbers that showed
364 Quality of life
real income declining consistently over the previous five years in spite of
rising wage levels. According to the HSE, business incomes and social trans-
fers were also in decline.80
The apparent indifference to sanction regimes expressed by Russian
officials in the spring and summer of 2018 wavered already in the fall. Kudrin
warned that a new round of Western embargoes would render the possibility
of Putin achieving his inauguration assurances null and void. He made it
plain that reducing international tensions was the only way to lower sanc-
tions against the Kremlin.81 Whereas both Rosstat and the World Bank set
the poverty level in Russia at 13.2 per cent in 2017, using different criteria the
Presidential Academy of the National Economy and Public Administration
reported in November 2018 that up to 22 per cent of the people were in the
‘poverty zone’, up from just a few years earlier.82 Rosstat raised the level
somewhat in 2019, counting 20.9 million people living below the poverty line
(14.3 per cent), thereby placing Putin’s goal of 12 per cent a little further out
of reach.83
These data confirmed existing fears that the quality of life for millions of
Russians was threatened by the issue of retirement ages that had been part of
the public discourse for some years and then burst to the forefront in 2018.
Surveys conducted in May that year showed that over half the respondents
believed that the current age requirements were still appropriate (53%) and
that only 6 per cent believed that the bar should be raised. A surprising num-
ber (35%) thought the pensionable age should be lowered. 84
When, in June 2018, the government finally decided to go ahead with the
change in official retirement ages the transition period was set to start in 2019
and evolve gradually until 2028. Time was needed to soften the blow for
expectant pensioners and also to enable the government to build up the
pension fund to keep it above the inflation rate. Within a week of the
announcement, over a million citizens signed an online petition opposing the
change. Titled, ‘To the President of the Russian Federation, the Government,
the Federal Assembly: Do not Raise the Retirement Age!’, it was authored by
the Confederation of Labour of Russia, published on the Change.org web-
site, and reached 2.5 million hits by the end of June.85 The Navalny move-
ment, Yabloko and the Communist Party all staged authorized protests.86
The Confederation of Labour of Russia organized demonstrations in over 30
cities, including a World Cup host city. Dozens of applications for protest
rallies were rejected and others remained ‘pending’. Still, demonstrators
caught a break when the Russian Supreme Court ruled that municipal
authorities could no longer reject an application for a rally simply because it
might inconvenience non-participants.87
One commonly heard complaint was that over 17 per cent of Russian males
and 6.5 per cent of females would not be expected to live long enough, or well
enough, to benefit from their pensions. The Institute of Demography at the
HSE made these numbers public in a life expectancy report in June 2018.88
The dispute also revealed that life expectancy for Russians had risen by
nearly eight years since Putin took the presidency in 2000.89 Mortality rates
 Quality of life 365
are one thing, quality of life is another. The additional work years meant that
tens of thousands of Russians had to change their life plans, employers had
to keep higher-paid people on salary longer than expected and younger
people were now unable to take their places. Young families planning to have
children had to wait longer so as to have retired grandparents help raise them.
Aware that these criticisms hurt his ratings, Putin softened the reform,
suggesting that the proposed pensionable age for women should be 60,
instead of the 63 recommended in the draft law. He kept the proposed age for
men at 65. His recommendations allowed early retirement for mothers of
three or more children. The Duma approved (326–59) the bill on raising the
age ceiling, along with amendments proposed by Putin, in late September,
while Communists led a rally against it outside the House.90
Speaking to the issue, the president made it clear that Russia’s rapidly
aging population and low birth rates were part of the consideration, as was
the simple fact that Russia could no longer afford even existing pensions for
the growing pensionable age group. He added that social benefits, such as
discounts on public transport and prescription drugs, would be granted at the
current retirement ages of 55 for women and 60 for men.91
Even with the pension situation mostly resolved, social unrest was in the
air. According to Moscow’s Centre for Economic and Political Reforms
(TsEPR), protests on behalf of particular social and economic interests
spiked in 2018, when it recorded 2,500 events before the month of November.92
There were hundreds more in 2019, mass demonstrations and single pick-
ets, many of them voicing grievances over deteriorating public services –
hospital services, doctor shortages, transportation, garbage pick-up, schools
and so on. Although the rise in social activism posed no threat to authori-
ties, a perception that they might become politicized and even grow into a
‘colour revolution’ kept law enforcement on the alert. Increased demonstra-
tions for economic reasons reflected a growing pessimism for the future of
Russia. Results of a survey conducted by VTsIOM and published in
November 2018 revealed that, while a clear majority was satisfied with their
own life (58%), they were pessimistic about the economic future of their
families.93
Attempting to defuse rising disaffection, in 2018 the government granted
pay raises to teachers, doctors, social workers, veterinarians, researchers and
other state workers. They were given another hike for 2019. Insurance
pensions for non-working pensioners rose by 7 per cent, and the minimum
wage increased, bringing it, finally, to the subsistence minimum.
Unemployment benefits nearly doubled, and villagers were allocated a
pension supplement. This last was awarded to anyone who worked in
agriculture for 30 years. The right to purchase discounted bus, air and train
tickets also expanded.94 By the fall of 2019, Rosstat claimed, unemployment
had fallen to 4.4 per cent nationwide, with Moscow (1.3%) and St. Petersburg
(1.3%) leading the way. Putin told potential investors at the ‘Russia Calling!’
forum in November that Russia’s unemployment rate was the lowest in its
history.95
366 Quality of life
Medvedev had addressed income disparities during a televised interview in
February, saying that national budget funds should be distributed more fairly
to villages, where about one-quarter of the population still lived, and incomes
overall must be raised. His remarks came in the context of questions about
new sanctions levelled by the US which, he said, would cause difficulties but
would not prevent the National Projects from going forward.96 Mishustin’s
budget amendments in 2020, noted above, and Putin’s constitutional
proposals related to minimum wages and pension indexing capped a decade
of slow progress on these quality of life essentials.
Slowed by the pandemic in their attempts to improve daily living for
Russians, and conscious of falling public confidence in it and the president,
the government adopted legislation in June 2020 to supply soft loans for
enterprises in single-industry towns, provide self-employed citizens with the
same support measures that small and medium-sized businesses receive and
double benefits for unemployed citizens with young children.97
In September, during an address to the Federation Council, Putin
announced the indexation of pensions by 6.3 per cent for 2021 and substan-
tial support for families with incomes less than the subsistence level.98 Keeping
promises made during the pandemic and debates over the ‘January
Revolution’, he announced that ‘maternity capital’ amounts were to be raised
as of 1 January 2021, more places provided in nurseries for pre-schoolers, hot
meals for all primary school children from the first to fourth grades, and pay
increases for teachers. Funds were set aside to cover expenses for medical,
teaching and digital economy university students, with priority granted to
students from the regions.99 Whether these allocations would ease tensions in
the regions and relieve pandemic-driven family anxieties overall would likely
be clarified by the general elections of 2021.

Climate change100
As if Russian families didn’t have enough to think about in their daily
routines, accelerated global warming began to attract such concern in Russia
that, in September 2019, the Kremlin ratified the Paris agreement on carbon
emissions. Huge additional expenditures on Arctic development at a time
when the Arctic ice is melting, equally costly droughts, wildfires and floods
menaced budget allocations for the National Projects and unsettled the lives
of thousands of Russian citizens. In 2020, Russia was still the world’s fourth-
largest emitter of greenhouse gases, even though its overall consumption of
oil and coal had been reduced and its use of natural gas increased.
In early January 2020, Medvedev approved a national action plan to man-
age climate change.101 For some regions, especially Siberia, the Far East and
the Arctic, the adaptation may have come too late (see Chapter 2). In July, the
ice cover on the Arctic Ocean was the thinnest in recorded history; in June,
the town of Verkhoyansk, in Sakha, suffered the hottest temperature ever
recorded in the Arctic; and the nearby Batagalka crater, the largest mega-
slump in the world, began widening.102 By mid-June 2020, wildfires had
 Quality of life 367
already burned through over 12 million acres in Siberia and Russia’s Far
East. Greenpeace, which claimed that nearly three times that many acres were
burning, and other experts warned that the year could be the worst in history
for such phenomena. Wildfires that emit huge quantities of carbon dioxide,
and trigger cyclones, increased five-fold during the spring/summer heatwave
and raged within 50 km of the Arctic Ocean in Yakutia.103 By the end of
August there were over 600 wildfires blazing in Siberia and the Russian
Arctic, and reports showed that Russia had its warmest September ever, with
its northern and Arctic regions averaging the largest rises in temperature.104
The massive diesel fuel reservoir collapse in Norilsk in June was also a
consequence of climate change.
Damage caused by the diesel fuel drew greater than usual attention to
other such incidents and made it plain that they should not be seen as isolated
incidents. Shortly after the spill occurred, an enrichment plant belonging to
Norilsk Nickel was caught pumping wastewater from a dangerously full
tanker into nearby tundra. The fact that responsible employees were
suspended and the Investigation Committee opened an investigation did not
mitigate harm done to Norilsk Nickel’s reputation, to the environment and to
the public’s already limited faith in government oversight.105 This was fol-
lowed by reports that a petroleum slick in the Khimki Reservoir that supplies
water to Moscow was growing in size exponentially. The slick was traced to a
drainage system from a company (Khimvodostok) that failed to follow a
2018 order that it install more modern waste management treatment
equipment.106
Making matters worse, a landfill fire close to Norilsk sent plumes of smoke
towards the tundra. Russia’s independent media picked up on these incidents,
blogs and social media carried photos of the endangered sites, and climate
change activists accused Nornickel of covering up the seriousness of the ‘eco-
logical catastrophes’.107
Reports that the Russian climate was warming faster than anywhere else
on Earth and that 2019 had been the country’s hottest year on record
compelled the government to adopt the plan noted above, which emphasized
damage control, and also outlined ways and means to exploit whatever
advantages the changes might provide. The plan recognized global warming
as a problem officially, noted that a rapidly warming climate generated new
health risks, and foretold more natural disasters. It then outlined 29
preventative and opportunistic steps planned for 2020–22 as a first stage in
climate change management. These included contingency plans for temporary
resettlement and evacuations, vaccinations, infrastructure construction
(dams, bridges), reduced reliance on fossil fuels and improved land use man-
agement.108 On paper, the plan sounded encompassing and properly based on
science; getting it done was the problem.
The National Plan has a lot of history to overcome. In 2019, the Germany-
based NGO, the Climate Change Performance Index, placed Russia at 52nd
of 61 countries for its adoption of policies to combat adverse climate change.
The index compilers include greenhouse gas emissions, renewable energy,
368 Quality of life
energy application and climate policy in their categories for investigation.
Russia fared poorly on each of them.109
Even though Kudrin’s Audit Chamber has advised that climate change
will have a debilitating effect on Russia’s GDP and negatively impact the
National Project targets,110 the action plan noted above did not propose any
capping of greenhouse gas emissions. The fact that all Russian records for
high temperatures were broken again in 2020 and the Russian Arctic and
Siberia were the hardest hit, added an exclamation mark to the need for
action on global warming. For the first time in recorded history, the Laptev
Sea, the so-called birthplace of Arctic sea ice, was not frozen by the end of
October.111
A step in the right direction came in December when experts from Russia,
Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland formed a regional alliance (BRIES)
to monitor the climate and environment in the Barents Sea region. Not an
official government agency of any of the participating countries, BRIES
comprises environmental and journalist organizations that will, presumably,
keep appropriate authorities and the public informed of climate-related con-
ditions.112 Yet another major ‘to do’ fell into Putin’s already full bucket.

General healthcare
According to one Western analyst, Russia had a few ready-made advantages
in combatting the coronavirus pandemic: more doctors and other medical
workers per capita than most other countries, plenty of hospital beds, and
universal medical insurance coverage.113 While these facts and the short-term
remedies noted above were effective enough at first, in the long run the
pandemic exposed serious weaknesses in Russia’s healthcare system.
Overworked and underpaid medical workers found it difficult to manage the
greatly increased workload. Cuts in government funding over the previous
few years meant that, in fact, there were not enough ambulances or specialized
ambulance crews, not enough hospital beds, young doctors, nursing assistants
or hospital cleaners. Hospital equipment in many areas was old and of poor
quality.
Another problem was the long-standing intuitive distrust of the quality of
medical care, which may have prevented many Russians from seeking help in
time. Regional disparities were glaring as well: hospitals and healthcare in
major cities like Moscow and St. Petersburg are mostly modern and up-to-
date, while in many of the regions medical infrastructure is dilapidated and
not much improved since Soviet times.
Most importantly, cuts to healthcare in federal budgets over several years
had made the study of medicine unattractive. The original purposes of the
slashes that started in 2012 had been to make healthcare more efficient and
modern, but they came at the expense of up to half the medical staff in some
clinics. The Russian Medical Association warned Putin, in October 2019,
that the ‘reforms’ had already cost Moscow over 2,000 infectious disease
treatment beds and that further cuts might lead to ‘catastrophe’. They were
 Quality of life 369
right. By mid-April 2020, student doctors were mobilized to work in under-
staffed hospitals, many of them as unpaid volunteers.114
The appointment of Mikhail Murashko as health minister was part of an
attempt to resolve these and other issues. Named minister during the ‘January
Revolution’, Murashko brought his experience as head of Rosdravnadzor
(since 2013), Russia’s monitoring agency for health, to the job. A medical
doctor with lengthy practice in the regions (Komi Republic), he had a
reputation for efficiency and anti-corruption efforts in the medical field, both
characteristics required for the hoped-for modernization of the sector.
Serious medical issues exposed before the pandemic didn’t go away. For
instance, in the spring of 2018 a surprising report to the effect that obesity
levels in Russia had risen by nearly 50 per cent over the previous five years
shook the healthcare system. The Ministry of Health claimed to have a
strategy for the development of healthy lifestyles that included an ongoing
campaign against heavy smoking and alcohol abuse, plus a public relations
drive in support of good eating habits. A study released by Rospotrebnadzor
assigned 63 per cent of deaths in Russia to bad nutrition. While calling for
detailed labelling of food products, the agency blamed heavy consumption of
‘salt, sugar and fat’ for needless fatalities in the country and, especially among
women, the surge of obesity.115
Supporters of these objectives had a hard row to hoe. Data compiled for
The Lancet in 2018 showed that, even though both life expectancy and infant
mortality rates had greatly improved in Russia, they remained low compared
to countries with similar socio-demographic index levels. Russian women
(76.2) continued to live on average 11 years longer than men (65.4 years),
whose abuse of alcohol, drug use and smoking still prevailed.116 Minister of
Health at the time, Veronika Skvortsova, laid the issue out starkly when she
said that 70 per cent of fatalities among working-age men were associated
with alcohol abuse, which led to cirrhosis and multiple other health compli-
cations, plus accidents.117 A year-end report by the State Traffic Inspectorate
claimed that over 270,000 drunken drivers were stopped and 41,000 of them
arrested in 2020. Skvortsova was given some slight help in this regard when a
vigilante group calling itself ‘Lev Protiv’ (Lion Against) began patrolling
public places on weekends and reporting drinkers to the police, or pouring
the alcoholic beverage out.118
This group of young people also opposes smoking in public, sometimes
spraying the cigarette from a water bottle if the smoker is in a non-smoking
area and refuses to butt out. They take videos of their actions and post them
on a YouTube channel.119 Even though smoking has declined significantly in
Russia, anti-smokers still have a lot of work to do. A research report released
by Skolkovo’s Centre for Health Care noted in December 2019 that 30 per
cent of Russians still smoked cigarettes. Director of the Centre, Natalia
Komarova, said that smokers were mainly men and that only about 8 per cent
used vapes, hookahs or cigarettes with filters. Legislation adopted in that
month equated e-cigarettes with conventional ones when it came to public
places where smoking is prohibited.120
370 Quality of life
Cuts to medical services in 2019, especially in the regions, where Putin had
promised improvements, prompted protests that drew national attention.
Activists and pensioners marched with posters demanding that local hospitals
obey Putin’s orders that departments they closed be re-opened. In one case,
low wages and poor working conditions motivated staff and doctors at a
prominent cancer centre to walk out. They complained especially about their
inability to treat children properly because of infrastructure deterioration
and overcrowding. The walk-out was just one of many non-political actions
taken at a time when almost any social grievance could trigger a demonstration:
fires, floods, building and bridge collapses, unwanted garbage disposal
facilities, unwanted state, regional or church construction projects,
environment damage, police corruption and so on. Unauthorized spontane-
ous social protests were on the rise.121
Given the history of funding for healthcare, Russians were not impressed
by Putin’s pledge in November 2019 to increase the percentage of GDP
allocated to medical services. Financing of the sector would rise in 2020 to
4.1 per cent of GDP, he said, compared to the prior year’s 3.7 per cent.
Specialists in his audience in Kaliningrad told Putin that the funds allocated
to healthcare in his five-year projection were insufficient. He responded by
noting that 4.1 per cent was, indeed, lower than in many developed countries,
but the alternative was to raise taxes to the same level as those countries.122
The pandemic made this explanation look flimsy, at best.
A lack of medicinal drugs, caused by a dramatic drop in imported
medicines, regulations protecting domestic suppliers and, since 2019, a law
setting minimum prices on government tenders for the purchase of medicines,
had already grown serious before the pandemic hit Russia. Nearly a quarter
of the tenders were not even bid on. The problem is especially acute for
victims of diseases like HIV/AIDS and cystic fibrosis, who rely mostly on
imported antibiotics. In his address to the Federal Assembly that year, Putin
demanded that the issue of shortages be resolved ‘as soon as possible so that
people, especially parents of sick children, no longer find themselves in a
hopeless situation when the necessary medicines cannot be legally obtained’.
The situation was worse in the regions where, he said, ‘purchases were actu-
ally being thwarted’, leaving people without ‘vital medicines’.123 All of this
came back to haunt the government in 2020.

Alcohol & drug abuse

CPSU leaders from the time of Nikita Khrushchev in the 1950s to M.S.
Gorbachev in the 1980s have tried to curb the abuse of alcohol by Russians,
with very limited success. Every leader was well aware of the problems the
heavy consumption of alcohol caused in the workplace and in homes, that is,
the loss of work time, industrial and traffic accidents, and domestic abuse.
Low life expectancy, increases in suicides and a rise in crime were among
other consequences of heavy drinking. What’s more, anti-alcohol abuse
campaigns prompted drinkers to turn to dangerous home brews (samogon)
 Quality of life 371
and, because the sale of vodka was a state monopoly, also cost the government
large sums of money.
In the 21st century, Putin could justifiably claim greater success in such
efforts than any of his predecessors.124 Rospotrebnadzor announced in April
2018 that deaths from alcohol poisoning in Russia had dropped by 25 per
cent in 2017. The consumer monitoring agency said that further steps taken
over the year, such as tighter controls over retail sales of non-drinkable
alcohol (e.g. food additives and flavouring), a ban on selling alcohol after 11
p.m. and increases in the minimum price on spirits, were among reasons for
the improvement.125 Deputy Prime Minister Golikova submitted a recom-
mendation to raise the legal drinking age from 18 to 21 to the Duma in
February 2019.126 That failed. Nevertheless, the WHO reported in October
2019 that alcohol consumption in Russia had fallen 43 per cent between 2003
and 2016, and credited alcohol control measures introduced by various
ministries during that period. This result also helped explain the rise in
Russian life expectancy.127
Golikova and Murashko continued to advocate raising the age for retail
purchase of alcohol to 21, even as the spread of the coronavirus infection
took up the time of the ministry.128
Much less satisfactory was the important matter of children’s healthcare.
A study issued by the Audit Chamber in February 2020 harshly criticized the
‘unsatisfactory technical and sanitary conditions’ of medical facilities used
for children’s clinics. In the regions, some of these buildings lacked running
water and central heating, and about half of them were not readily accessible
by wheelchair. The paper noted that doctors and administrators alike
complained about underfunding, too few trained technicians and dilapidated
infrastructure. Deputy Director of the Audit Chamber, Galina Izotova,
echoed these concerns in her introduction to the report.129 Shortly after the
Audit Chamber’s study, and perhaps connected to its findings, the Ministry
of Health issued new models for organizing health clinics so as to provide a
‘continuous increase in the availability, quality and safety of medical care by
redirecting all the resources of the system to meet the needs of patients’. The
ministry allocated funds to provide inspectors who would check for compli-
ance at least every three years.130

Infectious diseases other than COVID-19

Reviews were mixed when it came to the management of infectious diseases
prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. By the end of 2019, HIV cases were
reaching epidemic levels, surpassing one million people. Although these
numbers were disclosed by Rospotrebnadzor’s AIDS Control and Prevention
Research Centre, the government remained mostly silent on the matter.
According to activists, discrimination against LGBT communities was one
of the reasons for the increase; others blamed the indifference of the
government towards health issues in the regions. In the opinion of the Federal
AIDS Centre director, Vadim Pokrovsky, the main culprits were insufficient
372 Quality of life
funding for treatment and preventative programmes. Doubtless the Orthodox
Church’s condemnation of gays and lesbians, and the lack of progressive sex
education courses in schools, contributed to the problem.131
In at least one area, tuberculosis, there appeared to have been a major
breakthrough. Skvortsova announced in 2018 that the WHO placed Russia
close to the top among countries reducing the incidence of TB. The death
rate for the disease dropped by 60 per cent over the previous decade, she said,
and the number of cases by over 40 per cent. The disease remained a problem,
though, as nearly 80,000 Russians contracted it in 2018, or about 48 per
100,000 people.132

World Cup, fitness and sport

Putin has said many times that the road to health in Russia lies with fitness
and competitive sport for everyone. He set the tone himself by remaining
obviously fit, refraining from smoking and consuming little alcohol. His
viewpoint also meant that success in international competitions by Russian
teams and individuals were important both for reasons of national pride and
also as an example to set for Russia’s youth. Victories in major sporting
events, such as the World Cup, were central to these ambitions, just as the
doping scandal of 2015 that caused Russia to be banned from country
competition in the Olympics (IOC) and the International Amateur Athletic
Federation was a major blow to the country’s sporting prestige and national
pride (see ahead).
All of his concerns about the place of sport in the national consciousness
played out during preparations for the 2018 World Cup. As tickets sold out
quickly, the sports ministry worried about acts of terrorism, hooliganism and
the flood of tourists to the most watched events in international sport.
Various crises in international relations and accelerated sanctions regimes
caused governments, especially Western governments, to threaten boycotts,
and the huge costs for facelifts on 11 host cities, 12 new stadiums, new hotels
and airport reconstruction were daunting. Security expenses were estimated
in the billions.
Just as it had savagely denigrated Russian efforts to prepare for the Winter
Olympics in Sochi in 2014, the Western media fell over itself to find fault in
the lead-up to the FIFA events in Russia. Though Western leaders stayed
away, there were no team or national boycotts for the World Cup and about
200,000 foreign visitors arrived in the country before the month-long
tournament opened on 14 June 2018.
Even with all the carping from abroad, the World Cup month was an
enormous success. Tens of thousands attended the games, had fun, spent
millions and went home satisfied. Russians revelled in the competition as
their own underrated team advanced to the quarter-finals, greatly exciting
Russian fans, few of whom expected their team to get that far. As the New
York Times put it, ‘the crowd has gone absolutely bonkers in here’.133 Even
Navalny cheered them on, while a state-owned newspaper called a victory
 Quality of life 373
over Spain a ‘miracle’.134 In difficult times, an opportunity for pride in
accomplishments witnessed by the entire world, both in the unexpected
success of its team and in terms of the World Cup tournament itself, was
an important boost to Russian morale. Putin basked in responses such as
FIFA president Gianni Infantino’s description of the 2018 World Cup as
the ‘best ever’.135
These words were an enormous relief to Russia’s sporting circles, who were
still reeling from the well-known doping scandal, making the World Cup
worth its extraordinary expense. There was even a short-lived breakthrough
in Russia’s status as pariah in international track and field competition when,
in September 2018, the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) voted 9–2 to
reinstate Russia’s anti-doping agency, RUSADA. The WADA’s controversial
decision cleared a path for Russians to once again participate in major
international track and field competitions. On the other hand, the IAAF
maintained its suspension of Russia’s athletics federation.136 The relief was
short-lived, and RUSADA found itself facing sanctions again in November
2019. WADA’s Compliance Review Committee (CRC) ruled that RUSADA
was non-compliant, claiming it found evidence of manipulation of data from
a Russian laboratory. In December, WADA banned Russian athletes from
Olympics for the next four years, though ‘clean’ athletes were eligible to
compete as neutrals, i.e. absent the Russian flag, anthem and team name.
Putin called the decision ‘unfair’ and politically motivated.137 Russia’s appeal
to regain team identity went before the Court of Arbitration for Sport in
Lausanne nearly a year later.138
The appeal failed and a decision was reached to exclude Russia from
‘major’ international competitions: the Summer Olympics 2020 in Tokyo; the
IAAF World Championships in 2021; the Winter Olympics 2022 in Beijing;
the Women’s World Cup 2023; and the Summer Universiades in 2021 and
2023 (scheduled to be hosted by Russia). They are allowed to compete as a
neutral team in Qatar at the Men’s Football World Cup 2022.139 Because it
was too late to re-schedule, Russia will host the world’s volleyball
championships in 2022. It also retained planned tournaments that were at the
European rather than the world levels.
The Court of Arbitration offered some relief in December 2020. The four-
year ban proposed by WADA was cut in half and clean Russian athletes will
be able to compete in the Tokyo Olympics (2021) and Beijing’s Winter Games
(2022). They can use ‘Russia’ on their uniforms, along with the words ‘neutral
athlete’. In addition, RUSADA was ordered to pay a hefty fine to WADA.
The doping scandal had resulted in a limited purge of senior sport officials
in 2016, and it wasn’t until 2020 that a real sweep was undertaken in Russia’s
international sports scene. The sports minister, Pavel Kolobkov, a former
Olympian gold medallist who was named to the post in 2016 as a sop to
critics, lost his job in January 2020. Oleg Matytsin, the president of the
International University Sport Federation since 2015, and a member of the
IOC’s education commission, took his place and vowed to fight for Russia’s
reinstatement. Dmitry Chernyshenko, the former head of the 2014 Sochi
374 Quality of life
Olympic Committee, was named as one of eight new deputy prime ministers,
and the ministers for sport, health, education and culture were replaced. The
sports world thought that this marked a final clean-up of the Russia’s
international sports activities.
Even that purge had limits. In August 2020, RUSADA fired its head, Yury
Ganus, after he accused Russia’s sports leadership of failing to address the
issue of doping seriously enough. Other officials resigned in protest of the
firing.140
Not getting much help from management, individual Russian athletes tried
to clear their own reputations, 43 of them as third parties in the four-day
hearing in Lausanne held in November 2020. Others fought back earlier.
Two-time Olympic biathlete champion Olga Zaitseva, now retired, filed a
defamation suit in July against Grigory Rodchenkov, the doctor who claimed
to have prepared drug cocktails for Russian sports stars, and whose testimony
swayed WADA. Insisting that none of his tale was true, she and two others
sued him and also filed an appeal with the Court of Arbitration for Sport.
Her vehement denials that she used illegal drugs were lent credence by
information posted in Der Spiegel that revealed inconsistencies in
Rodchenkov’s claims. At about the same time the president of the Russian
Athletics Federation (RusAF), Yevgeny Yurchenko, resigned. He told
reporters that the RusAF could not afford the heavy fine imposed on it by
World Athletics.141 The scandal was a bitter pill for Russian sports enthusi-
asts to swallow, and left a long-term stain on Russia’s sports reputation.
In the winter of 2020 the Duma adopted a package of bills that reorganized
sports at the amateur and mass level. These were based on instructions given
to the Presidential Council for the Development of Physical Culture and
Sports by Putin in October 2019, and provided frameworks for various
physical culture and sports societies. Local and regional organizations were
handed greater obligations to plan and run inter-republic competitions,
manage sports teams and sponsor widespread participation in sporting
activities. According to Mikhail Degtyarev, then head of the Duma
Committee on physical education, sports, tourism and youth affairs, the
purpose of the bills was to raise the percentage of citizens who were ‘system-
atically involved’ in physical education and sport.142

Religion
Russia has four ‘historical religions’, Christian Orthodoxy, Judaism, Islam
and Lutheranism, each of which gets subsidies from the state. Most other
Christian organizations and mainstream non-Christian religions are repre-
sented in Russia too, among them an active Shamanisn in Siberia.
According to the 1997 Russian law on religious associations, adherents of
all religions have a right to ‘freedom of conscience and freedom of reli-
gious creed, and also to equality before the law, regardless of attitude
toward religion and beliefs’.143 It doesn’t always work out that way in
practice.
 Quality of life 375
Catholicism functions openly, for less than 1 per cent of the population. As
a proselytizing religion whose faithful owe allegiance to a foreign person, the
Pope, it is looked upon with suspicion by the Russian state and as a competitor
by the Orthodox Church.
Other proselytizing Christian denominations are treated more harshly.
The Jehovah’s Witnesses (JWs), for example, is labelled an extremist organi-
zation by law and is prevented from congregating or handing out literature.
The Russian Supreme Court ruled that the JWs put the Kingdom of God
above country and are therefore potentially subversive. Accordingly, all 395
branches in Russia were ordered closed. Authorities launched a campaign
against them in the spring of 2018, conducting raids and detaining dozens
of members. In Novosibirsk, police seized religious literature, cell phones
and electronic data from JW homes, and claimed to have found explosives.
The group denied any subversive activity.144 In February 2019, a Danish
Witness was found guilty of extremism and handed a six-year sentence in
Russia, becoming the first member to be imprisoned for his faith. About 75
more Witnesses were arrested in the winter–spring of that year, and a spokes-
man for the JW asserted that some adherents were tortured after 19 were
arrested in Surgut. Nearly 800 raids were conducted in 2019 and, as of
December, over 300 people had been charged or convicted since the law
passed in 2017.145
The JWs’ disregard for national anthems and flags angers Russians, but the
notion that they are ‘extremist’ in the manner of ISIS is, of course, nonsense.
Problematic for Russian church leaders and secular authorities is the fact that
the JWs have a centralized structure with its headquarters in the US.146
International condemnation may have had some effect. Several sentences
imposed on Russian JWs in 2019 were overturned in March 2020 by a court
in Penza, and the Danish Witness was released early, in June 2020, and
ordered to pay a fine in lieu of his remaining sentence.147
The difficulties facing the JWs, and other proselytizing religions such as the
Church of the Latter-Day Saints (Mormons), stem in part from sweeping
anti-terrorist laws passed in 2016 that included a ban on preaching or
disseminating religious materials unless by authorized officials in registered
religious buildings or sites. The laws covered activities in private homes and
communications online.148
Police arrested leaders of the Church of Scientology (CS) in St. Petersburg
in 2017 and accused them of extremism, illegal business activities and
incitement. The CS is not a recognized religious institution in Russia, where
it is considered a cult because of its programme of ideas called Dianetics.
With its headquarters in California, its international financial enterprises
linked globally and its proselytizing practices, it is unsurprising that Russian
authorities are suspicious of the organization. France and Germany also
consider CS a cult. Their sites in Russia have been raided regularly and sev-
eral members have been charged with fraud and money laundering.149
The Constitutional Court heard complaints from Pentecostal groups who
were fined for posting notices of their religious premises inside private
376 Quality of life
residential premises, in short form, and not outside. The Court ruled in
November that such notices must also be placed outside the building (if only
in the foyer) using its full official name: Word of Life Church of Christians of
Evangelical Faith (Pentecostals). Citizens must be able to understand what
religion ‘they are dealing with’, so said the Court.150
At about 80 per cent of the faithful in Russia, Orthodoxy is by far the
dominant historic religion. Its Russianness made it a victim of the Ukrainian
crisis. Shortly after Poroshenko’s accusations against the Russian Orthodox
Church in Ukraine (see Chapter 5), the Ukrainian Orthodox Church split
from the ROC, with the blessing of the Ecumenical Patriarch in
Constantinople. In response, the Russian organization froze relations with
Patriarch Bartholomew I, archbishop of Constantinople (Istanbul), who in
turn rehabilitated Ukraine’s Patriarch Filaret. Filaret had been
excommunicated in 1997 for advocating a split with Russian Orthodoxy.
Consequently, Putin could no longer claim to be the secular leader of the
entire Orthodox Christian world (Russkii mir), and religious issues became
yet another variable in the Russia-Ukraine contest.151
The degree to which church affiliation became toxic in Ukraine was
symbolized in February 2019 when the Ukrainian SBU (security forces)
prevented a bishop in the Moscow Patriarchate Church in Ukraine from
re-entering the country and stripped him of his Ukrainian citizenship. Bishop
Gedeon (Yuriy Kharon), who is also a US citizen, was accused of undefined
‘anti-Ukrainian activity’.152
Islam is the second-largest religion in Russia, numbering around 15 million
adherents (or 10 per cent of the population). Several subjects of the Federation
are predominantly Islamic: Chechnya, Ingushetia, Dagestan, Karachay-
Cherkessia and Kabardino-Balkaria, while Tatarstan and Bashkortostan are
around 40 per cent Muslim. Although followers of Islam in the North
Caucasus have produced domestic and international terrorists who serve in
the ranks of ISIL, al-Qaeda and other such organizations, the republics
themselves remain loyal components of the Federation, perhaps because
their individual GDPs depend on Moscow’s largesse. As we saw in Chapter 2,
inter-ethnic tensions in Russia are more often than not driven first by
traditional religious disputes and then shaped by levels of poverty,
unemployment and uncertainty about the future.
The Jewish population of Russia makes up less than 1 per cent of the total
and is mainly secular. Their once-large numbers were decimated by pogroms
under the tsars, murders by invading Nazis and the Stalinist regime and,
more recently, by mass emigration to Israel. The Jewish Autonomous Oblast
(Birobidzhan) has about 2,000 Jews, a small part of the oblast’s population.
On a more encouraging note, in June 2019 Putin presided over the
inauguration of a monument dedicated to Jewish resistance leaders in Nazi
concentration camps and ghettos. Construction of the monument was
launched in January 2018 with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu in
attendance. The monument is located at the Jewish Museum and Tolerance
Centre in Moscow.
 Quality of life 377
Another change for the better came when a law providing religious pil-
grims with special status came into effect in November 2019. This status will
be provided only to registered religious organizations, though pilgrims to
sites can travel independently; for example, foreign Doukhobors who travel
to the Tolstoy estate, Yasnaya Polyana. The law’s main expressed purpose is
to prevent scams by agencies or individuals that take money for pilgrimages
and then don’t fulfil their promises.
Putin meets annually with representatives of Russian religious associations.
On National Unity Day, 4 November 2020, delegates from Orthodox,
Lutheran, Evangelical, Old-Rite and Armenia Christian establishments, plus
Muslim, Jewish and Buddhist organizations attended. Putin stressed national
unity and the role that all religions had played on historical turning points,
such as the Time of Troubles and World War II. ‘Inter-ethnic and inter-
religious peace is the keystone for our huge country’, he said, while urging
religious leaders to help harmonize relations and ‘prevent extremism and
terrorism’. He cited from the Bible, the Quran, the Torah and Buddha to
augment his video-conferenced message.153

Constitutional amendments 2020

The amendments proposed by Putin in 2020 included a description of the
Russian Federation as a country that preserved ‘the memory of the ancestors
who transmitted to us ideals and faith in God’. This addition was proposed
to Putin by Patriarch Kirill and representatives of the other historic religions
in Russia. It did not counter other articles that guaranteed Russians the right
to profess any religion, or none, or violate the fact that officially Russia is a
secular state.154

Coronavirus & the Church

Reluctant to act at first, the Orthodox Church finally issued a series of 22
sanitary measures (no kissing of relics) for liturgy services, baptisms and
communion, and requested that people with symptoms should not visit
churches. These prescriptions were explained by citing Mathew 4:7, ‘Thou
shalt not tempt the Lord thy God’.155 It was not until late April that Patriarch
Kirill recommended that parishioners pray at home and watch his Easter
service on television, though he left final decisions to diocesan bishops.

Demographics, immigration & the workforce

Rosstat data showed that the number of Russian citizens decreased in 2018,
dropping to 146.8 million. Rising urbanization and slower immigration were
part of this trend.156 Hoping to rectify the population loss, in March 2019
Putin signed a plan of action called the ‘Concept of State Migration Policy’
which made it easier for immigrants to gain citizenship. He named post-
Soviet states with Russian-speakers as potential ‘donor countries’ and
378 Quality of life
ordered the creation of working groups headed by Tatyana Likatkina to
implement the Concept.157 Seeking Russian-speaking immigrants was under-
standable, but it was likely that ‘Russian-looking’ was an unstated criterion as
well.
The simplified rules brought an upsurge in the granting of citizenships. For
example, during the first quarter of 2020 double the number of passports
were issued to foreigners than during the same time in 2019. Two-thirds of
these, 108,500, were former Ukrainian nationals.158
Putin had taken up the never-ending problem of population decline in his
February 2019 address to the Federal Assembly by offering mortgage benefits
and property tax incentives to Russians with large families. These would
augment the increased aid already pledged to low income families, families
with ‘disabled’ children, and improved access to doctors and medical assis-
tants in small towns and the countryside.159 Golikova told journalists that the
proposed social benefits would be implemented as of January 2020 and cost
about ₽80 billion, a sum covered in the annual budget. At that time, Russia’s
National Welfare fund held about ₽2 trillion ($70 billion). Her assurances
were overtaken by the pandemic and so had to be re-issued later in 2020
under quite different conditions.
In further efforts to attract new citizens, in April 2020 the Duma adopted
(302–0) legislation allowing for dual citizenships. Authors of the bill hoped to
draw new citizens from Russian speakers in post-Soviet states and Germany,
who will no longer have to renounce their other citizenships. The bill exempted
spouses and children from a regulation that requires five consecutive years in
residence before becoming eligible for citizenship.160
Employment opportunities were already difficult for labour migrants. For
example, an amendment to immigration regulations in June 2018 compli-
cated the process of registering foreign employees.161 The law now compels
labour migrants to register a residence address with the Federal Migration
Service (FNS) soon after their arrival in Russia. Previously, an employer
could list them with a work address only. Since many, perhaps most, migrants
rent space off the books, landlords do not want to comply with the new rule.
This regulatory restriction further undermines Russia’s workforce, which is
rated as one of the least productive in the world.162
The regulation mirrored the growing xenophobia in Russia revealed in
surveys conducted by the Levada Centre. According to polls conducted in
2018, the percentage of Russians who approved restrictions on certain
‘undesirable’ nationalities had more than doubled since the previous year. So,
too, had the number of Russians who advocated ‘Russia for [ethnic] Russians’
(Rossiia dlia russkikh). Even as the Central Asian and Balkan immigrants
established deep roots in major Russian cities they faced significant
discrimination.163
The problem was exemplified by angry anti-immigrant rallies in Siberia in
2019 after reports spread that three Central Asian migrants had abducted
and raped a woman in Yakutsk. Police had to place a local mosque under
protection, and authorities urged calm as they arrested three persons, all
 Quality of life 379

Table 9.1 Q: Would You Limit those who come to live in Russia …, Percentage?

July 2017 July 2018

Roma 17 32
Chinese 15 31
Vietnamese 12 26
Immigrants from former Central Asian 19 25
Republics of the USSR
From the Caucasus 22 23
Any country 28 28
Ukrainians 8 17
Europeans 4 12
***
Approve ‘Russia for Russians’ 10 19
Limit flow of immigrants altogether 58 67
Do not limit flow 28 28
Source: Compiled by the author from data produced by the Levada-tsentr, 19-25 July 2018, and
by Elena Mukhametshina, ‘V Rossii rezko vyrosli ksenofobnye nastroeniia’, Vedomosti, 26
August 2018.

Kyrgyz. The level of distrust of Muslim migrants remained high in Siberia

and other unauthorized protests were held; bus drivers failed to show up,
fearing violence, and fruit stands usually run by migrants were closed. The
governor of Sakha, Aysen Nikolaev, announced new measures against illegal
migration, among other things barring them, counter-productively, from
working in transport, commerce, construction and agriculture (Table 9.1).164
These obstacles aside, labour immigrants into Russia, especially Russian
speakers from Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Tajikistan, jumped in the first quar-
ter of 2019 by nearly 100,000, almost double that of the same period in 2018.
The numbers record only those with valid work permits. Many more come in
illegally and work in the shadow economy, pay no taxes and, many believe,
depress wages for Russian and migrant quota workers.165
The coronavirus threw a different light onto the migrant labour situation
in 2020, when millions of registered and unregistered migrant workers lost
their jobs, especially in the construction sector. Most of them had little or no
financial support in Russia and also were unable to return to their, mostly,
Central Asian homelands.166 Aid provided to registered migrants by the
Russian government and charity groups helped, but the numbers were over-
whelming. Even after home countries lifted travel restrictions for citizens, the
situation remained difficult because planes and passenger trains were not
moving. Migrant workers by the thousands were still living in tent camps in
the late fall of 2020, waiting to go home. Russia’s Emergency Measures
Ministry provided tents and other assistance while the migrants’ respective
embassies in Russia did almost nothing to help them.167
Surveys conducted in the midst of the pandemic showed 51 per cent of
respondents now supported the idea of ‘Russia for Russians’, either fully or
within certain limits.168
380 Quality of life
Back to work
In his post-All Russia Vote meeting with the Council on Strategic Development
and National Projects, Putin requested that the revised prospects for national
development have as their unifying task the improvement of the peoples’
quality of life. That meant investments in life expectancy programmes,
fighting poverty, healthcare, education, research and development, plus
improved housing and road transportation. The new agenda was not much
different than previous ones. This time, though, he promised attention to
reality and turned the projects over to Mishustin on the assumption that he
would prove more efficient on the file than Medvedev had been. Pandemic
management was a theme throughout the council’s discussion of Russia’s
future and, not surprisingly, the national Healthcare Project now stood at the
top of the list of 13 fields covered by the proposed new plan. It included a
new system of long-term home care and the reorganization of vaccination
programmes. Schools, ‘especially in rural areas’, must get necessary equipment
for e-learning, and improved training facilities were to be made available to
both teachers and medical personnel. At a press conference, however, Peskov
warned that the earlier goals of raising life expectancy and cutting poverty in
half would have to be delayed. Putin gave the Council three months to pre-
pare a revised national development plan.169
Planning for the future did not mean that the pandemic was as yet under
control. As the number of confirmed cases in Russia soared in the fall,
officials found themselves again persuading citizens to wear masks, keep safe
distances from each other and avoid crowds. This was not a task Putin could
have foreseen when he launched the ‘January Revolution’ and the new social
agenda in July.
Talk of the national development plan faded even deeper from sight and
mind as the pandemic hit its second stride in October and November.
Unemployment numbers crept up and food prices rose. Putin called for a
food price cap in December, as we have seen, but that may have been too late.
As Russians had been doing for time immemorial, they were going to have to
wait awhile for the next stage in their improved quality of life.

Notes
1 Reports from ITAR-TASS, 20 October 1999, and Interfax, 14 December 1999, in
REDA 1999, Vol. 1 (2000), pp. 282–3.
2 Putin, ‘Otkrytoe pis’mo Vladimira Putina k rossiiskim izbirateliam’, Izvestiia 25
February 2000.
3 For a documentary narrative of the social impact of perestroika, the 1990s and
Putin’s early years, follow the appropriate chapters in J.L. Black, ed. USSR
Documents Annual and REDA. Vols. 1987–2007. Gulf Breeze, FL: Academic
International Press, 1988–2009. 32 volumes in all.
4 ‘Soveshchanie s chlenami Pravitel’stva’, Kremlin.ru, 17 March 2020, Kremlin.ru/
events/president/news/63001.
5 Irina Nevinnaia, ‘Poberegis’. V Rospotrebnadzore poiasnili, komu nado sdelat’
test na koronavirus’, Vedomosti, 1 March 2020; ‘How is Russia Preparing for the
 Quality of life 381
Coronavirus?’, The Moscow Times, 29 January 2020; ‘Coronavirus in Russia: The
Latest News’, The Moscow Times, 10 February 2020, and subsequent daily reports.
6 ‘Russia first nation to finish human trials for COVID vaccine’, The Economic
Times (India), 13 June 2020; ‘Russia Eyes First Coronavirus Vaccine Launch in
Mid-August’, The Moscow Times, 13 July 2020; Aleksandr Stepanov,
‘Dobrovol’tsam vveli vtoroi component vaktsiny ot COVID-19’, Rossiiskaia
gazeta, 13 July 2020.
7 ‘Russia Military Says Virus Vaccine Is Tested and Safe’, The Moscow Times, 15
July 2020; see also ‘Russia approves R-Pharm’s Coronavir for COVID-19
treatment’, Pharmaceutical Technology, 9 July 2020.
8 ‘Coronavirus in Russia: The Latest News, Feb. 28’, The Moscow Times, 28
February 2020.
9 Aleksandra Chunova, Bela Liauw, ‘V Moskve i Podmoskov’e zapretiat
nakhodit’sia na ulitse bez propiska’, Vedomosti, 29 March 2020.
10 ‘Sobyanin otkryl samyi krupnyi v Moskve statsionar dlia bol’nykh koronaviru-
som’, Kommersant, 27 March 2020; ‘Moscow to Build New $135M Coronavirus
Hospital – Reports’, The Moscow Times, 11 March 2020
11 Telegram, RBK, 7 May 2020, t.me/rbc_news/11867; ‘Soveshchanie o merakh po
bor’be s rasprostraneniem koronavirusa v Rossii’, 24 March 2020, kremlin.ru/
events/president/news/63053. A special website, Covid-19, ‘Operativnye dannye’,
provided a daily count. See stopkoronavirus.rf/#operational-data. On the problem
of getting accurate information from regional hospitals, see Judy Twigg, ‘Russia’s
Health Care System and the Covid-19 Pandemic’, Russian Analytical Digest,
No.251, 20 April 2020, pp. 2–5. See also, Piotr Sauer, Evan Gershkovich, ‘Russia
Is Boasting About Low Coronavirus Deaths. The Numbers Are Deceiving’, The
Moscow Times, 8 May 2020.
12 Mosgorzdrav.ru, Koronavirus COVID-19 informatsiia dlia grazhdan,
‘DEPSDRAV denied allegations of incorrect calculation of mortality from
COVID-19’, 13 May 2020, https://mosgorzdrav.ru/ru-RU/news/default/card/3952.
html; Ivan Nechepurenko, ‘A Coronavirus Mystery Explained: Moscow Has
1,700 Extra Deaths’, New York Times, 11 May 2020; ‘Why so few COVID-19
deaths?’, The Bell, 17 May 2020.
13 Andrew Higgins, ‘New Data Triples Russian’s Covid-19 Death Toll’, New York
Times, 29 December 2020; ‘Russia reveals it has world’s 3rd-highest overall Covid-
19 deaths after US & Brazil, per capita numbers similar to rest of Europe’, RT, 29
December 2020.
14 ‘Operativnoe soveshchanie s vits-prem’erami’, Novosti, 16 March 2020.
15 ‘Dva zhitelia Chechni zarazilis’ koronavirusom vo vremia khadzha’, Kavkazskii
Uzel, 24 March 2020.
16 Sobyanin website, 29 March 2020, https://www.sobyanin.ru/koronavirus-
ogranichenie-peredvizheniya-i-sospodderzhka-grazhdan.
17 Sobyanin website, 10 March 2020, https://www.sobyanin.ru/koronavirus-
dopolnitelnye-ogranicheniya-i-drugie-resheniya-100420.
18 Putin, ‘Soveshchanie po voprosy o sanitarno-epidemiologicheskoi obstanovke’,
Kremlin.ru, 20 April 2020, Kremlin.ru/events/president/news/63229; ‘Postroennaia
za metsiats infektsionnaia bol’nitsa v TiNAO nachala prinimat’ patsientov’, Moscow
City website, 21 April 2020, www.mos.ru/news/item/72917073/; ‘Moscow Opens
New Coronavirus Hospital Built in 30 Days’, The Moscow Times, 21 April 2020.
19 Putin, ‘Soveshchanie s rukovoditeliami sub’ektov Federatsii po voprosam pro-
tivodeistviia rasproctraneniiu koronavirusom infektsii’, Kremlin.ru, 28 April
2020, kremlin.ru/events/president/news/63288; ‘Putin ob’iavil o zavershenii
nerabochego perioda’, Kommersant, 11 May 2020.
20 Sobyanin website, https://www.sobyanin.ru/vtoroi-etap-smyagcheniya-ograniche-
nii-0106; ‘Sobyanin zaiavil Putinu o gotovnosto k paradu Pobedy’, Vedomosti, 27
June 2020.
382 Quality of life
21 ‘Zaniatost’ naseleniia’, Levada-tsentr, 19 May 2020, https://www.levada.
ru/2020/05/19/zanyatost-naseleniya/; ‘Pochti tret’ rossiiskoikh semei stolknulis’ so
snizheniem zarplaty v aprele’, Vedomosti,19 May 2020.
22 “Kafedra. Neotlozhnye sostoianiia’, https://www.facebook.com/groups/reanima-
tology/permalink/3532614320087598/, ‘Memory List’, https://sites.google.com/
view/covid-memory/home.
23 Memory List/Spisok pamiati, https://sites.google.com/view/covid-memory/
home?authuser=0; ‘V Rossii umerli 489 medikov, zarazivshikhsia koronavirusom’,
RIA Novosti, 18 June 2020.
24 ‘“Vam Putin obeshchal – pust’ Putin lichno i vydaet”’, Novaia gazeta, 28 April
2020; ‘Pochemu pandemiia privedet k padeniiu reitingov vlasti’, Levada-tsentr, 27
April 2020, https://www.levada.ru/2020/04/27/pochemu-pandemiya-privedet-k-
padeniyu-rejtingov-vlasti/.
25 Yurii Litvinenko, ‘Putin nazval “biurokaticheskoi kanitel’iu” situatsiiu s vyplatami
medikam’, Vedomosti, 15 April 2020; ‘Siberian Ambulance Crews Vow Hunger
Strike Over Putin’s Unpaid Virus Bonuses’, The Moscow Times, 15 May 2020.
26 See, e.g. Anton Troianovski, ‘As Coronavirus Overruns Russia, Doctors Are
Dying on the Front Lines’, New York Times, 14 May 2020; ‘Russia Slams New
York Times, Financial Times on Virus Deaths’, New York Times, 14 May 2020;
‘Third Russian Doctor Falls from Hospital Window After Coronavirus
Complaint’, The Moscow Times, 4 May 2020.
27 Ministerstvo Zdravookhraneniia RF, Vremennye metodicheskie rekomendatsii.
Profilaktika diagnostika i lechenie novoi koronovirusnoi infektsii (COVID-19),
28 May 2020.
28 Evan Gershkovich, Piotr Sauer, ‘As Russia Officials Back Hydroxychloroquine,
Doctors Take Matters Into Their Own Hands’, The Moscow Times, 1 June
2020.
29 Alena Yakushova, Svetlana Bocharova, ‘Putin ob’iavil o provedenii parada
Pobedy 24 iiunia’, Vedomosti, 26 May 2020.
30 Government of Russia, ‘The government has eased restrictions on entry into
Russia for foreign specialists’, 25 June 2020, http://government.ru/news/39929/.
31 Andrew Osborn, ‘Exclusive: Russia to roll out its first approved COVID-19 drugs
next week’, Reuters, 1 June 2020; ‘Things you need to know today’, The Moscow
Times, 3 June 2020.
32 Yuliya Fedorinova, ‘Russia to Ship Covid-19 Drug to Hospitals in Race for
Treatment’. Bloomberg News, 1 June 2020.
33 ‘Ukaz o edinovremennoi vyplate sem’iam, imeiushchim detei’, Kremlin.ru, 23
June 2020, Kremlin.ru/events/president/news/63553; Artem Grish, ‘Putin ob’iavil
o prodlenii vyplat medrabotnikam’, Vedomosti, 24 June 2020.
34 Aeroflot, ‘Aeroflot korrektiruet programme mezhdunarodnykh reisov na avgust’,
6 August 2020, https://www.aeroflot.ru/xx-ru/news/61813?_preferredLocale=
xx&_preferredLanguage=ru.
35 ‘Vtoraia volna’, Kommersant, 27 October 2020.
36 Ukaz Prezidenta Rossiiskoi Federatsii ot 12.10.2020 No. 620, ‘O Mezhvedomstvennoi
komissii Soveta Bezopasnosti Rossiiskoi Federatsii po voprosam sozdaniia
natsional’noi sistemy zashchity ot novykh infektsii’, http://publication.pravo.gov.
ru/Document/View/0001202010120052?index=6&rangeSize=1.
37 These numbers come from a government website for daily information on corona-
virus: stopkoronavirus.ru. They were reprinted daily in the government’s
Rossiiskaia gazeta and the independent The Moscow Times.
38 ‘Meeting of the Coordination Council … to combat the spreads of new coronavi-
rus infection in the RF’, 9 November 2020, http://government.ru/news/40801/.
39 ‘Rospetrebnadzor vvel vseobshchii masochnyi rezhim’, Rossiiskaia gazeta, 27
October 2020; ‘Russia Reinstates Mask Mandate, Restricts Nightlife to Stop
Virus Spread’, The Moscow Times, 27 October 2020.
 Quality of life 383
40 ‘2 in 3 Medics Say Russia Unprepared for Second Coronavirus Wave – Poll’, The
Moscow Times, 15 October 2020; Pjotr Sauer, ‘“We’re in Hell”: Russia’s Second
Wave of COVID-19 Is Catching the Regions Off Guard’, The Moscow Times, 27
October 2020; ‘Chinovniki ob’iasnili skoplenie trupov v podvalakh gospitalia v
Barnaule’, Interfax, 22 October 2020; Leah Silinsky, ‘COVID-19 in Russia’s
Arctic’, Russian Analytical Digest, No. 256, 5 September 2020, pp. 11–14.
41 ‘Koronavirus: strakhi i mery’, Levada-tsentr, 2 November 2020, https://www.
levada.ru/2020/11/02/koronavirus-strahi-i-mery/.
42 Putin, ‘Soveshchanie s chlenami Pravitel’stva’, Kremlin.ru, 28 October 2020,
kremlin.ru/events/president/news/64293; Anastasia Shinkeeva, ‘Putin poruchil
vydelits regionam 5 mlrd rub. na lekarstva ot koronavirusa’, Vedomosti, 28
October 2020.
43 Putin, ‘Investitsionnyi forum “Rossiia zovet!”’, Kremlin.ru, 29 October 2020,
kremlin.ru/events/president/news/64296.
44 Embassy of China in Russia, ‘Notice of temporary suspension of entry from
Russia for persons holding valid Chinese visas and residence permits’, 5 November
2020, http://ru.china-embassy.org/rus/lsfw/bc/t1829738.htm.
45 Ukaz Mera Moskvy, 10 Noiabria 2020 g. No. 107-UM 2020, ‘O vnesenii izmen-
eniia v ukaz Mera Moskvy ot 8 iiuniia 2020 g. No. 68-UM’, published in
Rossiiskaia gazeta, 10 November 2020.
46 Putin, ‘Otkrytie meditsinskikh tsentrov Minoborony dlia lecheniia patsientov c
COVID-19’, Kremlin.ru, 2 December 2020, kremlin.ru/events/president/
news/64535.
47 ‘Ezhegodnaia press-konferentsiia Vladimir Putina’, Kremlin.ru, 17 December
2020, Kremlin.ru/events/president/news/64671.
48 Stephanie Nebehjay, Karen Lema, ‘“Vaccine nationalism” will make the corona-
virus pandemic worse, WHO says’, Global News (Reuters), 21 August 2020; on
COVAX, see Geoffrey York, ‘New agreements seek to overcome “vaccine apart-
heid” in the developing world’, Globe and Mail, 19 December 2020. For Gavi, the
Vaccine Alliance, see, https://www.gavi.org/our-alliance/about.
49 Marco Hafner, et alia, ‘COVID-19 and the cost of vaccine nationalism’, Rand
Corporation, https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA769-1.html,
accessed 4 November 2020; ‘“Vaktsinnyi natsionalizm”: k chemu mozhet privesti
gonka stran za sredstvom ot COVID-19’, Aktual’nye kommentarii, 3 November
2020.
50 ‘Rossiiskaia vaktsina ot koronavirusa postupit v oborot s 1 ianvaria 2021 goda’,
TASS, 11 August 2020; Talha Khan Burki, ‘The Russian vaccine for COVID-19’,
The Lancet, 4 September 2020.
51 See, e.g. Jon Cohen, ‘Russia’s approval of a COVID-19 vaccine is less than meets
the press release’, Science, 11 August 2020; Andrew E. Kramer, ‘Worldwide
concern as Putin announces a coronavirus vaccine despite lack of testing’, Globe
and Mail, 12 August 2020. Ukaz
52 Denis Y. Logunov and many others, ‘Safety and immunogenicity of an rAd26 and
… in two open, non-randomised phase 1/2 studies from Russia’, The Lancet, 4
September 2020.
53 ‘Which Countries Have Signed Up for Russia’s Coronavirus Vaccine?’, The
Moscow Times, 26 August 2020; ‘Rossiiskaia vaktsina ot koronvirusa postupit v
oborot s 1 ianvaria 2021 goda’, TASS, 11 August 2020; ‘The maximum volume of
COVID vaccine supplies will start in November–December’, Interfax, 31 August
2020; Justin Cremer, ‘Skepticism and caution greet Russia’s COVID-19 vaccine’,
Alliance for Science (Cornell), 12 August 2020.
54 ‘“World’s First” Coronavirus Vaccine: What We Know So Far About Russian
Injection’, The Moscow Times, 12 August 2020.
55 ‘Opros prodemonstriroval nedoverie vrachei k vaktsine ot koronavirusa’, RBC.
ru, 14 August 2020.
384 Quality of life
56 ‘Minzdrav odobril ambulatornoe primenenie dvukh preparatov ot COVID-19’,
RIA Novosti, 17 September 2020; ‘Russia Clears Two Coronavirus Drugs for
Pharmacy Sale’, The Moscow Tines, 18 September 2020.
57 Putin, ‘75-ia sessiia General’noi Assamblei OON’, Kremlin.ru, 22 September
2020, kremlin.ru/events/president/news/64074.
58 CISION, ‘RDIF and ChemRar to supply Avifavir to 17 countries’, Russian Direct
Investment Fund (RDIF), 24 September 2020; https://www.prnewswire.co.uk/news-
releases/rdif-and-chemrar-to-supply-avifavir-to-17-countries-884826336.html.
59 ‘More Countries Line Up for Russia’s Sputnik V Coronavirus Vaccine’, The
Moscow Times, 13 November 2020.
60 ‘Golikova announced the start of mass COVID vaccination in the Russian
Federation in 2021’, Interfax, 24 November 2020; Sputnik V. Newsroom, ‘Second
interim analysis of clinical trial data showed a 91.4% efficacy for the Sputnik V
vaccine on day 28 after the first dose; vaccine efficacy is over 95% 42 days after the
first dose’, 23 November 2020, https://sputnikvaccine.com/newsroom/pressreleases/
second-interim-analysis-of-clinical-trial-data-showed-a-91-4-efficacy-for-the-
sputnik-v-vaccine-on-d/; ‘RDIF and Hetero agree to produce over 100 million
d0ses of the Sputnik V vaccine in India’, 27 November 2020, https://sputnikvaccine.
com/newsroom/pressreleases/rdif-and-hetero-agree-to-produce-over-100-million-doses-
of-the-sputnik-v-vaccine-in-india/.
61 Petrovax, ‘The First Group of Volunteers are Vaccinated with AD5-NCOV
Candidate Vaccine in Russia’, 21 September 2020, http://petrovax.com/press_
centre/news/2020/1881/.
62 Kseniia Vorontsova, ‘Putin ob’iavil o registratsii v RF vtoroi vaktsinu ot COVID-
19’, Rossiiskaia gazeta, 14 October 2020; ‘Bolee 400 tys. rossiiskikh voennykh
budut privity ot koronavirusa’, Interfax, 27 November 2020.
63 Sergei Sobyanin, ‘Sobyanin anonsiroval otkrytie 4 dekabriia zapisi na vaktsinat-
siiu ot COVID-19’, tweet reprinted in Rossiiskaia Gazeta, 3 December 2020;
‘Moscow Announces Coronavirus Vaccination Drive’, The Moscow Times, 3
December 2020.
64 Kate Thomas, David Gelles, Carl Zimmer, ‘Pfizer’s Early Data Shows Vaccine Is
More Than 90% Effective’, New York Times, 10 November 2020; ‘Russia’s Sputnik
V Coronavirus Vaccine 92% Effective – Interim Data’, The Moscow Times, 11
November 2020; Sputnik V, ‘The First Interim Data Analysis of the Sputnik V
Vaccine Against COVID-19 Phase III Clinical Trials … Demonstrated 92%
Efficacy’, 11 November 2020, https://sputnikvaccine.com/newsroom/pressreleases/
the-first-interim-data-analysis-of-the-sputnik-v-vaccine-against-covid-19-phase-
iii-clinical-trials-/.
65 ‘Klinika v “Skolkovo” planiruet privesti v Rossiiu inostrannye vaktsiny ot korona-
virusa’, Forbes, 28 December 2020; ‘Moscow Clinic Seeks to Bring Pfizer,
Moderna Vaccines to Russia’, The Moscow Times, 29 December 2020; ‘What you
need to know today’, The Moscow Times, 28, 29, 31 December 2020, 1 January
2021.
66 Anna Kiseleva, ‘V Rossii nachalas’ massovaia vaktsinatsiia ot kovida vrachei i
uchitelei’, VTimes, 7 December 2020; Pjotr Sauer, Felix Light, ‘As Russia Begins
Mass Coronavirus Vaccination, Its Medics Aren’t on Board’, The Moscow Times,
8 December 2020; ‘Pasport privitogo ot COVID-19 budut s ianvariia vydavat’
avtomaticheski na portale gosuslug’, TASS, 29 December 202l.
67 ‘5 Questions About Russia’s Sputnik V Vaccine, Answered’, The Moscow Times,
3 December 2020.
68 ‘Naibolee trevozhashchie problemu’, Levada-tsentr, 24 April 2020, www.levada.
ru/2018/04/24/naibolee-trevozhashhnie-problemy-3/.
69 ‘Vladimir Putin’, www.levada.ru/2018/05/07/vladimir-putin-6/.
70 ‘Natsional’nye proekty: kliuchevye tseli i ozhidaemye rezul’taty’, 11 February
2019, government.ru/news/35675; ‘Putin’s Ambitious Plan to Overhaul Russia’s
 Quality of life 385
Economy Will Cost $390 Bln, Government Estimates’, The Moscow Times, 11
February 2019.
71 Anastasia Manuylova, ‘Meditsina vazhnee pensii. Rossiiane zhdut reform v zdra-
vookhranenii’, Kommersant, 23 May 2018.
72 ‘Government report on its performance in 2018’, government.ru/en/news/36422,
17 April 2019.
73 Putin, ‘Poslanie Prezidenta Federal’nomu Sobraniiu’, Kremlin.ru, 20 February
2019, kremlin.ru/events/president/news/59863.
74 ‘Poslanie Prezidenta Federal’nomu Sobraniiu’, Kremlin.ru, 15 January 2020, krem-
lin.ru/events/president/news/62582. These changes were to Article 75, a) 5, b) 6.
75 ‘Trevozhashche problemy’, Levada-tsentr, 25 September 2019, www.levada.
ru/2019/09/25/trevozhashhie-problemy-2/.
76 ‘Mikhail Mishustin poruchil podgotovit’ izmeneniia v zakon o federal’nom
budzhete na 2020-2022 gody i zakon o biudzhete Pensionnogo fonda …’, 22
January 2020, government.ru/news/38805/.
77 Martin Brand, ‘Fighting Poverty in Russia’, Russian Analytical Digest, No. 249,
20 March 2020, pp. 2–5; Anne-Mari Sätre, The Politics of Poverty in Contemporary
Russia. London: Routledge, 2019.
78 ‘Pochemu sanktsii ne raskalyvaiut rossiiskuiu elitu’, Nezavisimaia gazeta, 10
April 2018.
79 Yevgenii Gaiva, ‘Uroven’ bezrabotitsy v Rossii snizilsia do istoricheskogo mini-
muma’, Rossiiskaia gazeta, 9 November 2018.
80 Anna Kholiavko, ‘Real’nye dokhody rossiian padaiut piatyi god podriad’,
Vedomosti, 25 January 2019.
81 ‘Kudrin predzlozhil otsenivat’ effektivnost’ vneshnei politiki RF po rezhimu
sanktsii’, Interfax, 10 October 2018; ‘New Sanctions Risk Wrecking Putin’s
6-Year Plan, Kudrin Warns’, The Moscow Times, 10 October 2018.
82 ‘One-Fifth of Russians Live in Poverty, 36 Percent In “Risk Zone”, Study Finds’,
RFE/RL, 21 November 2018.
83 ‘On the ratio of money incomes of the population to the subsistence minimum
and the number of poor people in the Russian Federation as a whole in the first
quarter of 2019’, Rosstat, July 2019, https://new.gks.ru/bgd/free/b04_03/IssWWW.
exe/Stg/d04/145.htm; ‘21M Russians Live in Poverty, Official Data Says’, The
Moscow Times, 30 July 2019.
84 ‘V Sovfede otsenili mnenie rossiian ob optimal’nom pensionnom vozraste’,
Izvestiia, 11 May 2018.
85 ‘Petitsiia protiv povysheniia pensionnogo vozrasta sobrala million podpisei’,
Vedomosti, 17 June 2018. For the actual petition, Konfederatsiia truda Rossii
website: www.ktr.su/content/news/detail.php?ID=5979.
86 ‘As World Watches Russia, Opposition Seeks to Score With Pension Protests’,
RFE/RL, 21 June 2018.
87 ‘Russian Supreme Court softens rules for street protests’, RT, 26 June 2018.
88 ‘Study Shows 17 Percent of Russian Men Won’t Live to Retirement’, The Moscow
Times, 27 June 2018.
89 ‘Skvortsovva rasskazala, kak izmenilas’ prodolzhitel’nost’ zhzni rossiian’,
Rossiiskaia gazeta, 24 September 2019.
90 ‘Gosduma odobrila povyshenie pensionnogo vozrasta v tret’em chtenii’,
Vedomosti, 27 September 2018; ‘Gosduma odobrila pensionnuiu reformu vo
vtorom chtenii’, Kommersant, 26 September 2018; see also ‘Russia’s Pension
Reform’, Russian Analytical Digest, No. 225, 8 October 2018.
91 ‘Samye shchedrye pensionnye podarki ot Putina poluchili zhenshchiny’, Vedomosti,
29 August 2018; ‘Putin ob’iavil o smiagchenii uslovii pensionnoi reformy’,
Vedomosti, 29 August 2018; ‘Putin Announces Concessions in Retirement Age
Hike’, The Moscow Times, 29 August 2018; ‘Golikova: samymi bednymi v Rossii
iavliaiutsia sem’i s det’mi, a ne pensionery’, Kommersant, 29 August 2018.
386 Quality of life
92 TsEPR, ‘Protests 2017-2018: growth of protest activity of the population’, 8
November 2018, http://cepr.su/2018/11/08/protests-2017-2018/.
93 ‘Sotsial’noe samochuvstvie rossiian: monitoring’, VTsIOM, 16 November 2018,
wciom.ru/index.php?id=236&uid=9430. ‘Most Russians Are Pessimistic About
Political and Economic Future – Poll’, The Moscow Times, 16 November 2018.
94 ‘Russia Shores up State Workers’ Support with New Wage Hike’, The Moscow
Times, 9 January 2019; Marina Gusenko, Irina Zhandarova, Irina Nevinnaya, ‘V
Rossii vyrosli posobiia pensii i zaplata’, Rossiiskaya gazeta, 9 January 2019.
95 ‘Bezrabotitsa v Rossii: v kakikh regionakh slozhnee vsego naiti rabotu’,
Aktual’nye kommentarii, 28 October 2019; Putin, opening address at the ‘Russia
Calling! Investment Forum’, Kremlin.ru, 20 November 2019, en.Kremlin.ru/
events/president/news/62073.
96 ‘Dmitry Medvedev answers questions …’, 14 February 2019, government.ru/en/
news/35737.
97 Kira Latukhina, ‘Putin poruchil podderzhat’ predpriiatiia monogorodov’,
Rossiiskaia gazeta, 6 June 2020. The other laws are described in the same issue of
the state-owned newspaper.
98 ‘Putin zaiavil on indeksatsii pensii na 6.3 protsenta’, Rossiiskaia gazeta, 23
September 2020;
99 Putin, ‘Vstrecha s senatorami Rossiiskoi Federatsii’, Kremlin.ru, 23 September
2020, kremlin.ru/events/president/news/64076.
100 For background, see Marianna Poberezhskaya, Communicating Climate Change
in Russia. State and Propaganda. London: Routledge, 2016.
101 Pravitel’stvo Rossii, ‘Dmitrii Medvedev utverdil natsional’nyi plan meropriiatii
pervogo etapa adaptatsii k izmeneniiam klimata na period do 2022 goda’, 4
January 2020, http://government.ru/news/38739/.
102 ‘Siberia’s “Gateway to the Underworld” Expands Amid Record Smashing Heat
Wave’, The Moscow Times, 4 August 2020.
103 Anna Liesowska, ‘Arctic wildfires burning further north than previously spotted
from space, satellite shows’, The Siberian Times, 27 June 2020; ‘Fivefold growth
of forest fires in Siberia reported’, AP, 27 June 2020, (with aerial photos);
‘Russia’s 2020 Wildfire Cover Greece-Sized Area – Greenpeace’, The Moscow
Times, 3 June 2020. This item includes a reference to the Federal Forestry
Agency’s list of on-going wildfires, and the Greenpeace Russia source.
104 ‘Russia Sees Warmest September in Recorded History’, World News Monitor, 5
October 2020; ‘2020 Arctic Wildfires Emissions So Far Surpass All of 2019’, The
Moscow Times, 31 August 2020; Maria Antonova, ‘Nearly 300 Wildfires in
Siberia Amid Record Warm Weather’, The Moscow Times, 12 July 2020.
105 ‘Norilsk Nickel caught dumping poisonous waste into rivers month after the
catastrophic diesel leak’, The Siberian Times, 28 June 2020. This piece came with
pictures.
106 Federal’noe agentstvo vodnykh resursov, ‘Maximum permissible concentration
during oil spill in the Khimki reservoir is exceeded 1000 times’, 29 June 2020,
http://voda.mnr.gov.ru/news/detail.php?ID=552923; ‘Moscow Oil Spill Trigger’s
1,000-Fold Pollution Surge’, The Moscow Times, 29 June 2020; ‘Rasskazyvaem
to, o chem drugie boiatsia dazhe podumat”, Novaia Gazeta@novaya_gazeta,
accessed 29 June 2020.
107 ‘Industrial waste landfill caught fire in Norilsk’, Interfax, 29 June 2020; ‘“Chego tak
boitsia “Nornikel’” i legshie pod nego siloviki?” CMI zaiavili o popytke zamolchat’
massshtaby ekologicheskoi katastrofy v Noril’ske’, Meduza, 29 June 2020; ‘Explainer:
Russia’s Arctic Environmental Disasters’, The Moscow Times, 29 June 2020.
108 ‘Dmitrii Medvedev utverdil natsional’nyi plan meropriiatii pervogo etapa adap-
tatsii k izmeniiam klimata na period do 2022 goda’, 4 January 2020, http://gov-
ernment.ru/news/38739/; ‘Putin’s Top Climate Adviser Calls for Urgent Climate
Action’, The Moscow Times, 10 January 2020.
 Quality of life 387
109 Climate Change Performance Index, CCPI 2020: International Press Release,
December 2019.
110 Ekaterina Mereminskaia, ‘Zagriaznenie vody, vozdukha i zemli v Rossii zamedli-
aet rost ekonomiki’, Vedomosti, 12 January 2020; Daniel Kozin, ‘Is Russia Finally
Waking Up to Climate Change?’, The Moscow Times, 4 March 2020.
111 Mark Serreze, ‘Where’s the sea ice?’, The Maritime Executive, 3 November 2020;
‘Moscow Breaks 70-Year Heat Record’, The Moscow Times, 17 June 2020; ‘Arctic
Temperatures Hit Record High in Russia Amid Heat Wave’, The Moscow Times,
22 June 2020.
112 ‘Environmentalists from five countries united to protect the Arctic’, ECO Media
Barents, 8 December 2020, http://media-week.ru/; Leyla Latypova, ‘New Alliance
Hopes to Raise Awareness of Arctic Environmental Crisis’, The Moscow Times,
11 December 2020.
113 On this, see Judy L. Twigg, ‘What Lies Behind Russia’s Coronavirus Containment
Effort’, The Russian File, Wilson Center (Kennan Institute), 24 March 2020.
114 ‘Vrachi – Putinu: “Optimizatsiia” – meditsinu vedet k katastrofe”’, Novye
Izvestiia, 1 October 2019; Aleksandr Sokolov, ‘Gotovo li rosisiiskoe zdra-
vookhranenie bor’be s koronavirusom’, Vedomosti, 9 April 2020; Evan
Gershkovich, Piotr Sauer, ‘Russia’s Healthcare System Faced Cuts for Years.
Now Medical Students Are on the Coronavirus Frontlines’, The Moscow Times,
16 April 2020.
115 ‘Diseases caused by bad nutrition cause 63% of deaths in Russia –
Rospotrebnadzor’, Interfax, 6 December 2018; ‘Minzdrav: chislo rossiian s ozhi-
reniem uvelichilos’ pochti na 50% za piat’ let’, TASS, 4 May 2018.
116 ‘The Burden of disease in Russia from 1980 to 2016: a systematic analysis for the
Global Burden of Disease Study 2016’, The Lancet, 30 August 2018, online.
117 ‘Skvortsova nazvala glavnuiu prichinu smertnosti myzhchin v Rossii’, Vedomosti,
7 February 2019.
118 For a video of one such arrest, see ‘Young Russians Fight Against Drinking
in Public’, The Moscow Times, 15 June 2019; Ivan Egorov, ‘V Rossii v prosh-
lom godu poimali 270 tysiach p’ianykh voditelei’, Rossiiskaia gazeta, 2
January 2021.
119 For an early account, ‘“Lev protiv”: gosudarstvennye gopniki?’, Kolokol Rossii,
26 April 2016, http://kolokolrussia.ru/vlast/lev-protiv-gosudarstvenne-gopniki;
and Rashid Gabdulhakov, ‘Citizen-Led Justice in Post-Communist Russia: From
Comrades’ Courts to Dotcomrade Vigilantism’, Surveillance & Society, Vol 16,
No. 3 (2018), pp. 314–31.
120 ‘Opros: okolo 30% zhitelei Rossii iavliaiutsia kuril’shchikami’, TASS, 14
December 2019.
121 For a discussion of this, see ‘Russia’s new resistance. “Meduza” analyses the rise
of a new wave of protest movements’, Meduza, 7 August 2019; Mathew
Luxmoore, ‘Staff At Russia’s Main Cancer Center Quit En Masse, Citing Low
Wages And Dire Conditions’, RFE/RL, 1 October 2019.
122 Putin, ‘Vstrecha s predstaviteliami obshchestvennosti Kaliningradskoi oblasti’,
Kremlin.ru, 31 October 2019, Kremlin.ru/events/president/news/61941.
123 Putin, ‘Poslanie Prezidenta Federal’nomu Sobraniiu’, 15 January 2020, kremlin,.
ru/events/president/news/62582; Mariia Kotova, ‘Lekarstva doveli do sryvov’,
Kommersant, 7 August 2019; Evan Gershkovich, ‘“People Could Lose Their
Lives”: Medicine Shortages in Russia Have Left Patients Fending for Themselves’,
The Moscow Times, 12 February 2020.
124 World Health Organization, Global Status Report on Alcohol and Health, Geneva,
2019.
125 For the full report, www.rospotrebnadzor.ru/about/info/news/news_details.
php?ELEMENT_ID=9913, 16 April 2018; ‘Russia’s Alcohol Consumption
Plummets More than 40% – WHO Study’, The Moscow Times, 1 October 2019.
388 Quality of life
126 ‘Minzdrav RF podgotovit proekt ob uvelichenii vozrasta, s kotorogo mozhno
pokypat’ alkogol’, Interfax, 24 September 2018; ‘Russia Moves to Raise Drinking
Age to 21’, The Moscow Times, 14 December 2018.
127 World Health Organization, Europe, Alcohol Policy Impact Case Study 2019. The
effects of alcohol control measures on mortality and life expectancy in the Russian
Federation, Copenhagen, 2019.
128 Edith Hancock, ‘Russia’s Health Minister wants to raise legal drinking age to
21’, Drinks Business, 14 May 2020.
129 Biulleten’ Schetnoi palaty RF. Zdravookhranenie, 11 February 2020, http://audit.
gov.ru/upload/iblock/84e/84ed13237c0fe2b0dae052063e371cfe.pdf. For a sum-
mary of the 189-page paper’s conclusions, pp. 8–9.
130 Anastasiia Manuilova, ‘K zdravookhreniiu pribintovali berezhlivost”,
Kommersant, 28 February 2020.
131 See esp. ‘HIV and Aids in Russia’, Avert. Global Information and Education on
HIV and AIDS’, November 2018, www.avert.org/professionals/hiv-around-the-
world/eastern-europe-centra-asia/russia; ‘Prezidenstckoe molchanie’, Novaia
gazeta, 29 November 2019.
132 ‘Russia emerges as frontrunner in global fight against tuberculosis’, TASS, 27
September 2018; ‘Russian Federation sees 9.4% drop in TB cases in 2017’, World
Health Organization, 19 March 2018.
133 See Andrew Das, Kevin Draper, ‘That Roar You Hear is From Russia, Where Its
Team Just Stunned Spain’, New York Times, 1 July 2018; ‘Russia Reaches World
Cup Quarterfinals with 4–3 Penalty Victory Over Spain’, The Moscow Times, 1 July
2018.
134 ‘Obychnovennoe chudo’, Rossiiskaia gazeta, 1 July 2018; Tony Weselovsky,
‘Team Russia Scores Surprise Goal at 2018 World Cup: National Unity’, RFE/
RL, 2 July 2018.
135 Brian Homewood, ‘Infantino says 2018 World Cup is the best-ever’, Reuters, 13
July 2018.
136 ‘IAAF Maintains Ban on Russian Athletics Over Doping Scandal’, The Moscow
Times, 11 March 2019; ‘Russia Facing Sports Isolation Over Missing Doping
Data’, New York Times, 22 September 2019; ‘WADA Gives Russia Three Weeks
to Explain Missing Doping Data’, New York Times, 23 September 2019.
137 ‘Bol’shaia press-konferentsiia Vladimira Putina’, Kremlin.ru, 19 December 2019,
kremlin.ru/events/president/news/62366; ‘Russia Facing Potential Olympic Ban
After WADA Cites “Inconsistent” Data”’, The Moscow Times, 23 September
2019; ‘Komitet po sootvetstviiu WADA ob’iasnil prichiny rekomendatsii otstra-
nit’ Rossiiu ot mezhdunarodnykh turnirov na 4 goda’, https://www.sports.ru/
biathlon/1080587070.html, 25 November 2019.
138 World Anti-Doping Agency, ‘WADA prepared for CAS hearing with Russian
Anti-Doping Agency’, 30 October 2020.
139 Kirill Bulanov, ‘MOK osudil rossiiskie vlasti za manipuliatsii a doping-probami’,
Vedomosti, 16 November 2019; ‘Russia Banned From Olympics for 4 Years Over
Doping Scandal’, The Moscow Times, 9 December 2019; Tariq Panja, ‘Russia
Banned from Global Sports for 4 Years Over Doping’, New York Times, 9
December 2019.
140 ‘Russia Fires Outspoken Head of Embattled Anti-Doping Body’, The Moscow
Times, 28 August 2020.
141 Thilo Neumann, ‘Evidence Casts New Doubts on Russian Doping Whistleblower’,
Spiegel International, 3 July 2020; ‘Russian Athletics Federation president steps
down’, Globe and Mail, 14 July 2020.
142 ‘V GD vnesen paket zakonoproektov o razvitie massovogo i liubitel’skogo sports
v RF’, RAPSI, 13 March 2020.
143 ‘Rossiiakaia Federatsiia federal’nyi zakon, O svobode sovesti i on religioznykh
ob’edineniiakh’, Rossiiskaia gazeta, 1 October 1997. English translation avail-
able in REDA 1997, Vol 1 (1998), pp. 40–9.
 Quality of life 389
144 ‘Jehovah’s Witnesses Leader Detained in Siberia’, The Moscow Times, 12
November 2018. See also ‘Russia; Sweeping Arrests of Jehovah Witnesses.
Religious Persecution, Other Abuses’, Human Rights Watch, 28 June 2018;
‘Russia: Court Bans Jehovah’s Witnesses’, Human Rights Watch, 20 April 2017.
145 ‘7 Jehovah’s Witnesses Brutally Tortured in Russia, Spokesman Says’, The
Moscow Times, 20 February 2019; for the Investigative Committee’s report on
the arrest, hmao.sledcom.ru/news/item/1300284, 15 February 2019; ‘EU Citizen
Abused in Russian Jail – Jehovah’s Witnesses’, The Moscow Times, 20 March
2019; ‘Memorial Recognized Another 75 Believers of Jehovah’s Witnesses as
Political Prisoners and Politically Persecuted’, Memorial. Human Rights Center,
13 May 2019; Jehovah’s Witnesses in Russia, ‘Jehovah’s Witnesses Under the
Yoke of Repression: Results of 2019’, 31 December 2019, www.jw-russia.org/en/
news/19123114-1512.html.
146 Roman Lunkin, ‘Russia’s Crackdown on Jehovah’s Witnesses Hits Critical
Milestone (Op-ed)’, The Moscow Times, 7 February 2019.
147 ‘In the City of Penza, Court of Appeal Overturns Conviction of Six Jehovah’s
Witnesses. Alushkin Must Leave Jail in the Near Future’, Jehovah’s Witness in
Russia, 25 March 2020, https://www.jw-russia.org/en/news/2020/03/7.html; ‘Russia
Overturns First Jehovah’s Witness Convictions’, The Moscow Times, 26 March 2020.
148 Sarah Eekhoff Zylstra, ‘Russia’s Ban on Evangelism is Now in Effect’, CT
(Christianity Today), 21 July 2016; Michael Alison Chandler, ‘Missionaries are
struggling to work under new Russian law banning proselytizing’, The Washington
Post, 20 September 2016; Emma Friedlander, ‘Russian Mormons Search for
Identity and Acceptance in an American Church’, The Moscow Times, 26
February 2019.
149 ‘St. Petersburg Scientology Leader Released [on bail] 2 Years Into Arrest’, The
Moscow Times, 15 November 2019; ‘Russian Scientology Church Raided in
Fraud Investigation’, The Moscow Times, 29 March 2019; ‘Russian Orthodox
Church Labels Scientology a “Brutal, Totalitarian Sect”’, The Moscow Times, 5
October 2016; See also SOVA, ‘Freedom of Conscience in Russia: Restrictions
and Challenges in 2018’, 17 April 2019. SOVA issues these reports annually.
150 ‘Tserkov’ mozhet ne afishirovat’ svoiu deiatel’nost’ i obkhodit’siia bez ulichnykh
vyvesok – KS’, RAPSI, 6 November 2020.
151 Mark Mackinnon, ‘Ukraine’s split from Russian orthodoxy a blow for Putin’,
Globe and Mail, 13 October 2018; ‘Russian church official says “impossible” to
remain united with Ecumenical Patriarchate’, RFE/RL, 13 October 2018; ‘Putin
Vows to Defend Believers in Ukraine Church Dispute’, The Moscow Times, 12
October 2018; Veera Laine, ‘The “Russia World” and the Orthodox Church in
the Post-Soviet Space’, in Arkady Moshes, András Rácz, eds. What Has Remained
of the USSR. Exploring the Erosion of the Post-Soviet Space. FIIA Report, No.
58 (February 2019), pp. 195–216. See also ‘Russian Orthodoxy’, special issue of
the Russian Analytical Digest, No. 252, 8 May 2020.
152 Christopher Miller, ‘Ukraine Deports Russia-Aligned Priest, Strips Citizenship,
in Church Rift’, RFE/RL, 15 February 2019.
153 Putin, ‘Vstrecha s predstaviteliami religioznykh ob’edinenii’, Kremlin.ru, 4
November 2020, kremlin.ru/events/president/news/674336.
154 Tatyana Zekakhina, “Komitet GD odobril popravku ob upominanii Boga v
Konstitutsii’, Rossiiskaia gazeta, 3 March 2020.
155 Russkaia Pravoslavnaia Tserkov, ‘Instruktysiia nastoiateliam prikhodov in pod-
vorii, igumenam i igumeniiam monastyrei Moskovskoi eparkhii v sviazi s ugro-
zoi rasprostraneniia koronavirusnoi infektsii’, 17 March 2020, http://www.
patriarchia.ru/db/text/5608418.html.
156 ‘Russia’s Population Decreases for First Time in a Decade’, The Moscow Times,
20 September 2018; ‘Russian population put in its first full-year decline in a
decade’, Intellinews, 24 January 2019; ‘Russia’s Migrant Numbers Hit Record
Low in 2018’, The Moscow Times, 9 April 2019.
390 Quality of life
157 ‘Obrazovana rabochaia gruppa po realizatsii Kontseptsii gosudarstvennoi
migratsionnoi politiki’, Kremlin.ru, 6 March 2019, kremlin.ru/events/adminis-
tration/59986; ‘Kremlin Seeks Russian-Speaking Migrants to Offset Population
Decline’, The Moscow Times, 14 March 2019; Daniel Shapiro, Natasha Yefimova-
Trilling, ‘Russian Population Decline in Spotlight Again’, Russia Matters, 13
September 2019; ‘Russia’s Natural Population Decline to Hit 11-Year record in
2019’, The Moscow Times, 13 December 2019.
158 Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation, ‘Summary of key perfor-
mance indicators on the migration situation in the Russian Federation for
January–March 2020’, 21 April 2020, https://xn--b1aew.xn--p1ai/Deljatelnost/
statistics/migracionnaya/item/20020603/; ‘Za god Rossiia stala v dva s polovinoi
raza chashche predostavliat’ grazhdanstvo’, RBC.ru, 19 May 2020.
159 ‘Poslanie Prezidenta Federal’nomu Sobraniiu’, Kremlin.ru, 20 February 2019,
kremlin.ru/events/president/news/59863.
160 Vladimir Solov’ev, ‘Mnogopasportiinaia sistema’, Kommersant, 7 February
2020; ‘Russia Passes Dual Citizenship Law, Hoping to Add 10M Citizens’, The
Moscow Times, 17 April 2020.
161 On this, see esp. Anna-Liisa Heusala, Kaarina Aitamurto, eds. Migrant Workers
in Russia: Global Challenges of the Shadow Economy in Societal Transformation.
London: Routledge, 2018; ‘Russia’s FSB Publishes Foreign Worker Statistics for
First Time in 20 Years’, The Moscow Times, 16 August 2019.
162 ‘Despite Long Hours, Russians Named Among World’s Least Productive
Workers’, The Moscow Times, 5 July 2018; ‘Vneseny izmeniia v zakon o migrat-
sionnom uchete inostrannykh grazhdan’, Kremlin.ru, 27 June 2018, kremlin.ru/
acts/news/57883; ‘Foreigners in Russia are Panicking Over New Migration
Rules’, The Moscow Times, 5 July 2018.
163 On this, Jeff Sahadeo, Voices from the Soviet Edge. Southern Migrants in
Leningrad and Moscow. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2019. See also Agnieszka Kubal,
Immigration and Refugee Law in Russia. Socio-Legal Perspectives. Cambridge,
UK: CUP, 2019, which lays out the complications for individuals brought on by
inconsistent laws and practices related to immigrants and refugees in Russia.
164 Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation, ‘On the progress of the
criminal investigation into the crimes committed against a resident of the city of
Yakutsk’, ykt.sledcom.ru/news/item/1314222/, 18 March 2019; ‘Siberian City
Holds Unauthorized Protest After Rape Blamed on Migrants’, The Moscow
Times, 19 March 2019; ‘Siberian Region Bans Migrant Workers Amid Tensions
Over Rape Case;’, The Moscow Times, 28 March 2019.
165 Anna Chervonnaia, ‘V Rossiia safiksirovan skachok chisla migrantov’,
Vedomosti, 23 July 2019; ‘Russia’s Migrant Numbers Surge to Highest Levels in
a Decade, Study Says’, The Moscow Times, 16 July 2019.
166 On this, see Tom Balforth, ‘Russia’s stranded migrants lose jobs, rely on hand-
outs and peers for food’, Chronicle Herald (Halifax, NS), 27 April 2020; ‘Stranded
in the pandemic’, Meduza, 24 March 2020.
167 Olga Putilova, ‘“Tut i beremennye est’, gde rozhat’ oni bydut – na zemle?”’,
Novaia gazeta, 13 September 2020, on Uzbek migrants; ‘More than 1000
Azerbaijanis are waiting for a pass to their homeland near Kullar’, Caucasian
Knot, 21 September 2020; Evan Gershkovich, ‘Six Months Into Pandemic,
Migrant Workers in Russia Live in Makeshift Camps as They Wait to Go Home’,
The Moscow Times, 28 September 2020.
168 ‘Ksenofobia i natsionalizm;’, Levada-tsentr, 23 September 2020, www.levada.
ru/2020/09/23/ksenofobiya-i-natsionalizm-2.
169 Putin, ‘Zasedanie Soveta po styrategicheskomu razvitiiu i natsional’nym proek-
tam’, Kremlin.ru, 13 July 2020, kremlin.ru/events/president/news/63635; ‘Russia
Resets Ambitious National Development Plan’, The Moscow Times, 13 July
2020; ‘Russia Ditches Goal of Becoming Top 5 Economy’, The Moscow Times,
21 July 2020.
Closing remarks
What’s left after 2020?

In 2020, Russians at home faced social and political unrest, never-ending

corruption exposés and a rapidly warming climate. The biggest public stories,
however, were the pandemic, the lengthy protest in Khabarovsk and the
Navalny poisoning. None of these phenomena were gone as 2021 dawned. At
the level of pure politics, the 2020 ‘January Revolution’, marked by constitu-
tional changes that could keep their president in office for another two terms
after 2024, still divided Russians a year after the fact. From abroad the
Kremlin encountered an increasingly hostile Western front, instability on
their southern and south-eastern flanks and an economically aggressive
China moving into Central Asia. Extraordinarily bitter divisions in the US,
which resulted in the storming of the Capitol in Washington by manic Trump
supporters just prior to Biden’s accession to office, left the Kremlin worrying
that newly empowered Democrats might vent their spleen on Russia – and
also gloating that the US ‘model’ was discredited, at least for a time. The next
few years will reveal how well Russians coped with this broadside of potential
calamities.
In fact, two major events in January 2021 give us cause to speak of a sec-
ond ‘January Revolution’ in Russia. In contrast to those of a year earlier,
these happenings were expected, even planned for, but the degree to which
their ripple effects reached tidal proportions was not foreseen. The episodes
in question were: 1) domestic and foreign reactions to the Navalny imprison-
ment; and 2) the raised level of hostility towards Russia exhibited by both the
new Biden Administration in Washington and by the EU.

Stability anyone?
Before 2020, maintaining internal stability after the chaotic decades of the
Gorbachev and Yeltsin eras was the personal accomplishment for which
Putin most often congratulated himself, and for which Russians were likely
most grateful. Paradoxically, 2020 marked an apex of more recent instability
in Russia, largely hidden from sight because of restrictions required by the
COVID-19 pandemic. After a relatively quiet first decade, politically, ele-
ments of anxiety and anger that hovered just beneath the veneer of calm
burst sporadically into dramatic incidents of public unrest. These included
DOI: 10.4324/9781003158646-11
392 Closing remarks
huge demonstrations against election rigging in 2011–12, pension reform in
2018, ballot discrimination in Moscow in 2019 and the arrest of a popular
governor in Khabarovsk in 2020. Street actions over the Navalny arrest in
2021 were only the most recent of such outbursts. The trigger causes of the
outbursts always broadened into protests against a larger gamut of pent up
grievances.
Even if there was never a real danger of a Russian Maidan, or ‘coloured’
revolution supported by Western governments, the administration’s reaction
to each flare-up of public energy was fashioned by its fear of one. In practice,
worry about insecurity caused heavy-handed police clampdowns against
peaceful demonstrations and that, in turn actually created instability. To date,
the state has emerged from political upheaval unscathed for two main rea-
sons: 1) pragmatic social decision-making by the government itself, i.e. con-
cessions; and 2) the intuitive preferences of the majority of the Russian
people who have had no desire to overturn the government, or toss Putin out.
Although we might have to wait until 2024 to see if these considerations still
apply, the reset, the pandemic and downturn in the Russian quality of life in
2020 will determine what happens in that presidential election year.

The Presidency
In January 2021, a full year after he proposed amending the Russian
Constitution, Vladimir Putin’s approval ratings hovered between 60 (FOM)
and 61 per cent (VTsIOM) in polls conducted by government-funded agen-
cies, and at 65 per cent by the independent Levada Centre.1 Two of these
returns were close to all-time lows. The ratings made his handling of Navalny’s
return to Russia on 17 January (see ahead) especially sensitive.
The international and domestic uproar generated by the attempt to assas-
sinate Navalny carried over into 2021 with a vengeance. Complicating mat-
ters for Putin personally, two days after Navalny arrived back in Russia his
Anti-Corruption Foundation released a two-hour video of a vastly expen-
sive, allegedly secret, construction of what it called ‘Putin’s Palace’ in
Gelendzhik, a resort town on the Black Sea, Krasnodar Krai.2
Although Putin responded a week later during a videoconference with uni-
versity students that ‘nothing listed there as my property belongs to me or my
close relatives, and never has’, his protestations came too late. The video of
the $1.3 billion estate, with Navalny providing the introduction, had 100 mil-
lion views in its first five days.3 The braying didn’t stop after Arkady Rotenberg
told journalists that he and his brother owned the property and planned to
turn it into an apartment hotel resort.4 The protesters now had more than
just Navalny’s fate to complain about.
Labelled the ‘Underpants Poisoner’ by Navalny, Putin’s persona became
ever more toxic to Western politicians and media, and his already unblushing
authoritarianism grew more stringent at home. 5 The Kremlin seemed no lon-
ger to care about Western perspectives and only time would tell if the ‘risk–
reward’ approach would work at home again
 Closing remarks 393
The domestic political scene
The uproars noted above made it plain that the most successful political
activity in Russia was the street demonstration and that political parties other
than United Russia were ineffective in achieving their agendas. ‘Putin’s Party’,
the UR, won control of the official political arena handily, but could never
dominate or behave in the manner of the old CPSU. Of the parties repre-
sented in the Duma, only the nearly moribund Communist Party served,
from time to time, as an opposition party. Parties and movements outside the
Duma were more visibly active, yet they tended to rely on single personalities
for leadership – and these personalities competed against each other for
media and public attention to such a degree that attempts at unity among
them were usually stillborn.
Among the many activist opponents of the government, only Navalny
attracted consistent national and international attention, but there was never
any evidence that he was admired enough to win regional or national elec-
tions. In fact, both state and independent pollsters consistently placed him
low on their ‘trust’ and ‘confidence’ rankings. A handicap borne by Navalny
and other ‘liberals’ when it came to Russian voters was the simple fact that
they were lionized in the West.
Watched closely and harassed by law enforcement already before the All-
Russia Vote on constitutional amendments, the chances of the extra-systemic
political opponents of the regime gaining in effectiveness after 2020 were
slim, but possible. Without a foothold in the power vertikal, the only obvious
opportunity for change rests with the regions, especially in Siberia and the
Far East where Moscow’s grip is not so tight, the natural resources essential
to Russia’s economy are nearby and local political leadership is increasingly
popular. Regional elections in the fall of 2020 and sustained protest in
Khabarovsk provided some small signs of growing opposition to the UR.
Beyond specific political parties, environmentalists, LGBT activists, reli-
gious and ethnic movements all gained confidence in 2018–20 and can hope
to play a role in shaping post-pandemic Russia. Women’s movements, in par-
ticular, have grown in stature.

Poisoned politics
Putin’s third term opened with the damaging Skripal affair and took a turn
for the worst in 2020 with the Navalny affair. In both assassination-by-poison
attempts, the majority of Western politicians and people pointed their fingers
directly at Putin. In neither case did the majority of Russian people agree
with them. This difference in perspective is symptomatic of a new great
divide.
Whoever the guilty parties were, these horrible events revealed what may
prove to be an insoluble problem for the Russian state. Highly publicized
assassinations seriously damage the image of Russia and its president
abroad and energize opposition forces at home. Whether such acts of
394 Closing remarks
violence are commissioned by rogue officials, oligarchs, senior law-enforce-
ment or military officers, criminal bosses or financiers threatened with
exposure for corruption, or the Russian state, blame will always be attrib-
uted to the state generally and to Putin specifically. The culprit may even be
a self-styled ‘patriot’ who believes that he or she is doing the right thing for
Russia’s honour – witness 6 January in Washington. Although it is unlikely
that Putin ordered the kills, for he has too much to lose and too little to
gain, they occurred on his watch. Such acts are far more unsettling to the
security, or stability, of the Russian state than street demonstrations and are
something that Putin must do something about if he wishes to soften his
legacy.

The international arena

In the international arena, one could say that the first big gap in the aura of
stability provided by Russia’s central government was the annexation of
Crimea in 2014, an event that is often depicted as the starting point of the
new Cold War.6 Where that particular action won Putin great popularity at
home, at the time, it lost the West to Russia and forced the Kremlin to ‘pivot
to the East’ and rely on China for trade and political comfort.
The Russia–China relationship stepped up as a consequence of their com-
mon economic interests in the face of Washington’s economic and sectoral
sanctions against Russia and its trade war with China. Moscow’s turn east-
ward was motivated by expediency at first, and then drew tighter as the
Eurasian continent cautiously integrated as an economic competitor to the
EU and the US.
The fact is, Russia’s foreign policy during the first two Putin decades was
pragmatic and reactive and, in spite of claims to the contrary from critics,
had too few clearly thought-out objectives other than an urge to renew the
country’s Major Power standing. The MID could boast of diplomatic suc-
cesses in the Middle East, Africa and Latin America, but was well aware that
opportunism, rather than careful long-term strategic planning, was a key
ingredient to its good fortune in those regions. Assad’s Syria, Erdogan’s
Turkey, Al-Sisi’s Egypt, Maduro’s Venezuela and Rouhani’s Iran are not par-
ticularly reliable partners and Russia’s ties to them could pull apart quickly if
circumstances change. The same could be said about Russia’s relations with
its neighbours in the South Caucasus, and with Belarus.
The Russian foreign ministry discovered in 2020 that even the appearance
of steadiness in the EEU, the BRICS, the SCO and the CSTO associations
was deceiving. Border conflicts between India and China and between India
and Pakistan, the outbreak of war between Armenia and Azerbaijan, and
unrest in Central Asia and Belarus threatened to emasculate all of the above-
mentioned organizations. They will all have to make full recovery before
Russia can feel secure in its international skin again. There has been a good
start in this regard. In most of the cases of conflict noted above, Moscow
could have made zero-sum choices, that is, line up on one side or the other.
 Closing remarks 395
Instead, it offered diplomacy and waited the situation out. Not only did this
approach counter the popular view of Russia as ‘aggressive’, it worked.7
Hot spots left over from the devolution of the USSR continue to plague
Moscow’s MID as well. The peoples of Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Nagorno-
Karabakh and Transdniestria all maintain that their de facto separations
from Georgia, Azerbaijan and Moldova respectively were earned by bloody
wars for independence in the 1990s and reached de jure status by the Western-
set Kosovo ‘precedent’ in 2008.8 The West presumes, instead, that the Kosovo
case was sui generis and so inapplicable to the other secessions. The fate of
these hotspots is tied theoretically to interpretations of two potentially con-
tradictory articles of the UN Charter, one that supports the ‘principle of
equal rights and self-determination of people’ (Art. 1.2) and another that
supports the ‘territorial integrity of any state’ (Art. 2.4). All too often, the
Kremlin takes one side of this question and the West takes the other, both
persuaded more by their geopolitical interests than by some moral or legal
standpoint. For example, Nagorno-Karabakh was returned to Azerbaijani
control against the wishes of the its inhabitants by force of arms, and the
West wants Crimea ‘returned’ to Ukraine. Most Crimeans prefer to be part
of Russia. Who gets to decide their fate?
In that connection, Russia’s greatest success in international affairs was, in
fact, the annexation of Crimea, an act that elated Russians, made the presi-
dent popular and kept NATO expansion temporarily at bay. The annexation
was also Russia’s greatest failure in international affairs. It brought genera-
tions of close economic, political and cultural relationships between Russians
and Ukrainians to an end, perhaps forever. It also brought NATO’s and
Russian armed forces to a point of confrontation in East and East-Central
Europe, and forced Moscow to look eastward for political and economic
succour.

Biden in office
Less than a week after his official inauguration, Biden’s press secretary told
journalists that, in the president’s first telephone call to Putin, 26 January, he
insisted that Navalny be released, and listed other US grievances against
Russia. Russia’s presidential press release stressed only that the two presi-
dents agreed on a five-year extension of the New START treaty. The latter
decision was a great relief to the Kremlin, the other matters set out lines in
the sand.
The real message came from Washington during Biden’s first major speech
on foreign policy, 4 February, in which he said that the US would no longer
be ‘rolling over in the face of Russia’s aggressive actions’, and went on to
proclaim that the US ‘leadership must meet this new moment of advancing
authoritarianism, including the growing ambitions of China to rival the
United States and the determination of Russia to damage and disrupt our
democracy’.9
The new Cold War appeared destined to grow hotter.
396 Closing remarks
Demonization of Russia
It has become de rigueur for Western analysts to blame the Russian state and
Putin for polarization in the international arena, the rise of populism, street
disorders in Europe and even Brexit.10 Russia’s repeated denials and requests
for evidence are rarely taken seriously. By attributing international disarray
to Russian ‘aggression’ or, to use the new favourite, ‘malign influence’,
Western governments free themselves from the tiresome task of seeking out
root causes (e.g. in the Donbass), or contemplate blaming themselves at least
in part. Nor do they need to consider the possibility that blameworthy events
might have been the responsibility of rogue actors, Russian or otherwise.11 As
a case in point, long before the US presidential election was held in November
2020, American punditry was already falling over itself with accusations that
Russian hackers were preparing to ‘destroy American democracy’, again.12
Russian cyber trolls may well have been in play, but domestically-based con-
spiracy theorists provided all the ammunition needed to taint the US elec-
toral process.13 Whatever damage American democracy suffered in 2020, it
was self-inflicted.
While it is certainly true that some of the Kremlin’s behaviour in interna-
tional affairs cannot be excused, even by realpolitik, the point here is to rec-
ognize that: a) Russian actions in the global arena do not take place in a
vacuum; and that b) if its security interests are seriously threatened, the
Kremlin will use force to protect them. Moscow is hardly a unique actor in
the international arena, where geopolitical interests have shoved traditional
diplomacy aside everywhere.

The economy
As nightmares about the 1990s fade in the Russian memory bank, recent
delays in Russia’s better economic future were caused primarily by factors
over which the government had little control: the pandemic, a decline in
demand for Russian oil and gas, and further sanctions. These variables made
Putin’s offers of ‘great expectations’ a matter of waiting with bated breath. In
fact, in the summer of 2020 the Kremlin officially gave up on its ambition to
become one of the world’s five largest economies by 2024 and reset its devel-
opment targets to the year 2030.
No one can doubt that Putin yanked Russia out of the economic doldrums
of the 1980s–90s. That success was based on three fundamental props: con-
tinued reliance on the energy sector for government revenues; large-scale gov-
ernment intervention in the economy; and oligarchic dominance of both
private and government enterprises. Specialists, including Russian ones, have
warned for years that each of these features could lead to stagnation and
deterioration of the economy. After surviving recessions and exponentially
increasing sanctions by unexpected margins of comfort it was left to a pan-
demic and climate change to highlight threats to the Russian economy. These
include the fact that the market for Russian energy may never recover fully,
 Closing remarks 397
plus the extraordinary costs of restructuring the country’s healthcare system,
and managing the projected hurt expected from global warming.
According to Minister of Finance Siluanov, the pandemic cost Russia 9
per cent of its GDP in 2020 and the planned surplus budget for 2021 will, in
fact, be a deficit.14 Reports made public in January revealed that the year
2020 saw the lowest level of foreign direct investment in Russian enterprises
since the mid-1990s. Gloomy as these reports were, the economy was not
doing as badly as the average citizen might naturally think. Very low foreign
and domestic debt, and Russia’s huge and growing reserves, are still there to
fall back on if need be. Even the usual reliance on energy export prices is not
as pressing as it could have been, because, if Putin’s statement in a December
press conference was accurate, 70 per cent of the federal budget now comes
from non-oil and gas revenues.15 There was little doubt in Russian homes,
however, that real disposable income was dropping in purchasing power.

Quality of life
Even while the president signed multiple laws in 2020 boosting incomes, pen-
sions and other benefits for the Russian people, foreign investments slowed.
Projections of greater contractions in the Russian economy in 2021 com-
pelled the government to invest in poverty amelioration and delay the
National Priority Projects for at least another six years. Agreement with pro-
ducers kept prices for sugar and several other commodities under control
and, as a New Year’s bonus, in December Putin announced cash gifts of
5,000 rubles to families for each child up to seven years of age.16 Such efforts
helped sustain his image for many Russians as the ‘people’s president’.
Although the oft-mentioned plans to diversify the economy are off the
drawing board for now, Europe and China still need Russian oil and gas, and
export markets for grains, NPPs and weapons continue to expand. Thus, the
Russian government has sufficient revenue to provide wide-ranging public
benefits. Higher taxes for the wealthy will contribute too.
That said, community worries are rooted in household realities. A survey
conducted by FOM in December 2020 reported that 33 per cent of Russians
considered themselves poor. That was an increase of 5 per cent since March
that same year. Well aware of this, Putin admitted at the World Economic
Forum in Davos, in January 2021, that the poverty level in Russia rose the
previous year. He blamed the pandemic and, yet again, proclaimed that the
struggle against poverty was a priority for his government.17
Rosstat data showing that living standards in 2020 were the lowest since
2013 made those words ring a little hollow at home. Frustrations caused by
economic anxiety from spilled over into protests originally intended as sup-
port for Navalny.18

Pandemic futures
There was some good news, relatively speaking.
398 Closing remarks
The coronavirus second wave that savaged Russia in the fall of 2020 began
to slow in January 2021. On 1 January, the Ministry of Health confirmed
27,039 new coronavirus cases that day and 536 deaths. On 31 January, the
record revealed a slight, but consistent drop to 18,359 cases and 485 deaths.
The decline in cases continued into February. But distrust lingered. As the
ministry launched the anti-virus vaccination programme for the general pub-
lic on 5 January, more than half the population had told pollsters that they
would not take the Russian vaccine. The programme continued unabated
anyway, while travel and business restrictions were gradually lifted.19
Many foreign governments had no such reservations about Sputnik V.
Kazakhstan, Belarus, Algeria and Bolivia began public vaccinations with it
in mid-January. The first EU country to receive large quantities was Hungary,
without EU authorization, and the first Middle East nation to do so was the
UAE, both in late January. NATO member Turkey signed up. Six Latin
American countries had registered the Russian vaccine by early February,
and others began getting in line. San Marino was the 31st country to approve
the vaccine. Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Italy soon followed, even
though the EU had not yet approved its use. Russian doses are less expensive
than most Western ones, at less than $20 for a two-shot vaccination, and is
easier to transport because they do not need to be deep-frozen.20
Yet, even after clinical trials published in The Lancet on 2 February showed
Sputnik V to be 91.6 per cent effective against symptomatic COVID-19, over
60 per cent of Russians were still hesitant about taking a jab.21

Government and society going into 2021

There is no point in repeating here the number of authors who describe Putin
as a dictator or a tsar, and Russia as a totalitarian state. Most of these com-
plainants sharpened their pencils after the constitutional amendments were
introduced in 2020. Still, there are scholars who recognize that Russia is more
nuanced than that. Richard Sakwa, for example, wrote that Putin has created
an ‘administrative regime’, or a ‘network of social relations’ that is neither an
authoritarian system nor a democratic one. His strength, Sakwa says, lies in
his ability to draw a wide variety of competing factions and ideas together
and govern by consensus, thereby preventing ‘an excess of authoritarian-
ism’.22 Robert Service, who is by no means inclined towards Putin, said that
‘dictator’ is ‘too strong a word’. He called the system of government in Russia
‘authoritarian’, because ‘there remains much free air to breathe in Russia’.23
Both were right.
Authoritarian as the Russian government obviously is, it is difficult to
make the case that a country is a dictatorship while public demonstrations
flourish, often with less police interference than in many European countries.
Anti-government and anti-head-of-state placards are waved openly on
Russia’s streets and social media carries every conceivable political opinion.
More importantly, to date the system seems to be what most of the Russian
people prefer. That is their prerogative. There are lots of detainees, to be sure,
 Closing remarks 399
and extra-systemic opposition leaders are harassed by law enforcement. Yet
opposing viewpoints are heard and disseminated, sometimes even from inside
a jail, bloggers flourish and opposition parties and movement have their own
websites. This may get more difficult over the next few years and, if so, the
generally supportive consensus could fade.
No matter his constitutional prerogatives and support from most of the
siloviki, the Russian president faces potentially obstructionist forces, such as
federal and regional bureaucracies, parts of the security services that act on
their own, the Orthodox Church, regional activists and, of course, the tradi-
tional Russian handicaps to progress: corruption and inertia.24
When Putin undertook to amend the Russian Constitution, and reset his
terms in office, he shook the entire political structure of Putinism, causing
cliques, interest groups, political parties and the public to regroup.
Coinciding as it did with the outbreak of a global pandemic, a crisis over
which his leadership appeared uncertain, the ‘January Revolution’ of 2020
may have given Putin more executive authority while denting his mantle of
invulnerability.
Putin’s image suffered further when the general public grew suspicious of
data about the pandemic released by the government, and of the Kremlin’s
overall handling of the health crisis. As the number of cases began spiking
again in late September and then worsened, much of that chariness fell on
Putin. Faith in him as leader wavered also because his government appeared
to mismanage climate change and never got around to act extensively on the
oft-proclaimed need for infrastructure upgrades. Setting some of the old
social conservative themes in stone, that is, in the amended Constitution, did
not help much. Conservative laws banning ‘disrespect’ of authorities and
‘fake news’, with the state acting as judge, punishing the LGBT community
and decriminalizing some forms of domestic violence may, in fact, prompt
Russians eventually to regret what they wished for.

A second ‘January Revolution’, 2021

A survey conducted by FOM in January 2021 put the UR at 32 per cent sup-
port, trailed by the LDPR (13%) and the CPRF (12%). A Just Russia stood
at 5 per cent and about a dozen small parties received one per cent or less.25
The surprise was the lack of interest in long-standing oppositional parties,
such as Yabloko. Not mentioned in the survey was Navalny’s still unregis-
tered Russia of the Future. The fact that over 10 per cent of respondents said
they would spoil their ballot or not vote at all, and seven or eight small par-
ties attracted at least some attention suggested that there was a potentially
large voter catchment for any opposition leader able to garner some unified
support. It was not clear whether Navalny could fill that bill, for in an open-
ended question as to which public figures respondents trusted the most, even
after all the furore noted ahead, only 5 per cent included Navalny among the
five or six names they picked. Putin still led easily, but at 29 per cent his own
trust rating had slipped a full 5 per cent since October 2020.26
400 Closing remarks
Navalny comes home
The storm began on 13 January, when Navalny announced via Instagram
that he would be returning to Russia four days later and called on followers
to ‘come and greet me’. He said that ‘Putin, who gave the order for my mur-
der is screeching all around his bunker and telling his servants to do every-
thing so that I do not return. The servants act as usual: They fabricate new
criminal cases against me.’ These inflammatory words earned over 150,000
‘likes’ within hours. The Instagram message was reported fully in Kommersant
and The Moscow Times, without the blame cast on Putin in Vedomosti, and
not at all in the state-owned Rossiiskaia gazeta. RT summarized Navalny’s
message, including the part where he blamed Putin for the assassination
attempt.27
The widely-touted ‘return’ attracted swarms of journalists to airports in
Germany and Moscow, and prompted authorities in Moscow to divert the
flight to an unscheduled landing site at the last moment. In fact, Navalny
didn’t need journalists to greet him for the publicity. Representatives of CNN,
Associated Press, ABC News, Washington Post, The Economist, Reuters,
Ekho Moskvy, Dozhd, RFE/RL, Nastoiashchee vremia, as well as Navalny’s
lawyer, were among the excited passengers on the aircraft with him.28
Amid Western calls for his release and protesters gathering outside the
police station where he was held, Navalny released a video message calling on
his followers to ‘take to the streets’. Head of his regional headquarters net-
work, Leonid Volkov, told FBK HQ’s around the country to ‘immediately
begin preparations for large rallies across the country on January 23rd’.29 It
was at this timely moment that the FBK released the video carrying aerial
photos of the opulent ‘Putin’s Palace’. Systemic party leaders Zyuganov,
Zhirinovsky and Mironov, and House Speaker Volodin, all railed against
Navalny’s gambit, calling him various names, such as ‘traitor’ and ‘cheat’
financed by foreign governments.30 Lavrov, Volodin and Zakharova hinted
that the entire Navalny affair, including the poisoning, may have been staged
by Western agents. Older Russians believed them; younger Russians did not.31

Street protests against the odds

The legislation introduced in late 2020 tightening up restrictions related to
demonstrations came into force in January 2021. They made it possible to
designate individual Russian citizens as foreign agents, toughened sentences
and fines for libel, and adopted further restrictions on the Internet. These last
made it more difficult to draw people to demonstrations.32 Nevertheless, on
23 January demonstrations took place in about 110 Russian cities and towns.
By mid-afternoon that day the number of detainees in Moscow, St.
Petersburg, Novosibirsk, Krasnoyarsk and dozens of other cities showed the
degree to which the state felt threatened. According to OVD-Info, about
4,000 were detained across the country, 1,500 of them in Moscow. Sobol was
held, and Yulia Navalnaya posted a photo of herself inside a police wagon.
 Closing remarks 401
A Pussy Riot leader, Maria Alyokhina, and Navalny’s brother Oleg were con-
fined for 48 hours. 33 A post-demonstration sweep of FBK homes and offices
resulted in charges against dozens of members and associates. Most of the
detainees were released within hours, but criminal cases were opened against
a few, including Volkov, who called for a second national rally the next week.34
As editor-in-chief of Nezavisimaia Konstantin Remchukov pointed out,
none of this was unexpected. Navalny had violated the conditions of his sus-
pended sentence even when not in a coma and was warned as early as 29
December 2020 that he would be detained on his arrival in Russia. On the
other hand, he and his supporters knew that the longer he stayed out of the
country the more credible the state’s charge that he was an agent of foreign
powers would become.35 Most of the demonstrations were unauthorized, and
protest organizers knew they were likely to be apprehended. Many were taken
in for participating in a large public gathering without wearing a mask – also
illegal by pandemic rules. All classic Catch-22 situations. Russian official and
pro-Putin sites showed videos of violence against the police; opposition and
foreign sites showed videos of violence against protesters.
Significantly, many of the placards carried by demonstrators expressed
anger at the regime itself, against Putin, the oligarchs and corruption. After
three nation-wide rallies, the FBK gave it up and promised a return to public
action in the summer and spring – in preparation for the September elec-
tions.36 These protests were dominated by people in the age bracket between
25 and 39, many of whom were university educated and reasonably well off;
that is, Russia’s middle class. They were less interested in Navalny per se than
they were in the manner in which the state treated him, meaning that opposi-
tion to Putin was no longer a marginal point of view.37 Herein lay the revolu-
tionary nature of domestic events in January 2021. After a year of confusion
and frustration, Russia’s domestic affairs and foreign relationships had come
full circle, and now seemed to be spiralling downwards.

***
As one prominent sociologist at the Levada Centre put it towards the end of
2020 even massive street demonstrations have tended to be local and so had
not threatened the natural ‘order of things’. There were always people who
are ‘outraged, insulted and disagree’ with one policy or another, he said, but
they ‘are marginal to the mainstream, [always forced to ponder] “if not Putin,
then who?”’. When it comes down to the notion of an uprising, the ‘mass
consciousness’ prefers the status quo, as long as living conditions do not get
seriously worse.38 That may be changing.
The first January Revolution, in 2020, was planned in the form of consti-
tutional amendments, but took on far greater meaning than expected as the
pandemic came to roost over Russia. The second January Revolution, in
2021, was expected if not planned, but its manifestations may have far greater
consequences for Russian than the earlier one. As, or if, the dust settles from
the January to January crises, Putin’s apparently ad hoc reaction to the
402 Closing remarks
pandemic and the concomitant social and political unrest may finally force
substantive changes in the Russian world, perhaps not for the best. The gen-
eral elections set for September 2021 will test the degree to which Putinism
has come unglued – or if it has.
Now that he has immunity from prosecution after he leaves office and a
permanent seat on the Federation Council, stepping down in 2024 may look
more inviting than it did in January 2020.

Notes
1 ‘Vladimir Putin: otsenki raboty, otnoshenie’, FOM, 31 December 2020, https://
fom.ru/Politika/10946; ‘Odobrenie deiatel’nosti Vladimira Putina’, Levada-tsentr,
November 2020, accessed 13 January 2021; ‘Odobrenie deiatel’nosti gosudarst-
vennykh institutov’, VTsIOM, December 2020, accessed 13 January 2021, https://
wciom.ru/ratings/dejatelnost-gosudarstvennykh-institutov/.
2 For the film, see ‘Palace for Putin. The history of the biggest bribe’ (Dvorets dlia
Putina. Istoriia samoi bol’shoi vziatki), Naval’nyi, 19 January 2021, https://
navalny.com/p/6453/.
3 ‘Vstrecha s uchashchimisia vuzov po sluchaiu Dnia rossiiskogo studenchestva’,
Kremlin.ru, 25 January 2021, kremlin.ru/events/president/news/64922; ‘Billion-
Dollar Palace in Navalny Investigation “Doesn’t Belong to me,” Putin Says’, The
Moscow Times, 25 January 2021. For Navalny’s claim of 100 million viewers, see
‘Vam pis’mo!’, https://navalny.com/p/6460/.
4 ‘Nazvano prednaznachenie stroiashchegosia pod Gelendzhikom “dvortsa
Putina”’, Vedomosti, 29 January 2021; ‘Russian Billionaire Arkady Rotenberg
Says He Owns “Putin Palace”’, The Moscow Times, 30 January 2021.
5 See, e.g. Peter Dickinson, ‘Putin the Poisoner’, Atlantic Council, 16 February
2021; Michael McFaul, ‘How to Contain Putin’s Russia’, Foreign Affairs, 19
January 2021; Tony Wood, ‘Putin Isn’t As Strong as he Looks’, New York Times,
2 February 2021.
6 See, e.g. essays in Paul J. Saunders, ed. Costs of a New Cold War: The U.S.–Russia
Confrontation Over Ukraine. Washington: Center for the National Interest, 2014,
and in J.L. Black, Michael Johns, eds. The Return of the Cold War. Ukraine, the
West and Russia, Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2016.
7 For a Russian perspective, Dmitri Trenin, ‘Moscow’s “New Rules”’, Carnegie
Moscow Center, 12 November 2020.
8 On recent references to the Kosovo precedent, see Milena Sterio, ‘The “Frozen”
Conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh’, Opinion Juris, 2 October 2020, https://opinio-
juris.org/2020/10/02/the-frozen-conflict-in-nagorno-karabakh/.
9 The White House, ‘Remarks by President Biden on America’s Place in the World’,
4 February 2021.
10 For recent examples of ‘blame the Russians for everything’ and the ‘evil empire’
under new leadership, see Luke Harding, Shadow State: Murder, Mayhem, and
Russia’s Remaking of the West. New York: Harper, 2020, and Catherine Belton,
Putin’s People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and Then Took On the West. New
York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020.
11 For example, Larry Diamond, Ill Winds. Saving Democracy from Russian Rage,
Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency. New York: Penguin Books, 2019,
and Mitchell Orenstein, The Lands In Between: Russia and the West and the New
Politics of Hybrid War. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2019.
12 On this, e.g. Alina Polyakova, ‘The Kremlin’s Plot Against Democracy’,
Foreign Affairs, (September/October 2020); Gennady Rudkevich, ‘In the
 Closing remarks 403
West, Russia Backs Chaos, not Candidates’, The Moscow Times, 25 February
2020; Paul Robinson, ‘Exposing the Disinformation Industry’, Irrussianality,
8 April 202.
13 There is a huge literature on this, for a summary see Nick Corasaniti, Jim
Rutenberg, Kathleen Gray, ‘As Trump Rails Against Loss, His Supporters Become
More Threatening’, New York Times, 9 December 2020.
14 ‘Pandemic to cost Russia 9% in 2020–2021 — Siluanov’, Interfax, 26 October
2020.
15 ‘Ezhegodnaia press-konferentsiia Vladimira Putina’, Kremlin.ru, 17 December
2020, kremlin.ru/events/president/news/64671.
16 Tatiana Zamakhina, ‘Putin ob’iavil o vyplatakh na kazhdogo rebenka do semi let
k Novomu godu’, Rossiiskaia gazeta, 17 December 2020.
17 ‘Sessiia onlain-foruma “Davosskaia povestka dlia 2021”’, Kremlin.ru. 27 January
2021, kremlin.ru/events/president/news/64938; ‘Putin nazval bor’bu s bednost’iu
glavnoi zadachei Rossii’, Vedomosti, 27 January 2021.
18 Federal’naia sluzhba gosudarstvennoi statistiki, ‘Informatsiia o sotsial’no-eko-
nomicheskom polozhenii Rossii’, https://rosstat.gov.ru/compendium/docu-
ment/50800, accessed 29 January 2021; ‘Pandemic Pushed Russians’ Household
Finances to Decade Low’, The Moscow Times, 29 January 2021.
19 ‘Chislo zhelaiushchikh privit’sia ot COVID v Rossii vernulos’ k letnemu urobniu’,
RBC.ru, 15 January 2021; Lucian Kim, ‘Poll: More Than Half of Russians Don’t
want to Get Vaccinated’, NPR, 24 December 2020.
20 ‘What you need to know today’, daily summaries of the state of coronavirus pan-
demic carried in The Moscow News. See also Henry Meyer, ‘Putin’s Once-Scorned
Vaccine Now Favorite in Pandemic Fight’, Bloomberg, 6 February 2021.
21 ‘Bol’she poloviny rossiian odobriaiut vaktsinatsiiu ot COVID, po oprosu
VTsIOMa’, Vedomosti, 28 January 2021; ‘Safety and efficacy of an rAd26 and
rAd5 vector-based heterologous prime-boost COVID-19 vaccine: an interim
analysis of a randomised controlled phase 3 trial in Russia’, The Lancet, 2
February 2021; Ilya Yablokov, ‘How The Kremlin’s Years of Conspiracy
Spreading Are Biting Back’, The Moscow Times, 1 March 2021
22 Richard Sakwa, Russia’s Futures. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2019, pp. 57–71.
23 Robert Service, Kremlin Winter. Russia and the Second Coming of Vladimir Putin.
London: Picador, 2019, pp. 187–9.
24 Andrew Higgins, ‘Is Putin as Powerful as He Acts?’, New York Times International,
30–31 March 2019.
25 Ivan Rodin, ‘Reiting “partii Naval’nogo” – ot 5 do 9%’, Nezavisimaia gazeta, 24
January 2021.
26 ‘Prezidentskie reitingi i polozhenie del v strane’, Levada-tsentr, 4 February 2021,
www.levada.ru/2021/02/04/prezidentskie-rejtingi-i-polozhenie-del-v-strane/?
fromtg=1.
27 Navalny, message & video on Instagram, ‘navalny. Vosvrashchaius’ domoi’, 13
January 2021, https://www.instagram.com/tv/CJ-lt0YoT2s/?utm_source=ig_
embed; ‘Navalny Announces Return to Russia Despite Prison Threat’, The
Moscow Times, 13 January 2021; ‘Naval’nyi nazval datu vozvrashcheniia v
Rossiiu’, Vedomosti, 13 January 2021; Sam Greene, ‘“Meet Me”, Alexei Navalny
Wrote’, The Moscow Times, 13 January 2021.
28 Tweeted by Yuliia Vitiazeva, who also was on the plane, 17 January 2021, https://
mobile.twitter.com/Vityzeva/status/1350809571519066112.
29 ‘Navalny urged supporters to go out. Its headquarters are preparing rallies on
January 23’, Meduza, 18 January 2021.
30 Elena Mukhametshina, Maksim Ivanov, ‘Gosduma otkryla sessiiu s obsuzhde-
niia Alekseia Naval’nogo i vyborov v SShA’, Vedomosti, 20 January 2021; ‘Kremlin
Calls Navalny’s Viral Putin Palace Report “Nonsense”’, The Moscow Times, 20
January 2021.
404 Closing remarks
31 ‘Zakharova sochla prizyvy osvobodit’ Naval’nogo napisannymi “pod kopirku”’,
RBC.ru, 3 February 2021, www.rbc.ru/politics/02/02/2021/6019a5219a79474793c
4a91e. For a list of statements by Western leaders, see ‘“Pure Cowardice”: World
Leaders React to Navalny’s Imprisonment’, The Moscow Times, 3 February 2021.
32 ‘Legislative restrictions of freedom of assembly at the end of 2020’, OVD-Info,
accessed 10 January 2021, https://ovdinfo.org/reports/legislative-restrictions-
freedom-assembly-end-2021.
33 ‘Detainee Lists … according to OVID-Info as of 23.01.21 15:21’, and later at
16.02, https://ovdinfo.org/, accessed 23 January 2021; ‘As It’s happening:
Thousands Rally for Navalny’s Release Across Russia’, The Moscow Times, 23
January 2021; Uliana Pavlova, Felix Light, ‘Protests for Jailed Kremlin Critic
Navalny Sweep Russia’, The Moscow Times, 23 January 2021. This last includes
videos of mob attacks on police lines.
34 ‘Navalny Allies Announce Second Nationwide Protest Sunday’, The Moscow
Times, 25 January 2021; ‘OVD-Info statement on the number of people detained
at the Freedom Navalny protest rallies’, 26 January 2021, https://ovdinfo.org/
articles/2021/01/26/zayavlenie-ovd-info-o-kolichestve-zaderzhannyh-na-akciyah-
protesta-svobodu.
35 ‘Konstantin Remchukov ob areste Naval’nogo i piati predposylkakh revoliutsii’,
Nezavisimaia, 18 January 2021.
36 ‘Leonid Volkov anonsiroval protestnuiu aktsiiu 14 fevralia’, MBKh-media, 9
February 2021, https://mbk-news.appspot.com/news/14feb/; ‘Leonid Volkov
announced a new action in support of Navalny’, VTimes, 9 February 2021;
‘Navalny Team Switches Tactics in Call for New Protest in Russia’, RFE/RL, 9
February 2021.
37 ‘Prezidentskie reitingi i polozhenie del v strane’, Levada-tsentr, 4 February 2021,
www.levada.ru/2021/02/04/prezidentskie-rejtingi-i-polozhenie-del-v-
strane/?fromtg=1; ‘Dissatisfaction With Putin Surges Among Young Russians —
Levada Poll’, The Moscow Times, 4 February 2021; Alexander Baunov, ‘The New
Face of Russian Protest’, Moscow Carnegie Center, 25 January 2021.
38 ‘Knopka. Pochemu protesty v Rossii ne ugrozhaiut vlasti’, Levada-tsentr, 12
October 2020, https://www.levada.ru/2020/10/12/knopka-pochemu-protesty-v-
rossii-ne-ugrozhayut-vlasti. An interview with Aleksei Levinson, director of the
Socio-Cultural Research Department of the Levada Centre.
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Index
Note: Page number followed by n refers to footnote number
Abdulatipov, Ramzan 67
Abdullah II, King 213
Abe, Shinzo 140, 218, 219–20
Abkhazia 34, 52, 180
Abramchenko, Viktoriia 34
Afghanistan 76, 216, 235n186, 236n187,
240, 259, 268–9
Africa 220–2
Agora 330
Agriculture 163–5
A Just Russia 21, 95, 96, 107
Akimov, Maksim 22, 267
Aksyonov, Sergei 63
Alekseeva, Lyudmila 329
Aliev, Ilham 191, 193, 213
Al-Khattab, Ibn (Samir Saleh Abdullah) 10
All-Russia People’s Front (ONF) 63, 98
All-Russia Public Opinion Research
Centre (VTsIOM) 16, 24, 25, 35
All-Russia Vote, see Constitution
Al-Qaeda, see terrorism
Alyokhina, Maria 401
Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK) 92,
103, 105, 114; see also Navalny
Antifa 249
anti-Semitism 62, 107
Apakhonchich, Daria 251
Applebaum, Anne 206
Arashukov, Rauf 337
armed forces, see military, Russia
Armenia 228n71, 286, 307, 308
arms race 286, 294–7; military, Russia
284–308
arms reduction treaties 240, 286, 288,
294, 298–300
arms sales 294, 298, 300–2
Artyukhov, Dmitry 57
Arutuyan, Anna 257
Aslund, Anders 17, 250
Assad, Bashar al 194–5, 198–9, 394
Association of Southeast Asian
Countries (ASEAN) 149–50, 217
Astreya, see Human rights
Atambaev, Almazbek 217
Azerbaijan 228n73–n77, 286
Babich, Mikhail 201
Baburin, Sergei 12
Baghdadi, Abu Bakr al 76
Bakhtadze, Mamuka 305
Bakiev, Kumanbek 217
Baltic States 179, 200–1, 209, 288, 305–6
Bartholomew I, Patriarch 376
Basaev, Shamil 10, 71
Batkivshchyna 182
Baturina, Yelena 356
Belarus 201–4, 307; Union State (with
Russia) 202–3
Belousov, Andrei 34, 40, 354
Belt and Road 148–9, 161, 209, 213, 218,
267
Berdimuhamedow, Gurbanguly 153
Berezovsky, Boris 11, 318
Berlusconi, Silvio 209
Beslan 72; see also terrorism
Biden, Joe 240, 248, 259, 260, 265–6,
267, 391, 395
Biegun, Stephen E. 192
Billingslea, Marshal S. 288
Blank, Stephen 288
Bobkov, Roman 339
Boldyrev, Roman 338
Bolsonaro, Jair 144
Bolton, John 107, 212, 242, 259, 295
Borisov, Yury 22, 197
Bortnikov, Aleksandr 16, 19, 75, 211
414 Index
BRICS 143–4
Bridenstine, Jim 242
Brouillette, Dan 162
Browder, William 17, 89, 206, 208, 247, 248
Burkhardt, Fabian 334
Butina, Maria 252, 253, 256
Calvey, Michael 255, 259
Canada 186, 203, 204, 212, 247
Cardin, Ben 258
Caspian Sea 142
Chaika, Yuri 33, 67, 71, 89, 338
Champagne, Françoise-Philippe 204
Chapman, Anna 252
Chebotarev, Sergey 22
Chechen wars 10–1, 61, 284
Chechnya 6, 51–2, 59–60, 70, 81n49; see
also Kadyrov
Chekunkov, Aleksei 41
Cheremisov, Konstantin 373
Chernyshenko, Dmitry 34
China 3, 171n90–n93, 213, 223, 267–8,
285, 288–9, 290–1, 294, 295, 298–9,
300, 301–2, 307, 308; see also Belt and
Road; Xi Jinping
Chubais, Anatoly 41
Churchill, Winston 7
Church of Scientology 375; see also
religion
Chuychenko, Konstantin 22
CIS, see Commonwealth of
Independent States
climate change 26–7, 65, 366–8; see also
environment
Clinton, Hillary 244, 246
coal, see energy
Cohen, Michael 132
Cohen, Stephen F. 39, 241, 258–9
Cold War 3, 178, 239–70
Collective Security Treaty Organization
(CSTO) 302–3
‘coloured revolution’ 20, 72, 102, 178,
202–3, 204, 217, 250, 269, 292
Comey, James 258
Commonwealth of Independent States
(CIS) 76, 179, 183
Communist Party of the Russian
Federation (CPRF) 57, 88, 94–8,
104–5, 116
Conscription, see military
Constitution, Russian 6, 7–8, 13, 42,
51n137, 178; All-Russia vote 29, 31–2,
51n137, 51n141, 111, 188; amend-
ments 30–3, 53–4, 47n80, 59,
125n127–n130, 377, 384n64
Conte, Guiseppe 209
Coronavirus, see COVID-19
Corruption 14, 19, 22, 26, 57, 67, 68, 77,
89, 90, 92, 95, 98, 115, 131, 139–40,
317, 323, 325, 327, 334–4; Armenia
191; Moldova 205; Ukraine 185; see
also crime
Council of Europe 234n162
COVID-19 1, 35–7, 57, 67, 78n15,
78n17, 78n19, 122–3, 142, 162,
169n45, 263–5, 327–8, 352–60, 397–8;
vaccine nationalism 222, 383n48–n49;
vaccines 111, 144, 211, 269, 352; see
also healthcare
crime 334–41; see also corruption
Crimea 2–3, 7, 52, 53, 60–4, 188–9,
292–3; see also Ukraine
Crimean Tatars 61, 63, 224n21
Cruz, Ted 155
CSTO, see Collective Security Treaty
Organization
Cuba 211–12
cyberattacks 258–61
Czech Republic 254
Dagestan 60, 80n43; see also terrorism
Dawisha, Karen 334
Degtyarov, Mikhail 97, 112, 374
demography 21–2, 365, 377–80; life
expectancy 21, 351
demonstrations, see protests
Deripaska, Oleg 132
Diaz-Canel, Miguel 211
Ditrich (Dietrich), Yevgeny 22, 41, 146
Dodon, Igor 205, 223
Doguzova, Zarina 152
Donbass (Donbas) 182, 184–8; see also
Ukraine
Donetsk People’s Republic, see Ukraine
Donnelly, Christopher 206
Dorenko, Sergei 323
Double-Headed Eagle Society 107
drug and alcohol abuse 369, 370–1; see
also smoking
Druzhba 131
Duda, Andrzej 200, 205
Dugin, Aleksandr 15, 107
Durov, Nikolai 320
Durov, Pavel 73, 320
Duterte, Rodrigo 213
Dvorkovich, Arkady 21, 328
Dvornichenko, Anna 331
economics 7, 11, 129–66; see also energy;
pipelines; sanctions
 Index 415
education 325–8 Francis, Pope 209
Efimov, Aleksandr 197 fresh water 161
Egypt 194, 231n111; see also Sisi Frias, Leopoldo Cintra 211
Eldzharkiev, Ibragi 67 Frost, David 178, 303
elections, Russia 6, 12, 96–7, 100–6, FSB, see Federal Security Service
128n173–n174 Fukuyama, Frances 239
electoral reform 117 Furgal, Sergei 56, 98, 116, 126n144–145
energy 65–6, 151–60, 162–3; coal 161;
gas 151–6, 157; LNG 157; NPPs 149, Gabbard, Tulsi 246
155, 160, 195, 259; oil 150–9; pipelines Gadzhiibragimov, Dzhamaludin 60
129–30, 142, 173n128–130; see also Galeotti, Mark 38, 337
Nord Stream; Power of Siberia; Gamidov, Abdusamad 68
TurkStream Ganus, Yury 374
Environment 66, 93–4; see also climate gas, natural, see energy
change Gaugazia 52, 205
Erdogen, Recep Tavyip 144, 191, 192, gays, see LGBT
194–7, 354 Gazprom 130, 132, 140, 151–6
Espionage 251–5 Gedeon, Bishop (Yuriy Kharon) 376
Eurasian Economic Union (EEU) 107, Georgia 179–80, 189, 209, 228n66–69,
143, 149, 150, 165 304
Eurasianism 107 Gerasimov, General Valerii 292–3, 295
Euromaidans 61, 183, 187, 239 Germany 186, 201, 206, 207–8, 211, 213
European Council 203, 234n162 Ghani, Ashraf 214
European Court of Human Rights Gintsburg, Aleksandr 360
(ECHR) 91, 209, 248, 330 Glasser, Susan 15
European Parliament (PACE) 206, 209 Glushakova, Yekaterina 341
European Union (EU) 199–205, 207–17, Goble, Paul 39
231n125, 232n126 gold 161–2
Evans, John 9 Golikova, Tatyana 22, 34, 37, 267, 334,
Evmenov, Admiral Nikolai 300 354, 361, 371, 378
Extra-systemic opposition 88–94 Golodets, Olga 22
Golos 39
Fadeev, Valerii 330 Golubovich, Aleksei 324
Falkov, Valery 327 Golunov, Ivan 99–100, 323–4, 329
Farage, Nigel 206 Gorbachev, Mikhail S. 6, 10, 52, 239,
Farion, Irina 62 286, 295–6, 317–8, 391
Fatherland-All Russia Party 84 Gorbunov, Valentin 103
Fayzullin, Irek 41 Gordeev, Aleksei 22, 84, 163
Federal Migration Service 378 Gorring, Ruslan 340
Federal Security Service (FSB) 2, 10, 16, governance 8–9, 15–6, 21, 33, 53, 54, 84,
19, 21, 23, 25–6, 77, 82n76, 82n79, 118n5, 380n2–n4, 391–2, 398–9;
82n82, 84, 91, 106, 111, 115, 117, 136, governors 54–7
251, 252, 253–4, 320, 325, 330, 337, Gref, German 13, 129
339 Grigorieva, Yelena 331
Federation Council, see governance Gromov, Aleksei 21
Fedotov, Mikhail 330 Grudinin, Pavel 12, 88, 341
Filaret, Patriarch 376 Guaido, Juan 212
Filip, Pavel 205 Gudkov, Dmitry 92, 96–7, 101, 111
food, see agriculture Guriev, Sergei 111
Foreign Policy Concepts, Russian 179 Gusinsky, Vladimir 11, 85, 318
For Human Rights party 98–9 Guterres, António 161
Forum of Free Russia 248
Fradkov, Mikhail 9 Haftar, General Khalifa 221
France 186, 190, 191, 196, 205, 206, 210, Haley, Nikki 196, 241
211, 213; see also Macron hazing (dedovshchina) 285, 287
416 Index
healthcare 368–72, see also COVID-19 Kalashnikov 301, 302
homosexuality, see LGBT Kalimatov, Makhmud-Ali 68
human rights 329–30; see also European Kaljulaid, Kersti 200
Court of Human Rights, LGBT Kamath, K.V. 144
Hungary 205 Kamian, Harry 185
Huntsman, John 258, 262–3, 306 Kara-Mursa, Vladimir 89
Hydroxychloroquine 356 Karzai, Hamid 213–14
Hyten, John 294 Kasparov, Garri 39, 247, 248
Kasyanov, Mikhail 9, 84, 89, 247
Ignatiev, Mikhail 57 Katz, Maksim 92
immigration/migration 372–80 Kazakhstan 74, 213, 216, 236n187,
Import Substitution Commission 236n190–n191
167n21; see also sanctions Kelin, Andrei 208
India 195, 210, 211, 213–14, 216–18, 223 Kerch Strait 136, 189, 245, 292–3; see
industry/manufacturing 132, 134, 136, also Sea of Azov
142, 161–2, 170n75–n76 Kerch Strait Bridge 145, 188
Infantino, Gianni 373 Kerry, John 185
Ingushetia 51–2, 60, 70, 80n43, 80n45 Khabarovsk protests 126n144, 126n150,
Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces 126n152; see also demonstrations
Treaty (INF) 286, 294, 295–7, 298, Khabrieva, Taliya 28
299, 303, 307 Khachaturyan sisters 331–2
International Monetary Fund (IMF) 129, Kharichev, Aleksandr
134, 135, 138–9, 140, 144, 149, 213 Khodorkovsky, Mikhail 11, 89, 93, 99,
internet 320–2, 326, 341 247–8
interpol 246–7 Khrushcheva, Nina L. 245
investment, foreign 145, 146–7; domestic Khrushchev, Nikita 61, 270, 370
145–6; see also SPIEF Khusnullin, Marat 34
Iran 181, 207, 213, 229n91–n94, Kim Jon-Un 218–9
230n105–n106, 242 Kirill, Patriarch 12, 330, 377
Iraq 180, 229n92–n93 Kiriyenko, Sergei 15, 21, 84, 100, 108,
Ishaev, Viktor 57 211
Ishchenko, Andrei 98 Kiselev, Dmitry 322
Islam 61, 66, 67, 71–2, 194, 376 Klishas, Andrein 28
Islamicists, see terrorism Kobak, Dmitry 22
Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIL) Kobylkin, Dmitry 22, 41
77, 242; see also terrorism Kolbe, Paul R. 260
Israel 152, 164, 181, 193–4, 213, Kolesnikova, Maria 203
230n105–n106 Kolobkov, Pavel 22, 373
Italy 205, 209, 222 Kolokoltsev, Vladimir 18, 22, 100, 337
Ivanov, Aleksei 341 Kolomoyskiy, Ihor 185
Ivanov, Sergei 304 Komarova, Natalia 369
Izotova, Galina 371 Konovalov, Valentin 22, 98
January Revolution 1, 28, 29, 77, 88, Kosachev, Konstantin 194
391, 399–400 Kosovo 179–80
Japan 172n100–n101, 213, 218, 219–20 Kosovo precedent 180
Japarov, Sadyr 217 Kostin, Andrei 134
Jaresko, Natalie 250 Kotukov, Mikhail 22
Jeenbekov, Sooronbai 217, 223 Kozak, Dmitry 34
Jehovah’s Witnesses 375; see also religion Kozlov, Aleksandr 22, 41
Jews 376; see also anti-Semitism Kramer, Mark 241
Johnson, Boris 113, 208 Krasheninnikov, Pavel 28
Krasnov, Igor 33
Kabardino-Balkaria 67–8 Krasovsky, Anton 97
Kadyrov, Ramzan 13, 37, 59, 68, 70, 73, Kravchuk, Leonid 52
89, 99, 110, 355 Kravtsov, Sergei 34, 327–8

Kuchma, Leonid 6
Kudrin, Aleksei 13, 21, 25, 37, 58, 96,
129, 130, 139, 141, 161, 326, 364, 368
Kudryavtsev, Demyan 324–5
Kudryavtsev, Konstantin 115
Kulikov, Sergei 41
Kulyavtsev, Kirill 338
Kumin, Vadim 97
Kurds 195, 196–7, 198–9
Kuril Islands, see Japan
Kurz, Sebastien 205
Kyrgyzstan 216–17, 223
labour 130, 135, 141, 351, 362, 364, 379;
see also migrants
Laden, Osama bin 71
Lagarde, Christine 140
language 57–9, 62, 64
Latin America 211–13
Lavrentiev, Aleksandr 196
Lavrov, Sergei 22, 109, 110, 115, 191–2,
193, 194, 196, 212, 217, 219–20,
240–1, 252, 258, 259, 269, 271n24,
296, 400
Ledena, Alena 334
Le Pen, Marine 206
Levinson, Aleksei 335
LGBT 70, 330–31
Liberal Democratic Party of Russia
(LDPR) 21, 39, 57, 88, 96, 97, 98,
105–6, 111–12, 116
Libya 179, 195, 207, 211, 221
life expectancy, see demography
Linkevicius, Linas 204
Litvinenko, Aleksandr 11
LNG, see energy
Luhansk People’s Republic (LPR), see
Ukraine
Lukashenko (Lukashenka), Alyaksandr
6, 143, 160, 201–4, 266, 269, 303
Lukashevich, Marina 341
LuKoil 140, 155
Luzhkov, Yuri 318, 336
Lyubimova, Olga 34, 37, 327
Maas, Haiko 208
Macron, Emmanuel 113, 140, 186, 192,
194, 203, 204, 205, 210, 211, 261, 288,
307, 207
Maduro, Nicolas 159, 212, 394
Magnitsky Case 208, 240, 247–8
Magnitsky, Sergei 248
Magomedov, Magomed 337
Magomedov, Ziyavudin 337
Maguire, Mairead Corrigan 2
Index 417
Maidan, see Euromaidans
Malaysian Airliner MH17, 11, 184–5,
186
Malofeev, Konstantin 107
Manturov, Denis 22, 267
Matovnikov, Aleksandr 67
Mattarella, Sergio 209
Mattis, James 305
Matviyenko, Valentina 84, 109, 323, 324,
326
Matytsin, Oleg 373
May, Theresa 181, 208
McCain, John 89
McFaul, Michael 246, 263
Mearsheimer, John J. 241
media 317–20, 322–5; see also
propaganda
Medinsky, Vladimir 22, 34
Medvedev, Dmitry 7, 9, 13, 16, 21, 23,
33, 35, 87, 93, 108, 129, 150, 161, 216,
267, 328, 334, 336, 341, 362, 366
Melikov, Sergei 67
Memorial 100
Merkel, Angela 113, 153, 194, 203, 204,
206, 207–8, 221, 249
Meshkov, Yuriy 61
Mezentsev, Dmitry 201
Michel, Charles 203
Miftakhov, Azat 93
migrant workers 378–9
Mikhailov, Aleksandr N. 57
Mikhailov, Col. Sergei 253
military, Russia 284–308; defence
spending 287–8; manoeuvres 291–3,
297–8, 309n23, 316n132
Miller, Aleksei 153, 216
Minsk-1 & 2 2, 192, 227n51, 227n53
Mironov, Nikolai 108, 265, 400
Mirziyoyev, Shavkat 160
Mishustin, Mikhail 9, 33, 35, 40, 41,
59–60, 109, 114, 132, 141–2, 204, 334,
337, 339, 352, 354, 356, 363, 380
Mitchell, A. Wess 243
Mitrokhin, Sergei 92, 97, 101
Modi, Narendra 140, 217–8, 301
Moldova 52, 204–5
Mongolia 213, 216, 222
Mormons 375; see also religion
Moskalkova, Tatyana 252
Mothers of Russian Soldiers 287
Mueller Report 243, 273n44–n46
Mueller, Robert 243–4, 246
Murashko, Mikhail 37, 358, 360, 369, 371
Musk, Elon 255
Mutko, Vitaly 22
418 Index
Nabiullina, Elvira 13, 142
Naftohaz, see Ukraine
Nagorno-Karabakh 52, 180, 191–3
Naryshkin, Sergei 191, 323
national guard 18–9, 101, 103, 104, 110
nationalism 125n121, 125n123–n125
nationalists 106–7, 186, 200, 214, 217
National Priority Projects 13, 35, 40,
139–40, 165
NATO 7, 178, 180, 190, 195–6, 200–1,
207, 210, 211, 240, 266, 269, 303–08,
309n13–n14, 311n44, 311n46–n48
NATO expansion 178, 180, 240, 242–3,
246, 257
Navalnaya, Yulia 400
Navalny, Aleksei 11, 12, 17, 19, 23–4, 25,
35, 39, 76, 94–5, 113–17, 119n21–n25,
119n27–n28, 121n69–n70,
123n104–n105, 124n107–n108,
125n136, 126n138, 126n139–n140,
207, 211, 249, 264, 269, 320, 400,
402n1; poisoning 113–16, 391–2
Navalny, Oleg 401
Nazarbaev, Nursultan 216
Nekrasov, Andrei 248
Nemtsova, Zhanna 99
Nemtsov, Boris 11, 17, 99, 109
Neo-Nazis 62, 107, 182; see also Right
Sektor
Netanyahu, Benjamin 197–8, 376
Neverov, Sergei 108
NGOs 18, 20, 75, 99, 100, 105, 117,
250–1, 287, 324, 330, 340, 367
Niinisto, Sauli 210
Nikolaev, Aysen 379
nord stream 1 & 2 153–7,
173n116–n117, 206, 208, 210, 262
Normandy Quartet 186, 187, 188, 211
Nornickel 161, 367
North Caucasus 66–70
Northern Sea Route 65–6, 158, 171n90
North Korea 218–9, 222, 246
North Ossetia 60
Norway 135, 151, 152, 156–7, 159, 290,
294, 297
Noskov, Konstantin 22
Novak, Aleksandr 22, 37, 41, 158, 162
Novatek 140, 150, 157
Novichok 127n155, 181–2; see also
OPCW
nuclear power plants, see energy
Nuland, Victoria 239
Obama, Barack 140, 147, 240, 248
O’Brien, Robert 297
Odesa massacre 183
oil industry, see energy
oligarchs 6, 9, 11, 17, 25–6, 37, 96, 129,
130, 131–3, 163, 166
OPEC, see Organization of Oil
Exporting Countries
Open Russia 89, 93, 99, 112
Open Skies Treaty 297
Orban, Viktor 155, 205–6
Oreshkin, Maksim 13, 22, 33, 34, 267
Organization for Economic Cooperation
and Development (OECD) 141
Organization for the Prohibition of
Chemical Weapons (OPCW) 181, 196
Organization of Oil Exporting
Countries (OPEC) 137, 158, 159, 162
Orthodox Church, Russian 15, 60, 73,
86, 94, 107, 184, 190, 194, 209, 355,
372, 374, 376; see also religion
Orthodox Church, Ukrainian 184
Other Russia 96
Pakistan 213–14, 217–18
Pamfilova, Ella 39, 116
pandemic, see COVID-19
Parliamentary Assembly of Europe
(PACE) 62, 209
Pasechnik, Leonid 185
Pashinyan, Nikol 191, 192–3, 303, 327
Patriots of Russia Party 96
Patrushev, Dmitry 22, 164–5
Patrushev, Nikolai 84, 115, 164
Pence, Mike 197
Pensioners of Russia Party 85
pension reform 94–7, 118n5, 141, 385n71
Pentacostals 375–6; see also religion
perestroika 6
Peskov, Dmitry 15, 31, 37, 40, 112, 114,
116, 134, 136, 156, 164, 188, 253, 262,
266, 267, 321, 354, 380
Petrov, Valery 340
Petukhov, Leonid 165
Pipelines, see energy
‘Pivot to the East,’ 7, 147–50
Pivovarov, Andrei 93
Plotnitsky, Igor 185
Pokrovsky, Vadim 371
Poland 200–1, 209, 232n135, 290, 294,
295–6, 298, 304, 305–6, 308
Politkovskaia, Anna 11, 319
Poltavchenko, Georgy 57
Polyudova, Darya 92–3
Pompadour, Martin 324
Pompeo, Mike 113, 156, 185, 192, 198,
202, 212, 214, 241, 252, 259, 295, 297
Ponomarev, Ilya 48
Ponomarev, Lev 99, 250, 251

Popova, Anna 37
population(s), see demography
Poroshenko, Petro 186–7, 189, 224n23–
n24, 225n26, 292, 296, 305
Potanin, Vladimir 65
poverty 60, 351
Power of Siberia 151–2, 155
Praviy Sektor, see right sector
presidency 6–42; see also elections
presidential envoys 17–8
Prigozhin, Yevgeny 114, 244
Primakov, Yevgeny 84, 304
prisons, see crime
Prokhorova, Irina 111
Prokopchuk, Aleksandr 246
propaganda 265–8
Prostakov, Sergei 112
protests (demonstrations, rallies) 19–20,
27, 32, 88–94, 95–6, 98–107, 118n3–n4,
125n137, 400–1
public chamber 18, 29; see also
presidency
Pushilin, Denis 185
Pushkina, Oksana 332, 334
Pussy Riot 113
Putinism 2, 9, 14–6, 21, 38–9, 114
Putinophobia, see Putin, demonization
Putin, Vladimir: career 1–3, 9–12, 84;
demonization 1–2, 11–2, 39, 180–1,
247–9, 334, 396; on education 284; on
language 56–8; personal wealth 17,
392; popularity/trust 7, 10, 16, 19–20,
23–5, 29, 32, 35, 37, 41, 392; and
Stalin 212; and Trump 261–2, 265–7,
271n11–n12, 271n15; see also
putinism
Quadrilateral Security Dialogue
(QUAD) 218
Raab, Dominic 208
Radionova, Svetlana 65
railways, see transportation
rallies, see protests
Razvozhaev, Mikhail 63
Reagan, Ronald 286
Reeker, Philip 263
religion 60, 107, 374–7; see also indi-
vidual denominations
Remchukov, Konstantin 401
Reshetnikov, Maksim 33
Rice, Susan 248
Right Sector 183
roads, see infrastructure
Rodchenkov, Grigory 374
Rogozin, Dmitry 147, 242, 254
Index 419
Romania 189, 204–5, 295, 296
Roslyakov, Vladislav 74
Rotenberg, Arkady 392
Rouhani, Hassan 195, 394
Rubio, Marco 89, 248
Russia-Georgia war 7, 11, 180, 190
Russian foreign relations, see individual
countries
Russian Imperial Movement 107
Russian Liberation Movement, see
South East Radical Bloc
Russian March 107
Russia of the Future Party 92
Russophobia 207, 273n54, 329; see also
Putin, demonization
Rutskoi, Aleksandr 8
Ryabkov, Sergei 288, 297
Rybakov, Nikolai 92
Saakashvili, Mikheil 189–90
Sabaev, Aleksandr 249
Sachs, Jeffrey 14
Safronov, Ivan 254, 323, 325
Sakwa, Richard 334, 398
Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, King
137, 159
Salvini, Matteo 205, 206, 209
Samoilova, Alla 355
Sanctions vs. Russia 129, 130–2, 133–7,
140–1, 146, 147, 148, 149, 151, 153,
155–6, 161, 163, 166, 174n141,
174n147, 181, 185, 186, 189, 194, 195,
199, 200, 203–4, 210–12, 213,
233n149, 242–3, 244–5, 259, 260,
262–3, 267–8, 269, 289; vs. Belarus
204; vs. China 263; vs. Iran 197–8,
263; vs. Turkey 196–7; vs. Venezuela
212
Sandu, Maia 205
Sargsyan, Serzh 190–1
Saudi Arabia 1, 70, 181, 194, 199
Sauer, Derk 325
Savelyev, Vitaly 41
Savitskaya, Lyudmila 251
Schulmann, Yekaterina 31
Science 328–9
Sea of Azov 245, 292–3
Sechin, Igor 159–60, 162, 325
Seleznev, Gennady 351
Semenova, Marina 95
Sentsov, Oleg 93, 186
Serbia 179, 308
Serdyukov, Anatoly 336
Serebrennikov, Kirill 329
Serukanov, Vitaliy 92
Service, Robert 2, 398
420 Index
Shalkov, Dmitry 21
Shanghai Cooperation Organization
(SCO) 216, 235n185
Sharabokova, Oksana 95
Shaymiev, Mintimer 52
Shelby, Richard 243
Shershukov, Aleksandr 98
Shestun, Aleksandr 39
Shevchenko, Anastasia 93
Shevtsova, Lilia 93
Shishkina, Yevgeniia 339
Shishov, Lt. Gen. Mikhail 19
Shmarov, Andrei 325
Shoigu, Sergei 22, 38, 75, 84, 109, 110,
193, 210, 300, 307, 309n11, 361
Shulginov, Nikolai 41
Shushkevich, Stanislav 52
Siberia 61, 64–5, 74, 132, 140, 148, 151,
158, 161; see also Northern Sea
Route; Power of Siberia
Siberiaks 110
Sidorov, Artem 93
Siloviki 17, 25–6, 37, 57, 348n93
Siluanev, Anton 22, 34, 132–3, 136, 140,
159, 201, 267, 397
Singh, Rajnath 218
Sipyagin, Vladimir 98
Sisi, Abdel Fattah al 146, 160, 198, 394
Skolkovo 21, 328–9
Skripal affair 224n15, 224n17
Skripal, Sergei 11, 113, 135, 208,
224n15, 224n17, 224n19, 252
Skripal, Yulia 181
Skvortsova, Veronika 22, 369, 372
Slavina, Irina 324
Slovakia 165
smoking 369
Smolenkov, Oleg 253
Smolyarchuk, Yelena 352
Sobchak, Anatoly 9
Sobchak, Ksenia 12, 92
Sobol, Lyubov 104, 114, 122n84–n85,
326, 339, 400
Sobyanin, Sergei 37, 38, 59, 97, 109, 110,
122n86, 323, 328, 359, 381n10–n11,
381n16–n17, 381n20
social issues 20–1, 51n146, 351–80,
396–7; see also pension reform
Soleimani, Qassem 194
Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr 329
South Caucasus 51n146, 190–3
South East Radical Bloc (SERB) 107
South Ossetia 34, 52, 72, 180
SOVA 20
space 255–6
SPIEF 140, 142, 144, 176n162, 213, 255,
296, 313n80
Spiridonova, Karina 73
sport 372–4; doping scandal 374
Sputnik V., see COVID-19
Stalin, Josef 11–2, 61, 376
Stanovaya, Tatyana 35, 38, 57, 115
State Council 27, 29, 33; see also
governance
Steele, Christopher 206
Stein, Jill 246
Steinmeier, Frank-Walter 186
Stoltenburg, Sec.-Gen. Jens 294, 306
St. Petersburg Economic Forum, see
SPIEF
Strache, Heinz-Christian 206
Sullivan, John J. 260, 263, 265
Suraykin, Maksim 12
Surkov, Vladislav 14, 34
Svetov, Mikhail 101
Sviridov, Ilya 95, 97
Svoboda (Freedom) Party 62, 183
Syria 179, 195–7, 199, 207, 261, 285
Tajikistan 213, 308
Taliban 76, 214, 216; bounties 268–9; see
also terrorism
Tarasenko, Andrei 98
Taro, Kono 220
Tatars 57, 58–60, 61, 63, 224n22; see also
Crimean Tatars
Tatarstan 52–3, 58, 74
Taxation 130, 168; see also economics
Tereshkova, Valentina 30, 31
terrorism, terrorists 71–7, 224n24–n25
Timchenko, Galina 323
Titov, Boris 12
Tkachev, Aleksandr 164
Tokaev, Kassym-Jomart 213, 216
Topilin, Maksim 22
Torshin, Aleksandr 252
tourism 142, 145, 165, 352, 354–5, 372
Tourist Police 18
trade 231n110; see also economics
trade unions 86, 94, 98
Transdniestria 52
Transneft 155
transportation 145, 353–5; airlines 141;
railways 64, 139, 140, 141, 145–6,
147–9, 161, 353; roads 140–1, 145
Trenin, Dmitri 240, 241, 245, 262, 267, 291
Trump, Donald 2, 11, 25, 36, 75, 76,
132, 153, 156–7, 159, 162, 185, 192,
193–4, 196–7, 206–8, 210–11, 212–13,
218–19, 244–5, 255–6, 259, 261–2,
 Index 421
263–7, 269, 271n11–n12, 286, 289, Volodin, Vyacheslav 13, 30, 108–9, 243,
294–5, 300, 305, 307, 312n68–n69, 400
312n71, 358, 391 Vorobev, Stanislav 107
Trutnev, Yury 22, 149 Vorobyov, Andrei 97, 353
Tsepkalo, Veronika 203 Voronkov, Vladimir 75
Tsikhanouskaya, Sviatlana 203–4 Voronov, Vladimir 324
Tsipko, Aleksandr 39 Vucic, Alexander 197
Tsukanov, Nikolai 41 Vyatkin, Dmitry 117
Tsvetkova, Yulia 331
Tsygankov, Andrei 15, 241 wages, see economics, see social issues
Turcan (Tsurkan), Karina 254 Wang Qishan 140
Turkey 144, 151, 155, 160, 164, 174n142, Wang Yi 241
181, 189, 191–2, 195, 199, 213, 221–2, weaponry, see arms
229n87–n90 Wei Fenghe 289
Turkmenistan 142, 153 Weir, Fred 9
TurkStream 152, 155, 156 Whelan, Paul N. 252–3, 259
Tymoshenko, Yuliia 185 women 331–4; see also social issues
World Cup 388n133
Udaltsov, Sergei 19, 94
Ukraine 7, 11, 23, 34, 52, 53, 60–4, 131, Xi Jinping 144, 147, 151, 161, 218,
135, 140, 152–3, 155–6, 164, 179, 180, 267–8, 288
182–90, 195, 204, 208, 210, 211, 212,
239, 240, 242–3, 244–5, 247, 254, 259, Yabloko 84, 92, 94
285, 286, 289–90, 292, 296, 304, Yakovenko, Aleksandr 208
305–6, 308; Naftohaz 130, 153, 184; Yakushev, Vladimir 22, 37, 41
see also Crimea; Donbas Yanaev, Gennady 8
Ukrainian civil war 7, 180, 182–3, Yanukovych, Viktor 61, 225n27
184–8, 247, 261–2, 306 Yarovaya, Irina 321
Ulyukaev, Aleksei 336 Yashin, Ilya 96–7, 101, 109
unemployment 95, 140, 351, 362, 363–4, Yatsenyuk, Arseniy 186–7
365–6, 380; see also social issues Yavlinsky, Grigorii 12, 84, 92, 97
United Kingdom (UK) 181–2, 196, 206, Yeltsin, Boris 1, 6, 8, 9, 14, 52, 84, 129,
208, 213; Brexit 206 130, 178–9, 258, 318, 391
United Russia (UR) 13, 30, 46n59, 86–8, Yevkurov, Yunus-Bek 68
95–6, 98, 116–17, 118n8, 124n112, Yuarmiia 188
330, 332 Yurchenko, Yevgeny 374
United States 240–70; see also Biden;
OBama; Pompeo; Trump Zaitseva, Olga 374
Usmanov, Alisher 147 Zakharchenko, Aleksandr 340
Ustinov, Pavel 104, 329 Zakharova, Maria 111, 249, 269, 296,
Uzbekistan 213, 214, 216, 308 324, 400
Zelenskiy, Volodomyr 25, 187, 189, 202,
Vaccines, see COVID-19 225n31, 259
Vaino, Andrei 21 Zhdanov, Ivan 104
Vasilieva, Olga 22 Zhirinovsky, Vladimir 12, 24, 61, 84, 88,
Vasiliev, Vladimir 67 108, 110, 114, 400
Vekselberg, Viktor 132–40 Zhukov, Yegor 326
Velayati, Ali Akbar 198 Zinichev, Yevgeny 22, 65, 291
Venezuela 235n178–n183, 246, 261, 267, Zolotov, Gen. Viktor 18, 67, 339
268 Zorkin, Valerii 31
Verhofstadt, Guy 206 Zubkov, Viktor 9
Vietnam 213, 308 Zurabishvili, Salome 190
Volkov, Dmitry 37 Zyatkov, Konstantin 324
Volkov, Leonid 91, 400, 401 Zyuganov, Gennady 6, 84, 88, 97, 103,
Volodina, Valeriia 332 108, 114, 117, 400