Vladimir Putin is a dictator and a tyrant, but other forces also sustain him – and the west needs to understand them.
he west’s derisive reporting of Vladimir Putin’s election victory this week was a mark of his success. It was described as an abuse of democracy, “rigged”, “fixed” and “a sham”. The other candidates were shadows, while Putin’s true opponents were imprisoned, exiled or dead. According to this narrative, the 87% who voted for him were mere victims of coercion, the queues of silent protesters were the stars.
Putin’s vote had nothing to do with democracy. It was a rerun of his 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics, a global dressing-up, a rallying of support. As he celebrated his win to an adoring crowd in Red Square on Monday, we saw Putin as the new Ivan the Terrible against a backdrop of Ivan’s St Basil’s cathedral. He even made an offhand quip about his murdered rival Navalny. The image was of absolute power smilingly defying the enemy. Two years ago, he was supposedly crippled by western sanctions. We don’t hear that now.
I sometimes think what fun it would be to spend a month as the London correspondent for a totalitarian state newspaper. The evidence of relentless failures by the British government would fuel my daily contrasts with the order and stability back home. I would ponder when these bickering politicians and their corrupt donors would fade to nothing. I would report on the excluded populists – the Johnsons, Andersons, Farages and Galloways – waiting in the wings to pounce, while Rishi Sunak twists and turns frantically to avoid an election.
How we describe other countries matters when our concern is not how it seems to them, but how it feels to us. Almost half a century of George Kennan’s policy of containment and cohabitation with communism has given way to a shrill new agenda. Not just Russia, China, Iran, North Korea and Syria, but states across Asia and Africa are regularly castigated as tyrannical, terrorist or genocidal. They are made victims of economic aggression through sanctions, distorting global trade and impoverishing millions. There is no evidence this castigation has advanced the cause of democracy an inch – quite the opposite.
One survey suggests the number of democracies has declined since 2015. Political bookshelves heave with predictions of democracy’s decay and death. Most alarming was last year’s polling from Open Society Foundations. Surveying nations across the globe, it found that only 57% of 18 to 35s regarded democracy as their preferred form of government, against more than 70% for those over 56. Each successive younger generation has a lower respect for democracy. More than a third of the world’s under-35s would today support some sort of “military rule”, by a “strong leader” who did not hold elections or consult a parliament.
When I asked a Russia expert what he thought would be the true tally of electoral support for Putin’s dictatorship, his view squared with this survey. He suggested it would be about 60%, though lower in Moscow and St Petersburg. This sounded much like my visits to Moscow in the post-communist 1990s. Russians would concede the virtues of western democracy, but they pleaded the more urgent need for order, security and prosperity.
To vote for Putin, you did not need to support his regime or his war with Ukraine. You might well be content with the one thing he promises: security and a patriotic response to western abuse. Nato’s escalation of its logistical aid to Ukraine into an all-out economic war on the Russian people enabled Putin to construct an anti-west coalition. It now extends from China and India to embrace a stage army of authoritarians across the globe. This economic war has clearly been counter-productive. The Economist reports this week that the sanctions have in fact “juiced the [Russian] economy”. Russian GDP growth of approximately 3 % in real terms last year outstripped Britain’s. Western policy is actively helping Putin retain power.
As the historian of modern Russia Mark Galeotti points out, Putin’s defiance of his western critics has entrenched his “shabby police state”, possibly for his lifetime. We can hurl abuse at him, as we can at Xi, Modi and the rest. It may make us feel better. And perhaps we should, not least on moral grounds: these are not regimes we would cast as admirable. But let’s be realistic. There is not the slightest evidence that in doing so we are making the world a safer place for democracy; probably the reverse.
There was no election in Russia last weekend. There was no campaign. There were no debates, which was unsurprising, because no issues could be debated. Above all, there were no real candidates, bar one: the president of Russia, Vladimir Putin, the man who has just started his fifth, unconstitutional term in office.
Russians did line up at polling stations, but these were not actually polling stations. They were props in an elaborate piece of political theater, a months-long exercise in the projection of power and brutality. While that exercise unfolded, Putin’s only significant political opponent, Alexei Navalny, died under mysterious circumstances in a prison north of the Arctic Circle. Two Russian presidential candidates collected the requisite number of signatures to stand, both said they opposed the war in Ukraine, and both were removed from the ballot. Three practically unknown people were allowed to remain on the ballot, but they did not criticize Putin and did not oppose him in any way. One of them declared that he hoped Putin would win. In Russian-occupied Ukraine, men in balaclavas forced people to vote at gunpoint.
Some Western media nevertheless covered this orchestrated drama as if it really were an election. Reporters interviewed voters, cited “exit polls,” even commented on the “results,” as if these things mean anything in a country whose leadership lies openly about everything: economic statistics, war casualties, Russian history. Reuters ran a headline declaring Putin had won “in a landslide.” The earnest coverage was exactly what Putin hoped he would get. He knows, after all, that he is an illegitimate leader, and he knows that he abandoned the Russian constitution. This non-election was his messaging exercise, designed to show Russians, and the rest of the world, that he intends to stay in power anyway, illegally. He especially needs the foreign press, which is widely and frequently quoted inside Russia, to help him demoralize his internal opposition and frighten external opponents. Foreign recognition gives him the legitimacy he craves.
The Committee to Protect Journalists has documented that at least 320 members of the press were behind bars around the globe as 2024 began. In Vladimir Putin’s police state, at least 22 journalists are jailed, most for committing that most elemental of journalistic duties, speaking the truth. Two of them are American reporters. One of them, Evan Gershkovich of The Wall Street Journal, will soon mark a year in the infamous Lefortovo prison, awaiting trial on charges of espionage. The other, Alsu Kurmasheva, an editor for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, was arrested while visiting her mother and has been in detention since October.
The charges against both are a travesty. Their incarceration is a violation of their rights and an assault on foreign journalists that is even more egregious than what transpired under Soviet rule. The Biden administration should continue to do all in its power to secure their freedom.
Mr. Gershkovich, now 32, is not a spy, and his accusers know it. He is a reporter, a correspondent for The Wall Street Journal who worked in Moscow with official accreditation from the Russian government until he was taken prisoner by a secretive police unit in Yekaterinburg on March 29, 2023.
The reason for the arrest may be known only to Mr. Putin. Perhaps it was to send a signal that foreign correspondents are no safer from the reach of the Kremlin’s police than Russian reporters. For some time now, and especially since the invasion of Ukraine two years ago, the Kremlin under Mr. Putin has dealt ruthlessly with any opposition, as demonstrated most starkly by the sudden death last month of Aleksei Navalny, Mr. Putin’s most prominent opponent.
Perhaps Mr. Gershkovich was seized as a pawn to swap for Russians held in the West, as the American basketball player Brittney Griner was in 2022. Perhaps it was because Mr. Gershkovich’s parents are Russian Jews who emigrated in the 1970s, so Mr. Putin views him, as he views Ukraine, as within his sphere of repression.
As the first anniversary of Mr. Gershkovich’s incarceration approaches, there is no evidence of a potential trade, though Mr. Putin did suggest last month that it could happen. And there is no indication that a trial is imminent. Instead, Mr. Gershkovich will soon have spent a year at Lefortovo, which was built in the 19th century and was notorious in the Soviet era as an interrogation center for political prisoners, who are typically held in solitary confinement. Human contact is strictly limited: Only lawyers are usually allowed to visit.
Ms. Kurmasheva, a dual Russian and American citizen, lived with her husband and two daughters in Prague and worked there as an editor for R.F.E./R.L.’s Tatar-Bashkir service. She traveled to the Russian city of Kazan last May to visit her ailing mother but was prevented from leaving, purportedly for failing to register her American passport. On Oct. 18 she was detained for failing to register as a “foreign agent,” and she has been held since.
Introduced in 2012, the foreign agent law has been a central feature of Mr. Putin’s efforts to portray the West as a devious enemy seeking to undermine Russia. The law requires any organization or individual in Russia who receives money from abroad to register as a “foreign agent,” a phrase that, in Russian, carries a clear connotation of espionage. In December, authorities in Kazan began yet another investigation of Ms. Kurmasheva, this one for spreading false information about the Russian Army, and on Feb. 1, her pretrial detention was extended for two months.
Her husband, Pavel Butorin, who also works for R.F.E./R.L., has said he suspects the new case involves a book that Ms. Kurmasheva and her colleagues coedited called “Saying No to War: 40 Stories of Russians Who Oppose the Russian Invasion of Ukraine,” a collection of radio interviews with Russian people who expressed their antiwar feelings in different ways. (One of them said she was arrested for braiding a green ribbon in her hair.) Opposing the war is a crime in Russia, and R.F.E./R.L. itself has been branded an “undesirable organization,” putting Russians at risk for any connection with it.
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Mr. Butorin and a host of press organizations have been campaigning for the State Department to declare that Ms. Kurmasheva has been wrongfully detained — a finding that would allow her to receive intensified attention by the president’s special presidential envoy for hostage affairs. Mr. Gershkovich’s case was so categorized soon after he was detained, as was that of another American being held in Russia, Paul Whelan, who was convicted in 2020 of spying and sentenced to 16 years of incarceration. The State Department has yet to officially assign similar urgency to Ms. Kurmasheva’s case, but it should.
However different the details of Mr. Gershkovich and Ms. Kurmasheva’s cases, they both have their origins in Mr. Putin’s personal vindictiveness. In the waning years of the Soviet Union, the rules of officially acceptable behavior for foreign journalists were fairly clear and the consequences for violating them were rarely more serious than expulsion. Mr. Putin’s approach to the international media — now among the only sources of independent news in the country — has become steadily more malevolent and capricious as his war on Ukraine has dragged on.
Mr. Putin, having yet again consolidated his power as Russia’s leader, is unlikely to be moved by the American government’s pressure or censure about his treatment of journalists. Yet it remains incumbent on the United States government and on institutions of the free press to explore every avenue to win the release of Ms. Kurmasheva and Mr. Gershkovich and to continue to insist, using whatever diplomatic tools are available to them, that Mr. Putin cease intimidating journalists.
Journalists in Russia who are working to break through the obstacles and traps he has set are performing a critical service in shedding light on his authoritarian and expansionist project. He fears them for a reason, and for that same reason they deserve the unflagging support of all those who cherish freedom.
The European Union on Friday sanctioned 33 individuals and two entities in response to the mysterious death of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny in an Arctic penal colony last month.
“Alexei Navalny’s slow killing by the Kremlin regime is a stark reminder of its utter disregard for human life,” top EU diplomat Josep Borrell said. “Today’s sanctions demonstrate our determination to hold Russia’s political leadership and authorities accountable for the continuing violation of human rights in Russia.”
The sanctioned individuals include Russian officials from the judicial and penitentiary systems. Their assets in the EU, should they have any, will be frozen and they will be barred from entering the bloc.
The two sanctioned entities are the prisons where Navalny was kept in custody for years after he returned to Russia in 2021, after surviving an apparent assassination attempt.
The EU Global Human Rights Sanctions Regime was used to enact the measures. It now lists 104 people and 24 entities from different countries, including China, Eritrea and Libya.
Navalny, who was Russian President Vladimir Putin’s key political nemesis, died in prison in Russia’s far north on February 16. At least 27,000 people gathered in his memory at a funeral earlier this month.
