No month passed in 2019 without the Putin administration expressing satisfaction in the power that Russia wielded abroad and in the respect that others accorded it. The Kremlin – and the business tycoons who sought its approval – disbursed generous funds to initiatives aimed at raising the country’s international status still higher.
In September that year there was the usual display of national glamour and pride at the Formula One Grand Prix in Sochi, in which the Russian driver Daniil Kvyat won a creditable twelfth place. The remaining months, however, followed a different pattern. In early December the World Anti-Doping Agency declared that Russian sports organizations were still breaking the rules on drug abuse. A ban was announced on Russia’s participation in global competitions such as the 2020 Tokyo Olympics and the 2024 FIFA World Cup. Few world leaders or foreign commentators had recently spoken up for Russia. But among the exceptions was President Donald Trump, who sought to downplay the difficulties that the Kremlin caused around the world. In August 2019 he suggested it was time for the G7 group of nations to readmit Russia to its membership.1 Trump also made light of the accumulation of evidence that Russian operators had interfered in the 2016 US presidential election, dismissing prying investigators as purveyors of ‘fake news’.
Despite such approbation, Putin remained angry that so many other external voices spoke unfavourably about Russia past and present. When the European Parliament voted to attribute a high degree of blame for the outbreak of the Second World War on the USSR, Putin lashed out at the record of the pre-war Polish government. He called Warsaw’s then ambassador to Berlin ‘an antisemitic swine’ and alleged that Poland had conspired with Hitler in the break-up of Czechoslovakia. He dropped his earlier condemnation of the Nazi–Soviet Pact of August 1939 and went so far as to deny that the Red Army had invaded eastern Poland the following month. Putin’s new brief was that Stalin’s forces simply moved into a military vacuum when the Germans abandoned the territory in September 1939. His priority was to direct focus to the part played by the Red Army in liberating Europe from the Third Reich. He stopped mentioning the USSR’s post-war subjugation of eastern Europe, instead bluntly asserting: ‘As regards both the Soviet Union and Russia, we have never tried to create a threat for other countries.’2
Soviet history was the handmaiden to Russian politics as Putin advertised the growth of the Kremlin’s impact upon events across the Middle East. He had always understood the value of a militant style in international relations, which gratified even many Russians who otherwise disliked him and his administration. Admired as the nation’s champion in the global arena, he turned up the volume of his patriotic drumming. Russian warplanes and intelligence facilities continued to perform their services for the Assad administration in the Syrian civil war by pushing the surviving rebel forces into Idlib province next to the Turkish frontier. Turkey’s President Erdoğan was infuriated by the bombing campaign, which predictably forced further thousands of desperate Syrian families to stream into Turkey for refuge. The Moscow–Ankara diplomatic axis, creaky since its construction in 2016, was strained to breaking point. But after Russian bombers hit a contingent of Turkish forces operating on Syrian territory, an agreement was reached in Moscow between Putin and Erdoğan to hold joint patrols along the east–west M4 motorway in Idlib. Putin wanted to secure Assad’s survival without nudging Erdoğan back into the embrace of the NATO alliance.
He was keen to portray Russia’s ultimate aim as the achievement of peace and stability in Syria. He made the same argument about Russian policy towards Ukraine, agreeing in December 2019 to talks in Paris with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. It was their first meeting. Both men voiced the usual sentiments about the need for a peaceful settlement in eastern Ukraine, but little practical progress was made beyond making arrangements to swap prisoners taken by the two sides.
Putin struck up a combative tone again after returning to Moscow. In particular, he raised a question about the demographic basis for Lenin’s decision to give the Donbas and the Black Sea region to the Ukrainian rather than the Russian Soviet republic. This demarcation of frontiers, he said, had been unfair to Russian residents.3 In February 2020 he spoke in favour of the full integration of Russia and Ukraine, blaming malign foreign powers for having split them apart. Russians and Ukrainians, he repeated, were one and the same people. His vision was for Russia and Ukraine to come together again so as to become a global rival to ‘Europe’ and the rest of the world.4 He seemed unaware of the implication that, without Ukrainian help, Russia would fall short of the first rank of powers. He was, however, not aiming to show sensitivity. His priority was to intimidate the Ukrainians, and he certainly knew that everyone in Ukraine and Russia would understand that his ideas about integrating the two countries were just a code for the absorption of one by the other.
National opinion in Ukraine was offended even if no Ukrainian was surprised by what Putin said. Zelensky repeated that Crimea’s annexation by Russia was illegitimate and, as diplomatic hostilities were resumed between Kyiv and Moscow, the chances of an early end to the war in eastern Ukraine remained vanishingly small.
Since Donald Trump took office in January 2017, the US State and Defense Departments had stuck to Barack Obama’s policy of enabling Ukraine to defend itself against Russian aggression. Trump refrained from impeding the arms shipments to Ukrainian forces until the summer of 2019 when he talked by phone with Zelensky. The conversation was a troubling one for the Ukrainian president, who kept its content to himself. But leaks on the American side revealed that Trump had implicitly made the maintenance of military supplies conditional upon Zelensky carrying out an investigation into claims of malpractice in the Ukrainian gas business involving the son of ex-US Vice-President Joe Biden. Trump was picking on the younger Biden as a way of damaging his father, whom he saw as a serious challenger for the American presidency if the Democratic Party were to choose him as its candidate in the 2020 presidential election. Trump was accused of putting personal political interest above helping Ukraine to defend itself against Russia. In September 2019 the US House of Representatives, led by the Democrats, began an impeachment inquiry. Despite a torrent of damaging testimony, Trump escaped without censure when, in February 2020, the Republican-dominated Senate acquitted him of abusing his presidential powers by a vote of 52 against 48.
Stories continued to surface in parts of the American press that the Kremlin was helping Trump by getting Russian agencies to boost Senator Bernie Sanders’ campaign for the Democratic Party’s nomination to challenge Trump in the election of November 2020. Supposedly, the Russians calculated that Sanders would be easily defeated by Trump. Putin treated it all as a great joke when he was asked whether the Russian authorities had any plan to interfere in America’s electoral processes. On 2 October 2019 he told an international gathering in Moscow: ‘I’ll let you into a secret: yes, we’re definitely going to do this. Just to keep you entertained over there as you should be. Only you’re not to tell anybody, all right?’5 This was greeted with amused applause. If Putin was concerned about possible American retaliation, he knew how to disguise it.
Increasingly, however, Putin brooded on the year 2024, when he would complete his final term as Russian president. In January 2020 he surprised the country – and the world – by touting a project for constitutional reforms that would enhance accountability in governance by expanding the State Duma’s powers at the expense of some existing presidential prerogatives. He evidently wanted his successor to be weaker than he had been. At the same time he fired Dmitri Medvedev as prime minister, replacing him with Mikhail Mishustin, the little-known former head of the tax administration agency. Medvedev had always had reservations about aspects of Putin’s policies.6 Mishustin, being new to the job, was unlikely to cause difficulties. Putin ordered him to prioritize May Decrees of 2018, which had proclaimed ambitious plans for infrastructural renewal, technological innovation and social welfare provision. With Duma elections being scheduled for September 2020, it was important to show the Russian people that the Kremlin wanted to improve conditions not only for the ruling group but for everyone in the country.7
Putin rested his scheme for constitutional reforms upon the premise that he would leave the presidency when his current term ended. The Opposition argued that the proposals masked his true ambition, which was to conserve his own influence over Russian politics whilst keeping the economy and society unaltered. His display of reluctance to hold on to the presidency certainly gave him time to test opinion in the elite and the electorate.
In March 2020, his next step made it clear that accountable governance meant less to him than staying on as president. Responding to many pleas for him to stand again in the next election, he said he would consider doing so but only if such a change in the rules secured a favourable vote in the State Duma and a favourable judgement in the Constitutional Court – he also stipulated the necessity of approval by an ‘all-Russia poll’. The State Duma and the Constitutional Court quickly did as he wished and an April poll date was set. He did not bother to explain his abrupt stance, and perhaps he had never really intended to give up the presidency. It may also be that he had begun to worry that all the talk about his scheduled departure from office might create political bedlam among his associates as they clashed over who should fill his shoes. At any rate, as soon as he said that he might stand again, the entire ruling elite got behind him, eager to prove their loyalty and win preferment.
This still did not mean that Putin could abandon all caution. In 2011–2012, as he well remembered, there had been public disturbances when he suddenly declared his intention to stand for a third presidential term. He had learned his lesson and this time he planned to act with the necessary circumspection. A survey of public opinion in January 2020, shortly after he announced the constitutional reform project, suggested that trust in him had fallen to 35 per cent of Russian citizens. This was even lower than his rating after the government made unheralded changes to the pension laws in summer 2018.8 But there was light in the gloom. When asked in February whether the country’s affairs were moving in the ‘correct direction’, 53 per cent said yes. Still more encouraging for him was an accompanying survey that reported that nearly seven out of ten Russian citizens approved of his activity as president.9 Such results did not indicate a great swing in opinion within the space of a mere two months. Rather it was the case that most Russians both respected and distrusted him: they had made up their minds to be contradictory.
The Putin administration could however draw comfort from an opinion poll that found that half the population had little or no interest at all in politics.10 This did not mean, of course, that people were any less fed up with the injustices of daily life in Russia or that, if pushed too far, they would not take their discontent on to the streets. The scaffolding of power could be shaken when passions ran high. And, although Putin’s United Russia party held a towering majority in the State Duma, only a third of Russians in January 2020 said they were willing to vote for it.11 The whole Duma, moreover, was still regarded with widespread suspicion, even contempt. In December 2019 only two fifths of Russians approved of its activity. In the same poll, just four in eleven people said they endorsed what the government was doing, and Medvedev had become one of the most distrusted politicians in the final period of his premiership.12
These were tough times for the government. The world economy suffered after a downturn in Chinese industrial output under the joint impact of a Beijing trade dispute with America and the outbreak of a deadly strain of coronavirus in Wuhan, China. The result was depleted global demand for oil and gas, which had a negative effect on Russia’s finances, with World Bank estimates putting the growth in Russian gross domestic product in 2019 at only 1.2 per cent.13 Rosstat, the country’s official statistical agency, put it higher at close to 2 per cent but independent economists, including Russians, challenged the credibility of official optimism. There were accompanying doubts about the claim that household incomes were rising.14 In February 2020, as crude oil and other petroleum products fell further in value on global markets, Saudi Arabia persuaded other OPEC countries to agree to limit the volume of sales in order to force up prices. Fearful of a gaping hole in the Russian budget, the Kremlin refused to go along with the Saudi policy and opted to increase oil exports even at historically low rates. The Saudis reacted by withdrawing from their own agreement and increasing output.
Oil prices predictably went on tumbling. By late April the price of Brent crude was hovering at around $20 a barrel, its lowest level since 1999. Putin called for calm while acknowledging that global trends could have repercussions on political stability, religious accord and social and economic development.15
It was difficult to be stoical while the news worsened on a daily basis. On 18 March 2020, Finance Minister Siluanov admitted the necessity for an overhaul of the budget that he had seen through the State Duma and Federation Council only a week earlier. Instead of a small surplus there would inevitably be a sizeable deficit – a matter of embarrassment for an administration that had boasted of its achievement of budgetary buoyancy. Siluanov had to dip his hands deeper into what was left of the National Well-Being Fund, the sovereign wealth pot that Alexei Kudrin, Siluanov’s predecessor in the Finance Ministry, had created against ferocious opposition from the state capitalist lobby led by Igor Sechin in politics and Sergei Glazev in economics. Siluanov forbore to ask them to throw away their crystal balls and applaud the Finance Ministry’s foresight.16
At the time of writing in late April 2020, the coronavirus pandemic has already forced the postponement of the April all-Russian poll. Putin was slow off the mark in appreciating the scale of the medical emergency, but he was not alone in this among the world’s leaders, and it can hardly be discounted that if and when the vote eventually takes place, the Russian people will endorse the idea of making him eligible to enter the contest for a fifth presidential term in the 2024 election. Ever the reluctant patriarch, he has left open the question as to whether he will take up the option.