How long until Putin’s pet oligarchs turn on him?

The Russian president cannot afford humiliation over Syria but his alliance is under pressure

So: war. We could be about to enter one. Easy as it is to see the escalating tensions in Syria as a crisis of Western authority, it is actually most severe for Vladimir Putin. For him, this is not just an international crisis: it is also a domestic one.

True, Putin has just been elected to his fourth term with a possibly manipulated 77 per cent of the vote. His restoration of Russia’s status as a great power, through his seizure of Crimea in 2014 and intervention a year later in Syria, have ensured that public support for the strongman in the Kremlin has remained strong. Having acted decisively where Obama and Britain had baulked, Putin had propelled his ally, President Assad, to the verge of victory in the civil war.

If you listen to the abusive language between UN ambassadors in the Security Council and the Russian diplomats threatening to shoot down Western planes and missiles, it’s clear that Syria is a life-or-death issue for Putin. Will the groups who have underpinned his regime until now stand with him?

Following the economic crisis of 2008 and the Western sanctions from 2014 over Russian policy in Ukraine, Putin consolidated his political hold over Russia by emphasising his ability to ward off foreign threats. Deciding that the West’s hopes for political change in Russia left no place for him, he turned against it and regime change generally. Assad was one beneficiary.

Operating geopolitics as an extension of his domestic self-interest served Putin well. He forged a coalition of interest groups from the security services which had shaped him via the new rich, whom he protected in return for fealty. A broad swathe of Russian public opinion, meanwhile, swelled with national pride even if belts were tightening.

As the London property market and St Tropez’s register of mega-yachts showed, Russia’s oligarchs sailed smoothly through the post-2014 political storms. That was until President Trump went for their financial jugular by sanctioning some by name and making European as well as US banks wary of dealing with them. As Iran has found, US unilateral sanctions make doing business with the EU and Japan almost impossible, because banks are global and need dollars from the Federal Reserve.

So now, while only a fool or a madman would welcome a direct clash between American and Russian forces, an economic war of attrition is already under way which could split Putin’s ruling alliance. Strong as he is, all political systems are oligarchal. The top man needs allies and competent underlings to run the system, and they are boss to those beneath them.

In the early 2000s Putin purged the billionaires who thought their wealth made them political players in their own right, just as Peter the Great disposed of the boyars. But today’s oligarchs feeling the pinch are not his opponents but his supporters. The distress of a Deripaska has very different political impact at home than the bankruptcy of an exiled Berezovsky. Even as they backed Putin, the West – or at least its financial services, and indeed its servant class in general – has been very good to them. Now they face exclusion from our markets and fleshpots, which is humiliating.

Of course, the oligarchs are not Putin’s only allies. Even after the fiasco of the “hardline” coup in 1991, which seemed to show coups don’t work in Russia, he does rely on his security services and on the support of the patriotic working class. Yet here, too, there is a problem.

The ideologists of Putinism seem to welcome a return to a Russia cut off from the West. Since Russia is not strong enough to stand fully against the West on its own, that means swinging 180 degrees and cosying up to China after three centuries of trying to westernise. Because China is America’s looming rival, it seems Russia’s obvious ally, but China’s vast population and pulsating economy also pose a long-term challenge, especially to underpopulated Siberia.

Apart from energy and weapons, Russia has little to offer China except playing the distraction for American power from China’s rise in the Pacific. For ordinary Russians whose patriotism has been stirred by Putin’s apparent revival of superpower status, playing second fiddle to China could be difficult to swallow.

Putin might be willing to go to the brink to avoid humiliation in Syria, and the generals might go with him out of pride in their recent successes. But realism also has a long tradition in the Kremlin. In the long term, this pace and intensity of foreign adventure is simply unsustainable without embracing China, with all the problems that would bring.

On the other hand, what Westerners perceive as realistic is not necessarily what Russians take for granted. Economic self-interest has often been overrated in Russian history; Communism could not have happened otherwise. So in the short term, Putin is likely to double down, or even be pushed aside by a more hardline successor if he backs off. Expect things to get worse before they get better.