Minister’s arrest is a chilling sign of Putin’s power

No government minister in Russia had been arrested for 25 years, said Gazeta. ru (Moscow). So the arrest last week of economy minister Alexei Ulyukayev on charges of trying to extort a $2m bribe has caused a sensation. Police say he’d been under surveillance for a year and had been caught red-handed seeking a bung from the state-owned oil giant Rosneft as a pay-off for clearing its path to take over Bashneft, another stateowned oil firm. But few tears will be shed for Ulyukayev: he’s widely reviled for claiming the economy has reached the bottom and will now level out. Nothing about these “absurd” claims against Ulyukayev makes sense, said Boris Grozovsky in The Moscow Times. True, he initially opposed the deal as being bad for the economy, but he quickly relented when Putin said he wanted it to go through. And it would have been professional suicide to ask for a pay-off from Rosneft’s chief: he happens to be Igor Sechin, one of Putin’s closest friends. Besides, $2m is the sort of paltry sum a deputy mayor might solicit, whereas Ulyukayev is one of the wealthiest officials in Russia, with three homes, three flats and a salary in the region of $1m a year. No wonder he reacted as if his arrest was a joke, asking: “What the hell is going on here?” He’s being punished by Putin for his initial attempt to block the deal, said Neil Macfarquhar in The New York Times. Rosneft’s purchase of Bashneft transfers $5bn directly to the Russian treasury, money that Putin covets because, owing to Western sanctions and the Ukraine crisis, the state’s reserves are dwindling fast. The two main sovereign funds are down to $105bn, from $160bn at the start of 2015, and at this rate will run out altogether by the end of 2017, just as Putin faces re-election for a fourth term.

For Putin, Ulyukayev’s arrest has many benefits, said Fyodor Krasheninnikov in Vedomosti (Moscow). It reinforces the public fiction that Putin is serious about fighting corruption in high places. It confirms his reputation for being “tough and decisive”. It identifies a scapegoat for Russia’s economic decline, one who, as an economic liberal, is hated by nationalists. It also tells his colleagues that none of them is safe. But there are downsides, too. Russia has reached the point where there are no longer constitutional ways to resolve high-level conflicts: people must be discredited and put behind bars. By confirming that the power structure is full of “crooks and bribe takers”, it underscores Russians’ belief that the only solution is to “change the whole system”. And for the rest of the world, it’s a chilling echo of Stalin’s purges, a sign of hardening autocracy.