Putin hones image in 2 years of war
Brutal and willing to escalate conflict at home, with West
After President Joe Biden called President Vladimir Putin of Russia a “crazy SOB” this week, the Kremlin was quick to issue a stern condemnation.
But the image of an unpredictable strongman ready to escalate his conflict with the West is one that Putin has fully embraced after two years of full-scale war.
At home, the Kremlin is maintaining the mystery over the circumstances of the death last week of Alexei Navalny, preventing the opposition leader’s family from reclaiming his body.
In Ukraine, Putin is pressing his army to maintain its brutal offensive, boasting on television that he stayed up all night as the city of Avdiivka fell to Russian forces. And in outer space, U.S. officials warn, Russia may be planning to place a nuclear weapon into orbit, aboard a satellite, which would violate one of the last arms-control treaties.
In power since 1999, Putin, 71, is set to extend his rule to 2030 in Russia’s rubber-stamp elections next month. As the vote nears, he is feeding his increasingly overt conception of himself as a history-making leader carrying on the legacy of past rulers who were willing to sacrifice untold numbers of lives to build a stronger Russian state.
But Putin also faces headwinds: a still-determined Ukrainian resistance, a Western alliance that largely remains united and murmurs of discontent in the Russian public. The question is whether Putin, as he exults in leading a “thousand-year, eternal Russia,” can avoid the domestic upheaval that has also been a repeated hallmark of the country’s history.
“Putin is living in eternity,” said Boris Nadezhdin, an anti-war politician who tried to mount a presidential bid to challenge Putin but was barred from the March ballot. Listing rulers dating to the ninth century, he added of Putin: “It’s clear he’s thinking of himself alongside Oleg the Wise, Peter the Great, Ivan the Terrible and perhaps Stalin.”
Nadezhdin, who has worked in the Russian government and served in parliament, insisted in a video call interview this week that Putin’s grip on power is weaker than meets the eye. The security, stability and increased prosperity that was long Putin’s selling point after the chaos of the 1990s are all waning, Nadezhdin said. “This regime,” he went on, “is historically doomed.”
Indeed, even as Putin has worked hard to paint a picture of Russia as an invincible state, he has repeatedly been caught off guard. There was the Kremlin’s stunning intelligence failure two years ago, when Putin expected Russian troops to be welcomed as liberators and that Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s government would quickly collapse.
There was the 24-hour uprising staged last summer, when Yevgeny Prigozhin, long viewed as a close Putin ally, brought Russia to the brink of civil war.
And, despite a crackdown on dissent that some analysts describe as more fierce than the late-stage Soviet Union, Russians are still braving arrest to show their disagreement.
A group of women has continued to stage small protests demanding that their mobilized sons and husbands be brought home, people laid flowers in memory of Navalny in scores of Russian cities, and Nadezhdin was able to submit more than 100,000 signatures last month in his bid to get on the presidential ballot with an anti-war message.
Putin is also making it ever more clear that those who cross him should fear for their lives. Russian officials have been celebrating the killing in Spain this month of a Russian pilot who defected to Ukraine.
Portraying the invasion of Ukraine as having broad public support is also allowing the Kremlin to justify its crackdown on dissent.
Footage of masked security service officers detaining critics of the war has become commonplace on Russian television. On Tuesday, Russia’s domestic security service, known as the FSB, announced that it had arrested a visiting 33-year-old Russian American woman on suspicion of treason.
Her alleged crime: donating about $50 to a Ukrainian charity. She faces 20 years in prison.
News of that arrest came four days after the death of Navalny, who spent more than three years in prison, including about 300 days in solitary “punishment” cells.
But Putin, in public, is keeping his distance from the machinery of repression that he oversees. While a spokesperson said the president had been briefed on Navalny’s death, Putin himself has not commented on it.
Instead, Putin revealed this week that he was up late the night after Navalny died, consumed by something else: the war in Ukraine.
In a televised meeting with Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, Putin described being briefed in real time on Russia’s advance in Avdiivka until 4 a.m. last Saturday.
At 11 a.m., Shoigu and Gen. Valery Gerasimov, the head of Russia’s general staff, returned to brief the Russian leader again on Ukraine’s rushed withdrawal from the strategically important city, Putin said.
Shoigu said the military had carried out the president’s order to set up loudspeakers on the southern Ukrainian front to coax soldiers into surrendering.
The message was geared toward showing Putin as a tireless leader, in tune with all the details of the war.