Putin’s Power Is Cracking, and the Kremlin’s Propaganda Can No Longer Keep the People in the Lie.
In history, we have rarely seen an authoritarian regime survive a humiliating military defeat.
It has been more than twenty-two years since Vladimir Putin has enjoyed undivided power at the head of Russia. If we rely on his speech on Friday, September 30, 2022, Putin does not seem to be totally in phase with reality. During a grandiose ceremony cleverly organized by the Kremlin propaganda on the Red Square in Moscow, Vladimir Putin celebrated the illegal annexation by Russia of four Ukrainian regions (oblasts).
But at the same time, in the face of a Ukrainian blitzkrieg, the Russian army fled from the town of Lyman (population 20,000 before the war), a strategic railway junction located in the Donetsk oblast, one of the four allegedly annexed. In the territorial expansion strategies of empires, control normally preceded annexation.
In his speech on September 30, Putin innovated, inventing annexation without control …
This speech also made extensive use of the rhetorical bias of accusatory reversal. This is a technique of psychological manipulation, where one seeks to put the responsibility for his own mistakes on his opponent, accusing him of having committed them. He presented the West as the aggressor of Russia, while it was he who started an unprovoked war of aggression against Ukraine on February 24, 2022.
Nobody ever believed that the Ukrainian nation posed any military threat to the Russian nation.
As for the West, they had indeed expanded NATO (in contradiction with their verbal commitments to Gorbachev) and sanctioned Russia after it annexed Crimea in 2014. But they continued to invest in and trade with Russia. In the summer of 2021, the German chancellor, leaving power, had come to say goodbye to the Russian president in Moscow.
For his meeting with Vladimir Putin in Geneva on June 16, 2021, U.S. President Joe Biden arrived with a big present: his acceptance of the new Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, connecting directly, via the Baltic, Russian territory to German territory.
The reality is that Putin had elevated Russia to an enviable strategic and economic position, which he ruined on February 24, 2022, with his irrational - and failed - gamble against the Kyiv government. Today, as the only effective Western sanction, Russia no longer has access to Western technology, which was essential to its productive apparatus.
With this war, Russia shot itself in the foot.
And today, in terms of technology, it has become subject to the goodwill of the Chinese. When you have not been able to modernize your army and your industry, the first duty of a leader is to realize this. And the second is to avoid launching a military invasion of a neighboring country, which is equipped and trained for eight years by the British and American services.
Generally speaking, when one is about to take an important strategic decision, the least one can do is to make a cost-benefit assessment of the planned operation. It seems that Putin has not done this assessment and that the Russian president has failed to prepare a coherent plan B in case of failure of his army in the submission of the Ukrainian army.
The worst thing for Putin is that the Russian elites are beginning to realize all this. The trust in the great leader has chipped away. Putin's power is cracking. More than 200,000 young Russian men have left Russia to escape the mobilization of reservists decreed on September 19, 2022. The security services could not or did not dare to seal the borders with Georgia and Kazakhstan.
In the Russian state media, journalists now talk about the setbacks of Putin's army and speak of war, not only of a “special military operation,” an expression that Putin's power had made compulsory. The lie becomes apparent, which undermines the state organs from the inside. Do the military, security and media cracks in Russian power foreshadow its collapse?
Militarily, how could 300,000 poorly trained and ill-equipped reservists be able to turn the tide on the front? As for Russian use of nuclear weapons, it is taboo for the Chinese and Indian allies. The Kremlin knows that a nuclear strike, even a “tactical” one, would trigger heavy American reprisals and worldwide condemnation. However, there is still a significant risk of a global extension of this conflict, which was initially regional. France is therefore right to maintain a dialogue with Russia, to avoid further slippage.
But the way out of the crisis is anything but obvious. How could Putin assume his military failures without his head rolling? In history, we have rarely seen an authoritarian regime survive a military defeat as humiliating as the one that is looming for Putin's Russia in Ukraine.
Some reading
The Impact of EU Sanctions on Russia Is Growing. Putin Is Obliged to Stake Everything on the Gas Weapon. The situation is much worse than the Russian propaganda would have us believe.
The United States, a Reaffirmed World Superpower, Is More Than Ever Fractured Internally. Joe Biden must remake the United States into a nation that guarantees a life of dignity and security for all its citizens.
Xi Jinping’s China and the West Are More Than Ever in a Phase of Decoupling. An invasion of Taiwan by China would tear at the tight fabric of interdependencies.
The Russian Annexation Will Not Change Anything, Ukraine Continues Its Offensive to Free Its Territory. Ukrainians have no other choice when faced with the dictator Putin.
The 4 Main Lessons That Vladimir Putin Teaches Us (Despite Himself) After 7 Months of War in Ukraine. In the end, Putin will perish for having despised the West, but also and especially his people.