Vladimir Putin, in power in Russia For a quarter of a century, he has entered the presidential elections as an authoritarian leader in the midst of the invasion of Ukrainethe repression in his country and the confrontation with the West.
The Russian leader, who reformed the Constitution in 2020 to allow him to remain in power until 2036, is guaranteed re-election for a fifth six-year term in the March 15-17 elections.
He has already served two four-year terms and two six-year terms, with an intermediate period as prime minister.
The vertical power structure established by Putin, coming from the Soviet KGB and arriving at the Kremlin on December 31, 1999, highlights two characteristics of his regime.
The first is its constant hardening, starting with the control of the oligarchs, the second war in Chechnya and the suffocation of public freedoms, the press and the opposition.
His most famous opponent, Alexei Navalny, died in February under unclear circumstances in a prison in the Arctic, where he was serving a long sentence for “extremism”.
The second characteristic is the search for geopolitical power, with the war in Georgia (2008), the annexation of Ukrainian Crimea (2014), the military intervention in Syria (2015) and the invasion of Ukraine (2022).
Europe, especially Angela Merkel’s Germany, believed it could channel its ambitions and opted for economic interdependence with massive purchases of Russian gas. But it was in vain.
“The new World”
At 71 years old, Putin seems indestructible. The head of the Kremlin is immersed in the war in Ukraine and, although his army has suffered humiliating defeats, Putin continues with his efforts, seeking a victory by attrition, thanks to the exhaustion of the Western allies and the Ukrainian population.
Two years after the start of the attack, Putin sees reasons to believe in it.
His soldiers, on the offensive, took the eastern city of Avdiivka and advanced on the Ukrainian forces, lacking ammunition and sufficient soldiers. Putin assured at the end of February that his soldiers will not retreat in Ukraine.
At the beginning of the offensive, he accused Ukraine of Nazism, claimed its territories and said that the United States had orchestrated the conflict.
Since then, any opposition to the invasion is punishable by prison. Thousands of Russians have been harassed, prosecuted, imprisoned or forced into exile.
Western sanctions or the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant against him for the deportation of Ukrainian children matter little. The Russian president has a mission: to end Western hegemony.
In October, it announced that it would “task to build a new world.”
In confidence
But this former KGB agent, stationed in East Germany in the 1980s, still resents the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War.
On the other hand, Putin can boast of his closeness to China, Asia’s thirst for hydrocarbons, and African countries that turn to Moscow and its paramilitary groups to counteract the “neocolonialism” western.
The Russian leader has another obsession: for him, Russia is the exponent of “traditional” values in the face of what he considers the moral “decadence” of the West and its tolerance for the LGBT population.
With the failure of the Ukrainian counteroffensive in the summer of 2023, Putin feels freer, facing Western powers divided over aid for Ukraine.
The Russian economy generally absorbed the impact of Western sanctions, despite inflation and dependence on military production.
But as powerful as he is, the president faces big challenges. Victory in the conflict in Ukraine is far away, and the ability of Russians, elites and the economy to resist in the long term remains an unknown.
The mutiny in June 2023 by Wagner’s mercenaries, led by his former ally Yevgeny Prigozhin, was a case in point. The death of the rebel leadership in a plane crash presented as an accident allowed the Kremlin to close that chapter.
Repression
At the level of domestic policy, the Kremlin does not tolerate any more opponents. Some of them have died, like Navalni or Boris Nemtsov, assassinated in 2015, and many more, anonymous dissidents, are behind bars for having denounced the invasion of Ukraine.
However, for the majority of the population, Putin remains the one who has restored honor to a Russia plagued by misery, corruption and the alcoholic decline of Boris Yeltsin.
When he came to the Kremlin at the age of 47, he promised to maintain good dealings with Western countries and developed the economy, taking advantage of favorable hydrocarbon prices.
US President George W. Bush described it as “someone notable” The German Gerhard Schröder and the Italian Silvio Berlusconi were his friends, despite the repression he imposed and the abuses in Chechnya.
But the foundations of the divorce with the West were already there. Putin made them concrete in 2007 in Munich, in a virulent speech against Western leaders. He accused NATO of threatening Russia and reproached the United States for being the “sole sovereign” of the world, arguments that he has brought up again to justify the invasion of Ukraine.
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Source: Gestion
Ricardo is a renowned author and journalist, known for his exceptional writing on top-news stories. He currently works as a writer at the 247 News Agency, where he is known for his ability to deliver breaking news and insightful analysis on the most pressing issues of the day.
