The military invasion in Ukraine has sparked protests in various parts of the world, including in Russia. Last Sunday, 5,000 people were arrested in 69 cities for demonstrating against the military intervention.
If mass protests occur, Vladimir Putin would have a National Guard of approximately 400,000 members to contain thembeing a body created in 2016 precisely to respond to such an eventuality by the former bodyguard of the Russian president, Viktor Zolotov, in which former special anti-riot troops entered.
However, “It is one thing to hit the heads of students in Moscow and St. Petersburg, and quite another to shoot the mothers of soldiers killed in Ukraine,” says Leon Aron, an expert on Russia’s domestic and foreign policy, in a column titled Why Putin has to watch his back published in Washington Post this Tuesday.
In this article, Aron describes what the consequences of this conflict are for Putin. “Whatever the outcome, Vladimir Putin’s war against Ukraine is bad news for his regime. Neither the taking of Kiev and the declaration of victory nor the start of peace negotiations will save the Russian president from the serious, if not fatal, internal repercussions of this war.“, he observes.
The analyst, born in Moscow in 1954, explains that throughout Russian history, andhe military has generally steered clear of politics, with the exception of the Decembrist revolt in 1825. “Like other autocrats, Putin has had ample opportunity to choose his top officers for loyalty rather than ability. His defense minister, Sergei Shoigu, has no military background at all: he is a civil engineer who was minister of emergency situations when Putin put him in charge of the country’s armed forces,” he explains.
Military would not come to Putin’s rescue in protests
Although thousands of Russian citizens have been arrested for the protests against the invasion, he says that it is almost certain that the majority of the population will support Putin at first, “as they did after Putin’s first attack on Ukraine in 2014″.
Aron considers that Putin hopes that “this effect will last until the presidential elections of March 2024, when, at 71 yearsprobably try to embark on a lifetime presidency”. He notes that “it is impossible to predict when memories of the Soviet Union’s quagmire in Afghanistan – the zinc-lined coffins and unmarked graves – will result in resentment, then anger, then mass protests.”
Faced with a situation of massive demonstrations and that the guards hesitate to act, Aron believes that “the military will not come to Putin’s rescue, while the oligarchs might be encouraged enough to donate to protesters, as their Ukrainian counterparts did during the 2004 Orange Revolution and the 2014 Maidan Revolution″.
He mentions that the Russian national tradition does not forgive military setbacks.” Virtually every big loss has resulted in a sea change. The Crimean War (1853-1856) precipitated the liberal revolution from the top of Emperor Alexander II. The Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905) sparked the First Russian Revolution. The catastrophe of World War I resulted in the abdication of Emperor Nicholas II and the Bolshevik revolution. And the war in Afghanistan became a key factor in Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms.”
“It is also worth noting that the current regime is exceptionally vulnerable in this regard. More than any other Russian ruler, Putin has made war, or the threat of war, the basis of his popular support”, argues the author.
“He began his presidency promising economic modernization, but when growth slowed and then began to stall, he changed his tactics to what Russian scholars have called ‘patriotic mobilization’ or ‘militarized patriotism in peacetime’. Russian propaganda soon began to emphasize two main themes: ‘The West’ is at war with Russia. An undeclared, petty, constant war. But the Motherland has nothing to worry about as long as Putin is in charge. It will not only protect Russia, but also restore it to at least part of the victorious glory of Soviet superpower status..”, he reflects.
Drawing a comparison with Marxism-Leninism, Aron believes that “Putin’s national ideology of militarized patriotism lacks coherence and has yet to be tested by adversity (…) the evolution of the regime from an even ‘softer’ authoritarianism to a traditional brutal dictatorship will be one of the most worrying consequences of this war.”
“Wartime censorship has already begun, with huge fines and up to 15 years in prison for “distorting the purpose, role and tasks of the Armed Forces”, arrests are piling up and more repression is likely to follow. Yet after two decades of incomplete and ever-diminishing but real freedoms, a sudden shift to near-totalitarianism carries huge risks for Putin”, estimate.
“Every day that Ukraine resists, it erodes the Putin regime. The consequences could be far-reaching.”, he concludes. (I)
Source: Eluniverso
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