Just months into a quarter of a century at the helm of Russia, Vladimir Putin will get his hands on a copy of the Constitution on Tuesday and begin a new six-year term as president, wielding extraordinary power.
Since becoming interim president on the last day of 1999, Putin has shaped Russia into a monolith – crushing political opposition, driving independent journalists out of the country and promoting a growing attachment to prudish “traditional values” that are growing from many members of society down. margins.
His influence is so dominant that other officials have been forced to stand aside as he launched a war in Ukraine, despite hopes that the invasion would bring international opprobrium and harsh economic sanctions, and would cost Russia dearly in terms of the blood of its soldiers.
With this level of power, what Putin will do during his next term is a daunting question, both domestically and abroad.
The war in Ukraine, where Russia is making incremental but steady gains on the battlefield, is the main concern, and it shows no signs of changing course.
“The war in Ukraine is at the heart of his current political project, and I see nothing to suggest that this will change. And that affects everything else,” Brian Taylor, a professor at Syracuse University and author of “The Code of Putinism,” said in an interview with The Associated Press.
“It affects who holds what positions, it affects what resources are available and it affects the economy, affects the level of internal repression,” he said.
In his state of the nation address in February, Putin pledged to achieve Moscow’s goals in Ukraine and to do everything in his power to “defend our sovereignty and the security of our citizens.” He claimed that the Russian army had “gained enormous combat experience” and was “firmly holding the initiative and carrying out offensives in a number of sectors.”
This will entail huge spending, which could drain money available for the vast national projects and reforms in education, social protection and the fight against poverty that Putin used much of his two-hour speech to to give detail.
Taylor suggested that such plans were included in the speech as much to show as to indicate a real intention to implement them.
Putin “sees himself in the great historical terms of the Russian lands, bringing Ukraine back to its place, those kinds of ideas. And I think those outweigh any kind of more socioeconomic type programs,” Taylor said.
Should the war end in less than total defeat for each side, with Russia retaining some of the territory it has already conquered, European countries fear that Putin will be encouraged to continue his military adventurism in the Baltics or elsewhere. Poland.
“It is possible that Putin has broad ambitions and is trying to follow up a costly success in Ukraine with a new attack elsewhere,” Stephen Walt, a professor of international relations at Harvard, wrote in the journal Foreign Policy. “But it is also entirely possible that his ambitions do not extend beyond what Russia has won – at enormous cost and that he has no need or desire to gamble further.”
But, Walt added, “Russia will not be able to launch new wars of aggression when the war in Ukraine is finally over.”
Such rational concern might not prevail, others say. Maksim Samorukov of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center said that “driven by Putin’s whims and illusions, Moscow is likely to make self-destructive mistakes.”
In a commentary in Foreign Affairs, Samorukov suggested that Putin’s age might affect his judgment.
“At 71 years old… his awareness of his own mortality surely influences his decision-making. The growing sense that he had limited time no doubt contributed to his fateful decision to invade Ukraine. »
Overall, Putin may enter his new term with a weaker grip on power than he appears to have.
Russia’s “vulnerabilities are hidden in plain sight. Today more than ever, the Kremlin makes decisions in a personalized and arbitrary manner, without even the most basic checks,” Samorukov wrote.
“The Russian political elite has become more flexible in carrying out Putin’s orders and more obsequious towards his paranoid worldview,” he wrote. The regime “constantly runs the risk of collapsing overnight, as its Soviet predecessor did thirty years ago.”
Putin is sure to continue his animosity toward the West, which, he said in his state of the nation address, “would like to do to Russia the same thing they have done to many other regions of the world, including Ukraine: sowing discord in our country.” house, to weaken it from the inside.
Putin’s resistance to the West manifests not only his anger over its support for Ukraine, but also what he sees as an attack on Russia’s moral fiber.
Last year, Russia banned the LGBTQ+ “movement” as extremist in what authorities said was a fight for traditional values such as those upheld by the Russian Orthodox Church in the face of Western influence. Courts have also banned gender transition.
“I would expect the role of the Russian Orthodox Church to continue to be very visible,” Taylor said. He also highlighted the outrage on social media that followed a party thrown by TV presenter Anastasia Ivleeva, where guests were invited to turn up “almost”. naked.”
“Other players in the system understand that this resonates with Putin. … There were people interested in exploiting this stuff,” he said.
Even though the opposition and independent media have almost disappeared under Putin’s repressive measures, there is still room to take further steps to control Russia’s information space, including continuing its efforts to establish a “sovereign Internet.”
The inauguration comes two days before Victory Day, Russia’s most important secular holiday, commemorating the capture of Berlin by the Soviet Red Army during World War II and the immense hardships of the war, during which the USSR lost some 20 million people.
The defeat of Nazi Germany is integral to the identity of modern Russia and to Putin’s justification of the war in Ukraine as a comparable struggle.
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Associated Press writer Jim Heintz, based in Tallinn, Estonia, covered Putin’s entire tenure as Russia’s leader.
ABC News
