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Russian President Vladimir Putin attends a meeting with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas outside Moscow, Russia August 13, 2024.
The endless ends of Vladimir Putin
I am holding a copy of The Economist magazine. The cover photograph shows Vladimir Putin, bundled up in a heavy black overcoat. His face is turned away from the camera. He stares out at the Moscow skyline. Above him are the words: The Beginning of The End for Vladimir Putin.
With Ukraine’s recent thrust into the Kursk region, the first time anyone has invaded Russia since World War 2, you might think Putin suddenly does look vulnerable, uncertain, maybe even teetering on the edge of collapse.
But the magazine issue isn’t from this week. It came out on March 3, 2012.
At that time, Putin – then in power for 13 years already – was about to return to the Russian presidency in an election that everyone understood was rigged. Several hundred thousand protesters were in the streets of Moscow, led by a charismatic young dissident named Alexei Navalny. “His time is running out,” the magazine warned.
In the dozen years since his end supposedly began, Putin has met three different US presidents, ordered two illegal invasions of Ukraine, rigged two more elections of his own, eliminated his most prominent critic, and even survived a major insurrection.
Experts have predicted at least half a dozen of the last zero collapses of Putin’s regime. Even I, at one point, thought he was spinning an untenable “Fairy Tale.” The Russian proverb says you measure seven times before cutting. By that standard, Putin seems to be a ruler beyond measure entirely.
He has, of course, has done no great wonders for Russia lately. Despite what Tucker Carlson may tell you from a Moscow grocery store, Russia today is a corrupt, militarized, and increasingly isolated economy. The population is shrinking and the oil-based business model is slowly becoming a fossil of its own as the global energy transition accelerates. Meanwhile, Putin’s neo-imperialist outbursts have brought immense destruction to Ukraine, yes, but they’ve done no favors for Russia’s own future either.
So how does the Teflon Tsar do it?
For one thing, Putin has mastered the dark art of the Russian system. Backed by the men with guns – his old KGB cronies – he has spent years honing the role of indispensable arbiter, balancing the various clans of spooks, bureaucrats, and businessmen who constantly war with each other, but who rise against Putin himself only at the risk of falling out of a window.
In this sense, he is more godfather than goon.
And to the Russian people, easily moved to national pride but also plagued by political apathy, he uses a totally captive media to tell a good story. Putin, as he tells it, is the last champion of Russia, an old, great civilization, always unfairly held back by a decadent, perfidious West. And in that role, Vladimir Putin makes sure there is no viable alternative to Vladimir Putin.
But perhaps most importantly, his economy is simply hard to kill. For years, Putin built up a war chest, hiring some of the world’s best financial whizzes to run the books. Now, despite the best attempts of the West to sanction Russia into submission, GDP is set to grow faster than most of the world’s rich economies, this year and consumer confidence is surprisingly high.
That’s partly because China and India have continued to purchase Russian oil, yes. But it’s also because of something else.
As the Russia scholar Cliff Gaddy once put it, Russia’s economic model, which basically pulls money out of the ground and uses it to pay pensions, buy weapons, and keep state employees happy, is “the cockroach of economies — primitive and inelegant in many respects but possessing a remarkable ability to survive. Perhaps a more appropriate metaphor is Russia’s own Kalashnikov automatic rifle — low-tech and cheap but almost indestructible.”
Over the past two weeks, the keeper of that Kalashnikov cockroach has suffered an especially sharp blow. Ukraine’s invasion of Kursk is, to my knowledge, the only time the core territory of a nuclear power has been invaded. (Sorry Argentines, the sheep pastures of the Falklands aren’t quite the marchlands of Mother Russia.)
The Kremlin, clearly caught off guard, is struggling to respond. Thousands of Russians have been evacuated. The Ukrainians say they don’t plan to hold the territory, but they also seem ready to push further if need be.
In principle, this should be intolerable for a leader like Putin. The boss can’t protect his own borders? The elites must be whispering that the old man is slipping. Surely it’s another beginning of Putin’s end.
Don’t bet on it.
We’ve been here before. A little more than a year ago Wagner mercenary group founder Yevgeny Prigozhin led an insurrection of thousands of armed men, marching unopposed through Southern Russia and coming to within 125 miles of Moscow before flinching. The spell of Putin’s power looked certain to be broken. Instead, it was Prigozhin who met his end in a fiery plane crash two months later.
It seems to me that the obsession with predicting Putin’s demise comes less from a detailed understanding of what’s happening inside the Kremlin, and more from a kind of wishful, indignant disbelief that a leader like Putin can keep getting away with the things he gets away with. The killing of dissidents. The rigging of elections. The invasion of neighbors. He is a leader who has made a career out of bending back that “moral arc of the universe” we keep hearing about.
Still, if there’s something different about the Kursk advance, maybe it’s this: it’s a reminder that Putin isn’t the only nine-lives leader in the neighborhood. How many times has Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky been on the ropes, his counter-offensives doomed, his end beginning?
It’s a reminder that two years after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, perhaps the “end” of Putin, or of Zelensky, simply isn’t a viable goal -- for either side.
Ukrainian servicemen ride a military vehicle, amid Russia's attack on Ukraine, near the Russian border in Sumy region, Ukraine August 13, 2024.
Ukraine says its operation in Kursk is not about ‘taking territory’
The goals of Ukraine’s surprise military incursion into Russia’s Kursk region – its biggest attack on Russian territory since the war began in February 2022 – have been murky from the start. But Kyiv has now at least officially confirmed its presence there and claims to be in control of close to 390 square miles of the region.
It’s unclear how long Ukraine will maintain a military presence in the region. Russia is striking back with airstrikes, drones, and missiles — and Ukrainian forces could struggle to hold onto recent gains.
So, what’s this all about? While there’s no end to the war in sight, Ukraine’s operation could be designed to pressure Moscow into peace negotiations.
The surprise attack on Kursk proves Ukraine’s ability to be disruptive along Russia’s border and within its sovereign territory — and puts Russian President Vladimir Putin in the uncomfortable position of explaining how his country failed to prevent an invasion of thousands of Ukrainian troops.
A Ukrainian government spokesperson on Tuesday said that Kyiv is not interested in “taking territory” in Russia.
“The sooner Russia agrees to restore a just peace, the sooner Ukrainian raids on Russian territory will stop. As long as Putin continues the war, he will receive such responses from Ukraine,” the spokesperson said.
We’ll be watching to see what Putin does to save face, and whether Ukraine offers any further indications of its objectives.
Ukrainian service members ride an Armoured Personnel Carrier, amid Russia's attack on Ukraine, near the Russian border in Sumy region, Ukraine August 11, 2024.
Russia warns of “tough response” to Ukraine offensive
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky confirmed this weekend that Ukraine is conducting a cross-border offensive into Russia’s western Kursk region, marking the deepest incursion into Russian territory since that country’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Ukrainian forces have advanced more than six miles inside Russia, prompting the evacuation of over 76,000 people from border areas.
Zelensky saidthe move was designed to “restore justice” and exert pressure on Moscow.According to a senior Ukrainian security official, “The aim is to stretch the positions of the enemy, to inflict maximum losses, and to destabilize the situation in Russia,” adding “There is no idea of annexation.”
Russia's foreign ministry has warned of a“tough response” to the incursion. As of Sunday evening, Russia’s armyclaimed to have halted Ukraine’s advance, hitting targets in areas up to 20 miles from the Russian border, and stepped up attacks on Kyiv, killing a father and son on Saturday. Moscow’s Defense Ministry reported the destruction of 14 Ukrainian drones and four Tochka-U missiles over Kursk, denouncing the operation as “barbaric” and lacking military sense.
Russia has raised concerns about potential attacks on the Kursk nuclear plant, located just 37 miles from the Russia-Ukraine border, andthe International Atomic Energy Agency has called for both sides to “exercise maximum restraint to prevent a nuclear accident with severe radiological risks.” In response, Ukrainian officials assured, “We absolutely will not cause problems for nuclear security. This we can guarantee.”President Joe Biden looks on as Evan Gershkovich, who was released from detention in Russia, is greeted by his mother Ella Milman, upon his arrival at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland, on Aug. 1, 2024.
Did Moscow just open the diplomatic door?
They’re free! Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, former US Marine Paul Whelan, journalist Alsu Kurmasheva, and Kremlin critic Vladimir Kara-Murza were released in a major prisoner swap between Russia and the West on Thursday.
President Joe Biden proudly addressed the nation about securing the release of 16 prisoners, including 12 foreigners, noting that it was a “feat of diplomacy.” The plane carrying Gershkovich, Kurmasheva, and Whelan landed at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland late last night, where they were greeted by a heartwarming scene with their families, Biden, and Vice President Kamala Harris.
The less good news: Vadim Krasikov, a Russian imprisoned in Germany for murdering a former Chechen militant, also walked. But he’ll likely be stuck in Russia for the foreseeable future — so we won’t dwell on it.
Why now? Many assumed Vladimir Putin would avoid handing a clear win like this to Biden, or that the Kremlin would exact a bigger price in doing so. But instead, they’ve given up their highest-profile prisoners in exchange for 16 of their own in a politically advantageous win for the Biden-Harris administration. The swap was the result of months of complex negotiations and high-stakes diplomacy.
Still, we don’t know all the details. “We don’t know whether there were any quid pro quos that are not part of the public statements on all of this,” as Sam Greene, director for democratic resilience at the Center for European Policy Analysis, points out. And as for Biden, he says, “Maybe giving him a win isn’t so important [to the Kremlin] anymore.”
But it still surprises Greene “that [the Russians] would take essentially their entire deck of trading cards and cash it in for at least what on the face of it is not a whole heck of a lot.”
Could this signal that Russia is willing to engage in broader diplomacy? Unlikely, says Tinatin Japaridze, a regional expert and analyst at Eurasia Group. “Even though some will interpret the latest move as a signal of potential Russian openness to hold constructive negotiations on Ukraine,” she says, “it is too soon to jump to those conclusions.”
Greene agrees that the swap is unlikely to have a big impact on the war, but he does see room for hope. It upends the Western narrative that there isn’t really a negotiating partner for diplomatic outreach in Moscow. While the prisoner swap didn’t involve anything else Moscow is otherwise fighting for — at least as far as we know — there is one bonus for Russia: “It does kind of send a message or can be seen to send the message that there is a negotiating partner in the Kremlin,” he says.
And Moscow may see this as a now-or-never moment, Greene says. Western F-16s are now landing in Ukraine, which improves Ukrainian capabilities, and the US election looks a little bit less likely to go the way Putin wants (read: for Donald Trump), while the Russians are making progress on the front lines but at a huge cost.
“So maybe they do want to send that signal,” says Greene.
We’ll be watching for any signs of Moscow’s willingness to negotiate.
Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich has been sentenced to 16 years on espionage charges. He is seen here in court on July 19.
Russia sentences US reporter Evan Gershkovich to 16 years
A Russian court on Friday sentenced Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich to 16 years in prison on espionage charges that the US government and his newspaper maintain are fabricated. The US State Department says Gershkovich was “wrongfully detained.”
The 32-year-old journalist was arrested last year while on assignment in the Russian city of Ekaterinburg shortly after he published a story focused on Russia's economic downturn amid the war. His trial was conducted behind closed doors, and no evidence to support the Russian government’s allegations has been made public.
Fast trial leads to hope for a swap deal. The trial was conducted with considerable speed, lasting just three weeks from first hearing to sentencing. That has raised hopes that Gershkovich could soon figure into a high-profile prisoner swap deal between the Kremlin and the West. A swap deal requires a pardon from President Vladimir Putin, which can not happen until after a guilty verdict and sentencing.
Talks to that effect have reportedly been ongoing between Moscow and Washington. But the main prize Russia seems to be seeking is Vadim Krasikov, a Russian spy serving a life sentence in Germany for the murder of a Kremlin opponent in Berlin in 2019.
So far, Germany has been reluctant to release him, but with Gershkovich’s sentencing complete, US pressure to reach a deal could now rise as the Biden administration seeks a high-profile diplomatic success as part of its reelection campaign.
Yoon Suk-yeol, the presidential election candidate of South Korea's main opposition People Power Party (PPP), speaks during a news conference at the party's headquarters in Seoul, South Korea January 24, 2022.
South Korea considers sending weapons to Ukraine
Well, if North Korea is going to cozy up to Russia like that, South Korea isn’t going to just sit there, is it?
No, it’s not. Following Russian President Vladimir Putin’s trip to Pyongyang on Wednesday, where he and North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un celebrated their “fiery friendship” and inked a new strategic alliance, Seoul said it could start sending weapons directly to Kyiv to help Ukraine repel Russia.
That would mark a dramatic change from South Korea’s current policy of supporting US and EU sanctions against Russia while arming Ukraine only indirectly – by selling high-tech weaponry to Poland, which in turn has sent its own, Soviet-era equipment to Ukraine.
Kyiv, for its part, is keen to secure more firepower as Russia grinds its way deeper into Eastern Ukraine. These weapons “could have a meaningful impact on battlefield dynamics and potentially cause Moscow to reconsider the cost at which its burgeoning partnership with Pyongyang has come,” says Jeremy Chan, an East Asia expert at Eurasia Group.
Putin did not take kindly to the announcement, warning South Korea that arming Ukraine would be "a big mistake" and that Moscow "will... [make] decisions which are unlikely to please the current leadership of South Korea" if Seoul proceeds.
Meanwhile, Korean peninsula tensions are growing, as Seoul deepens its military coordination with the US and Japan, while Pyongyang has been testing more missiles and, of course, sending those gifts of garbage and excrement across the 38th parallel.
Russia's President Vladimir Putin and North Korea's leader Kim Jong Un arrive for a gala concert in Pyongyang, North Korea June 19, 2024.
Putin and Kim sign mutual defense deal
Russian President Vladimir Putinarrived in Pyongyang early Wednesday for his first official visit to North Korea in 24 years. He met with Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un and signed a deal to provide “mutual assistance in the event of aggression against one of the parties to this agreement.”
Putin called it a “breakthrough” document, but “aggression” is a vague term that leaves plenty of room for interpretation.
The real news. Russia, which has been isolated by the international community over its invasion of Ukraine, desperately needs more munitions to continue the war — that’s what this visit is really about. Moscow is deepening ties with Pyongyang to ensure it keeps the ammunition train rolling.
North Korea has sent roughly 10,000 shipping containers to Russia that could contain as many as 4.8 million artillery shells, according to recent comments from South Korea’s defense minister. Russia and North Korea have denied such arms transfers are taking place.
During Putin’s visit, North Korea notably declared “full support” for Russia’s war in Ukraine.
What does North Korea get? The expanding partnership between the two countries could see Russia provide North Korea with everything from food to military technology.
Like Russia over its war in Ukraine, the rogue state faces crippling sanctions over its nuclear program. Putin is also calling for increased cooperation between the two in fighting these sanctions, decrying such economic penalties as an effort by the West to maintain its hegemony.
Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Kremlin in Moscow, Russia May 3, 2024.
Russia announces battlefield nuke drill
It’s also a flex from Vladimir Putin ahead of his fifth inauguration as president taking place today and Thursday’s annual Victory Day celebration, which marks the defeat of Nazi Germany. This is the first time Russia has publicly announced drills that include so-called tactical nuclear weapons, which are far less powerful than warheads that can be fitted to intercontinental ballistic missiles.
Western governments will take this public threat seriously, but Russia’s use of these weapons remains highly unlikely. Putin knows that tactical nukes might well unite, rather than divide, Ukraine’s Western allies and sharply increase the risk that NATO fully enters a war that Russia can still win if it can isolate Ukraine further from its backers.