>>512458659
THE LIMITS OF PUTIN’S BALANCING ACT
>What the Kremlin Will Sacrifice in Pursuit of Victory in Ukraine
>Russian President Vladimir Putin has achieved an eerie calm at home. Shortly after assuming the presidency in 2000, he tied once independent oligarchs to the state while placating the growing middle class with rising living standards and greater material comforts. Gradually, he assembled a ruling ideology from bits and pieces of Russia’s past, one that was nationalistic enough to inspire pride but not so nationalistic as to be divisive.
>As a result, after a quarter century in power, Putin has brought Russia to a point of equilibrium. Putin has given Russians the gift they were most eager to receive: stability. The country is not enduring visible disruptions or political tumult. Indeed, Russia hardly has any politics at all—it lacks real political parties and does not stage meaningful elections. The state, which reserves the right to repress, mostly represses those who dare to display their disapproval, a vanishingly small minority of Russians. In this arrangement, the Kremlin retains control, and most Russians can go about their business, provided that their business is unobtrusive.
>Another reality shadows this carefully crafted equilibrium. Putin has implied that Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, and Boris Yeltsin, the first president of a post-Soviet Russia, had brought Russia to its knees, in part by letting post-Soviet states and former Warsaw Pact countries spin out of its orbit. Putin’s historic task, as he saw it, was to restore Russia as a major actor on the international stage. At the 2007 Munich Security Conference, he approached the West without any deference, reproaching the United States and its allies for “unilateral and frequently illegitimate actions” that had “caused new human tragedies and created new centers of tension.”
No DEFERENCE? WHAAAA?! the audacity!
Unironically, a good read.
https://archive.md/es7XV