Daily Archives: January 5, 2024

Is Vladimir Putin trying to end his war in Ukraine? According to recent reports, the Kremlin has launched a new back-channel diplomacy to reach out to senior officials in the Joe Biden administration. Putins message: to signal that he could accept a ceasefire that freezes the fighting along current lines.

Reactions to the story have been furious. Some Ukrainians, sheltering from Russias biggest-ever missile and drone assaults of the war over Christmas, saw it as evidence of a nefarious Washington insider plot to sell Kyiv down the river. President Volodymyr Zelensky dismissed Putins initiative as disingenuous, saying that he saw no sign Russia genuinely wanted to negotiate. We just see brazen willingness to kill, he told the New York Times.

Even Zaluzhny has admitted that a magical breakthrough to reconquer its lost territories was unrealistic

In one sense, Zelensky is right: Putins ceasefire proposal will lock in Russias military gains, allow Putin to claim victory, reward aggression and effectively partition Ukraine. Nor does Putins reported offer to talk show any real willingness to compromise. We have repeatedly proved that we are able to solve the most difficult tasks and will never retreat, because there is no force that can divide us, Putin told his nation in his New Years address hardly the words of a man preparing any kind of climbdown.

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Putin's 'peace' is a partitioned Ukraine - The Spectator

In March of this year, Russia will hold presidential elections. The contest, like ones past, will be highly choreographed, and its outcome is preordained. President Vladimir Putin, who has ruled Russia for more than 23 years, will dominate the race from the beginning. Every media outlet in Russia will promote his candidacy and praise his performance. His nominal opponents will, in fact, be government loyalists lined up to make the contest appear competitive. When all the ballots are counted, he will easily win.

Yet even though the election will be a farce, it is worth watching. That is because it is an opportunity for Putin to signal his plans for the next six years and, relatedly, to test different messaging strategies. Analysts can therefore expect him to do two main things. One is to play up Russias struggle against the West. But the other is something that Westerners will find familiar from domestic politics: decrying socially liberal, or woke, policies. Putin will, for example, talk a lot about family values, arguing that Russians should have traditional two-parent households with lots of children. He will denounce the so-called LGBT movement as a foreign campaign to undermine Russian life. And he will rail against abortions, even though most Russians support the right to have them.

The parallels with the American right are not coincidental. Putin and his advisers have adopted the views and rhetoric of conservative American firebrands, such as anchors on the Fox News channel. The Kremlin has done so because, by embracing the culture wars, it believes it can win over support from populist politicians in Washington and elsewhere. In fact, Russia has already won international right-wing fans. Conservative leaders across the United States and Europe, including former U.S. President Donald Trump, have praised Putin. Some of them have suggested they are happy to compromise over Ukraines future.

Putins far-right rhetoric and policies are thus a form of statecraft. By championing such causes, the president appears to believe he can undermine Western societies from within. He likely thinks he can thereby tear down the rules-based international order. And he probably hopes he can replace it with a new, conservative global system with the Kremlin at its center.

When Putin first came to power, he was not a culture warrior. In fact, until 2012, the Kremlin was driven by a moderate agenda. Under his first deputy chief of staff, Vladislav Surkov, Putin focused on economic development. Although Surkov was an apologist for Putins authoritarian system, he did not despise queer people, immigrants, or women. Instead, he believed that the best base of support for Putin would be cosmopolitan middle-class voters, who tend to be relatively socially liberal.

But Surkovs theory was incorrect. Russias middle class may have supported Putin at first, but as his rule dragged on and became increasingly autocratic, this demographic became critical of the president. During his run for a third presidential term in 2012, hundreds of thousands of middle-class Russians even took to the streets in protest.

Putin won nonetheless. But the demonstrations were a turning point in how he thought about power. He felt betrayed, so he sidelined Surkov. His new chief political strategist, Vyacheslav Volodin, was a conservative ideologue who prompted Putin to focus on enlisting the support of Russias poor and its working class, who were considered more religious and conservative. As a result, Putins rhetoric and policies began to shift away from the economy and the middle class and toward cultural issues, playing up so-called traditional values and skewering a supposedly decadent West.

One of the first symbols of this reversal was a 2013 law, passed and signed at Volodins suggestion, that banned LGBTQ propaganda. In effect, the bill made it illegal for the media to describe nontraditional relationships in a positive fashion, and it banned gay characters from appearing in movies or television shows that might be viewed by anyone under 18. The law was not the only way Putins new regime worked to stigmatize the queer community. Kremlin-controlled media outlets also began branding LGBTQ people as both dangerous to society and inherently sinful. In August 2013, for example, Dmitry Kiselyov, the host of Russian state televisions evening news show, demanded that the government ban heart transplants from gay men killed in accidents. Instead, he said, their hearts should be burned.

At the time, such vitriol was still unusual in Russia, so Kiselyovs statements created a scandal. But Putin seemed happy. In December 2013, he created a new state-owned news agency and named Kiselyov its head. Kiselyovs promotion helped symbolize the changing nature of Russias media outlets. Before Putins third term, state television was dull and sedate. In 2012, however, state broadcasters began behaving as if they were on Fox News, the right-wing U.S. television channel known for drumming up outrage. According to a senior former official in Russian state television, who asked to remain anonymous out of concern about his safety, journalists were told to watch and mimic what they saw on the channel. Kiselyov, for his part, started acting like the Fox News star Bill OReilly, who was famous for his angry diatribes. That OReilly was no fan of Putinhe once called Russias president the devilwas of no concern to Russian anchors. What mattered, as the former official told me, was that OReilly had the flames of hatred bursting from his eyes: his news programs were exciting, with fury, fights, and shouting. Now, so were Kiselyovs.

The state broadcaster was not the only Russian outlet to borrow from Fox News. At the end of 2013, Jack Hanick, a longtime Fox News producer, came to Russia to help the businessman Konstantin Malofeev launch Tsargrad TV, a private far-right channel with ties to the Russian Orthodox Church. In the spring of 2014, Malofeev funded Igor Girkin, then a Russian military commander, as Girkin helped lead Russias invasion of eastern Ukraine.

Ironically, and much like many conservative politicians in the United States, Russias leaders are hardly paragons of right-wing principles. Putin, for instance, divorced his wife in 2014. Putin has not remarried, but he appears to have been involved with Alina Kabaeva, the former Olympic rhythmic gymnastics champion, since at least 2008. They are widely thought to have children together.

Many of Putins cronies are also divorced. Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin divorced his first wife in 2011 and his second in 2017. Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin divorced in 2014. Arkady Rotenberg, Putins close friend and a major Russian businessman, divorced in 2013. If these were Soviet times, the separations would have damaged these mens careers; the Soviet Communist Party was ardently against divorce. But today, separations do not matter at all. Russia has, for many years, been among the world champions in divorce. Its current rate3.9 divorces per 1,000 inhabitantsis one of the highest in the world, well above the global average of 1.8. (The rate in the United States is 2.5.)

Putins culture war has not stopped at Russias borders. Beginning in the 2010s, for example, Russian politicians and propagandists began to bemoan the influx of migrants and refugees into Europe, declaring that the continent had lost its identity, culture, and spirituality to people from Africa and the Middle East. Many Euro-Atlantic countries have actually gone down the path of abandoning their roots, including Christian values that form the basis of Western civilization, Putin declared in a 2013 speech. Europeans, he said, have been unable to ensure the integration of foreign languages and foreign cultural elements into their societies.

Moscow has also waded into U.S. politics. When the Black Lives Matter movement took off in 2020, the Kremlin said the cause was a catastrophe for the United States. American elites themselves undermine the statehood of their country, Nikolai Patrushev, the secretary of Russias security council, said in an article. They use street movements in their own interests. They flirt with marginalized people who rob stores under noble slogans. Patrushev even suggested that there were places in the United States where whites are forbidden to enter, and local gangs will take over the police functions. Such remarks could easily have been written by the right-wing media personality and former Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson.

Moscows anti-woke diatribes have, of course, come to feature Ukraine. In a 2022 speech celebrating Russias illegal annexation of four Ukrainian regions, Putin avowed that his country was fighting to protect our children and our grandchildren from sexual deviation and satanism. In this view, Kyiv is now a vehicle for the West, spreading its corrupt liberal values into Russias rightful sphere of influence, and Moscows aggression is actually a defense of tradition. It is a way to make sure that every Russian child would have a mom and dad, not parent number one, parent number two, and parent number three, as Putin put it in September 2022.

In the Kremlins view, trans peoplethe supposed parent number one, parent number two, and parent number threeare especially threatening. As a result, they are now the target of extremely repressive legislation. In July, Russia passed a hastily drafted bill that banned hormone therapy and gender reassignment surgery. It also prohibited people from changing their gender identification on passports, annulled any marriage in which one person has changed gender, and deprived transgender adults of the right to adopt children.

At a Russian Supreme Court hearing on whether to designate the LGBT movement as extremist, Moscow, November 2023

Gay cisgender Russians have not been quite so marginalized. But they have faced heavy repression, as well. In November, the Russian Ministry of Justice pronounced the international LGBT social movement to be an extremist organization and banned it. This law might seem to be of little consequence, given that there is no such formal movement. But in practice, the move has criminalized any show of support for gay rights and the very act of being gay in public. Today, any outward display of queer behavior in Russia can lead to a prison sentence of at least five years.

Moscows new right-wing measures are not just targeted at LGBTQ Russians. The Kremlin has also launched attacks on women, in part by promoting restrictions on abortion. At a recent public event, both Putin and Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, criticized abortion, arguing that the country needed more native-born Russians to prevent the country from being overrun by migrants. At the end of the event, both leaders listened as a mother of ten made an orchestrated call to ban the procedure.

So far, no one has drafted a bill outlawing abortion, and the speaker of the Russian Senate, Valentina Matvienko, has promised that the country will not totally ban the right to choose. But regional governments have started prohibiting private clinics from offering abortions. Such restrictions on private clinics might expand in the years ahead.

Putins right-wing policies may play well at home, helping to justify his continued rule and the invasion of Ukraine. But domestic politics alone cannot explain his war on wokeand not just because it includes attacks on European immigration and the racial justice movement in the United States. Contrary to what Putin suggests, Russia is not a fundamentally conservative society. According to surveys by the Levada Center, for example, only one percent of Russians attend church weekly, and more than 65 percent of Russians say that religion does not play a significant role in their lives. According to other Levada surveys, roughly 65 percent of Russians support the right to abortion. Transgender people, meanwhile, make up only a tiny fraction of the countrys populace. Before Putin launched his attacks, they attracted almost no public attention.

Instead, Putins rants appear to be aimed less at a domestic audience and more at right-wingers abroad. They seem to be targeted at Europe and North America in particular, the two places where Moscow has lost the most support over Putins last decade in power. In both regions, mainstream leaders who have isolated Moscow are struggling to fight off insurgent right-wing politicians who support ostensibly Christian values. Increasingly, these populist conservatives are winning. And by embracing their rhetoric, Putin believes he can gain their support and, with it, find a way to improve Russias international position.

It is easy to see why the Kremlin believes such an approach is necessaryand why it will succeed. After Russia occupied Crimea in 2014, the West slapped sanctions on the country, and Putin found it harder (although not impossible) to do business with his usual partners in Europe. But the continents far right remained receptive. The French right-wing leader Marine Le Pen, for example, praised the annexation. She has also asserted that Putin is looking after the interests of his own country and defending its identity. Russian banks, perhaps not coincidentally, have provided loans to her party. It has proved to be a smart investment: In 2017 and 2022, Le Pen was the runner-up in Frances presidential elections.

Le Pen is hardly the only conservative Western politician who developed a loose alliance with the Kremlin. The surging far-right party Alternative for Germany has also been warmly received by the Kremlin, and many of that partys senior officials have spoken fondly of Moscow. One regional leader, for instance, described Putin as an authentic guy, a real man with a healthy framework of values. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who likes to rail against woke policies and the LGBTQ community, has become a committed Putin partner. Orban even blocked European Union aid to Kyiv, aiding Moscows war efforts.

But none of these parties or politicians is as valuable to Putin as former U.S. President Donald Trump. As a candidate and as president, Trump repeatedly complimented Putin, and should Trump win power again in 2024, he has suggested he might stop aiding Ukraine. Trump himself has never cited Putins policies as the reason he likes Russias presidentinstead, he has pointed to Putins supposed strengthbut Trumps advisers have. Steve Bannon, Trumps onetime chief strategist, praised Russias president for being anti-woke. Carlson, perhaps Trumps foremost media booster, delivered a speech in Budapest in which he said that U.S. elites hate Russia because it is a Christian country.

For Putin, then, far-right policies and rhetoric are an effective means of building international support. He is, in essence, forming a kind of Far-Right International, similar to the Communist International, which promoted the Soviet revolution in the first half of the twentieth century. As with the Soviet Union, which never practiced communisms philosophical tenets, it does not matter that Putin and his entourage violate their espoused principles. What matters is that those principles help him gain friends and undermine the liberal order.

Even if Putins vision does not come to full fruition, a far-right international would help strengthen his hand. He hopes that it might prompt Western states to weaken sanctions, for example, or to cut back on support for Kyiv. The result might be a more durable Kremlin regime. And for Putin, that in itself would be a win.

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Russia's War on Woke: Putin Is Trying to Unite the Far Right and Undermine the West - Foreign Affairs Magazine

When the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant last year for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, a Moscow court launched a surprise counterattack: It ordered the arrest of a 70-year-old retired judge in Lithuania.

The judge, Kornelija Maceviciene, was not connected in any way to the case against Mr. Putin in The Hague or to investigations into Russian war crimes in Ukraine.

Her crime, as the Moscow court sees it, was handing down unjust guilty verdicts against former Soviet officers, nearly all Russians, for their role in a brutal crackdown against pro-independence protesters who had gathered at a television tower in Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital, on Jan. 13, 1991.

In a bloody episode that helped seal the demise of Soviet power, 14 protesters one of them a young woman crushed by a tank were killed and hundreds of others were injured when Soviet forces stormed the tower in an abortive last-ditch attempt to prevent Lithuania from escaping Moscows grip.

After examining copious evidence showing who in 1991 gave the orders to use deadly force and who carried them out, Ms. Maceviciene and two fellow judges ruled in 2019 that scores of Russians, along with a few Ukrainians and Belarusians, were guilty of crimes against humanity, war crimes and other offenses.

That has put her in the sights of Russian authorities beholden to Mr. Putins view that the collapse of the Soviet Union brought about the unjust disintegration of historical Russia a preoccupation that lies at the heart of his military assault on Ukraine.

Setting the historical record straight as Mr. Putin sees it hinges on reframing the demise of Soviet power as a tragic injustice in which Russians were innocent victims, never perpetrators, of violent crimes in defense of Moscows empire.

And doing that requires overturning, or at least discrediting, guilty verdicts handed down by Ms. Maceviciene in Lithuania against the former Soviet military and security officers.

Ms. Macevicienes verdict was clearly unjust, according to an August ruling by the Basmanny District Court in Moscow that ordered her immediate arrest. Two fellow judges and the lead Lithuanian prosecutor in the Vilnius television tower case have also been declared criminals and placed on Russias wanted list for persecuting Russians.

In an interview in Vilnius, Ms. Maceviciene voiced disbelief and alarm that, more than three decades after the bloodshed at the television tower, Russia was now trying to edit out uncomfortable facts and punish her for adjudicating on the events of 1991.

I really cant figure out their logic, she said. The facts of the case are clear.

Saulius Guzevicius, a former special forces commander and an expert on hybrid threats, said Russias pursuit in recent months of judges and prosecutors had sharply escalated a yearslong campaign to rewrite the history of 1991 and discredit us as fascists.

They are sending us a message: We never forget those who went against us, Mr. Guzevicius said. During the Vilnius showdown in 1991, he was part of a security detail assembled by pro-independence activists to protect the Lithuanian legislature.

Under Mr. Putin, Russia has gone to extraordinary lengths to present itself as a guilt-free victim of Western powers and foreign fascists, rewriting history textbooks and punishing historians who delve into Moscows past crimes.

Yuri Dmitriev, an amateur historian in northwestern Russia who found a mass grave containing hundreds of people killed by Stalins secret police, was jailed for 13 years in 2020 on what his family dismissed as trumped-up pedophilia charges. Pro-Kremlin historians claimed, against all evidence, that the bodies include many Soviet soldiers killed by Finnish fascists.

Lithuania, dragooned into the Soviet Union in 1940, was the first Soviet Republic to declare independence from Moscow, setting an example in March 1990 that was later followed by Ukraine and 13 others.

For Mr. Putin, that process, which resulted in the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991, was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century.

Lithuanias efforts to hold accountable those who took part in the 1991 killings in Vilnius began with a trial in 1996 of six Lithuanians who had collaborated with the Soviet military.

The case expanded rapidly after a 2010 change in Lithuanian law to allow defendants to be tried in absentia. That opened the way for scores of former Soviet military and K.G.B. officers sheltering in Russia to be charged and judged by a Lithuanian court.

Of the 67 defendants convicted in 2019 by Ms. Maceviciene and fellow judges, only two appeared in the dock: Yuri Mel, a Russian tank commander; and Gennady Ivanov, another Russian officer in the Soviet military.

The others, including the former Soviet defense minister Marshal Dmitri T. Yazov, were found guilty in absentia of using military acts against civilians prohibited by international humanitarian law and sentenced to years in jail. Marshal Yazov died in Moscow a few months later aged 95.

Vilmantas Vitkauskas, director of the National Crisis Management Center in Lithuania, said that Moscow had no real expectation of getting its hands on Lithuanian judges and prosecutors and was engaged in a psychological operation aimed at spreading fear and caution to deter others from trying to hold Russian citizens to account.

Among those Russia wants to frighten off, he said, are Lithuanian prosecutors and police officers active in international investigations into war crimes in Ukraine. They are sending a signal: Dont mess with Russia, he said.

Russia has also opened criminal cases against three judges and the chief prosecutor in The Hague involved in the case against Mr. Putin.

For Lithuania, a Baltic nation that shares a border with the Russian region of Kaliningrad, getting the facts straight about 1991 is a matter not only of defending the countrys origin story of heroic, peaceful resistance but also of national security.

Like other formerly Soviet lands, Lithuania has always had a few citizens who lament the end of Moscows rule. But the war in Ukraine has turned what used to be seen as a mostly harmless fringe into a source of serious concern.

Russias full-scale invasion, justified on the pretext that Moscow had a duty to protect Ukrainians from fascism, has stoked deep alarm in Baltic States that pro-Kremlin groups, no matter how small, could call for help from Moscow. That is what happened in 1991 when a so-called Citizens Committee, made up of Soviet loyalists in Lithuania, pleaded for Moscow to intervene to crush fascists pushing for independence.

A Vilnius court last year ordered the liquidation on security grounds of the Good Neighbors Forum, a tiny grouping of mostly leftist activists seeking good relations with Moscow and the departure of NATO troops.

Erika Svencioniene, a member of the forum, was charged in December with endangering national security by helping Russia and Belarus and their organizations to act against the Republic of Lithuania. In an interview in her hometown, Jieznas, in southern Lithuania, she denied working against her country and accused the West of luring it into needless confrontation with Russia.

We were given Western sweets but they turned out to be very bitter, Ms. Svencioniene said. I know there is no democracy in my country, she added.

Algirdas Paleckis, co-founder of the forum, is a former leftist member of Parliament whose grandfather served as the puppet leader of Soviet-occupied Lithuania in the 1940s.

Before being found guilty in 2021 of spying for Russia, the grandson was at the forefront of a Russia-orchestrated campaign to deny that Soviet military personnel were responsible for the 1991 bloodshed. He insisted that Lithuanian nationalists had secretly sent snipers to the television tower to shoot their own supporters.

As Mr. Putin took an increasingly authoritarian and nationalistic turn over the past decade, Moscow moved beyond defensive denials and went on the offensive, with Russias intelligence service collecting confidential information about Lithuanian prosecutors and judges involved in the television tower case.

Among its helpers on the ground was Mr. Paleckis, who was jailed for five and a half years for espionage after he was found to have collected information at the behest of Russian intelligence about where prosecutors lived and other personal data. He denied working for Russia and said that he had been collecting information for a book.

Simonas Slapsinskas, one of the prosecutors targeted by Russian intelligence, said that he was unnerved by an announcement in September by the Russian news agency Tass that he was wanted by Moscow to face criminal charges over his persecution of those involved in storming the television tower.

He has stopped traveling abroad, he said, and confined family holidays to the territory of Lithuania. The whole family has had to restrict its movements, he said.

Ms. Maceviciene, the retired judge, has also curtailed her travels.

She said she was dismayed that Russia would try to overturn well-established facts. Of her own position as a target for Russian revenge, she added, I dont know whether to cry or be proud.

Tomas Dapkus contributed reporting.

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Putin's Drive to Rewrite History Snares a Retired Lithuanian Judge - The New York Times

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia vowed on Monday to continue missile strikes on Ukrainian cities, in retaliation for what he called a terror attack on the Russian city of Belgorod last week.

They want to scare us, to create a certain uncertainty inside the country, Mr. Putin said during a televised meeting with the veterans of the war in Ukraine. From our side, we will build up the strikes.

Mr. Putins rare public comments about an attack on the Russian territory comes as his armed forces in recent days have pummeled Ukrainian cities with some of the largest rocket strikes since the start of the invasion, and as both sides look for ways to break a stalemate on the battlefield.

The cycle of strikes and retaliation is raising fears of escalating civilian casualties in the conflict, which began in February 2022.

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Putin Vows to Keep Up Bombardment After a Russian City Is Hit - The New York Times

Returning to tradition after speaking flanked by soldiers last year, Putin delivered his address to the nation against the backdrop of a snowy Kremlin. In remarks carried by RIA Novosti, he described 2023 as a year marked by high levels of unity in Russian society.

What united us and unites us is the fate of the Fatherland, a deep understanding of the highest significance of the historical stage through which Russia is passing, the president said. He also lauded Russian citizens solidarity, mercy and fortitude.

The nearly 2-year-old war in Ukraine was front and center in the address, with Putin directly addressing Russias armed forces involved in what the Kremlin has termed its special military operation in the neighboring country.

We are proud of you, you are heroes, you feel the support of the entire people, the president said. According to state media, he emphasized that Russia would never retreat and asserted there was no force that could divide Russians and stop the countrys development.

The address broadcast comes a day after shelling in the center of the Russian border city of Belgorod Saturday killed 24 people, including three children. Another 108 people were wounded, Belgorod Gov. Vyacheslav Gladkov said Sunday, making the attack one with the most casualties on Russian soil since the start of Moscows invasion of Ukraine 22 months ago.

As last year, New Years celebrations were toned down in Moscow, with the traditional fireworks and concert on Red Square canceled. After the shelling in Belgorod, local authorities in the Pacific port city of Vladivostok and other places across Russia also canceled their usual New Years firework displays.

Dmitry Medvedev, the deputy secretary of Russias Security Council and former Russian president, also congratulated Russians on the New Year. In video remarks posted to Telegram, he said that thoughts and hearts are with those at the front and that the past year had required a special stability and unity, and true patriotism from Russia.

Medvedev also called on Russians to make 2024 the year of the final defeat of neo-fascism, repeating Putins claims of invading Ukraine to fight neo-Nazis. The Holocaust, World War II and Nazism have been important rhetorical tools for Putin in his bid to legitimize Russias military actions in Ukraine, but historians see their use as disinformation and a cynical ploy to further his aims.

Analysts are describing 2023 as largely a positive year for Putin.

Its been a good year; I would even actually call it a great year for the Russian leader, said Mathieu Boulegue, a consulting fellow for the Russia-Eurasia program at Chatham House think tank in London.

Moscow in May won the fight for the bombed-out Ukrainian city of Bakhmut after the longest and bloodiest battle of the war. In june, Putin defused a revolt against him and reasserted his hold on the Kremlin. A Ukrainian counteroffensive against Russia started with high hopes but ended in disappointment.

As he enters 2024, Putin is wagering that the Wests support for Ukraine will gradually crumble due to political divisions, war fatigue and other diplomatic demands, such as Chinas menacing of Taiwan and war in the Middle East.

Putin is seeking reelection in a March 17 presidential election that he is all but certain to win. Under constitutional reforms he orchestrated, the 71-year-old leader is eligible to seek two more six-year terms after his current term expires, potentially allowing him to remain in power until 2036.

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Putin lauds Russian unity in his New Year's address - POLITICO