TL;DRussia Weekend Roundup

9 February 2025: The view from the Kremlin, plus texts and tunes

© Yaroslav Chingayev (TASS), 2020

This has been a tough week. A friend remarked that it feels like living in a movie. To me, it feels a bit more like living in a movie theater, if only because I’m pretty sure I’ve seen this film before. And I’m reminded of the Jethro Tull lyric:

Well, do you ever get the feeling
That the story's too damn real
And in the present tense?
Or that everybody's on the stage
And it seems like you're the only
Person sitting in the audience?

Dubious poetry and mangled metaphors aside, it is no accident that everyone I talk to is afflicted to one degree or another by the same sense of detachment and spectatorship. The shock-and-awe tactics taken by the Trump administration are meant to stun opponents into paralysis, and to some extent it’s working.

In moments like these, time and space can seem to collapse in on one another, compressing all of reality into a single, undifferentiated mass of heat, light and noise. It’s important to remember that this is an illusion. The world retains its complexity and diversity, it proceeds at exactly the same pace it always has, and our cognitive and analytical faculties, should we choose to use them, are undiminished.

Another friend reminded me the other day of Martin Luther King Jr’s phrase, beloved of Barack Obama, that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” If that has ever been true, my friend said, it is because people have bent that arc, often at the cost of great personal sacrifice. He is certainly correct. Absent human action, the cosmos has no moral fabric, and morality does not bend of its own accord. That strikes me as a reassuring thought. Our societies are not captive to unyielding forces, and progress has not slipped irretrievably from our grasp.

The arc of the moral universe can still bend towards justice—we need only opt to bend it.

What I’m thinking about

I’ve been so captured by what events in Washington mean to me as an individual—as an American citizen, as someone who cares about democracy, about Ukraine, about the transatlantic community, and much more to boot—that I’ve very nearly neglected my job, which is to think about what these events mean to a very different individual, namely Vladimir Putin.

Long-time readers will know that I cannot and will not attempt to read Putin’s mind. I’m neither his confidante nor his shrink, and my academic discipline gives me no access to his head. Instead, what I have tried to do over the years is to look at how his behavior has evolved, the lessons he appears to have learned, and thus the assumptions and motivations that appear to be shaping his decisions, and those of the people who advise and serve him (what you might call the ‘collective Putin’). That, in turn, has led to two basic analytical conclusions:

• Putin went to war not to secure Russia, but to secure Putin. In this, Putin is like most authoritarian rulers, who see little difference between national security and regime security (and even if they do see the difference, they are disinclined to sacrifice the latter in the service of the former). As a result, foreign policy—whether the war in Ukraine, or relations with the US—becomes an extension of the autocrat’s broader effort to prolong his rule as long as humanly possible.

• Over the years that he has been in power, Putin has come to see his regime security as predicated on the achievement of three foreign policy goals (or a fuller explanation these goals, see here):

  • securing internal governance against external pressure;

  • exercising domination in the post-Soviet space; and

  • disrupting the institutions that underpin Western power.

As Putin watches the news from Washington, then, the question he will be asking himself is, is Trump making the world more or less safe for autocracy?

Some of the early indications will not have been encouraging for the Kremlin. For all of Trump’s campaign rhetoric and outward friendliness towards Putin, the man put in clearest command of foreign policy—National Security Adviser Mike Waltz—is a hawk, whose support for ramping up military and sanctions pressure on Russia has been clear and consistent. Ditto for Keith Kellogg, Trump’s special envoy for Ukraine and Russia.

But while Moscow’s tele-propagandists were predictably apoplectic at the administration’s threats of further sanctions, the Kremlin itself was likely nonplussed. They will not have bought the idea that Trump would genuinely seek an end to the war within 24 hours (which, in any event, they would not have accommodated), and they would never have believed that Trump would simply hand Ukraine to Russia as an inauguration party favor. So far, so neutral.

Indeed, if there was a problem for the Kremlin in the early going, it came not from Washington, but from Kyiv. Volodymyr Zelensky’s pivot towards Trump—which began in the waning weeks of the Biden administration, and has included productive engagements with Fox News, and long-standing courting of American Evangelicals—has broadly succeeded in breaking the link between Biden and Zelensky in the White House’s mind. If Zelensky can take things one step further and create genuine common cause with Trump, things may become more difficult for Moscow.

For the moment, though, that’s where the bad news for Putin ends.

It’s unlikely that Putin believes that Trump intends to make good on his threats to annex Greenland, Canada and Gaza (though the Panama Canal may seem more plausible), much as a war among NATO allies and/or the direct insertion of the US into the Middle East’s most intractable conflict might be to his liking. Similarly, the Kremlin is probably reserving judgment when it comes to the Trump’s mooted tariffs on many of America’s closest allies, given the pattern set by the almost immediate suspension of tariffs on Canada and Mexico. Nonetheless, Putin is almost certainly enjoying the vibe. The fact that politicians in both Ottawa and Copenhagen have to spend more time talking about the threat from Washington and less time about the threat from Moscow, that NATO allies are trying to figure out how to pay for more defense spending while bracing for a trade war, and that NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte is having to focus on basic alliance cohesion, will feel to the Kremlin like a win.

The Gaza casus—which, again, the Kremlin likely doesn’t believe will ever come to pass—will have come as a further and a highly pleasant surprise. Even without any movement towards implementation of Trump’s mooted plan to occupy, de-populate and rebuild Gaza, he will see the damage to America’s standing in the global south and even in much of Europe as done. And Putin cannot help but be pleased that the White House has attacked the same International Criminal Court that has a warrant out for Putin’s arrest. And then there’s the appointment as (acting) Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs of a man whose inflammatory rhetoric on race, public support for North Stream and insistence that the US provoked Russia’s invasion of Ukraine should make Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova worry about her job security.

Because I’m not a conspiracy theorist and do not believe that the Kremlin and the White House are actively in cahoots, I’m entirely certain that the White House’s full-throttle assault on the US Agency for International Development (USAID) will have come as yet big surprise to Moscow—and a pleasant one, to boot. Indeed, it’s hard to know what aspect of the decision to freeze and then cancel virtually all USAID spending, and then to dismiss some 98 percent of its workforce will have been the Kremlin’s favorite. There’s the fact that Ukrainian energy grids, hospitals, schools and other infrastructure destroyed by Russian attacks will no longer be rebuilt. Or the fact that Russian civil society and media organizations in exile, who have struggled mightily to survive persecution at home and violence abroad, will be effectively kneecapped by the precipitous withdrawal of American support. Or the fact that Russian efforts to subvert the democratic and European trajectories of Georgia and Moldova will now face a freer hand. And while Russia is not in a position to step into the global soft power gap left by America’s withdrawal from the foreign aid game, the prospect of a permanent diminution in the capacity of the United States to respond to crises around the world will make the Kremlin very happy indeed.

In the midst of all of this, the Kremlin will not have missed the announcement by the US Department of Justice that it would shutter the so-called ‘KleptoCapture’ task force, dedicated to finding and seizing the global assets of sanctioned Russian oligarchs. More than anything else that has happened in the three weeks since Trump took office, the Kremlin will likely see this as the biggest short-term win. After the flurry of new sanctions at the end of the Biden Administration, this will provide some breathing space, by allowing oligarchs to move money and assist in sanctions evasion with greater confidence, and by reducing the compliance pressure imposed by global financial institutions and other counterparties worried about American enforcement measures. That should have an immediate impact on the cost of capital for the Russian economy.

And then there’s DOGE. Quite apart from the USAID story, the way in which the White House is deploying Elon Musk and his ‘team’ to ‘disrupt’ the working practices of large swaths of the federal government, operating outside of established legal procedure and security protocols on systems critical to the functioning of the state and the economy, and potentially dislodging large chunks of the federal workforce, will likely be quite confusing to the Kremlin. They had expected to have one wildcard in DC; the addition of Musk makes their analytical modeling more difficult. But Russia’s spy chiefs in the FSB, GRU and SVR will be salivating over just how target-rich Washington has become, with ample opportunities to recruit new (witting or unwitting) informants, to exacerbate intra- and inter-agency tensions, and to infiltrate newly unsecured networks.

To take this back to Putin’s core objectives, then, it’s hard to see how he could be anything other than ecstatic—with the obvious caveat that it’s still early days, and things could change. For the moment, however, the Kremlin will believe the following:

• When it comes to its objective of securing the regime against external pressure, a lasting blow has been dealt to the Russian activist and media networks that are best positioned to undermine the Kremlin’s power, while Washington has de-prioritized efforts to squeeze Russia’s political-economic elite and made coordination with allies more difficult;

• When it comes to the objective of dominating the post-Soviet space, while there has been no shift as yet in Russia’s position in Ukraine, at least a temporary and likely a lasting blow has been dealt to Ukraine’s resilience against Russian attacks on its civilian infrastructure, while a lasting blow has likewise been dealt to pro-democratic forces throughout the region; and

• When it comes to disrupting the institutions of Western power, a series of highly destabilizing blows have been dealt to NATO and the cohesion of the transatlantic community more broadly, which, while not yet existential, constitute the greatest opportunity Russia has yet seen to break the back of Western coordination and make a policy of containment effectively impossible.

Could the Kremlin be wrong in its analysis? Of course. It was wrong about both Ukrainian resilience and Western coherence in 2022. European policymakers are paddling hard below the surface to try to keep the ship afloat, and there are plenty of reasons to believe they can succeed. And in the US itself, while Trump and Musk are moving with tremendous speed and across a staggeringly wide front, they are up against well entrenched institutions that, while they are bending, may yet not break. Just as in its invasion of Ukraine, then, Russia’s early gains could well be reversed.

For the moment, though, Putin will be feeling more secure and confident than he was just a couple of months ago.

What you’re thinking about

Ahead of the previous edition of the newsletter, I launched an ‘ask me anything’ thread on the Substack chat. It’s been pretty sparsely used, but I’m committed to answering any reasonable and tractable questions I receive—including the two below. Please do join the conversation!

Are alternative governing models are being discussed within Russia or in exile, or is the opposition simply against Putin?

Russian opposition groups of various kinds—almost entirely in exile—are greatly animated by conversations about the country’s future. Indeed, it is one of my enduring gripes that the opposition is more consumed by discussions of what should be done in a post-Putin future, than by discussions of how to make that future happen sooner. But that is not to say that these conversations aren’t important. However and whenever Putin leaves office, there will likely be a small window of opportunity to push the country towards a democratic and peaceable path. If those Russian citizens who oppose authoritarianism and war are to take advantage of that window, they need to know now what they will do then. Otherwise, a new set of authoritarian actors will almost certainly impose itself (and may well do so anyway).

This thinking about the future has taken numerous forms. Most prominent is a 15-point plan published from prison by the late opposition leader Alexei Navalny in February 2023 calling, among other things, for the restoration of Ukrainian territorial integrity on its 1991 borders, and the establishment of a parliamentary republic. Another group, led by three exiled academics, has gone as far as to draft a new constitution. Various communities of exiled legal scholars and human rights defenders have begun compiling lists of repressive laws that will need to be repealed or revised.

While all of these projects are potentially useful, in that they may speed up the adoption of pro-democratic policies as and when the opportunity arises, they all, in my view, suffer from two core challenges:

1. They lack agency. Run from exile, and without any means of reaching in and building constituencies within Russia, the projects do not present a clear sense of how they will turn their ideas into action when the moment comes. At best, they are predicated on the notion that Russia’s exiles will return at the moment of post-Putin transition and be welcomed into positions of leadership and influence. That seems unlikely to me.

2. They elide federalism. While both the Navalny plan and the draft constitution talk about decentralization, Russia is badly in need of something considerably more radical—a new federal settlement, redefining the purpose of the state from the point of view of the regions and peoples that comprise it. None of the projects address that head on, with the effect that they do not resonate terribly well among Russia’s ethno-national minorities.

Assuming that Trump will inevitably fail in his attempts at persuading Putin to come to an acceptable agreement with Ukraine, what is likely to happen next? Ukraine will not just give in.

At the risk of being boring, I’m going to fall back on the notion that inertia is among the most powerful forces known to man. In the absence of a negotiated ceasefire (and I don’t see a genuine peace agreement available any time soon), the most likely outcome is that the current war of attrition continues, until the war itself creates the impetus that both sides need to come to the table.

The conventional wisdom is that ceasefire talks take hold when both sides believe that there is nothing more that can be reliably achieved on the battlefield—and that’s one piece of conventional wisdom with which I see no reason to argue. So long as one side feels it can gain more advantage by fighting than by talking, it will fight. And that, as many have said before, is exactly why Trump’s campaign to seek peace in Ukraine has always seemed a fool’s errand: Moscow believes it can get what it wants by fighting, and Kyiv does not believe it can get what it needs by negotiating. Regardless of the carrots and sticks Trump might bring to bear, things may thus have to get a lot worse for both sides before the fighting can stop.

What I’m reading

I’ll admit, I’ve done a bit more reading about the US than usual this week, and a bit less about Russia, so the list this time is relatively short (and does include one piece on the US worth reading).

Three things caught my eye this week that all point in the same directly, namely that the conventional wisdom that time is now on Russia’s side may, once again, be wrong.

• First, on Tuesday, the Institute for the Study of War in its usual daily roundup on the war in Ukraine noted mounting evidence that Russia is struggling to recruit men to the fight in numbers sufficient to replenish the considerable losses they’re taking in their grinding advance.

• Second, and this one is a little bit older (way back from 30 January), the Moscow Times reported that two thirds of Russian citizens are spending more than half of their incomes on groceries, with inflation hitting lower-income Russians at rates considerably higher than those reported for the economy as a whole.

• And third, my CEPA colleague Alexander Kolyandr published on Wednesday a lengthy analysis of the structural problems mounting in the Russian economy and fiscal and monetary policymaking, which, while not yet critical, will begin to force the government into ever more fraught tradeoffs over the next six months and beyond.

Also on Wednesday, Elena Panfilova, the former head of Transparency International-Russia and now a fabulous columnist for the in-country edition Novaya Gazeta, had a long-read on what data on charitable giving in Russia might tell us about the actual proportion of people who are opposed to the war in Ukraine. (Semi-spoiler: The number is probably more than you’d think, but less than you’d hope.)

And on Friday, if I can be excused for including a video on a reading list, the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology published a fascinating interview with Xenia Cherkaev on informal and shadow-economy practices among Soviet-era workers which, if you’re interested in the deeper roots of Russia’s contemporary social system, is well worth your time. (It’s also a must for my students at King’s! Hat-tip to Jeremy Morris for the find.)

Finally, I promised one reading on developments in the US (in addition to all the links in the sections above), and it comes from the Nobel laureate Daron Acemoglu in Saturday’s Financial Times. I don’t agree with all of it, but it’s probably the most cogent attempt I’ve come across yet to de-collapse time.

What I’m listening to

In honor of the incoming chairman of the Kennedy Center, I thought I’d share this hauntingly beautiful performance from the creole singer Leyla McCalla. If you’re up for something with a little more of an edge, try the title track from her 2020 debut album, The Capitalist Blues.