TL;DRussia Weekend Roundup

15 September 2024: Mirror Mirror, plus texts and tunes

The Mirror of Venus, Edward Burne-Jones 1870

This edition of the newsletter was supposed to be about missiles. That was the plan — until the Russian opposition blew it up.

In truth, this edition of the newsletter is still mostly going to be about missiles. I cannot, however, entirely ignore the epic sh*tstorm (sorry, but there really isn’t a better term) that engulfed a large chunk of Russia’s anti-Putin community in the latter half of this week.

For those who don’t live and breathe this stuff — or if you’ve just been mercifully ensconced under a rock — the basic story is this: Back in March of this year, about a month after the death of Alexei Navalny, somebody attacked and severely beat Navalny’s former campaign manager, Leonid Volkov, in Vilnius. A month later, two Polish citizens were arrested, with ties to nationalist and football ultra organizations.

For most of the ensuing period, most observers (myself included) had assumed that the attack was orchestrated by the Kremlin or someone seeking to please the Kremlin. On Thursday, however, the Navalny team’s Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK, by its Russian acronym) published a video investigation, together with the investigative reporting site Proekt, alleging that the attack had been orchestrated by Leonid Nevzlin, a former Yukos executive and comrade of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, now living in Israel. According to the evidence collected by FBK, Nevzlin was upset about criticism from Navalny-linked activists and sought to attack others, including the economist Maxim Mironov. Nevzlin denies involvement and claims that Anatoly Blinov, the organizer of the attack named in the FBK investigation, fabricated the story to create conflict between Nevzlin and FBK.

I’m not going to say that I don’t care who’s right and who’s wrong. I do. But I don’t know who’s right and who’s wrong, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. FBK’s evidence is compelling, but not watertight. As for Nevzlin’s denials, well, denials are always hard to prove. And in the court of public opinion, lots of people are guilty until proven innocent.

There are two things I do want to say, however. First, this conversation could do with a bit more humanity. My Russian social media feeds are full of vitriol going in both directions, but if anything the vitriol coming fro the pro-FBK side is higher-octane. On the one hand, that’s understandable: they’re the victims of violence here, whoever the perpetrators may be. But rhetorical attacks on those who think this whole story smacks of a Kremlin operation to sow discord among the opposition are unhelpful. Most rank-and-file pro-democracy and anti-war activists don’t feel a particular allegiance to any of the factions of Russia’s organized opposition, and it’s more important to them to feel that they’re part of a united front, than to pick a side in the opposition’s long-running internecine battles. From that perspective, reflexive disbelief in accusations against any part of that front is a perfectly natural response. In fact, if the movement is to cohere, it may be the best possible response.

Second, while this may be overstepping the boundaries of an analyst, I’d dearly like to see all sides in this dispute make use of formal institutions. When they were all in Russia, it made sense to fight battles in the public space: Russian courts and law-enforcement officials, after all, could not be relied on to be neutral arbiters of justice. Now that all of the parties are outside of Russia, however, and living in (mostly) democratic, rule-of-law societies — and, notably, living in societies whose courts and law-enforcement officials have no particular interest in intra-opposition politics — there is no excuse for refusing to let the formal process run its course. If FBK are confident in their evidence, they should bring it to Lithuanian officials and let them investigate and, if necessary, prosecute. That need not preclude public appeals of the kind FBK made on Thursday. But if the danger is as real as Navalny’s former team believe it is, they should go one step further and seek the full protection of the law.

What I’m thinking about

Ok, back to the missiles.

The big news of the week, at least prior to the Nevzlin-Volkov story, is the evidently pending liberalization of the (infernally complex) regimes governing Ukraine’s use of the long-range weapons systems it has been given by Western governments. In a nutshell, the UK is eager to allow Ukraine to use British-made Storm Shadow missiles to strike targets deep(ish) inside Russia, but the nature of supply chains, defense procurement and alliance relations is such that London can’t give Kyiv that permission without Washington’s say-so. Getting that nod was agenda item No. 1 for Kier Starmer as he traveled to DC this week. While he didn’t quite get it, word is that it will come soon — or, in fact, that it may be communicated to Kyiv and put into action before it is announced publicly.

The slow-walked reversal of this long-standing policy has, of course, provoked a response in Moscow, with Vladimir Putin warning that the use of Western-provided long-range weapons systems by Ukraine to hit targets in Russia — as distinct from the Ukrainian-manufactured drones that have been hitting Russian cities, airfields and oil refineries — would put Russia effectively at war with NATO, with all the potential attendant consequences thereof.

This is, of course, not the first such warning Putin has given. He began the war in February 2022 with a promise of “consequences you have never seen” if anyone intervened to defend Ukraine. A quick Google search turns up red lines drawn by Putin in April 2022, June 2022, September 2022, March 2023, March 2024, May 2024, and June 2024. A more careful search would almost certainly turn up considerably, as would widening the aperture to capture warnings from other senior Russian officials.

I am not inclined to take this latest warning of dire consequences and more seriously than all of the previous warnings — but not because I think Putin is an inveterate bluffer. Rather, I don’t take it seriously because I don’t actually think that red lines work that way.

Analysts of international relations often talk about the phenomenon of mirroring, an idea borrowed from psychology, in which one person (or group of people) projects their own patterns of thought and action onto another. In many ways, mirroring is what makes life in a human society possible: given that we can’t know what’s going on in someone else’s head, we find it easier to cope if we assume that other people see the world more or less like we do, hold the same values, and respond the same way to basic stimuli. Foreign policy wonks, however, routinely warn of the dangers of mirroring when it comes to international relations: governments have different institutions and cultures, are subject to different politics, and suffer from different historical path dependencies, as a result of which assumptions that your adversaries or even your partners think and work the way you do are likely to lead to costly miscalculations.

In the context of this conflict, however, I think we’re suffering from a bit of whatever the opposite of mirroring is. As the will-we-won’t-we faffing over permissions for long-range weapons illustrates, despite stern warnings delivered to Moscow Western engagement in Ukraine’s defense has not followed the logic of red lines. Instead, policymakers have made contextual, situational decisions at each given moment in time, based on a complex and fluid equation that involves their assessment of the situation on the ground in Ukraine, their assessment of Russian capacity and resolve, and assessments of domestic politics and the coherence of the transatlantic alliance, among other things. In fact, even when clear red lines are allegedly drawn — such as Barack Obama did regarding the use of chemical weapons in Syria — the actual decision as to whether to respond to the crossing of that supposed red line is subject to the same situational calculation.

The discussion of Russia, however, always seems to assume that Russia does the red-line thing differently. My sense is that even most of those who, like me, see Putin’s latest threat as unserious tend to assume that Putin has a real red line somewhere. Certainly, that appears to be the prevailing opinion in the White House. It is clearly the prevailing opinion among those who are calling for the West to sacrifice Ukrainian territorial integrity on the altar of de-escalation. (To wit, see JD Vance’s proposed ‘solution’ to the conflict.) But that assumption was also the subtext of most of the questions I was asked by journalists this week — essentially, if this isn’t Putin’s real red line, what is?

For reasons I don’t fully understand (although I’m sure someone’s researched it), we have a tendency to assume that our major adversaries are more sure footed than we are. We are aware of our own doubts and anxieties, but because we are unaware of the internal thoughts and debates shaping Russian policy, we often make the mistake of assuming they don’t exist. As a result, we treat Putin like the quintessential Bond villain, a mastermind with a brilliantly laid plan, always at least one step ahead, made vulnerable only by his own hubris.

It would be safer, I think, to assume that Putin is a little bit more like us than we tend (or want) to believe. Putin, like any political leader, faces uncertainty. For him, as for Biden or Starmer, escalating in the face of a perceived provocation is risky. For one thing, he cannot know whether it will force his adversaries to back down or prod them into further action. And because large-scale escalation — such as an attack on a NATO member or the use of a weapon of mass destruction in Ukraine — is a one-shot deal, the incentive is to try it only in the direst of circumstances. The problem is, you never really know how dire the circumstances are until it’s too late.

As a result, whatever the rhetoric may be, Putin’s calculations on whether and how to escalate are likely as situational as ours, subject to an equally complicated political equation. Just as we don’t really know what the trigger is that might push Western leaders into an even more forward stance in defense of Ukraine, so too Putin doesn’t really know where his actual red lines are. In fact, it would not be a stretch to say that, just as the West doesn’t really have red lines when it comes to Ukraine, neither does Putin.

What I’m reading

This week’s reading list is mercifully short, but what it lacks in breadth it hopefully makes up for in depth.

On Wednesday, Novaya gazeta’s Moscow edition published an essay by Leonid Nikitinsky on the move by Russia’s prosecutor general to begin the wholesale review and potential reversal of decisions made in the late Soviet and early post-Soviet periods to rehabilitate victims of Soviet political repression. He writes:

How the line is drawn between authoritarianism and totalitarianism, in my view, depends on what’s at stake in the political struggle. Previously, until February 2024, repression mostly affected those who tried to take power (at least in the peculiar view of the incumbents). The transition to totalitarianism is characterized by a changing of the stakes. What is at stake now is the the entire worldview and first and foremost the place in this history of President Vladimir Putin. The figure of the victorious Stalin is just one piece of this construction.

Also on Wednesday, iStories published an investigation by Roman Katin into one Gennady Petrov, a one-time Leningrad mobster who got close to Putin, survived the 1990s, and is now sitting atop strategic state contracts worth hundreds of billions of rubles. Among other things, it contributes to the emerging picture of the wild-west nature of the war profiteering currently at play in Russia, and the ways in which people with a knack for the rough-and-tumble (to put it very mildly) are reasserting themselves.

In a shorter but no less curious tidbit, the Financial Times reported on Thursday of a move by Madrid to block the takeover of a Spanish engineering company by a Hungarian conglomerate. The Spanish company, Talgo, makes goods needed to maintain the Ukrainian rail system, and the Hungarian company, Ganz-Mávag, is controlled by the Hungarian oil company MOL, which does a lot of business with the Russian oil company Lukoil. The Spanish government, then, is reportedly concerned that the sale could lead to the disruption of supplies to Ukraine. It will be fascinating to see how this one works its way through the EU bureaucracy and judiciary.

Lastly, the Russian Central Bank’s September bulletin is an unusually action-packed read. In a nutshell: inflation is still rampant, despite cooling consumer demand, and interest rates — already at 19% — may have to climb still further if there is any hope of deflating the overheated corporate lending market. What really struck me, though, was this:

Between late July and August, developments in domestic financial markets were driven by a hostile geopolitical environment as well as an investor rethink on the timeframe of tight monetary policy. The foreign currency market grew more fragmented, with further complications in yuan-ruble pricing.

Never mind the deadpan bit about the geopolitical environment, and even the monetary policy thing. It’s the currency market thing that piqued my interest, especially given it’s not discussed in any further depth in the bulletin. A 5 September piece from Kommersant, however, sheds light on something I hadn’t tracked: despite the fact that Russian trade is supposedly shifting heavily towards China and de-dollarizing in the process, both of which are meant to help lessen the impact of sanctions, there are so few yuans trading on the open market that the Moscow exchange may be forced to stop quoting a yuan-ruble exchange rate. Banks are transacting for clients (largely corporate) off the open market, in large measure because Chinese banks don’t want to engage openly with Russian counterparties. That doesn’t quite sound to me like the “no-limits friendship” Putin and Xi have heralded, but what do I know.

What I’m listening to

Maybe a decade or so ago, a friend invited me to see a gig in London from a band I’d never heard of. “It’s hard to beat a girl with a guitar,” my friend texted, by way of encouragement.

“Agreed,” I texted back. “Though I’m not quite sure why you’d want to try to beat a girl with a guitar. And I’m pretty sure it’s illegal.”

Amazingly, said friend did not ghost me — and good thing, too, because I never would have gotten hooked on Hurray for the Riff Raff. The above-mentioned girl with the guitar is Alynda Segarra, originally from New York, now of New Orleans, and the music is country and folk-rock and ever so slightly latin, always with a rueful edge. The latest album, The Past is Still Alive, strikes me as a meditation on holding out hope in a world that refuses to reciprocate. Every track finds a heartstring to tug, but this is the one I can’t get out of my head.