TL;DRussia Weekend Roundup

16 February 2025: Counting losses, plus texts and tunes

Well, that was … interesting.

As of about a week ago, the inside word was that Vice President JD Vance and Keith Kellogg, Donald Trump’s special envoy for Russia and Ukraine, would present the White House’s Plan For Ending The War (TM) at this weekend’s Munich Security Conference. Then Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy for the Middle East, flew to Moscow to retrieve jailed American teacher Mark Fogel, after which Trump announced on Truth Social that Witkoff, but not Kellogg, would be leading on the Plan For Ending The War (TM). And so the inside word shifted: maybe Kellogg and Vance would not be announcing anything at Munich after all.

But then Trump called Vladimir Putin and announced that peace talks would “begin immediately”, and that he would call Volodymyr Zelensky to let him know. By mid-week, those in the know knew that the Americans, Russians and Ukrainians would meet in Munich to start those talks. But by mid-week, those in the know were also struggling to figure out what there was to talk about, given that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth was simultaneously announcing that Ukraine would not retake territory, would not be in NATO, and would not enjoy American security guarantees for itself or for potential European peacekeepers.

By the time the Munich Security Conference rolled around, Hegseth had walked back his remarks, Vance threatened sanctions and US military involvement if Russia didn’t play ball, and the Russians themselves were nowhere to be found. Left without a deal to talk up, Vance pivoted, using his keynote instead to campaign for the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party a week ahead of critical elections (and then leaving the conference to meet with AfD chief and Elon Musk acolyte Alice Wiedel, while turning down a meeting with Chancellor Olaf Sholz). Save for a face-saving half-hour meeting with Zelensky, that was basically that. Talks have now been announced for Saudi Arabia, albeit with no date, format or agenda, but with Kellogg back in the room.

As all of this was unfolding, I opined in a long social media thread (X/Bluesky) that:

1. The sky, while in clear descent, was still miles away from the ground;

2. It is fantastical to believe that Washington and Moscow can reach a mutually acceptable agreement in short order; and

3. Moscow’s intransigence combined with Washington’s tomfoolery leaves open a window of opportunity for Europe and Ukraine to devise a solution that yields genuine security.

I’ll be developing these ideas further in various fora in the coming days, so please stay tuned.

What I’m thinking about

Much earlier in my career, when I was still a journalist, an editor gave me a piece of advice: when it comes to the big interview, with that really key individual, you rarely get more than one shot, so make sure you’re prepared. It was with that advice in mind that I decided a dozen or so years ago that I wasn’t quite ready to interview Alexei Navalny: I had too many questions, not enough clarity of focus, and no real reason for him to trust me, and thus to open up to me. It was a reticence I never overcame, and the source of one of my greatest regrets.

When the news came of Navalny’s death in a Russian prison camp a year ago today, two things seemed clear to me. One, Navalny was murdered. Two, with Navalny died the idea that Russians have a right to a future different from their present. Indeed, that idea was why Navalny died. As I wrote at the time,

Navalny, for all his human faults and all the divisions he evoked, gave succor to Russia’s political heretics. He refused to allow fear—the knowledge that he was facing imprisonment and likely death—to cow him into silence or exile. For Putin, then, Navalny was dangerous not because he could have won an election or led a revolution. Rather, Navalny died for the reason that dogmatists have murdered heretics for millennia: his example threatened one day to provoke a crisis of faith.

When Navalny first began to emerge from the margins of opposition politics—transitioning in the late 2000s from a nationalist-adjacent blogger to an anti-corruption crusader with a knack for public speaking—I’m not sure I understood just how transformational he would be come. In fact, scratch that. I’m sure I didn’t understand. This was an era, mind you, when leaderless movements were all the rage, from Occupy Wall Street to the Arab Spring. But even if you didn’t drink that particular Kool Aid, the study of social movements—which had been at the heart of my PhD—focused more on groups and organizations than individuals. To the extent that individuals figure in most of the theory, it’s as a reflection of deeper social dynamics. And so I wasn’t inclined to see Navalny for what he was, or what he would become.

To be sure, Navalny was a reflection of deeper social dynamics. Young, digitally savvy Russian citizens were increasingly learning to come together in new and powerful ways, solving problems where the state was absent or incompetent. This networked civil society allowed people to believe that they could reshape the nature of the spaces and communities in which they lived, shifting the balance of power between citizens and the state in real, although not irreversible, ways. Through projects like Rosyama, helping citizens demand better infrastructure maintenance, and Rospil, a crowdsourced anti-corruption platform, Navalny recognized this shifting balance and harnessed it.

But Navalny was more than just a reflection. He was a leader, and a different kind of leader than the Russian opposition had seen before or since. Unlike most liberal party leaders in Russia, Navalny was enthusiastic about seeing new voices and personalities rise through the ranks of the movement and become leaders in their own right. Navalny’s organizations and campaigns, while eventually coming to bear his name, were always very clearly collective endeavors, and they produced more new faces across the country than any of their peers or competitors, precisely because Navalny understood that movements create change, not individuals.

Similarly, Navalny understood better than any opposition leader before, during or since that no one group or organization would ever be equal to the task of creating change in Russia. He shared stages and prison cells with people whose views he eschewed, save for their views of Putin and their demand for a different kind of Russian politics. I am convinced that only Navalny and his team could have put together the Smart Voting platform, which allowed for coalition-building and tactical voting across opposition parties and represented the greatest threat to Putin’s electoral machine.

And Navalny understood one of the key tenets of social movement theory, namely that people don’t mobilize for leaders—they mobilize for themselves and for one another, and when they can see a clear pathway from mobilization to change. By tracing the pathways of corruption all the way from the Kremlin to the crumbling infrastructure and sub-standard public services that plague people’s lives, Navalny was doing more than just making the political personal. He was making it possible for people to imagine change.

He was also making it easier for people to get angry. Successful political mobilization requires a sense of injustice, and that, in turn, requires people to understand that someone is to blame for their plight. Living in England, as I do, plenty of my neighbors are aggrieved by the weather, but few of us believe that shaking our fists at the clouds and the wind will do a lot of good. As a result, we go about our cold, wet lives in quiet resignation. But when grievance can be attached to blame—when people can see that their hardships are caused by specific human beings making specific decisions—change can be demanded. And when change is demanded and not received, people get mad.

Navalny, then, didn’t just reflect shifts in Russian society. He understood those shifts, he amplified them, and he helped turn them into a genuine—if doomed—challenge to an immensely powerful authoritarian regime. And the residue of that challenge remains even now. While the movement has been largely driven underground or into exile, and hundreds of its activists are in prison, thanks to Navalny almost every major city across Russia has the muscle memory of mobilization. Thanks to Navalny, investigative journalism and open-source intelligence has become a vigorous and inescapable threat to the Kremlin. Thanks to Navalny, Putin’s United Russia party will always be the Party of Swindlers and Thieves.

In the end, however, Navalny failed to push Russian society as far as he believed it could go. Aside from an ill-advised and abortive attempt to work with nationalists, Navalny never managed to reach across Russia’s dividing lines of class, culture and ethnicity in ways that might have galvanized a broader coalition. In part as a result, too many Russians—indeed, the vast majority—continued to behave as though corruption, government malfeasance and repression were simply naturally occurring phenomena, akin to the weather, and thus impervious to even the most righteous of indignation. When he was imprisoned, too many Russians continued to see themselves as free. When he was murdered, too many Russians looked away.

If I retained any doubts about Navalny’s role, however, they were dispelled by what I’ve seen in the year since Navalny’s death. While the Russian opposition remains replete with women and men of bravery and resolve, its leadership caste has reverted to the worst practices of the pre-Navalny era. As I’ve written before, I have no desire to pick sides in the escalating battles between Team Navalny and Team Khodorkovsky (for lack of a better term), and I recognize that the mutual grievances are strong and genuine. The reality, however, is that the divisions between them are deeply irrelevant to the millions of Russians who once believed in a better future for Russia and who desperately need a reason to believe again. Indeed, wallowing in internecine recrimination and the politics of personality will only ensure that the Russian opposition remains irrelevant to Russia’s future itself.

What I’m reading

Two core themes dominated my reading this week: Trump-Putin, and Trump-Musk. I’ll spare you much of the latter, though not entirely, but I’ll start with the former.

Much of the news itself is up in the opening section of this week’s newsletter, so I won’t rehash it here. I would, however, draw your attention to a handful of analyses from people with considerably more experience in these matters than me. Writing in the FT, my King’s College London colleague Lawry Freedman suggests that Trump’s punt has now put Putin in the slightly awkward position of having to decide, likely in a reasonably short period of time, what he actually wants out of this war. Writing in Prospect, former UK Ambassador to Moscow (and Kabul, among other places) Laurie Bristow argues that whatever the outcome of a deal in/over Ukraine, Putin will remain committed to conflict with the West.

Meanwhile, I’ve been struck by how markets are reacting. In Russia, predictably, the ruble jumped against the dollar after the Trump-Putin phone call, as did Russian stocks, but both gave up a chunk of their gains the next day, as things seemed to be reversing course (again, see above) and the Russian Central Bank elected to keep rates steady. Somewhat more troubling is that European traders are already talking of a “peace dividend”, which as sent investments higher, according to the Financial Times.

On Trump-Musk, this is a Russia-focused newsletter, so I won’t delve into the details here, but I wanted nonetheless to share what I’m reading. That list includes competing essays in Foreign Affairs, one by the Hungarian political scientists Bálint Madlovics and Bálint Magyar arguing that Trump will not quite be able to do to America what Viktor Orbán has done to Hungary, and another by the Canadian and American political scientists Lucan Way and Steven Levitsky, arguing that “the path to American authoritarianism” is clear. Probably the most insightful thing I read, though, came from Elena Panfilova, formerly director of Transparency International-Russia, in Novaya Gazeta.

And a few more odds and ends before I sign off for the week:

• The FT’s Max Seddon and Chris Cook reported on Monday on a leaked presentation from a Russian very-high-level strategy session fretting that sanctions are undermining Russian influence in its “near abroad”. While this is interesting in its own right, I’m inclined to take it as a signal of a clique of Russian policymakers trying to make the case for finding accommodations on Ukraine and relieving sanctions pressure.

• Andrei Kolesnikov’s column in The New Times is always worth reading, but in his piece this past Monday he returns to the theme of Putin’s attempts to erase the past (through nationalization) and the future (by ignoring climate change). It’s an unusual twist, and well worth exploring.

• The Russian social anthropologist Alexandra Arkhipova has a profound and simultaneously amusing analysis in iStories how the Russian propaganda machine has transformed Maria Vorontsova—yes, Putin’s daughter—into something of a war hero. The story is equal parts bizarre and illuminating.

• In the plus ça change category, Kommersant reported on Friday that while the Kremlin is outwardly overjoyed at Washington’s evisceration of USAID and funding other organizations, Russian pro-government analysts are warning people to “remain vigilant” against purported American influence activities.

What I’m listening to

This song popped into my head the other day. No idea why.