TL;DRussia Weekend Roundup

29 September 2024: Future perfect, plus texts and tunes

“Returning to the Trenches”, CRW Nevinson, 1915

Maybe it was the jet lag, but I found myself suffering from a bit of rhetorical déjà vu this week. Let me walk you through it.

The big news on Wednesday was that Donald Trump would not meet with Volodymyr Zelensky, who was in New York for the UN General Assembly, ahead of a trip to Washington to meet with President Biden and Vice President Harris. That came after Zelensky visited a defense factory in Pennsylvania, which provoked howls of protest from Republicans, including a sharply worded letter from House Speaker Mike Johnson. It also came after Trump on Tuesday called Zelensky “the world’s greatest salesman” (not meant as a compliment), and Zelensky called Trump running mate JD Vance “too radical” and somewhat ignorant of history.

But then, of course, the big news on Thursday was that Trump would meet Zelensky after all, an event that was, as my teenager would say, a cringe-fest.

That, though, isn’t what caught my eye. On Wednesday, when Trump still didn’t want to meet Zelensky, he gave a stump speech in North Carolina claiming that Ukraine had for all intents and purposes already ceased to exist, and that even a bad deal with Russia back in February 2022 would have been better than fighting. Nothing surprising about that, I suppose. But the next day, Balázs Orbán, a prominent aide to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán (but no relation), said that if Hungary had been invaded instead of Ukraine, it would have surrendered rather than risk destruction, and that Budapest would advise Ukraine to do the same. And the same day, the ruling Georgian Dream party began running ads ahead of that country’s October parliamentary elections showing pictures of destruction in Ukraine juxtaposed against pictures of undamaged Georgian cites. This is the same party that recently said they would consider apologizing to Moscow for Russia’s 2008 invasion of Georgia.

I am not a conspiracy theorist. While I know Trump, Orbán (Viktor, not Balázs) and chief Georgian Dream backer Bidzina Ivanishvili share common interests and an odd affinity for Putin, I find it hard to believe that there is that level of coordination. Still, it was jarring to see nearly identical rhetoric from all three on the same day.

What I’m thinking about

As previewed in the last edition of this newsletter, I spent this week in Washington, attending meetings at and around the annual CEPA Forum. While much of the side-buzz fixated on the aforementioned Trump-Zelensky drama, the conversations I was involved in focused mostly on two things: the future of Ukraine, and the future of Russia. Shocking, I know.

Zelensky, of course, came to the US not to meet Trump, but to meet President Biden, and to present a “victory plan.” While many of the details remain murky, there seem to be two basic elements to this plan. One is the secret part, in which Zelensky and his team are understood to have outlined to the White House and the Pentagon a detailed theory for how an improvement in Ukraine’s military fortunes can be achieved. For whatever it may be worth, I didn’t come across anyone in Washington who thought that this plan would map out a pathway to the full eviction of Russian troops from Ukrainian territory, at least not in detail; in the abstract, of course, that very much remains the objective, as Biden himself reiterated on Thursday.

The less secret part of Zelensky’s “victory plan”, however, was not military in nature. As reported widely in he press, he asked Biden for four things:

1. Consistent supplies of weapons;

2. The permission to use those weapons as needed;

3. Security arrangements involving or equivalent to NATO membership; and

4. A commitment to help fund Ukrainian post-war reconstruction and recovery.

Now, perhaps because the conversation about permission to use US long-range arms has dominated the discussion for weeks now, most of the people who spoke at most of the events in which I took part chose to focus on the first two of those things. Indeed, I heard it said on multiple occasions that it was somewhere between dangerous and impossible to talk about Ukraine’s future—including security arrangements and recovery—until the war was won: impossible, because both of those things will depend on how the war ends; and dangerous, because focusing too much on a distant future can undermine focus on the gravity of the task at hand, namely winning the war.

While I take those points, I think they’re wrong—and to explain why, I’m going to pivot to Russia.

One of the conversations I was privileged to chair was a discussion of what needs to happen—what laws need to be changed, what electoral procedures undertaken, what Western policies put in place, etc—in the first few months after Vladimir Putin eventually leaves office in order to increase the chances of Russia becoming a democratic and peaceful country. In truth, there was very little controversy on the question at hand: everyone more or less agreed that the war would need to stop, reparations would need to begin, repressive laws would need to be repealed, political prisoners would need to be released, free and fair elections would need to be held, and Western pressure in the form of sanctions would need to remain in place until all of these reforms and others had bedded in, and likely for some time beyond.

The controversy, however, was about what would happen before that hypothetical post-Putin window, and what would happen after. Some in the room felt that, regardless of what happens after Putin leaves office, the chances of a democratic and peaceful Russia taking root are so slim as to be of dubious importance for discussion. This is not my point of view, as I think you know, but it’s genuinely held by people whose opinions should not be ignored. Many others in the room felt that, rather than imagining some kind of post-Putin future, we should be talking about how to bring about a swift end to the post-Putin present. This is a view for which I have somewhat more sympathy—but again, I think it’s wrong, or not quite right.

It is often said, paraphrasing the anthropologist Alexei Yurchak, that the end of the Soviet Union was unimaginable until it was inevitable. (What he actually wrote was that “everything was forever, until it was no more”, but the sense is the same.) It is a basic fact of life as social animals that we struggle to get our heads around large-scale change, because the certainties we share about how things work are what makes it possible for us to get along in complex societies, while minimizing confusion and conflict. When change does occur on a grand scale, it is usually either because the current system has started to create more confusion and conflict than certainty and security, or because people have begun to be able to coalesce around a shared vision of an alternative future that is so much better than the present, that the continuation of the present becomes unthinkable. In truth, most revolutionary change probably involves a combination of both of these two things. Either way, the ancien régime gives way because it has, in the imaginations of the people it sought to govern, already ceased to exist.

The point I’m trying to make is that, in a very real sense, it is the future that creates the present. Whatever situation we currently find ourselves in, however much we may like or dislike it, holds sway over our present behavior because it holds sway over our future expectations. Put differently, because we expect a power structure to be powerful in the future, we are willing—even if only begrudgingly—to comply with it it today. Once we cease to see its power in the future, it loses its sway in the present.

The purpose of the “after Putin” discussion was, in fact, to focus on the future, and to begin to map out plans and contingencies that might help lead to better outcomes and stave off worse ones. But if those plans take shape and take hold in people’s imaginations—making it easier to envision how politics might function after Putin goes—they may have the unintended (but welcome) consequence of making the Russian opposition’s desired future a little bit more likely to materialize.

And that’s why I think Zelensky’s focus on the future—and not just the present moment in the war—is so important. Quite apart from how this war actually ends, or how much territory Kyiv controls when the fighting stops, a durable, institutionalized commitment to Ukraine’s security and reconstruction, including membership in the EU and NATO (or something like it) clarifies what Ukrainians are fighting for. It also clarifies for Putin what cannot be achieved under any circumstances, namely the subjugation of Ukraine to Moscow. Holding off on that conversation until the war is won plunges Ukrainians into continued uncertainty and tells Putin that, if he can hold on, he can win. Flipping that logic and settling the end result for Ukraine now, grants Ukraine a large measure of victory it needs and ensure’s Russia’s strategic defeat. Zelensky seems to understand that. I hope Biden does, too.

What I’m reading

The piece that seems to have captivated American audiences this week was Sarah Topol’s New York Times Magazine profile—also available as a podcast, theatrically voiced by Liev Schreiber—of a Russian deserter. The Times describes it as “a thrilling tale of escape and a disturbing account of the war” and “a revealing portrait of how Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine has ricocheted through the private lives of Russia’s citizens, and the desperate choices some of them have made to survive.” I’ll admit, though, that I’ve neither read nor listened to it, though I imagine I’ll get there eventually.

Instead, I was captivated this week by Taisia Bekbulatova and Maxim Martemyanov’s equally long profile in Kholod of Nikita Tsitsagi, a journalist for the Russian website News.ru who died covering the Russian side of the front line in Donbas. The piece has none of the moral clarity of Topol’s article, and that’s the point. Tsitsagi was, by most accounts, committed to being a good journalist and fought to ensure that the Russian army’s role in the war was covered with at least some degree of honesty. He even won a (semi-)independent journalism prize for his reporting. His outlet, however, is loyal to the Kremlin, and the Tsitsagi’s overall opus was not exactly critical of the war itself. Different people will read his story differently, and that’s as it should be. For me, however, it’s an excellent and important illustration of how any attempt to exist within the current Russian political system imposes untenable compromises. Even the studied neutrality to which Tsitsagi evidently aspired is not an option.

Also this week:

• On Tuesday, Andrei Zayakin published an investigation in The Insider of the spectacularly named Andrei Khaliavin, a Latvian citizen who has evidently played an outsized role in helping Russian (and various other nefarious actors) evade sanctions, including the G-7 oil price cap. (For those who don’t speak Russian: the root of Khaliavin’s surname roughly translates to “freebie”.)

• The Russian Central Bank on Wednesday published a summary of its 13 September key rate meeting, which raised the rate to 19%. It takes a certain kind of person, I suppose, to find this kind of thing fascinating, but it’s a remarkably honest window into the reality of Russia’s economic situation. In a nutshell, despite cooling demand and slowing economic growth—due in part to high and rising interest rates—inflationary pressures remain strong. Commentators elsewhere have taken this as evidence of stagflation, though my own (non-expert) sense is that diagnosis seems premature. Nonetheless, I’m struck by the CBR’s own analysis, that “inflation expectations are growing, despite tightening monetary policy. This may signal a decrease in the decree to which inflation expectations are anchored…. In this situation, economic actors … are guided more by past trends of price growth than by established inflation targets.” In other words, Russia’s monetary wizards—who are usually very good at what they do—are worried that they’re losing traction.

• The Russian opposition politician and commentator Leonid Gozman had a piece Saturday in Novaya Gazeta Europe on Putin’s proposed changes to Russia’s nuclear doctrine, allowing for a nuclear strike on a non-nuclear adversary. Gozman’s analysis is mostly the same as my own: this has very little to do with how Russia will or will not use nuclear weapons, and a lot to do with making Western powers nervous. To this, though, Gozman adds two additional thoughts. First, he sees this as equally aimed at Russian citizens, trying to inure them to the potential for a nuclear conflagration and thus stave off any domestic pressure for an end to the fighting. And second, he questions whether Putin actually put much stock and faith in Russia’s nuclear arsenal, whatever the doctrine may be. “I don’t think Putin himself knows whether he really has nuclear weapons,” Gozman writes. “He didn’t know that the border at Kursk was full of holes, that the army wasn’t prepared for war, that air defenses would let attacks through.” For what it’s worth, I’m pretty sure that Russia does have nuclear weapons. Still, though, it’s worth factoring some degree of uncertainty into Putin’s own planning.

• Also in Saturday’s edition of Novaya Gazeta Europe is a long-read by Mira Livadina on the eviction of Doctors Without Borders from Russia and the end of the long history of Western humanitarian support to Russians in need. There’s a lot of history in there that I didn’t really know, as well as a good explanation of the scandals around Russia’s branch of the Red Cross.

• Finally, the American Journal of Political Science published a curious paper by Thiemo Fetzer, Pedro C.L. Souza, Oliver Vanden Eynde and Austin L. Wright, economists and political scientists at Warwick University, Queen Mary University London, the Paris School of Economics and the University of Chicago, respectively, on public support for foreign wars. Their data is drawn from the US and focuses on Afghanistan, and I want to be clear that neither they nor I would claim any comparability here to, say, Russian support for the invasion of Ukraine. They find, though, two things that are nonetheless worth thinking about. One is that casualties do contribute to fatigue and declining support for the war. The other is that the impact of casualties runs through the media, rather than through direct impact (i.e., knowing someone who died or was injured), and that it’s highly dependent on how (and whether) the media decide to cover the war. To wit, the researchers found that even large casualty numbers were unlikely to have much of an impact if they were reported around the time of a major sporting event. Again, I would be very careful about trying to extrapolate anything from this study with reference to Russia, but the role of the media—and the ease with which people are distracted—are nonetheless worth bearing in mind.

What I’m listening to

I have no particular musical inspiration this week, but this song—and this performance—is never far from the back of my mind. Apropos of nothing and everything all at once.