Russian President Vladimir Putin's failure in the war in Ukraine is visible, but his serious failure is another – in the attempt to restore the global influence of the USSR. By Ivaylo Noizi Tsvetkov.
Vladimir Putin had a dream, except that he did not say in the style of Martin Luther King "I have a dream". And it was relatively simple and understandable – as a rudimentary "homo sovieticus", i.e. a Soviet man with roots in the omnipresent KGB, the grand idea of all Putin's foreign and especially domestic policy was to restore both the global influence of the USSR and to elevate to the level of arch-propaganda the nostalgia for Soviet "life" and especially the victory in the Great Patriotic War. Of course, especially in the eyes of the older generations, sweeping under the carpet the role of the USSR between 1939 and 1941, the collusion with Hitler in the "Molotov-Ribbentrop" pact, etc.
Putin failed in the first, and in the second rather not, i.e. over the past two decades he has managed to poison many with the meganationalist idea. Including mothers of those who died in the insane war against Ukraine, but especially those millions in the endless countryside outside the urban environment of Moscow and St. Petersburg, who drew everyday grandeur from the propaganda itself, but also felt they had lost the Russocentric imperial power of the USSR after its collapse, which was largely illusory.
I hasten to clarify: I am not speaking from Russophobic positions, which I share only with regard to the Russian imperial attitude, i.e. I distinguish between the Russian "imperium" and the Russian "spiritus"; the emotions here seem marginal to me. This is my attempt to open someone's eyes to the real failure of Putin with his dirty war, which has been going on for four years and will most likely end with the annexation of Donbas (after Crimea). But I am more interested in the deeper reasons, the first of which is that the idea of imperial influence, of peripheral to global domination, is embedded in the Russian collective mental software.
The Putin administration itself is anything but stupid – and it is very clearly aware of this particular kind of quasi-imperial failure, mainly because of the changed geopolitical context compared to the bipolar US-USSR model. The sad truth here is that not only has a "third" major player appeared in the person of China, but it is already in a position to challenge the "title" of the US – in a military, commercial, financial and every other sense. By the way, Thomas Friedman is right: the recent meeting between Trump and Xi is somewhat reminiscent of the one between Nixon and Mao in 1972, when for the first time in history it became clear that Americans and Chinese could cooperate - despite the special kind of totalitarianism that, in one form or another, still reigns in Beijing today.
The big loser? That's right - Vladimir Putin.
And now the question is how Putin himself can both survive and sell to his own people the idea that he is restoring Russian global influence through the war in Ukraine and the fact that he has unlimited energy sources. For him, since the beginning of the century, there have been "legitimate zones of interest", you understand - mainly former Soviet republics, be they in the West (in Eastern Europe) or the Muslim ones in Central Asia. At the same time, Putin is flexing his muscles in other parts of the world, for example in Mali, where he has also suffered defeats (the last one was in Kidal); long-time ally Iran has been thrown into hell by Donald Trump's whims, and Russian relations with Israel are at their lowest point in many years. Add to that the Trump circus - in terms of Russia, the US president is as unpredictable as an ischemic stroke, i.e. he is capable of both rolling out the red carpet in Alaska and one morning becoming lopsided and announcing that Putin is no longer his friend. Both have happened.
One of Putin's latest failures (as part of the recent general collapse) is the total electoral loss of his ally Orban, who is now in the "I'm offended by you, didn't you understand that I am the father of the nation" mode (remember the previous case in Syria, despite the Russian bases in Tartus and Hmeimim, which ended with Bashar Assad fleeing to Moscow; I don't even want to get started on Khalifa Haftar in Libya). But the more important thing here is that Putin himself is losing ground as an autocratic tsar in the tradition from Ivan the Terrible through Michael I and Peter I, to Stalin and Brezhnev. And that his dream of global influence is practically collapsing.
Why? Central Asia is already under China's influence in every sense, and China's interests in Africa are no secret to anyone. Zelensky was even shown kindness in Armenia, which Moscow already views with traditional suspicion (and in Yerevan they don't even want to hear about the supposedly great Orthodox power, after the "betrayal" of the Azerbaijani invasion of the exclave of Nagorno-Karabakh in 2022). Even Transnistria, where they always wanted to secede from Moldova and become Russian, got angry after Putin initially told them that the gas would be free, and then presented them with the bill through "Gazprom".
Of course, the end of Putin's global dream is mostly related to the war with Ukraine. The fact that this country did not surrender, even at the unthinkable cost of great sacrifices (and with serious NATO support and remodulation towards drone warfare), seriously undermines not only the specific Russian geopolitical goals, but also the autocrat's regime itself.
And again the context: modern Russia is far from having the military resources and budget of the USSR, which supported pseudo-communist regimes all over the world (Angola, Vietnam, Cuba, Mozambique, etc.). It can no longer arm partisans anywhere, spurred on by the Comintern and the later Brezhnev doctrine of "exporting and financing communism" for ideological benefits – simply because today's Putin's Russia is not based on any ideology, except that of circular defense (and is fed with the necessary internal and external propaganda of traditional Russian imperialism, including through hybrid tools such as a system of trolls, etc.).
Which reminds me that Putin cannot apply soft power either, because a large part of modern Russian culture has turned out to be anti-Putinist, and the specific Russian pop music is completely unknown outside the country. All he has left is nostalgia for the USSR, but even that is cracking: more and more people fed with Soviet propaganda are beginning to realize that, for example, the idol Vysotsky was actually a hoarse rebel against the system, i.e., approximately the same as they are living in at the moment.
Yes, Putin will probably stay in power until his death. Russian history is by no means full of democratic coups (the few attempts like in February 1917 were drowned in blood).
What could Russia be without Putin?
But the question here is whether a completely new civilizational model is possible in Russia, given that you have no ideology to export, and even to your own. Putin's own attempt to pose for a while as a pillar of conservatism was somehow ruined by his good friend Trump, who even went to make historical deals with the Chinese behind his back.
So Putin's Russia is not only a failure of its own Soviet reconstructionist dream, but also comes down to a few political requisites (according to Owen Matthews, but not only): cheap gas and oil, hybrid disinformation, Wagner mercenaries around the world, and most importantly - a deliberately self-sufficient and closed economic system.
But no one causes bigger problems for today's Russia than itself. And at the root of it all is Putin - the autocrat with limited expertise and, alas, apparently intelligence, compared to the overwhelming tasks he sets himself. Because a possible democratic Russia would be the second largest energy exporter in the world, as well as the fifth largest economy, and it is also a nuclear power with the ability to veto in the UN Security Council. That is. a Russia without Putin, which does not dream of a new USSR, could be a constructive global power in its own right, and decisively improve the lives of its own citizens, using its practically unlimited resources.
But no, no.. The Sukhoi-57 must be better than the F-35 (false), the Orthodox faith must be better than all other denominations (false), and individual human life must have no special meaning when laid down for the Motherland (true).
And all Russians, this great nation, must march in a common Putin immortal regiment under the gaze of their leader, who wants to be a tsar in their imperial tradition, but does not possess the necessary qualities for an "emperor".
It is yet to be understood that Putin himself is a failure. Remember what I said.
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This text expresses the opinion of the author and may not coincide with the positions of the Bulgarian editorial office and the State Gazette as a whole.