He said aloud, which many people hope for.
On Monday, the United States refocused Joe Biden’s statement by saying it was not seeking “regime change” in Russia; the previous evening, from Poland, the American president had declared about his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin: “For the love of God, this man cannot stay in power! »
For Joe Biden, the assertion testified above all to his “moral indignation” at the violence of the unjustified war in Ukraine. An indignation that certainly finds an echo among the opponents of the Russian dictator to whom the American president has just given, with barely veiled words, significant support in the possible exploitation of the invasion of the former Soviet republic, of its human drama and the unexpected resistance of the Ukrainian army against the powerful Red Army to permanently destabilize the strong man of the Kremlin.
The war in Ukraine as an antechamber to the “depoutinisation” of Russia? This is the scenario dreamed up by the Russian novelist Mikhail Shishkin. Monday, in the pages of the British daily The Guardian, he called on his compatriots not to waste the current crisis in Ukraine and to use it to try once again to “introduce a democratic social order in Russia”. Putin’s impeachment is of course part of the equation.
“Every time my country tried to build a democratic society by establishing elections, a parliament and a republic, it ended up in a totalitarian empire,” he wrote, referring to the 1917 revolution and when the Iron Curtain fell in 1989.
However, “a new democratic start in Russia is impossible without paying the price and especially without recognizing national guilt”, guilt that the war in Ukraine, with its images of destruction, its exiles and its corpses of civilians strewing the ground of cities disfigured, could come to feed. “Russia needs this zero hour” which, in the aftermath of the Second World War, allowed Nazi Germany to break with its dictatorship to embrace democracy, adds the novelist. “Just like the German population kept in ignorance” and awakened by the images of the concentration camps in 1945, “we must show the “ignorant” Russians the destroyed Ukrainian cities and the corpses of children”.
The road promises to be winding in a country where the media are repressed when they do not radiate the pro-government vision of the world. In this alternative reality, the war is above all a special military operation aimed at freeing Ukraine from a fabricated oppression. The rout of Putin’s troops against the Ukrainians or the failure to take the capital is not one of them.
On Monday, Vladimir Putin even banned the publication of an interview granted by the Ukrainian president to four Russian journalists; Volodymyr Zelensky called for a summit meeting with his Russian counterpart to try to end the war.
A meeting to which the Kremlin has been silent for weeks, but which could finally follow the negotiations between Moscow and kyiv, which resumed Tuesday in Turkey. And the Russian president will certainly seek to control the narration, to avoid the worst…
Defeat and instability
“Losing wars is never good for autocrats, and historically there are many examples of autocrats falling as a result of lost wars,” summarizes in an interview with the Homework political scientist Joshua Tucker, director of the Center for Graduate Studies on Russia at New York University.
Paradoxically, this is what could incite Putin to crush Ukraine further to secure a victory, at least in the eyes of the Russians. “In Russian history, defeat in wars has undermined political stability and led to major transformations in the political system,” adds Peter Rutland, a professor at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. and specialist in Russian nationalism. “That was the case in 1904, after the war with Japan, after the First World War in 1918, then after the war in Afghanistan in 1979.”
He adds: “The resistance of Ukraine has certainly put Putin in an uncomfortable situation. But he will continue his brutal military tactics to divide Ukraine and annex territories to the east and along the Black Sea to create fake independent states, such as Donetsk and Luhansk, rather than admit defeat. »
These tactics are also accompanied by purges currently being carried out in the Russian government apparatus to “recalibrate the Russian military effort” with regard to the field, summarized a few days ago the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), a geopolitical analysis group that is well established in Washington, but also to distance the proximity of the dictator from authority figures who could try to take advantage of the crisis to overthrow him.
Reign against regime
In the instability caused by the war, this mechanism drawn from the country’s Stalinist past was predictable.
It does not, however, remove the risks of the “depoutinisation” of Russia, believes Joshua Tucker, who judges the thing still “possible”, even if it is still complex to circumscribe. “Popular uprisings are very hard to see coming, especially in autocratic regimes where public opinion is almost impossible to measure,” he said. “What’s more, in these regimes, some may lose faith in the autocrat through a knock-on effect, which can sometimes take a long time to happen. »
It is moreover to act from the outside on this loss of confidence that Paweł Kowal, vice-president of the foreign affairs committee of the Polish parliament, and Karol Przywara, director of the Caucasus Foundation, called at the beginning of March the adoption of an international plan to hold Putin to account for his aggression against Ukraine, the better to hasten its downfall.
“Russia will have to pay for the damages of its wars against Georgia and Ukraine, they write in the review New Eastern Europe, both by compensating the families of the victims and by compensating for the loss of infrastructure. Russia, as an aggressor country, must pay and the lifting of economic sanctions should not be done before the complete settlement of these compensations”, they add. This measure, among others, is one of the factors that could contribute to the “depoutinisation” of Russia, according to them.
This prospect, however, risks placing the country facing the end of a reign rather than the end of a regime, however tempers Joshua Tucker. “It could very well be that the political system in Russia is so entrenched that it survives Putin’s ouster, especially if elites currently oppose him precisely because they believe he threatens, through his actions , the stability of the system in place”.
“It is much more common for autocrats to be driven from power by other elites rather than by a popular uprising,” adds the academic. And when we speak of the “depoutinisation” of Russia today, many experts believe that it is precisely towards this first scenario that the fall of Putin could lead. »
An uncertain path, therefore, which forked on February 24 to cross the territory of Ukraine, but which, for the writer Mikhail Shishkin, can only be taken by the Russians themselves – the only ones who can “clean up [leur] country,” he wrote.