Russia is suffocating from repression, fear and apathy.
In his bunker—mental and physical—Vladímir Putin executes another move in his favor with the marked cards.
At first glance he feels strong.
He has silenced Alexei Navalny, the charismatic opponent who challenged him to the point of returning to Russia despite the threat of ending up as he has done: struck down.
Added to the disappearance of another of its enemies is the takeover by Russian troops of the Ukrainian bastion of Avdiivka - or what remains of the mining city - and the staggering of the United States, where support for Kiev is suffering when the war large scale is going to be two years old, and with the prospect of the return of Republican Donald Trump to the White House, who has railed against aid to Ukraine.
The head of the Kremlin heads with that armor of strength, repression and cynicism towards his sixth term through a vote next month, which will elevate him until 2030. He has governed for a quarter of a century.
And he has no rivals.
It has eliminated all opposition - dead, in prison or in exile - and has cut to the foundations the networks of a civil society that could form a critical mass and mobilize against the large-scale invasion and against the internal situation in Russia, where Russia prevails. an economy in permanent crisis.
Because the Kremlin is fighting two wars, the external one and the internal one, points out analyst Alexander Baunov in a report for the Carnegie Institute.
And Putin believes that he is winning both: the one in Ukraine, for which he is preparing another offensive in June, according to Western intelligence sources, and the one he is carrying out against the Russian citizens, in which he does not want even a hint of criticism.
On Friday, defying that fear that corrodes everything today in the Eurasian country, a few dozen people took to the streets in several cities to protest the death of Navalny, the dissident who was a thorn in the side of the head of the Kremlin. and that managed to mobilize thousands of people against corruption and electoral rigging for years.
During the early hours of the morning, in Moscow, Yekaterinburg, Saint Petersburg or Arcangelsk, hooded police officers erased all traces of the flowers, photographs and offerings to the dissident.
Russian authorities have detained 340 people in protests across the country, which continued this Saturday.
These are not just unauthorized demonstrations: Navalny's organization was declared “extremist” in 2021, and any connection with it can lead to being tried for crimes equivalent to terrorism.
"Everyone is afraid"
“The Kremlin is preparing the ground for something big after the elections,” a human rights defender launches in a cafe in central Moscow on condition of anonymity.
“Everyone is afraid,” she remarks before adding: “We are screwed.”
In today's Russia, captive of the security apparatus and a leader who is a history fanatic who has set out to return his country to a great role as a super-powerful actor that he imagines halfway between the strength of the tsarist empire and the strength of the USSR, the simple act of leaving flowers in memory of the dissident can mean ending up behind bars.
In January 2021, when Navalny returned to Moscow from Germany, where he recovered from the very serious poison attack carried out by the Russian security services in Siberia, hundreds of people were waiting for him at the airport.
He was arrested right there and never set foot on the street again.
His arrest, harshly criticized by the West, led to large protests that winter in almost all of Russia.
A group of people go to the Solovetsky stone monument to the victims of political repression (Moscow) to remember opposition leader Alexei Navalny.
STRINGER (REUTERS)
Now, many of those who took to the streets then do not dare to do so again.
Others are already outside the country.
According to the Ministry of Defense, 1.3 million people left between 2022 and 2023, although many have returned.
According to the research group Exodus-22, a third of those who left after the military mobilization was announced, in September 2022, intended to return or have returned.
Anastasiya was one of those who came to receive the opponent at the Vnukovo airfield.
“Alexei Navalny was the embodiment of a living Russia where there is room for choice and truth.
I don't think that with his cynical murder the hope for a better future has disappeared.
Hope already disappeared before, when Russia attacked Ukraine and the Russian people turned a blind eye,” she laments.
Protesting in Russia has a very high cost.
Since the invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, at least 20,000 people have been arrested, according to the anti-political repression organization OVD–Info.
Putin, a former KGB spy who has relied on former colleagues to form his circle of trust, came to power on December 31, 1999. And since then, his different governments have gradually approved numerous repressive laws that multiplied after the soccer World Cup that Russia hosted in the summer of 2018. Since then, the persecution of all types of organizations - from entities in defense of the environment to associations for women's rights -, political persecution and the fulmination of any rival It has been a constant.
The Russian authorities have used the label "foreign agent", reminiscent of the Soviet Union, to "enemy of the people", which has been so distorted in the last two years that it now allows any citizen considered "under foreign influence.
Furthermore, at the beginning of the war, the Russian Parliament passed another law to punish with prison anyone who “discredits” the actions of the army or its president.
According to the OVD-Info portal, Russian authorities have opened 883 criminal cases against dissidents who have expressed their opposition to the invasion of Ukraine.
But large-scale war protests have not been numerous in a country devoured by apathy, where a tacit agreement has prevailed between the Russians and the Kremlin in which Putin had carte blanche as long as it did not affect them personally, and in which Most of the citizenry feeds on the menu of propaganda poured out by state channels, in which the clamor against the “collective West” and against the degradation of “traditional values” is constant.
No one is free from arrest for any reason.
In Saint Petersburg, Bishop Grigori Mijnov-Vaitenko, recognized for directing one of the largest aid networks for war refugees, was arrested this Saturday for announcing on his Telegram channel that he was going to officiate a mass for Navalni.
The fear and lack of habit to protest has become evident this year in which breakdowns due to Western sanctions on Russia multiplied: hundreds of thousands of Russians were left without heat or light in one of the harshest winters in years.
And there was not a single demonstration for it.
“Putin tries to show that he is in a strong position, but behind that screen there is enormous distrust of everything,” reflects a veteran Western diplomat, who knows Russia very well.
She believes that what has happened to Navalny—whether a murder or the consequence of the constant harassment of the opponent and the harsh living conditions in prison, the responsibility of the Russian authorities—is actually a symptom of Putin's insecurity.
The Kremlin is not even able to ignore the small protests over his death.
The name of the opponent was rumored to be included in the list of possible assets to exchange with the EU and the US. “The head of the Kremlin did not want him loose.
He is terrified that the opposition will truly organize abroad.
He is not now, but it could happen,” says the diplomat.
Analyst Tatiana Stanovaya does not think the same.
She believes that Putin was not afraid of Navalny, but rather that she treated him contemptuously.
But his tragic story, his return, his arrest and his disappearance, have severe consequences for Russia and represent “the total defeat of the non-systemic opposition.”
That which, like the party that Navalny formed, does not tolerate the regime that does use the systemic opposition formed by, for example, the Communist Party or the ultranationalist Liberal Democratic Party, formations with parliamentary representation useful to the Kremlin to try to camouflage that the country is actually an autocracy.
A vote for greater glory of the leader
The vote that will be held between March 15 and 17 and from which the new president will emerge is designed for the greater glory of Putin, 71 years old.
The Russian leader, who has changed the law to be able to run again, surpasses Soviet dictator Josef Stalin in years in power.
Boris Nadezhdin, who ran as the candidate in favor of peace with Ukraine and collected some 200,000 signatures of support, will also not appear on the ballot.
On February 8, the central election committee rejected his registration.
The opposition leader Boris Nadezhdin, in the Supreme Court of Russia, where he has appealed the ban on running in the elections.
MAXIM SHEMETOV (REUTERS)
On Friday, after the announcement of Navalny's death, the police raided the house of one of the organizers of Nadezhdin's campaign, who in an unprecedented way had regular space in Russian propaganda colloquiums, which normally veto the real opponents.
That raid has raised many doubts, acknowledges the human rights defender, who explains that she has come to fear that everything was an “operation” orchestrated by the Federal Security Service (FSB) to uncover dissidence.
“If it is a maneuver, it is certainly the best of all,” says the woman.
Some Russians thought the Kremlin had murdered Navalny in December, when he disappeared for three weeks during his transfer to the remote penal colony that reported his death on Friday.
The dissident's death now, a week before Putin's annual speech to the Federal Assembly (the two houses of parliament), and a month before the presidential vote, has been even more shocking.
The Russian president arrives at that meeting with the conquest of the Ukrainian city of Avdiivka, in the Donetsk region to publicize.
And with the West in a renewed position of alarm over the Russian threat.
NATO has not changed its alert level, but several NATO allies believe the Kremlin may seek to test the Alliance's mutual security commitment in the coming decade.
Additionally, this week, the White House confirmed that Russia has a “concerning” but “not yet active” new anti-satellite weapon.
The second anniversary of the large-scale invasion of Ukraine, which Putin justified with the supposed protection of the Russian-speaking citizens of the neighboring country and which he presented as a “special operation” to “denazify” it, comes at a difficult time for kyiv.
Also for the West.
Ukraine is a candidate for the EU and many European leaders have assured that Ukrainian soldiers and citizens are fighting a war for shared values and for the EU.
The Union has promised to support Ukraine “for as long as necessary,” but it is becoming increasingly difficult to take historic steps to validate that support and to put forward formulas to pressure Putin.
The West has reacted with verbal forcefulness to Navalny's death.
But for now it hasn't gone beyond that.
The MEP and former Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt demands more sanctions - which involve freezing assets and a ban on entering community territory - for what happened to the opponent and also that an extraordinary European Council be convened in which the leaders of the 27 member states approve “war bonds” for Ukraine, plus more policies to form a “proper European common defense union.”
“A perfect storm is heating up between an imperial Moscow, a poorly prepared and poorly directed Europe that goes to the polls [the European Parliament elections are in June] and an impressionable American public opinion driven by the so-called deranged Republicans and lovers of Putin ", the liberal politician claimed on social networks this Saturday.
The EU has imposed 12 packages of sanctions on Russia – and is debating a thirteenth – to try to stifle its war machine.
But while announcements of more support for Kiev, of a new NATO training center for Ukrainian troops, of a new coalition to send drones, troops on the fronts face ammunition restrictions and demand weapons more sophisticated.
The EU approved on February 1 a financial lifeline for Ukraine of 50 billion euros to keep the country afloat, but the United States keeps its package of 55 billion euros frozen (which could go, for example, to finance weapons) due to the opposition of a part of the Republicans.
This delay is already having an impact in Ukraine, said NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg.
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg during a press conference at the Munich Security Conference (Germany).KAI PFAFFENBACH (REUTERS)
Europe blames supply delays on the capacity of its defense industry, but more and more voices doubt the depth of the commitment and warn that the EU is not aware of the consequences for the West of a hypothetical defeat of Ukraine.
The Ukrainian soldiers emphasize from the hottest part of the battle that the material they are sent gives them enough to resist, but never enough to win.
Meanwhile, Russia increases its weapons production.
Putin visited the country's largest tank factory on Thursday, the Uralvagonzavod plant, a subsidiary of the state arms giant Rostec.
There, next to the Urals, he saw in its facilities the production of the T-72 and T-90 tanks that will soon be deployed in its offensive against Ukraine, and highlighted how the Kremlin has prepared for a long war by quintupling its production of tanks in a year and a half.
However, he still fears that his house of cards will collapse on the weakest side, the front.
The wives of some civilians mobilized for war demand his return home.
Some of them were interrogated by Russian security services.
But the Kremlin knows that touching soldiers' wives can have repercussions on the front lines, where the military is already fed up with how in Moscow and other big cities people live as if the war were far away and organize racy parties. .
Unable to forcibly break up the women's protests, the Kremlin opted to arrest journalists covering them.
Putin learned an important lesson from the failed coup of the owner of the Wagner group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, in June 2023. The head of the mercenaries, who exposed the weakness of the Russian regime at a key moment in the Ukrainian counteroffensive—which also ended for failing—died in September when his plane crashed into the void and after trusting in a presidential pardon.
Putin, due to his own history in espionage, has always distrusted the army - his Defense Minister, General Sergei Shoigu, is not a career military man, but a politician loyal to the president.
After purging the military leadership and Wagner, Putin's repression extended beyond the Democrats to several visible heads of the ultranationalist sector.
Navalny's silencing leaves fear of his legacy.
“Now emotions can play a role,” says analyst Stanovaya.
Navalni's mother received official notification of her death this Saturday.
With her hands hiding her face, the woman arrived at Jarp's IK-3 prison, in the Arctic Circle with one of the opposition's lawyers to try to clarify what happened.
The family, however, has not been able to see the body and faces a new fight to recover it.
Not even in death, does the Kremlin leave Navalny alone.
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