Steve Gutterman's Week In Russia

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Military movements and bellicose talk on state TV raise concerns about the Kremlin’s intentions regarding Ukraine again, seven years after the seizure of Crimea and the start of a war in the Donbas. Meanwhile, the condition of Russia’s most prominent prisoner, Aleksei Navalny, causes growing concern.

Here are some of the key developments in Russia over the past week and some of the takeaways going forward.

Talk Of War

Two buildups in Russia are raising concerns about a new flare-up in the seven-year war in the Donbas this spring. One is the movement of military forces toward the Ukrainian border and into Crimea, the other is a rash of bellicose reports and rhetoric on state TV.

A sample: an exchange in which a guest told prominent political talk show host Vladimir Solovyov that Russia could halt any hostilities “by threatening the use of tactical nuclear weapons, at least,” and suggested that to show that the warning had teeth, Moscow could “conduct a nuclear explosion somewhere in empty ocean waters -- but not so empty that it wouldn’t be seen.”

Solovyov had asked how quickly a Russian “battle against NATO forces in Ukraine” would “lead to a nuclear conflict.”

With the military movements, Russia’s ultimate purpose is unclear, presumably by design. And there may be several Kremlin goals that fall short of an intention to launch a major offensive and seize control of more territory in Ukraine -- where Moscow has occupied the Crimean Peninsula since March 2014 and has helped separatists take and hold parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions since that April, in a conflict that has killed more than 13,000 civilians and combatants.

The intent of the barrage of bellicose programming seems clearer: to justify any offensive or increase in hostilities, mainly in the eyes of the Russian audience, and to blame Kyiv and the West. As analysts say of the military movements themselves, it may also be aimed as a warning to Ukraine, the European Union, and the United States that Russia is ready, willing, and able to take action whenever it sees fit.

Senior Russian officials have also advanced those goals. Amid the TV talk of demonstrative nuclear explosions, Nikolai Patrushev, a close Putin ally who heads his Security Council, told the newspaper Kommersant that it’s the United States that needs to show “common sense.”

And Dmitry Kozak, a deputy chief of Putin’s staff, said on April 8 that if Kyiv initiated major military action, it would mean “the beginning of the end of Ukraine.”

Ratings And Risks

The mention of nuclear weapons and existential threats may be a way of making -- at least on the level of propaganda -- what is on the ground a regional conflict into a major potential test for Washington and a warning that if the United States and Europe are going to support Kyiv with words, they may need to be prepared to do so with actions.

Despite the growing tension, continuing Russian military moves , and reports of increased fighting in the Donbas, there are plenty of reasons to believe a major Russian offensive is not in the cards.

For one thing, the Russian populace may have little appetite for it, despite the propaganda on TV. With the COVID-19 pandemic still hitting the economy and real incomes falling, there are other things to worry about.

Putin got a boost from Russia’s takeover of Crimea seven years ago, but a new offensive against Ukraine now “is less likely to boost [the] Kremlin's ratings,” analyst Maria Snegovaya wrote on Twitter on April 8. “My study shows that under economic decline, Russians are much less inclined to support the authorities' aggressive military rhetoric.”

“This is based on logic: [The] Kremlin should be solving internal problems instead of going to war against other countries,” she wrote.

From Russia With…

And many Russians have no desire to see relations with the United States sour still further, whatever state TV says about Moscow’s former Cold War foe as relations continue to plumb the depths but never seem to find a bottom. A recent poll by the independent Levada Center found that 65 percent of Russians aged 18-24 and 51 percent aged 25-39 viewed the United States positively. Those reporting a negative view of the United States exceeded 50 percent only in the 55-and-over age group.

Also, analysts say the Ukrainian military has improved markedly since 2014, when Russian forces who occupied Crimea helped the separatists in the east -- whose actions were fomented by Moscow -- seize parts of the Donbas.

So, for the time being at least, Russia may be in it more for the signals it is sending -- saber-rattling, almost in the literal sense -- than anything else.

“War scare in [the Donbas] will pass. This time,” Dmitry Trenin, director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, wrote on Twitter on April 5. “But the threat of war will remain.”

The Kremlin may want it that way -- and be keeping its intentions cloudy deliberately.

“Russian forces are on the move around Donbas and into Crimea, and the unsettling thing for the outside world is that we don’t know why,” author and analyst Mark Galeotti wrote in an article published by BNE Intellinews on April 6.

The current crisis,” he wrote, is “a case study of what happens when nations lie, bluff, and posture.”

One cause for concern is the fact that in 2014, few predicted that Russia would seize Crimea and push into eastern Ukraine, changing Europe’s borders and making part of eastern Ukraine into a platform for constant pressure on Kyiv.

'Severe Test'

Another is the notion that with the world still reeling for the coronavirus pandemic and U.S. President Joe Biden saddled with multiple priorities at home and abroad less than three months into his term, Putin thinks he sees an opportunity to weaken the West.

Emboldened by inconsistent EU responses to its actions in several areas, Russia is posing a “more severe test,” Nigel Gould-Davies, a senior fellow for Russia and Eurasia at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, wrote in an April 7 article in the English-language Moscow Times. “This is a dangerous moment for Europe and the transatlantic alliance.”

“The risk now is that a major Russian offensive against Ukraine splits the continent from the Anglo-American world,” he wrote.

“Russia may believe this is the right moment to attempt a decoupling of the Atlantic alliance that the Soviet Union never achieved,” Gould-Davies added. “If it waits, Biden will heal the damage done by his predecessor to the alliance and Europe will recover from COVID-19. The stakes are high not only for Ukraine but for the West.”

Bad Medicine

Another test for the West is the Russian state’s treatment of Aleksei Navalny, the Kremlin opponent who survived a nerve-agent poisoning he blames on Putin and is now suffering from worsening health problems in prison 100 kilometers east of Moscow.

Navalny, who declared a hunger strike on March 31 after accusing his jailers of denying him adequate medical treatment and effectively torturing him through sleep deprivation, has been losing about 1 kilogram a day, his lawyer Vadim Kobzev said.

Navalny, 44, has complained of severe back pain and leg numbness for nearly three weeks. On April 8, another lawyer for the opposition politician, Olga Mikhailova, said that an earlier MRI showed he had two herniated disks in his back -- and also that he has started to lose feeling in his hands, as well. She said he refused treatment with two outdated drugs that have not been used by doctors in Russia for 30 years.

He is also being trolled.

Meanwhile, the government crackdown that gathered force following Navalny’s return to Russia in January persisted.

On April 8, a Moscow court kept Navalny’s spokeswoman, Kira Yarmysh, under house arrest and issued the same ruling in hearings for Pussy Riot protest group member Maria Alyokhina and two other people detained in connection with the protests sparked by the jailing of Navalny, who was arrested at the airport on return after treatment in Germany, and other grievances against the government.

On April 7, the same court ended house arrest and imposed milder restrictions on four other people in the case, including Navalny's brother, Oleg; a lawyer for Navalny's Anti-Corruption Foundation, Lyubov Sobol; and Moscow city lawmakers Lyusya Shtein and Konstantin Yankauskas.

'Grotesque Fables'

All eight and two others face up to two years in prison if convicted of violating public health rules during the pandemic, but they dismiss the charges, and the prominent Russian human rights group Memorial has recognized them as political prisoners.

Kremlin opponent Vladimir Kara-Murza, who was detained at a forum in Moscow on March 13 at which all of the nearly 200 attendees were rounded up in a police raid, wrote in The Washington Post that “the most grotesque fables” in Franz Kafka’s The Trial “pale in comparison with the reality of the judicial system under Vladimir Putin.”

Like all those arrested, many of whom were municipal lawmakers, Kara-Murza faced an administrative charge of “participating in the activities of an undesirable organization.” As expected, he wrote, he was found guilty at a hearing he described as “an exercise in absurdity” -- in part because the organization in question never existed.

Navalny’s ordeal has brought back memories of the fate of whistle-blower Sergei Magnitsky, who died in a Moscow jail in November 2009 after accusing the authorities of denying him medical treatment.

April 8 was Magnitsky’s birthday: He would be 49 years old now.

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Aleksei Navalny started a hunger strike in prison, while the father of a top ally of the Kremlin opponent was arrested in a move that one political analyst said echoed the Stalin era. The war in Syria passed the 10-year mark, the Kremlin tried damage control following a full-throated expression of support for Burma’s junta as it massacred protesters, and tensions rose amid fresh questions about Russia’s intentions in the Donbas.

Here are some of the key developments in Russia over the past week and some of the takeaways going forward.

'Getting Worrisome'

So far in 2021, the biggest Russia news has come from inside the country -- certainly since January 17, when Kremlin foe Aleksei Navalny was arrested at the airport upon his return from Germany, where he spent five months in treatment after a nerve-agent poisoning he blames on President Vladimir Putin and the Federal Security Service (FSB).

Since then, events have rushed along at a rapid pace -- but at the same time may seem almost like they are occurring in slow motion, a nightmare sequence that one might like to stop with the push of a button but is powerless to affect. Almost every day brings a new development that seems worse than the last, or at least equally bad.

There have been large protests, a harsh crackdown, and a 2 1/2-year prison sentence for Navalny, who charges that he is being denied adequate medical treatment in what he called a “deliberate strategy” of harm -- and is essentially being tortured in his cell through sleep deprivation.

On March 31, Navalny announced a hunger strike to protest his treatment, demanding that his jailers adhere to the law and that a doctor of his choice be allowed to visit him.

“I have the right to invite a doctor and to receive medicine. They are not allowing me either one,” Navalny said in an Instagram post. “The pain in my back has spread to my leg. Parts of my right and now also my left leg have lost sensation. All joking aside, this is getting worrisome.”

Another Kremlin opponent, Vladimir Kara-Murza, expressed concern in more concrete terms, writing in The Washington Post that after the nerve-agent poisoning in August, which Navalny and many others say was an assassination attempt, “the Kremlin is trying to kill him again -- this time slowly, painfully and in the confinement” of the prison where he is being held.

The situation contains echoes of the fatal plight of Sergei Magnitsky, a whistle-blower whose death in jail in 2009 has played a substantial part in defining Putin’s rule and souring Russia’s relations with the West.

Navalny himself is not the only one under pressure: Many of his associates and allies across Russia have been prosecuted, mainly on administrative charges linked to the protests held in January, and jailed, fined, or placed under house arrest in what Kremlin critics say is a concerted campaign to curtail Navalny’s reach from behind bars, blunt the challenge he poses, and reduce the chances of fresh protests ahead of parliamentary elections expected in September.

'Fathers And Sons'

Associates, allies -- and also their relatives, in at least one case. On March 27, the father of Ivan Zhdanov, director of Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK), was detained and jailed on an abuse-of-office charge stemming from a matter related to his preretirement job as a small-town official.

Zhdanov said he had “no doubt” that the arrest of his father was Kremlin-orchestrated punishment for his own work at FBK, which has produced several investigative reports revealing evidence of high-level corruption -- including an exposé, published two days before Navalny returned to Russia, on a sprawling Black Sea estate that it called “a palace for Putin.”

Yury Zhdanov, 66, faces up to four years in prison if tried and convicted. Pretrial detention puts “what remains of his health” in jeopardy, said Ivan Zhdanov, who blamed the Kremlin and said Putin’s administration had reached a “new level of villainy and turpitude.”

The elder Zhdanov’s arrest was “in keeping with Soviet-style ‘justice,' in which not only were parents made to pay for the ‘sins’ of their children and vice versa, but also siblings and other relatives were punished for each other’s ‘misdeeds,’” wrote Andrei Kolesnikov, head of the Russian Domestic Politics and Political Institutions Program at the Carnegie Moscow Center.

“By arresting family members of persecuted individuals, today’s authorities openly declare themselves to be the direct successors of Stalin’s repressive system,” Kolesnikov wrote in an opinion article in The Moscow Times under the headline: Fathers and Sons: A Kremlin-KGB Remake.

The Kremlin’s main focus seems likely to remain on domestic events through the end of summer, given the test that United Russia -- the party that serves as one of Putin’s main levers of power nationwide but is deeply unpopular -- faces in the State Duma elections, which must be held by September 19.

The timing of the vote means there is little chance of a letup in the pressure on Navalny, his allies, and anyone inside Russia who is seen as threat to the Kremlin.

But there’s plenty happening beyond Russia’s borders.

For one thing, the month of March marked a decade since the start of the war in Syria -- and a decade of Russian support for President Bashar al-Assad’s government in a conflict that has killed hundreds of thousands of people and driven millions from their homes.

Moscow’s involvement in the war is often described as having begun in September 2015, when Russia launched a campaign of air strikes targeting Assad’s foes and also stepped up its military presence on the ground, helping turn the tide in his favor when his back was against the wall.

A fresh reminder of Moscow’s role since 2015 came on March 30, when U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced a humanitarian aid package for Syrians in their own country and abroad.

In a statement, Blinken said that the Syrian people "have faced atrocities, including Assad regime and Russian air strikes, forced disappearances, [Islamic State] brutality, and chemical-weapons attacks."

Aiding Assad

Concerns about Russia’s actions in Syria are mainly focused on the last half-decade as well. Among many other reports, they were underscored by an October 2019 report in The New York Times about an investigation that found that Russian pilots had bombed hospitals four times in the space of 24 hours that May.

But Moscow has been behind Assad since the war started in 2011 with a government crackdown on protests, lending him military support -- albeit on a smaller scale before 2015 -- and crucial diplomatic backing in the UN Security Council and other forums.

Moscow’s backing for Assad -- not to mention Alyaksandr Lukashenka of Belarus, Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro, and others -- might make a recent incident in Burma seem unsurprising. But the timing was such that the Kremlin, which rarely if ever admits to much of anything, let alone apologizes, appears to have felt the need to distance itself in this case.

Visiting Burma to mark the Southeast Asian country’s Armed Forces Day, Russian Deputy Defense Minister Aleksandr Fomin met on March 26 with General Min Aung Hlaing, the leader of the junta that took over after a military coup on February 1.

Fomin called Burma a reliable ally and strategic partner and said that Russia “is committed to a strategy aimed at bolstering relations between the two countries."

The following day, the junta chief called Russia a “true friend” -- and, amidst lavish cerebrations of Armed Forces Day, security forces killed 114 people, according to local media, in the deadliest violence since mainly peaceful protests erupted after the military coup.

Even given Russia’s other relationships, the Kremlin’s tendency to shrug off accusations of violating human rights at home or condoning such actions abroad, the military official’s visit left observers wondering what the Russian state thought it had to gain with an expression of strong support for the junta amid the bloodshed.

'Really Worried'

In any case, the Kremlin climbed down -- or sought to soften the damage to its image amid outrage over the deadly violence -- two days later.

"We are really worried by the growing number of civilian casualties," Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, told reporters in a regular phone briefing with Russian and foreign media outlets. “It is a source of deep concern and we are following the unfolding situation in [Burma] really closely.”

Peskov, Putin, and other Russian officials have also voiced concern about the prospect of a new flare-up in the seven-year-old war in eastern Ukraine, where Moscow has given military, political, and financial backing to anti-Kyiv forces who have held parts of two provinces in the region known as the Donbas.

The sincerity of such remarks has been questioned in Kyiv and the West, where an escalation of fighting in the Donbas and Russian troop maneuvers near the Ukrainian border -- as well as in Russian-controlled Crimea -- have sparked concern about Moscow’s intentions at a time when its ties with the United States and the European Union are severely strained.

Kyiv has accused the Russia-backed forces in the Donbas of stepping up cease-fire violations, and four Ukrainian servicemen were killed on March 26 in what the Ukrainian military said was a mortar attack -- the highest single-day toll since 2019.

The war in the Donbas has killed more than 13,000 people since April 2014, when it erupted after Russia fomented separatism across eastern and southern Ukraine and seized the Crimean Peninsula after Moscow-friendly Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych was pushed from power by a pro-Western, anti-corruption protest movement known as the Maidan.

Observers are wondering whether Russia may be gearing up for a new offensive in Ukraine or sending signals to the West, making a show of force to warn Washington and the EU against imposing new sanctions or other forms of pressure on Russia over its treatment of Navalny and other issues.

That seems to be just what Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov was doing -- sending a signal, a warning, a threat -- when he said on April 1, quoting what he described as remarks by Putin, that “anyone who tried to start a new war in the Donbas will destroy Ukraine."

Putin spokesman Peskov, commenting on the reported movements of Russian military forces near the Ukrainian border and in Crimea, said that Russia "moves its troops within its own territory as it sees fit” and that these movements “pose no threat to anyone.”

“That’s not exactly going to assure anyone,” Steven Pifer, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine and a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, wrote on Twitter.

It probably wasn’t meant to.