Steve Gutterman's Week In Russia

President Vladimir Putin has signed a National Security Strategy that takes criticism of the West to a new level, claiming that Russia's "cultural sovereignty" is at risk and that its "traditional values" are "under active attack by the United States and its allies." Analysts say the Kremlin's main motive may be self-preservation, not the security of the nation.

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

'A Paranoid's Charter'

Moscow is aiding Bashar al-Assad in the Syrian government's gruesome war against its opponents, supporting separatists fighting against Kyiv in the conflict in eastern Ukraine, and has no treaty with Japan formally ending their hostilities in World War II.

Other than that, Russia is pretty much at peace.

But the Kremlin's new National Security Strategy is "the document of a country at war," according to Andrei Kolesnikov, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Moscow Center.

Numerous analysts made similar observations about the policy that was adopted by President Vladimir Putin's decree on July 2 and replaced a version that had been in place since 2015.

They noted wording like preparing for "wartime" and "mobilization readiness" of the economy, as well as many references to ways in which Russia is allegedly threatened by the West and, as author and analyst Mark Galeotti put it, by "the very processes reshaping the modern world."

The 44-page document, Galeotti wrote in a July 5 article in The Moscow Times, is "a paranoid's charter."

In some ways, this is nothing new. Over almost 22 years in power as president or prime minister, Putin has very frequently used the specter of external threats to justify restrictive actions at home, critics say, and has repeatedly raised the prospect of a new catastrophic war.

Other motives for this focus may be a desire to draw Russians' attention away from more immediate concerns -- which currently include a deadly new surge of COVID-19 cases and poor economic prospects -- and to remind the world, as he did following an incident in the Black Sea involving a British warship late last month, that a nuclear war is one type of confrontation in which Russia could hold its own.

'Gone Like Smoke'

But the new National Security Strategy seems to take the war footing a few steps further.

Compared to previous editions, "It reads as very closed off: more survivalist in tone and all [references] to cooperation with the West were deleted," Dara Massicot, an expert on Russian defense issues at the Rand Corporation think tank, wrote on Twitter.

Detailed provisions on relations with the United States and the European Union "have disappeared in [the] 2021 version," tweeted Igor Denisov, a senior research fellow at the Russian foreign-policy institute MGIMO.

Another difference: The 2015 strategy, while it was adopted the year after Russia seized Crimea from Ukraine and fomented separatism that contributed to the outbreak of the war in the Donbas, driving ties with the West to new lows, "contained a clause on possible cooperation with NATO," Denisov wrote.

In 2021, that wording was "gone like smoke," he wrote, while "criticism of the collective West has increased substantially."

Many aspects of that criticism are old hat. NATO, sanctions, and support for civil society are all held out as tools deployed by Western powers bent on holding Russia back, if not dismantling it altogether and collecting the spoils.

The novelty in this edition, 21 years into the 21st century, is the assertion that Russia's "cultural sovereignty" faces an existential threat from the West -- that "traditional Russian spiritual, moral, and cultural-historical values are under active attack by the United States and its allies."

Along with "transnational corporations and foreign nonprofit, nongovernmental, religious, extremist, and terrorist organizations," the strategy document states on page 36, these countries are "applying informational and psychological pressure on the individual, group, and societal consciousness by spreading social and moral tenets that contradict the traditions, convictions, and beliefs of the peoples of the Russian Federation."

This assertion, made without evidence or clear explanation, may come as no surprise: Putin has and other officials have made the notion that a conservative Russia is under constant attack in a kind of culture war waged by the West a frequent topic of their remarks.

Exceptionalism, Anyone?

In an exchange of unpleasantries with U.S. President Joe Biden in March, two months before they met for a summit in Geneva, Putin claimed that Russia was inherently different from the United States and other Western countries, its citizens set apart by "a different genetic and cultural-moral code."

And Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov unleashed an over-the-top example of such rhetoric when he accused the United States, in effect, of weaponizing what he called the "liberal concept of boundless permissiveness" as part of what he described as a push to "impose its own rules" on other countries.

Citing no evidence in a June 28 article that seemed intended to be a serious statement of Moscow's case that the West is seeking to press its values and ideals on Russia and the rest of the world -- that "in a number of Western countries, students learn at school that Jesus Christ was bisexual."

In recent months, it seems to have become increasingly clear that the Kremlin is determined to use this theme -- the idea of a dangerously liberal West imposing its will on a Russian populace that is uniformly possessed of a different set of values -- as part of its effort to consolidate opinion and instill patriotism, as a rallying cry that can unite millions of Russians against a common enemy.

The ascendancy of this rhetoric seems to coincide with a stepped-up crackdown on real and perceived opponents, civil society, and democratic rights and freedoms that the state has imposed since Putin foe Aleksei Navalny, whom the authorities cast without evidence as a tool of the United States, was jailed upon his return to Russia in January after recuperating in Germany from a near-fatal nerve-agent poisoning he blames on Putin and the Federal Security Service (FSB).

Several observers have said that this focus, and the new National Security Strategy itself, seem deeply influenced by Nikolai Patrushev, the hard-line fellow former KGB officer and critic of the West who has been one of Putin's closest associates throughout his years in power -- the FSB chief from 1999 to 2008 and the secretary of the presidential Security Council since then.

"Patrushev wins," was the succinct way that Anton Barbashin, editorial director of the media outlet Riddle Russia, put it after reading the new National Security Strategy.

Several observers, and not just staunch critics of the Kremlin, suspect it is in fact people like Patrushev, not the country as a whole at all, that Putin and his allies are trying to protect by adopting the new document -- that it is less a national security strategy than a tactic aimed to keep them in power.

"The new National Security Concept introduces the term 'alien ideals.' This is from the most primitive Soviet ideological vocabulary, which everyone has always laughed at," Kolesnikov wrote, suggesting that what the Kremlin is really trying to suppress are "universal human values" he said were "alien" to Putin and his allies.

The policy is "not about the security of the country, but about the self-preservation technology of the narrow ruling clique," he wrote. "For them, 'unity of the people' equals the loyalty of the state-dependent population."

History Lesson

Others have pointed out that while accusing Western countries of trying to impose their ideals on Russians, the security strategy does that by asserting that the country's citizens are monolithically guided by the magnet of quite a different moral compass -- though there may be little evidence of that.

And Dmitry Trenin, director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, suggested that Putin and those close to him should practice what they preach.

The National Security Strategy "sets out fundamental Russian values including service to the fatherland and responsibility for its fate, high moral ideals, the priority of the spiritual over the material, fairness, and mutual assistance," Trenin wrote in a July 6 article in the newspaper Kommersant.

"It's understood that this is an ideal, but possibly the main problem with Russia today lies in the fact that its ruling elite shares these ideals only in rare cases and, according to opinion polls, possesses not even a minimum of moral authority to lead society in its path," Trenin added.

History shows that in the past, he wrote, "the Russian state has collapsed not under the blows of external enemies, but as a result of the loss of trust in it on the part of its subjects."

President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly used high-profile appearances to call for a “breakthrough” in Russia. Observers said his remarks at a call-in show on June 30 won’t bring a breakthrough on Russia’s tough COVID-19 situation and its snail’s-pace vaccination drive.

And amid a persistent crackdown ahead of elections, Putin’s show and police actions against perceived opponents reveal two “perfectly separate universes,” as one political analyst put it.

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

'Increasingly Implausible'

Over nearly 22 years as president or prime minister, the main messages Vladimir Putin has sent to Russian citizens in his almost-annual Q&A show on national television have not changed much: Russia is good and getting better. The West is bad, but we’re ready for better ties whenever they are, and I’ll protect you in the meantime. And if you have a very specific problem, I can probably fix it -- by berating a regional official or demanding swift action.

Ahead of this year’s edition, on June 30, author and analyst Mark Galeotti predicted “the usual attempt to portray [Putin] as tsar of the Russias, defender of the nation, masterful chief exec with all the facts at his fingertips and stern and loving father of his people. Which is an increasingly implausible act.”

Implausible, perhaps, for at least two reasons.

For one thing, there’s the sheer number of problems that have not been fixed since he came to power more than two decades ago. There were plenty of examples of this in the three-hour, 42-minute program this time around: Crumbling schools, carrot prices, corrupt officials cheating citizens, polluted air, putrid piles of garbage, massive utility bills, towns waiting years for gas hookups.

Those problems are long-standing and persistent. Unrealized hopes for piped-in gas go back to the Soviet era, in some cases. But there was also an alarming backdrop that was more immediate: A major surge in COVID-19 cases and deaths in recent weeks, driven in part by widespread hesitancy among Russians to be vaccinated -- a severe problem that, whatever his level of responsibility, Putin failed to avert.

Tried, Not Necessarily True

In 2020, as the pandemic took hold despite Putin’s apparent hope that it might bypass Russia, he refrained from holding the Direct Line program. To skip it again this year would have been to imply defeat in a battle that officials had suggested was all but won.

But despite the dire situation, Putin did not stray far from the formula.

While he spent plenty of time calling on Russians to get vaccinated, observers said he conveyed no real sense of urgency and undermined the message in several ways.

SEE ALSO:

Putin Had A Chance To Rev Up Russia's Sluggish Vaccination Drive. His Message Was Muddled.

Perhaps the most meaningful of those ways was a quip about Western vaccines: “Thank god, we have not had such tragic situations as there have been after vaccination with AstraZeneca or Pfizer,” he said, referring to shots that are not available in Russia and giving no examples.

The comment fit in with Russian efforts to sow doubt about Western COVID vaccines, which in turn seem to fit in with a campaign of vaccine diplomacy that does not appear to have gone according to plan.

But in a country where Western goods have been sought after for decades because of the belief that they are, in many cases, of higher quality, the remark seems highly unlikely to bolster trust in Russian vaccines or speed up the inoculation campaign.

Home And Away

Putin spent the bulk of Direct Line discussing domestic Russian issues, in some cases hyperlocal as in the inexplicably steep water bills for residents of an apartment building in western Siberia, in some cases as pervasive as the bad roads in a dying Far East town.

But as in previous editions of the program, as well as at other annual events such as his press conference and state-of-the-nation speech, he took aim several times at the United States, at the West more broadly, and at Ukraine.

A leader who often extols the virtues of stability, he raised the prospect of nuclear war -- a frequent topic in some of his highest-profile appearances, presumably because he wants to remind the world that Russia is a nuclear power on par with the United States.

This time, he did it by baiting Britain and the United States, saying that a Third World War would not have ensued if Russia had decided to sink a British warship in the Black Sea late last month after it sailed close to Russian-held Crimea in what he called a "provocation," arguing that "those who did this know they could not win a war like that."

Putin reiterated Russia’s claim that one of its warships fired warning shots and that a warplane dropped bombs in the path of the British ship, HMS Defender, to force it from an area near Crimea that Moscow claims as its territorial waters. Russia occupied and seized Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, but its claim to the peninsula has been recognized by only a handful of countries.

Britain asserts that Russian vessels did not even fire at the Defender but were instead conducting unrelated drills -- an assertion that implies Putin is simply using the incident to talk tough. And talk tough he did: The talk of sinking a British ship is an escalation of rhetoric, if nothing else. It comes ahead of expected U.S.-Russian talks on further arms control measures following Putin's summit with U.S. President Joe Biden on June 16.

Without citing evidence, Putin also claimed that the United States was involved in the incident that further increased tensions over Crimea.

As for Ukraine as a whole, Putin made his latest in what is becoming a long string of comments that have caused anger there by repeating his claim that Ukrainians and Russians are “one people” -- an assertion that many see as implying that Ukraine is something less than a full-fledged sovereign state, or should be.

He also stated without evidence that President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has “handed his country over completely to foreign management,” asserting that “the main questions are decided not in Kyiv but in Washington, and in some cases in Berlin and in Paris.”

In an article published in the Russian edition of Forbes magazine shortly after Putin’s appearance, political analyst Andrei Kolesnikov suggested that his remarks on Ukraine and other foreign policy issues were detached from reality.

“It’s a make-believe world that exists inside [Putin’s] head,” Kolesnikov wrote.

Parallel Universes

When it comes to Russia itself, there’s also a disconnect between what goes on in the Direct Line and what happens outside, Kolesnikov suggested: two “perfectly separate information universes,” like a Venn diagram in which the circles never intersect.

One of those universes, he wrote, is the one in which, a day before Putin’s program, police searched the homes of journalists from an investigative outlet hours after it published a report examining the sources of Interior Minister Vladimir Kolokoltsev’s wealth -- and that of his relatives.

It’s also the one, he added, in which a Moscow district lawmaker who recently announced plans to run for a State Duma seat in September was ordered jailed pending trial on fraud charges he denies, becoming the latest in a growing group of opposition politicians and activists to face probes or prosecution after revealing plans to contest the elections to fill Russia’s lower parliament house.

Some of them are associates or allies of Aleksei Navalny, the imprisoned opposition leader who -- like all Kremlin opponents, and like human rights and civil society in general -- was not mentioned once during Putin’s televised marathon.

On the day of the Direct Line, the government crackdown on dissent ahead of the elections rolled on. The authorities labeled four groups linked to exiled former oil tycoon Mikhail Khordorkovsky “undesirable,” effectively banning their activity in Russia.

A day earlier, a Moscow election official from the opposition party Yabloko was sentenced to two years in prison after being convicted of hitting a policeman during a January protest in support of Navalny. His lawyer said he had been helping a demonstrator who was being attacked by police.

The other universe, Kolesnikov wrote, is one in which Putin thanks the Duma, the loyal ruling party, and his suburban Moscow dry cleaners for their "excellent work” and also “solves the problems of everyday repair work” -- a reference to the questions about dilapidated buildings, dripping pipes, and other such matters.

The impression is of “two completely different Russias,” Kolesnikov wrote -- one of which, while as undeniably real as police batons or prison bars, “doesn’t seem to exist because it’s not on the TV screen and it’s not in the stories of the head of state.”