Steve Gutterman's Week In Russia

I'm Steve Gutterman, the editor of RFE/RL's Russia/Ukraine/Belarus Desk.

Welcome to The Week In Russia, in which I dissect the key developments in Russian politics and society over the previous week and look at what's ahead. To receive The Week In Russia newsletter in your inbox, click here.

There's Red Square, and there's reality. Russian President Putin Vladimir Putin rehearsed grievances and repeated falsehoods at a Victory Day military parade as the war ground on in Ukraine. Farther from the Kremlin, the clampdown continued.

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

'A Real War'

Any military parade is probably more theater than reality -- a display of pomp, pride, and power that glosses over the pain, death, and deprivation of war.

But Putin's Victory Day address on Red Square on May 9, when Russia celebrates the defeat of Nazi Germany in World War II, seemed particularly detached from the facts of both that conflict decades ago and the war he has inflicted upon Ukraine -- the biggest war in Europe since 1945.

The parallels he drew between those wars were also badly flawed, observers of the annual event pointed out.

Whether the parade and his remarks served their purpose for Putin is another question. It's one that numerous analysts answered in the negative, saying they underscored his distortions of events past and present and gave additional exposure to the problems Russia is facing on the battlefield.

One major distortion came almost at the very start of the short speech, when he said that "a real war has once again been unleashed against our homeland."

This is false. Russia is the aggressor in the war in Ukraine, where Putin dramatically escalated a conflict that had persisted in the Donbas region since 2014 by launching a large-scale invasion on February 24, 2022.

Not Happening

Since then, there have been a number of artillery and drone attacks on Russian territory that Moscow has blamed on Kyiv. But these are minuscule compared to the Russian assault on Ukraine, where tens of thousands of civilians and combatants have been killed and millions of people driven from their homes. Russian forces control Crimea in its entirety, occupy parts of four other Ukrainian regions, and have laid waste to several cities and towns including Mariupol, a Sea of Azov port with a pre-invasion population of nearly half a million.

Putin's claim is false, but it fits in with a narrative he has turned to frequently as time has passed: that Russia is fighting not a war of aggression against Ukraine but rather a defensive effort against Western nations bent on tearing Russia apart. As he put it in the Red Square speech, "Their aim…is to achieve the collapse and destruction of our country."

This, too, is untrue. While plenty of people in the West would like to see what the domestic opposition describes in protest chants as "Russia without Putin," and some believe the war in Ukraine could bring that about, the prospect of Russia's disintegration or demise is a widely seen as a cause of concern, not enthusiasm, for the United States and many other governments.

Falsehoods aside, did this piece of military theater work for Putin?

As a show of strength, Russia's and his own, probably not.

The parade was modest compared to previous years in the Putin era. Fewer goose-stepping soldiers, fewer pieces of military equipment trundling across the square, and the absence of warplanes overhead might make sense when the country is fighting a war. But it may also have suggested that Russia's military -- built up over years in which Putin has warned the West to take notice -- needs everything it can get at the front and, after major losses in a war that Putin apparently hoped would be over in days or weeks but is now in its 15th month, has little to spare.

Prigozhin And Putin

The struggles on the battlefield and sharp disagreements among Russia's military leaders were on stark display in a series of angry video statements by Yevgeny Prigozhin, head of the ostensibly private mercenary group Wagner, who accused top generals and Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu of badly mishandling the war and particularly the bloody and protracted fighting over Bakhmut, a once-thriving city in the Donbas that is now the scene of horrors that seem out of place in this century -- or did before the Russian invasion last year.

In one video, Prigozhin stood before piles of corpses of what he said were Wagner soldiers and accused the generals of causing their deaths by withholding supplies of weapons and ammunition. In another, in a remark whose target he may have deliberately left vague, he came close to calling Putin a "prick."

Putin, addressing the parade from the grandstand near Lenin's tomb, was no doubt pleased that leaders from seven of the other 14 former Soviet republics attended -- up from zero in 2022. State TV made that clear by cutting to shots of them, one by one, during Putin's speech.

And the 70-year-old president "looked and sounded in good form, belying claims of his worsening health and imminent demise," author and analyst Mark Galeotti wrote in the Spectator shortly after the parade. He noted that Putin "exchanged remarks with…Shoigu, also bringing into question assertions of a rift between the two men."

"Yet there was also no escaping the way that the parade, for all its rousing tunes and geometric choreography, signaled a military locked in an unexpectedly tough war," Galeotti wrote. "Russia is a nation losing its international status, and its president has nothing to offer his people but false claims of victimhood."

The Immortal Regiment

Beyond Red Square, a different kind of parade was conspicuous in its absence. For years, Russians have held marches called the Immortal Regiment, walking the streets carrying signs with photographs of relatives who gave their lives or otherwise contributed to the Soviet war effort in World War II.

A grassroots initiative at first, the new tradition was swiftly appropriated by the state authorities under Putin, who over his years in power has become increasingly wary of what he cannot control, particularly when it involves large crowds of people in the streets.

This year, the Immortal Regiment marches were canceled. Security concerns were the official reason, but analysts say the Kremlin was concerned that Russians might carry portraits of men killed in the war in Ukraine and also, more simply, is afraid of large demonstrations.

"There is a fear that people will carry portraits of people who have been killed in Ukraine and the real casualty figures -- not the ones presented by the Defense Ministry -- will be visible," historian Ivan Kurilla told RFE/RL's Siberia.Realities. "That is the most likely reason. But more generally, the authorities are afraid of any mass demonstration by the people in public. The authorities are obviously afraid."

And in prisons, jails, and courts, the repression that Kremlin critics say is driven by that fear ground on.

Solitary

On May 11, imprisoned opposition leader Aleksei Navalny was sent to a punitive solitary confinement cell for the 15th time since August 2022, according to his Telegram channel.

Navalny said he was released from such a cell the previous evening but ordered back less than 14 hours later. He said he has spent 165 days in solitary confinement since he was jailed upon return to Russia in January 2021, after recovering in Germany from a near-fatal nerve-agent poisoning he blames on Putin.

The Telegram post came a day after the UN special rapporteur on torture, Alice Edwards, called on Russia to provide Navalny with "urgent and comprehensive" medical care amid reports that his health is deteriorating.

Edwards also cited the cases of three political supporters of Navalny who are also in detention -- Liliya Chanysheva, Vadim Ostanin, and Daniel Kholodny -- saying they should be released "without delay" if prompt, thorough, impartial investigations find that they "are being arbitrarily deprived of their liberty."

In the Ural Mountains city of Yekaterinburg, popular former Mayor Yevgeny Roizman is being tried for his criticism of the large-scale invasion of Ukraine, under legislation signed by Putin days after it began. He faces up to five years in prison if convicted of discrediting the Russian military.

Roizman says he's being tried for calling the invasion of Ukraine what it is: the invasion of Ukraine. Russia officially calls the war a "special military operation," and officials including Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov have falsely stated that Russia has not invaded Ukraine.

'Powerful, Beautiful Anti-War Poetry'

On May 4, police detained the director and author of Finist -- The Brave Falcon, a play about Russ ian women who married Muslim men and moved to Syria that won Russia's Golden Mask national theater award in 2002.

Director Yevgenia Berkovich and playwright Svetlana Petriichuk are accused of the justification of terrorism and have been sent to pretrial jail for at least two months while prosecutors assemble their case.

The accusation over the play is a pretext and Berkovich is really being prosecuted "for her powerful, beautiful anti-war poetry," Konstantin Sonin, a political economist and a professor at the University of Chicago, wrote on Twitter. "This is [about] her anti-war stance, her poetry, her bravery and independence."

That's it from me this week.

If you want to know more, catch up on my podcast The Week Ahead In Russia, out every Monday, here on our site or wherever you get your podcasts (Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts).

Yours,

Steve Gutterman

I'm Steve Gutterman, the editor of RFE/RL's Russia/Ukraine/Belarus Desk.

Welcome to The Week In Russia, in which I dissect the key developments in Russian politics and society over the previous week and look at what's ahead. To receive The Week In Russia newsletter in your inbox, click here.

Russian President Vladimir Putin decided on the large-scale invasion of Ukraine about a year before he launched it in late February 2022, and his main motives were personal, an investigative report released at a potentially crucial juncture in the devastating war concludes.

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

Resentment And Revenge

When pundits claim they know what Putin is thinking, there's often a justified backlash: We know what he says out loud, and we often have a good idea of why he said it and whether it's true or false, but to guess what's in his mind can be counterproductive.

But a new report about the run-up to the February 2022 invasion -- from factors that emerged two decades ago to the increasingly deafening drumbeat of war in the months before the onslaught -- sets out a stark conclusion in its very first sentence.

"Putin's motives for starting a war with Ukraine were personal resentment and a desire for revenge," it says.

The report by the Russian-language investigative outlet Vyorstka is based largely on conversations with former and current officials and other members of the political establishments in Russia and Ukraine, most of whom are cited anonymously.

Among its other key conclusions: Putin made the decision to invade Ukraine in February-March 2021, not earlier or later, so preparations were being made for almost a year. However, "all this time, the Kremlin was proceeding from inaccurate assumptions and calculations," the report says.

Almost anyone commenting for such a report may have their own motives for their remarks, of course: to deflect criticism, for example, or to assign blame to a person or group that is their rival for influence or standing in one of those establishments.

Beyond The Donbas

But it widens the scope of evidence about the factors that played into Putin's decision to launch the unprovoked invasion. And it points to the primacy of personal motives -- or, in some cases, geopolitical motives steeped heavily in animus, resentment, and spite -- over reasoned consideration of Russian security concerns.

"I struggle to imagine a moment of sober lucidity in Putin's decision-making between extended periods of snarling revanche," Brian Milakovsky, an analyst who spent several years in Ukraine's Donbas region amid the separatist war that Russia fomented there in 2014, wrote in an April 24 article.

The Vyorstka report suggests Putin's decision to launch the large-scale invasion nearly eight years later, massively escalating a conflict that had been limited to the Donbas, had much more to do with snarling revanche than with sober lucidity.

"Lots of interesting details in this piece, but one thing that's clear is Putin's decision to invade was driven much more by personal grievances and historical delusions than 'NATO expansion,'" Seva Gunitsky, an associate professor of political science at the University of Toronto, wrote on Twitter of the journalistic investigation.

He was referring to Putin's frequent, sometimes fiery criticism of the enlargement of NATO, which has taken in 15 Central and Eastern European countries seeking improved security and protection from potential Russian threats in the years since the Soviet collapse in 1991, and to Moscow's stated concerns that Ukraine would pose a threat to Russia if it joined the alliance.

The Vyorstka report also adds to evidence that a list of sweeping proposals made in draft agreements Russia sent to the United States and NATO in December 2021 were, as many in the West suspected, not a genuine effort at diplomacy but a ploy to create grounds to blame Kyiv and the West for an invasion that Putin had already decided to unleash.

The proposals -- which looked more like demands and were sometimes described that way by Russian officials -- called for a substantial rollback of the results of the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the collapse of communism in the countries to its west, leaving them more vulnerable while sharply increasing Moscow's power to shape the fate of nations in the region and beyond.

Revising History

In addition to barring Ukraine, Georgia, and other countries in the region from joining NATO, the proposed agreements would have prohibited NATO military deployments beyond the borders of the alliance as of 1997 -- before any of the former Warsaw Pact nations or the Baltic states became members.

One of the mantras of Putin's Russia is "indivisible security," the notion that one country should not increase its own security at the expense of another country's security. But the proposals Moscow laid out before the United States and NATO would have done just that to a swath of nations from the Baltics to the Black Sea, many analysts say.

Furthermore, the investigation casts additional light on steps, statements, and signals by Putin in the year or two before the invasion that caused alarm at the time, but only a limited amount of alarm: In the weeks and even days before the invasion on February 24, 2022, many observers clung to the belief, or at least the hope, that he would not go ahead with it.

Before the massive military buildup in the fall of 2021 but after an initial buildup that spring had raised concerns about Putin's intentions, those signals included several spoken and written remarks in which he sought to cast doubt on Ukraine's legitimacy as a sovereign state and suggest it has no right to independence.

This included a July 12, 2021, article about Ukraine and Russia that one commentator called "tortured" and another described as "over the top," "off the rails," and "completely deranged."

Analysts disagreed about what it meant: Was it a disturbing, ill-mannered, and historically inaccurate but ultimately unimportant reflection of Putin's psyche and his "fixation" on Ukraine? Or was it a "final ultimatum to Ukraine," as political observer Mikhail Rostovsky put it?

"I would draw your attention to one very important detail that is buried in the text and is of fundamental importance," said Aleksei Venediktov, then editor in chief of the Moscow radio station Ekho Moskvy. "Putin lays out territorial pretensions to Ukraine."

Those who read it as a concrete threat turned out to be right, even if they were reading between the lines: According to Vyorstka, Putin had wanted to include a more specific threat to Ukraine in the article but was talked out of it by associates -- something that certainly did not happen when it came to the invasion itself.

A Clouded Future

As has been widely reported in the 14 months since the assault began, Vyorstka concluded that Putin made the decision without seeking advice from anyone beyond a handful of cronies -- a big part of the reason it has, given that the apparent goal was to swiftly subjugate Ukraine, been a spectacular failure so far.

The Russian invasion has killed tens of thousands of Ukrainians, driven millions from their homes, and destroyed cities, towns, and villages across parts of the country where Putin has falsely claimed he is trying to protect residents. Instead, Russia is killing them.

Russian soldiers stand accused of widespread atrocities against civilians in Ukraine, and the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Putin last month on suspicion of war crimes over the illegal transfer of Ukrainian children to Russia.

Putin signed a decree this week that allows occupying forces to "deport" Ukrainians from Russian-controlled areas if they refuse to accept Russian citizenship, prompting additional accusations of war crimes.

Putin's decision to invade Ukraine has also led to the deaths or wounding of what Western estimates say are some 200,000 Russian soldiers and has darkly clouded his country's future, prompting hundreds of thousands of people to flee and worsening living standards for millions who remain.

In recent years, Russia's "decision-making became utterly subsumed to the personalistic, paranoid, (a)historically obsessed vision of one man, Vladimir Putin," Milakovsky wrote.

The Vyorstka report comes ahead of a potentially crucial juncture in the war as Ukraine prepares for what officials have signaled could be a major counteroffensive against Russian troops who hold large swaths of territory in the east and south including Crimea, the Black Sea peninsula that Moscow occupied in 2014.

That's it from me this week.

If you want to know more, catch up on my podcast The Week Ahead In Russia, out every Monday, here on our site or wherever you get your podcasts (Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts).

The next edition of The Week In Russia will be issued on May 12.

Yours,

Steve Gutterman