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.

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

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.

Vladimir Kara-Murza is sentenced to 25 years in prison, the longest term handed down to an opponent of President Vladimir Putin or a critic of Russia's war on Ukraine. As fighting persists, Putin is "tethering his future to that of an unpredictable conflict," an analyst and Kremlin expert says.

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

A 'Monstrous Sentence'

In addition to deadly wars and a retreat from democracy, Putin's long rule has been defined in large part by politically charged trials in which the verdict -- guilty -- is never in doubt, but in which the severity of the sentence is used by the state to send signals to audiences at home and abroad.

Often, judges in high-profile cases have handed defendants prison terms that are a little bit shorter than those sought by prosecutors, presumably as part of an effort by the state to suggest that the trial is fair and that the sentence has not been delivered from inside the Kremlin walls.

Sometimes, judges have suspended the sentence, allowing the defendant to avoid prison for whatever reason -- in the early trials of opposition politician Aleksei Navalny a decade ago and more, for example, the reason was to avoid provoking street protests by creating a martyr.

Those days are long gone, though: Navalny, behind bars since January 2021, is serving very real and very dangerous prison time after being sentenced to terms of nine years and 2 1/2 years in separate cases widely seen as the fabrications of a vengeful state.

And at the April 17 verdict hearing in the trial of Vladimir Kara-Murza, a vocal Putin foe who has spoken out against the war on Ukraine and has lobbied hard in the West for sanctions against Russians who violate human rights, there was no pretense of a carefully reasoned decision on the severity of the punishment.

Within about 10 minutes of the start of the hearing -- hours, even days faster than some interminable verdict-readings in past trials of prominent Kremlin opponents such as Mikhail Khodorkovsky -- the judge pronounced Kara-Murza guilty of treason and two other crimes and sentenced him to 25 years in prison. It was the term requested by prosecutors and the longest prison sentence handed down to an opposition figure in post-Soviet Russia, by far.

It was also a sign of the times, in several ways.

For one thing, it was a crude display of the state's power to do what it wants. For another, it was a warning to the West: Kara-Murza has both Russian and British citizenship, has spent much of his time in recent years in the United States, and is probably best known outside Russia for his advocacy of the 2012 Magnitsky Act -- which gives the U.S. president the authority to freeze the U.S. assets of Russian government officials and businessmen accused of gross violations of human rights -- and similar legislation in other countries. He had a close relationship with John McCain, the late U.S. senator from Arizona who was one of Putin's fiercest critics in Congress, and he served as a pallbearer at McCain's funeral in 2018.

Mainly, though, it was part of an effort to underscore the idea that no opposition to the war will be tolerated, and that anyone who criticizes it is not just a criminal -- an accusation covered by a now much-employed law that Putin signed days after launching the large-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 -- but a traitor.

'War Crimes'

If the message wasn't clear enough, it was amplified by Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova. Asked about U.S. and British criticism of the verdict, she was unwilling or unable to limit herself to a simple claim that the court had issued its verdict independently of the executive branch, instead stating that "traitors and betrayers…who are applauded in the West will get what they deserve."

Kara-Murza was arrested in April 2022, about two months after the invasion began and shortly after he returned to Russia following a speech to lawmakers in the U.S. state of Arizona in which he accused the "dictatorial regime in the Kremlin" of committing "war crimes." A year later, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued an arrest warrant for Putin over what it says has been the illegal deportation of children from Ukraine -- a war crime.

The charges against Kara-Murza have been the object of derision and anger among supporters, Western governments, and rights groups. He was facing "a monstrous prison term for no more than raising his voice and elevating the voices of others in Russia who disagree with the Kremlin, its war in Ukraine, and its escalating repression within Russia," Hugh Williamson, Europe and Central Asia director at Human Rights Watch, said ahead of the verdict.

Kara-Murza is the most prominent Russian to be convicted of treason since the invasion, but he is not the only one: In 2022, 22 cases of treason were opened in Russia, while at least 20 cases have already been announced this year -- and human rights lawyers say there may be dozens more that are being kept under wraps.

The increase in publicized cases of treason seems to coincide with a growing effort by Putin and the government apparatus he controls to bind citizens together and keep them from challenging the state by convincing them that Russia's "special military operation" is not a war of aggression against Ukraine but part of a struggle for survival against a "collective West" that, with Washington at the helm, is bent on tearing the country apart and erasing it.

To some extent, this propaganda push may have succeeded, at least for the time being. Hundreds of thousands of Russians who oppose the war, are afraid of being sent to die, or want a brighter future have fled in just over a year -- many of them after the invasion, many others after Putin announced a "partial mobilization" that was actually a massive military call-up last September. So, some of the Russians most likely to resist government narratives and government pressure are gone.

"The Kremlin has managed to transform the ‘special operation' into a ‘people's war,' a shared task that should unite the nation," Andrei Kolesnikov, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center in Berlin, wrote in an April 10 article. "Anyone who is against the Kremlin -- ‘national traitors,' in Putin's words -- must be fought against."

But it would be easier for Putin to mold the country into a monolith if it were winning the war. Instead, Russia has suffered numerous setbacks -- from the failure to subjugate Ukraine within days or weeks of the invasion, as he apparently expected, to the trouble its forces have had trying to seize just one small city, Bakhmut, the focus of extremely deadly fighting for at least eight months.

That means that Putin may have to turn to another major mobilization before long.

'High Levels Of Discontent'

The stage has just been set for that: Putin signed a bill into law last week that digitalizes the draft, potentially making it much harder for Russians to avoid service -- until now, something that could be done by physically avoiding receipt of a call-up notice.

Whether and when it might be used for a big new call-up is uncertain, for reasons that involve Putin's political calculations.

Putin is expected to seek a fifth term in a presidential election next March and will want to engineer as commanding a victory as he can. He could complicate that goal if a big escalation or major new mobilization deepens concerns among the Russian elites and brings what analyst Tatyana Stanovaya called their "high levels of discontent" -- now largely hidden – out into the open.

"Russians are aware that Putin could remain in power for a long time to come…. Yet if the conflict drags on and Moscow continues to flail, it is possible to imagine that the country's elites could start to seriously consider choosing a successor themselves," Stanovaya wrote in an April 11 article in the journal Foreign Affairs.

"That does not mean Russia's elites will attempt any kind of coup in the immediate future; for now, Russia's leader reigns supreme," she wrote. "But the war is remaking Russia, and Putin's willingness to commit ever-greater resources to avoid defeat has set him on a risky path, tethering his future to that of an unpredictable conflict. Putin may not be likely to lose power, but a historically large reelection victory is by no means guaranteed."

Bloomberg Opinion columnist Leonid Bershidsky, meanwhile, suggested that it would take more than a major escalation or a series of new setbacks to shake Putin's grip on power.

For now, at least, he "appears to be digging in and hoping that Russia's moneyed elite will adapt itself to the new order, as it's done repeatedly in the past -- just give it time," Bershidsky wrote in an April 19 article.

Putin will "only allow even partially dissenting voices if they sing harmony with each other and, ultimately, with him," he concluded. "Only a massive military defeat could, in theory, change that."

Kara-Murza, for his part, voiced confidence that change is on the way.

The day will come "when a war will be called a war, and a usurper a usurper;" he said in a final statement in court on April 10, "and when those who kindled and unleashed this war, rather than those who tried to stop it, will be recognized as criminals."

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