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Steve Gutterman's Week In Russia

It's been three years since Russian opposition leader Aleksei Navalny was arrested upon his arrival at Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport after recovering abroad from a near-fatal nerve-agent poisoning. He's been behind bars ever since.
It's been three years since Russian opposition leader Aleksei Navalny was arrested upon his arrival at Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport after recovering abroad from a near-fatal nerve-agent poisoning. He's been behind bars ever since.

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.

It’s been three years since Aleksei Navalny’s arrest and almost two since Russia launched an invasion aimed at subjugating Ukraine. Price woes and protests puncture the veneer of stability as an election set to hand President Vladimir Putin six more years in the Kremlin draws closer.

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

Airport Arrest

Three years ago this week, opposition politician Aleksei Navalny returned to Russia after recovering abroad from a near-fatal nerve-agent poisoning he blames on President Vladimir Putin -- and was quickly detained at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport.

He has been behind bars ever since, and last month was shipped off to a harsh prison above the Arctic Circle to serve a 19-year sentence following convictions on extremism and other charges that he and supporters say are Kremlin-engineered punishment for his political activity.

Anniversaries are arbitrary, of course. But a glance back provides a glimpse of what Putin may have hoped Russia, the region, and even the world would look like today: A Russia in which dissent does not exist, a world in which Moscow controls Ukraine, keeps NATO defanged on its eastern flank, and -- through a variety of levers -- has a major say in matters across Europe and beyond.

The Russian state had been cracking down increasingly hard on the opposition and independent voices for over a decade -- since Putin’s decision to return to the presidency in 2012 after a stint as prime minister became one of the catalysts for a wave of peaceful street protests in 2011-2012.

But Navalny’s arrest on January 17, 2021, marked the start of a new phase in the Kremlin’s clampdown on dissent -- one that kicked into overdrive with the full-scale invasion of Ukraine the following winter, on February 24, 2022.

Navalny’s return to Russia was not inevitable: It seems likely that once he was airlifted to Germany for lifesaving treatment following the poisoning in Siberia in August 2020, the Kremlin wanted him to remain abroad.

But he did return. And there’s speculation that the intensified clampdown that ensued -- encompassing Navalny’s associates and his now-outlawed political network across Russia but also targeting civil society, independent media, and all forms of dissent both real or perceived -- was part of a concerted effort by the state to erase potential sources of opposition to an invasion that was already being planned or at least considered by Putin and his close confidants.

'Impossible To Achieve'

Whether or not that’s the case, once it launched the large-scale invasion, the Russian state also turned the screws even tighter at home, using increasingly repressive legislation to silence criticism as it set about seeking to subjugate Ukraine.

Putin apparently thought that goal could be achieved within days or weeks -- a massive miscalculation.

“[T]he Russian government’s objectives were unrealistic from the start and impossible to achieve almost as soon as the fighting started,” Ruth Deyermond, a senior lecturer in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London,” wrote on X, formerly Twitter, on December 31.

Nearly two years later, the war grinds on. Each side has suffered hundreds of thousands of casualties, but neither has made a substantial advance in recent months along the 1,200-kilometer front line running through eastern and southern Ukraine.

Russia controls Crimea and substantial parts of four other Ukrainian regions -- in all, about 20 percent of the country. Moscow had already held much of that territory before the full-scale invasion, however, and over the course of 2022 its forces retreated from much of the land they had taken in the initial onslaught.

Meanwhile, Russian war goals such as establishing a pro-Moscow government in Kyiv and ending NATO military activity in Eastern Europe -- a reversal of some of the main results of the Cold War and the Soviet Union’s collapse -- are further from reach than they were before February 2022.

The War At Home

Domestically, the Kremlin seems to have made more progress toward its apparent goals -- at least when it comes to suppressing dissent.

The government has gutted civil society, outlawing or ordering the closure of such respected outfits as the Moscow Helsinki Group and Memorial, a highly respected human rights and historical truth advocacy group. It has chased opposition politicians and independent media outlets out of the country. It has persecuted LGBT Russians, stepping up restrictive laws and declaring what it describes as the "international LGBT social movement" an extremist organization. It has jailed prominent Kremlin opponents for years on what critics say are woefully unjust charges of treason, extremism, and other crimes. Lesser-known Russians who oppose the war have also been imprisoned for years -- like Aleksandra Skochilenko, a St. Petersburg artist who received a seven-year sentence for replacing tags in a grocery store with information about the invasion of Ukraine.

There were no major anti-war or anti-Kremlin protests in 2023, and Russia has weathered Western sanctions imposed over the invasion more successfully than many expected, at least for the time being.

But a wide array of incidents and developments has poked holes in the veneer of stability applied strenuously by the state, exposing potentially deepening problems as the country heads toward a March presidential election that, given the Kremlin’s sway over the media and its choke hold on politics nationwide, Putin is certain to win barring some massively unexpected development.

Last summer, Putin faced a major challenge when Wagner mercenary group founder Yevgeny Prigozhin staged a mutiny in late June, accusing Russia of mishandling the war against Ukraine, and his forces marched to within 200 kilometers of Moscow before a murky agreement ended their advance. Prigozhin was killed two months later in a plane crash that many believe was a Kremlin-organized assassination, but the mutiny pointed up problems posed by his decision to invade Ukraine and by the continuing war.

Colossal Costs

The cost of the war to Russian citizens is colossal, ranging from economic problems to the death of family members at the front and a surge in violent crimes committed by former inmates who have been pardoned and released in exchange for fighting in Ukraine, among other effects.

Both the Wagner mutiny and high casualty count underscore the consequences of a war that will require hundreds of thousands more soldiers unless it is halted soon, something that seems highly unlikely. Demonstrations by Russians who want their relatives to be sent home from the front point up potential political troubles for Putin if he orders another military call-up like the massive mobilization he decreed in September 2022, which prompted many to flee the country.

More mundane problems also plague Russia.

At an end-of-the-year press conference and question-and-answer session that was televised live in December, Putin began with an glowing assessment of the economy, as he often does, but later found it necessary to apologize for the high price of eggs, a reflection of inflationary pressure on Russians’ pocketbooks.

In the New Year, cold winter weather and crumbling infrastructure have combined to cause dangerous water-main breaks, power cuts, and heating problems in a country that the Kremlin has put on a war footing at the expense of quality of life for its citizens.

And while protests are rare, thousands of people rallied repeatedly this week in the Bashkortostan region in defense of Fail Alsynov, the former leader of a now-banned group that advocated for the rights of ethnic Bashkirs and the preservation of their language and culture.

On January 17, police forcibly dispersed a protest outside the courthouse where Alsynov was convicted of inciting hatred and sentenced to four years in prison in a trial that followed an investigation initiated by the Kremlin-backed regional leader, Radiy Khabirov.

Activists from the Bashkir community and other minority groups in Russia say the Kremlin and regional governments are violating their rights and have increasingly sought to marginalize their languages and cultures.

Navalny, three years after his airport arrest, was characteristically defiant and upbeat.

“Putin’s state is not viable” and eventually “will collapse and crumble,” he said in a thread on his X account. “One day we will look at its place and it will be gone.”

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

A firefighter works at the site of a warehouse heavily damaged during a Russian missile strike in Kyiv on December 29.
A firefighter works at the site of a warehouse heavily damaged during a Russian missile strike in Kyiv on December 29.

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.

The choreographed backlash over a risqué holiday party speaks volumes about Russia as the New Year approaches. So does the treatment of imprisoned Kremlin opponent Aleksei Navalny, who has been moved to a harsh prison in the country's frigid Far North.

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

Anatomy Of A Scandal

For decades, star-studded galas have been a gaudy staple of the winter holiday season on Russian television, bringing tens of millions of viewers an annual message: sit back, relax, stay out of politics -- and forget about the high price of the eggs you boiled for the obligatory New Year's potato salad.

This year, a celebrity-laden gathering that was ostensibly private has stolen the show: The state is stoking a backlash over an "Almost Naked" party at a Moscow nightclub earlier this month, using the louche celebration to drive home the socially conservative notions that it is increasingly casting as a national ideology amid a severe break with the West over Russia's war on Ukraine.

Socially conservative is an understatement in a country where the Supreme Court this month classified what the government called the "international LGBT social movement" as extremist. Kremlin critics say President Vladimir Putin's sharpening focus on so-called "traditional values" is disingenuous, a way to draw Russians' attention away from troubles such as inflation and to score points among select audiences abroad by portraying Russia as the world's valiant protector against what he paints as the decadent, ultra-liberal West.

Despite its risqué theme and the celebrity of some of the big-name guests, the party on December 20-21 might have flown under the radar for the vast majority of Russians if it had come off without incident. But even as they profess disinterest, state authorities have drawn attention to it, not least by arresting a rapper who wore nothing but a single sock -- and not on his foot. On December 27, a court sentenced him to 15 days in jail for "hooliganism" and ruled that the party had violated legislation banning the "propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations" -- Russia's infamous "gay propaganda" law, which has been made increasingly harsh by amendments since Putin first signed it in 2013.

Cancel Culture

Nobody else has been prosecuted at this point, but the club has been closed temporarily and its premises sealed by the consumer protection agency, famous attendees have lost sponsors and contracts, including for the New Year's Eve shows that the "Almost Naked" party has overshadowed in advance, and several -- including the organizer, Anastasia Ivleyeva -- have recorded public apologies that are being likened to the forced displays of repentance that were a fixture of the Stalin era, which are now echoed by those who cross Kremlin-backed leader Ramzan Kadyrov in Chechnya.

With Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine approaching the two-year mark in February, with no sign of a let-up in Moscow's onslaught, the scandal raised over the party was a sign of the times.

According to the Russian-language media outlet The Bell, it was also a signal to Russians that whether they are celebrities or ordinary citizens, they must "listen to the Party of War." And with Putin asserting that Russia's unprovoked invasion of Ukraine is actually an existential struggle against the West that has many elements, including a culture war, that means anything that the authorities pick out as a reflection of disloyalty is subject to pressure and punishment from the state.

In some ways, that's nothing new. A clampdown on dissent that can be traced back at least as far as opposition leader Aleksei Navalny's arrest upon his return to Russia in January 2021, and arguably to a wave of protests that began in 2011, has intensified since Putin ordered the full-scale invasion.

While the spiral of oppression has become the status quo, with any public criticism of the war risking persecution, prosecution, or both, some of the near-daily developments seem to stand out.

Poets Imprisoned

On December 28, two poets, Artyom Kamardin and Yegor Shtovba, were sentenced to seven and 5 1/2 years in prison, respectively, for condemning the invasion in verses they read out in September 2022 on a Moscow square. They were convicted of "inciting hatred and calling for anti-state activities."

Like the "Almost Naked" party, meanwhile, Navalny was also seemingly used by the state to send a message to Russians and the West.

After almost 20 days during which they were unable to contact him or determine where he was, lawyers for Navalny finally found him at an isolated prison above the Arctic Circle that former inmates have described as a harsh place where everyday treatment of the convicts was tantamount to torture.

Navalny disappeared while he was being moved, via a circuitous route, from the prison closer to Moscow where he had been held. This is common practice in Russia, dating back to the Soviet era and even earlier -- prison authorities hold inmates incommunicado while transporting them within the penitentiary system.

'Then The Night Again'

All the while, Putin's spokesman asserted that the Kremlin had no idea of his whereabouts and no interest in knowing them.

Many observers dismissed that claim, just as they doubted reports that the scandal over the nearly nude party was the result of a popular backlash, spawned when soldiers who had been decorated by Putin after returning from the war in Ukraine complained about the event, rather than what The Bell called a top-down "cancel campaign" approved by Putin's administration -- or at the very least used by Putin for his own ends.

Navalny, for his part, made light of his predicament. Finally located by one of his lawyers in a prison cell in the frigid Far North on December 25, Christmas Day in much of the West, he joked that he was exhausted from the journey "but still in a good mood, as befits a Santa Claus."

In the same post to his account on X, formerly Twitter, Navalny mentioned one way that he differed from Santa Claus. And in doing so, as 2024 approaches, he described the lightless atmosphere that Kremlin critics say is likely to prevail for the foreseeable future in Russia as Putin, in power as president or prime minister since 1999, heads for a new six-year term in a March vote.

"I don't say 'Ho-ho-ho,'" Navalny wrote, "but I do say 'Oh-oh-oh' when I look out of the window, where I can see a night, then the evening, and then the night again."

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

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About This Newsletter

The Week In Russia presents some of the key developments in the country and in its war against Ukraine, and some of the takeaways going forward. It's written by Steve Gutterman, the editor of RFE/RL's Russia/Ukraine/Belarus Desk.

To receive The Week In Russia in your inbox, click here.

And be sure not to miss Steve's The Week Ahead In Russia podcast. It's posted here every Monday or you can subscribe on Apple Podcasts.

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