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.

Nine years ago, Boris Nemtsov spoke out against Russian aggression in Ukraine. Then he was killed -- and now, a year after Moscow launched its large-scale invasion, some of his closest allies are being jailed for their criticism of what one called a "criminal, unprovoked, and aggressive war."

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

A Killing Near The Kremlin

At a rally in Moscow nine years ago this month, opposition politician Boris Nemtsov spoke out clearly and adamantly against Moscow's aggression in Ukraine, where Russian forces had occupied Crimea and the Kremlin was fomenting discord in the Donbas.

Less than a year later, Nemtsov was dead -- gunned down on a bridge in the shadow of the Kremlin on February 27, 2015. He was 55.

Not long afterward, it emerged that Nemtsov had been matching his vocal criticism of Russia's actions in Ukraine with efforts to provide damning evidence: He and associates had been working on a report detailing evidence of the extent of Moscow's interference in the neighboring country, which -- like Russia -- became an independent nation with internationally accepted borders when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.

With hindsight, it is reasonable to suspect -- as many do -- that Nemtsov was killed to silence perhaps the most prominent Russian critic of Moscow's growing interference in Ukraine. When he spoke at the rally on March 15, 2014, Russia was about to stage a plebiscite that it used -- despite broad international condemnation -- to justify its armed takeover of Crimea.

By the time of his assassination, the Ukrainian Black Sea peninsula was firmly in Moscow's grip and war between Kyiv's forces and Russian-backed separatists -- supported at crucial times by regular Russian troops sent across the border -- was raging in the Donbas, further northeast.

Today, such suspicions seem all the more reasonable in light of the large-scale invasion President Vladimir Putin launched on February 24, 2022.

There's no conclusive evidence that Nemtsov was killed because of his opposition to Russian aggression against Ukraine. That's in part because while five men from the Chechnya region were convicted in 2017, the person or people who ordered the crime have not been identified, let alone arrested or prosecuted -- with many observers suspecting a genuine investigation would likely lead to the Kremlin or the Kremlin-backed leader of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov.

In any case, though, some of Nemtsov's remarks at the rally now seem as prescient as they were passionate.

"I believe that we have no right to behave this way toward a friendly country," Nemtsov said. "It's despicable, it's impudent -- and most important, it is harmful for Russia."

Creating An Enemy

Putin would get "an enemy in the form of Ukraine," he said, and Russia would get a flood of body bags being shipped home to the families of soldiers thrown into battle.

"I have thought for a long time about what arguments Putin has for conducting himself this way -- any argument at all. The simplest answer: He is a sick person, a very mentally ill person," Nemtsov went on. "And then I thought, no, he is not just a sick person. He is also a cynical and despicable person. Using the operation for the occupation and annexation of Crimea, he wants to rule us forever, until Russia dies.... He has decided on open dictatorship."

"We should say no to war!" he thundered. "We should say enough of idiocy! We should say Russia and Ukraine without Putin! Russia and Ukraine without Putin!"

Tens of thousands of people attended the anti-war march and rally at which Nemtsov spoke -- the biggest opposition demonstration since the series of protests in 2011-12 sparked by anger over election fraud and Putin's decision to return to the presidency after a stint as prime minister.

The Kremlin clampdown on dissent that came in response to that challenge intensified after Putin took office in May 2012. The state turned the screws even tighter in 2021, targeting opposition leader Aleksei Navalny and others, and took further steps to crush dissent when it launched the large-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Navalny, who barely survived a nerve-agent poisoning in 2020 that he blames on Putin, is serving a lengthy prison term on charges he says are fabricated. Ahead of the anniversary of the invasion, he issued a 15-point statement condemning the "unjust war of aggression" that he said Putin "unleashed...under ridiculous pretexts."

'Nothing To Discuss'

Navalny called for a Russian withdrawal from all of Ukraine and respect for its borders as "internationally recognized and defined in 1991," writing: "Russia also recognized these borders back then, and it must recognize them today as well. There is nothing to discuss here."

He echoed some of the arguments Nemtsov made nine years ago, writing that the "real reasons for this war are the political and economic problems within Russia, Putin's desire to hold on to power at any cost, and his obsession with his own historical legacy."

Months after Nemtsov's killing, his friend and fellow opposition politician Ilya Yashin presented the report on Russian involvement in the Donbas war, which had been completed by allies of the slain former regional governor and first deputy prime minister.

Yashin, a local lawmaker who was chairman of his Moscow district council in 2017-21, was sentenced to 8 1/2 years in prison in December over criticism of what he has called Russia's "monstrous war" in Ukraine, after being convicted under a law signed by Putin days after the invasion.

The charge stemmed from YouTube posts in which Yashin spoke about the killings of civilians in Bucha, a city outside Kyiv where survivors, rights activists, and Ukrainian authorities say Russian forces committed atrocities before withdrawing following Russia's failure to capture the capital.

Another close Nemtsov associate who is now behind bars is Vladimir Kara-Murza, who has been jailed in Moscow since April 2022 and faces up to 24 years in prison on charges of treason and other crimes. He and allies and Western governments have denounced the charges, saying they are politically motivated.

'A Straitjacket Of False Unanimity'

At an Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) meeting in Vienna on March 2, U.S. Ambassador Michael Carpenter read out a letter from Kara-Murza, whom he called one of "a number of brave Russian citizens within Russia" who "spoke the truth to a brutally oppressive regime that they knew would severely punish them for daring to challenge its lies and propaganda."

In the handwritten letter, Kara-Murza condemned what he called Putin's "criminal, unprovoked, and aggressive war against Ukraine" as well as the clampdown on dissent in Russia, writing: "Just as the goal of Putin's war on Ukraine was to subdue a proud and sovereign nation, the goal of his internal war was to impose a straitjacket of false unanimity on Russian society."

"Today is a very dark time -- for Ukraine, for Russia and for the whole of this organization. But Soviet dissidents liked to say that 'night is darkest before the dawn' and history proved them right," he wrote. "Let us keep faith in a better tomorrow, a time when Russia can have a democratically elected government that will live in peace both with its own citizens and with its neighbors."

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

RFE/RL intern Ella Jaffe contributed to this report

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.

As Russia's large-scale invasion of Ukraine enters its second year, U.S. President Joe Biden visited Kyiv and promised that Western backing will not flag. Russian President Vladmir Putin turned to his go-to topic -- his country's nuclear arsenal -- in a bid undermine that support.

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

'As Long As It Takes'

If the invasion he launched a year ago today had gone the way he apparently expected, Russian President Vladimir Putin could probably have walked the streets of Kyiv this week with the leader of Ukraine -- one installed by the Kremlin.

Instead, it was U.S. President Joe Biden who traveled to Kyiv, where he met with President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on February 20 and promised that Washington and the West will support Ukraine for "as long as it takes."

Putin, in a long-delayed state-of-the-nation speech the day after Biden's surprise visit to Ukraine, indicated that Russia has no intention of easing up on the invasion in which Kyiv, rights groups, and Western governments say its forces have committed atrocities on a horrific scale.

Full of false narratives, outlandish claims, and vitriol directed at the West -- same old, same old -- the address contained only a few remarks that might be described as newsworthy, or at least as potentially significant signals.

One of the latter was a statement that Russia would conduct what the Kremlin calls the "special military operation" in Ukraine "step by step, carefully, and consistently."

Translation: We're not close to winning.

In fact, for the domestic audience, one of the chief aims of the speech seemed to be the normalization of war, an effort to get Russians who have not fled the country used to what could be years of conflict and isolation.

Putin promised soldiers two-week leave twice a year, for example, and support for the families of soldiers killed, and spoke at length about how businesses and industries should adjust and assist.

Despite all that, Putin did not actually tell Russians that Russia will win the war in Ukraine; he did not even say what would constitute a win. He used the word "victory" four times, all in one paragraph that was about putative future businesses, schools, and scientific discoveries -- not the invasion.

Killed In Action

A result that Putin could claim as a victory, even grudgingly, is not at hand. After several major battlefield setbacks last year, a new Russian offensive in the Donbas, in eastern Ukraine, is going slowly as the casualty toll -- not disclosed by the Russian state but estimated at 200,000 Russian combatants killed or wounded since the invasion on February 24, 2022 -- rises fast.

The high casualties are exacerbating tension between factions and individual figures in Russia's government and the elite. The head of the mercenary group Wagner, Yevgeny Prigozhin, posted a gruesome photo this week of what he said were the corpses of Russian fighters killed in the Donbas because of a lack of ammunition, deepening a dispute with the Defense Ministry.

Without a big battlefield success story to tell and without any of the escalatory steps that some had speculated he might announce a year after the invasion such as a new mobilization drive to bring Belarus and the breakaway regions of Georgia closer to Russia or some grim new ultimatum leveled at Ukraine and the United States, Putin tried a go-to tactic: nuclear saber-rattling.

Putin "could have clarified his war aims, but he didn't. He could have made explicit escalatory threats, but he didn't," Sam Greene, a professor at Kings College London's Russia Institute, wrote on Twitter after the address. "He could have made explicit escalatory threats, but he didn't."

In a speech devoid of any bombshell, the closest thing was his announcement that Russia would suspend its participation in New START, the only remaining nuclear arms reduction treaty between the United States and Russia.

He also said he had ordered new nuclear missiles to be put on combat duty. And he followed up the next day with more words about Russia's nuclear weapons, using a holiday honoring the military to hark back to World War II and promise to modernize the armed forces. "As before, we will pay increased attention to strengthening the nuclear triad," he said, referring to nuclear missiles based on land, at sea, and on long-range bombers.

"Putin, empty-handed after a bloody winter offensive, talked up Russia's nuclear arsenal," was how the Reuters news agency put it in a daily briefing.

'He Seeks To Stoke Fear'

One aim of all the nuclear talk, presumably, was to reassure Russians that their country is strong and expand on the false narrative that Russia is fighting a defensive war against NATO and the West, not a war of aggression and choice -- Putin's choice -- against Ukraine.

Another was to make the West more worried and undermine its unity in support of Ukraine, which many analysts say is one of Moscow's chief goals, given the obstacles to winning the war, or even achieving some of Putin's more modest intentions for the invasion, on the battlefield.

In the eyes of the Kremlin, Putin's speech "justifies continuing the war without specifying strategic aims, it stokes an amorphous fear of the U.S./NATO among Russians, and it tries -- vaguely -- to make Washington worry about nuclear arms control," Greene wrote.

"Putin's move is political, not military," Jon Wolfsthal, senior adviser at Global Zero, an NGO that advocates eliminating nuclear weapons, wrote on Twitter. "He seeks to unsettle NATO allies and stoke fears of broader war because he is losing in Ukraine."

The United States "has extensive ability to monitor Russian nuclear forces even without a treaty in place" and "still has many more nuclear weapons than it needs to deter Russian nuclear use," Wolfsthal wrote.

While Putin's move caused concern, there was no immediate evidence it would weaken Western resolve to support Ukraine.

"We're not going to change our policy on Ukraine because he's in a hissy fit over the New START treaty," Air And Space Forces magazine quoted Rose Gottemoeller, who was the top U.S. negotiator of the pact and served as NATO deputy secretary general from 2016 to 2019, as saying on February 22. "That's just not going to happen."

"Putin's ongoing attempts to hold New START hostage to his demands for the end of U.S. support to Ukraine will fail," Gottemoeller tweeted.

New START entered into force in 2011 and was extended for five years at the start of Biden's term, early in 2021, but that was over a year before Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and Moscow and Washington have been at odds over New START for several months. In late January, the United States accused Russia of violating the treaty by refusing to facilitate inspections.

Signed in 2010 by U.S. President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, New START was the showcase of a short-lived "reset" in ties. Relations became increasingly sour again starting in 2011, and Medvedev's over-the-top public hawkishness is a particularly grotesque attribute of Russia today.

The nuclear weapons pact is due to expire in February 2026, and the chances of a replacement seem slim unless tensions somehow ease considerably by then -- a development that is difficult to imagine while Russia's war on Ukraine rages with no end in sight.

For now, Russian officials have signaled that Moscow intends to remain within the limits on deployments and abide by other aspects of the treaty. Bien called the suspension a "big mistake" but said he did not interpret it as an indication that Putin is "thinking of using nuclear weapons or anything like that."

The "New Start suspension is an illusion, since no suspension clause is contained in the treaty and Putin is in no position to start a nuclear arms race with the United States," wrote Patrick Wintour, diplomatic editor of The Guardian. "But it is the last piece of nuclear security architecture, and so provides some leverage over Washington and will keep the nuclear threat bubbling."

In any case, Wintour concluded, Putin's address was a "speech full of lies, darkness, [and] self-pitying isolation."

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

RFE/RL intern Ella Jaffe contributed to this report.