Putin Is Now More Dangerous Than Ever

Russian forces have now seized the strategic port city of Kherson, which would provide a land bridge to Crimea. With the invasion now entering its 9th day, Putin’s 60-mile-long convoy is still stalling outside of Kyiv in the north as of late Thursday, while another round of talks between Russia and Ukraine produced only Russian resolve to continue the onslaught despite the fact that Putin has now become an outcast and is being cut off from much of the world. 

There is one school of thought here that Putin has already lost the war. There is another school of thought that much worse is to come and that an unhinged leader has nothing more to lose as Moscow reels from sanctions and hundreds of Russian soldiers won’t be coming home, ever (Moscow says they’ve lost just under 500 forces; Kyiv says the Russians losses have hit 9,000). It’s not the walk-in-the-park Putin seems to have thought it would be. It’s not the crowning achievement of a would-be authoritarian. Russians are likely unimpressed, at best, and bitter, at worst, as the Russian economy tanks and the ruble loses 30% of its value.

Back in Russia, the Interior Ministry has warned people against protesting the war in Ukraine, noting that it has introduced “extra measures” to deal with such protests. An independent monitoring agency says that over 7,500 Russians have been arrested over the past week in anti-war protests. 

Putin’s course here is a very difficult one from which to withdraw. If he fails in Ukraine, he will fail at home. He may fail at home, regardless. While we should not underestimate his resolve and his money, it’s his oligarchs who could end up taking him down, Kazakhstan-style, which is exactly what Putin fears. So far, at least three oligarchs have spoken out against the war, careful not to directly criticize Putin. Those oligarchs include aluminum magnate Oleg Deripaska (a Putin ally), who has demanded “explanations” as to what will happen to the economy in the near term. He also noted that “we need real crisis managers and not fantasists with a bunch of silly presentations”.  A second oligarch is Ukrainian-born Russian billionaire Mikhail Fridman, the head of Alfa Group, who has called an end to the “bloodshed”, though he has been far more cautious than Deripaska. Fridman’s Alfa Group holds the largest private bank in Russia and needs to raise money on the U.S. market. A third oligarch, Oleg Tinkov, appears to have lost $5 billion since Russia invaded Ukraine. Now, the digital banking tycoon is speaking out against the war, too. 

What all these oligarchs are doing is reaching out to each other, testing the waters, via statements to the media. Anything else would risk too much. They are the only forces who can bring down Putin, but they don’t trust each other, either. They fear Putin, but Putin also fears them. Putin will be thinking hard about what just happened in Kazakhstan. There, Nazarbayev, the former long-time dictator, had passed power to a puppet president who then became too powerful. Nazarbayev’s answer to that was to hijack an organic peaceful protest against soaring fuel prices to launch a coup. Kazakhstan was a bit of an experiment for Putin. He wanted to see how it would work to keep Nazarbayev in power forever, through a puppet president. It failed, and, in the end, Putin came to the aid of Narabayev’s new enemy, quashing the coup swiftly. Putin wishes to stay in power forever, and his routes to do so are being cut off. That makes him more dangerous than ever.