In the Duma’s election campaign, Putin is in survival mode | Russia

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The Kremlin is putting Ukraine on the agenda of the parliamentary election campaign in Russia and that is not a good sign.

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s references to Ukraine in his June 30 Q&A session produced some of the most newsworthy lines of an otherwise boring show.

One was related to the recent incursion of a British warship into the 12 nautical mile territorial area around Crimea, a peninsula that Russia annexed to Ukraine in 2014. Like most countries in the world , the UK did not recognize this takeover, so it sent a ship into Crimean waters to reaffirm Ukraine’s sovereignty over the peninsula. Russia responded with warning shots fired from a small coast guard boat from a safe distance.

Putin said he was not concerned about what he called a “provocation” because even if the Russians had sunk the British warship, HMS Defender, it would not have caused a shock anyway. world War. That is, he is skeptical of preparing the West to go as far as Russia could in the game of fighting Ukraine.

His other statement was a teaser for an upcoming article on Russia’s relations with Ukraine he is authoring. He only mentioned one line of this article – that Russians and Ukrainians are one people. He knew full well that he was going to anger the Ukrainians (and indeed, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was promptly reprimanded), but this narrative was aimed squarely at his core national audience, who – like it or not – don’t believe it. so much because of Putin, but because the strong personal and family ties between the two countries are part of the complicated social reality of this part of the world.

These statements by the Russian president come less than three months before the elections to the State Duma on September 19. And it is clear that they set the tone for the campaign leading up to the vote.

Elections in Russia are neither free nor fair, but they serve as a plebiscite intended to confirm the remaining majority support for the president and, thereby, his legitimacy. Maintaining the impression that a relative majority of Russians still support Putin’s policies is not easy, especially when it comes to his party, United Russia, rather than Putin himself.

Recent polls have shown that support for the ruling party is waning – with some polls falling as low as 27% – suggesting it risks losing its constitutional majority in the Duma.

Earlier this year, Putin unleashed an unprecedented crackdown on the opposition led by jailed politician Alexei Navalny, whom his team and many commentators have directly linked to the election campaign. Banned from participating in elections, Navalny’s movement focuses its efforts on derailing United Russia by supporting any random candidate who has the best chance of winning.

This strategy proved to be effective in the last local elections, which is why this time around, the Kremlin chose to act preemptively and to ban Navalny’s movement and arrest many of its militants in across the country. Crackdown may help Putin avoid election embarrassment, but it further erodes his regime’s legitimacy in the eyes of the Russian public.

At the same time, he also launched a markedly new strategy for the United Russia election campaign. Previously, it was up to Putin’s staunch lieutenant Dmitry Medvedev to lead the party in the elections. This helped imbue it with a flair for liberalism, which allowed the Kremlin to broaden the electoral base far beyond its right-wing nationalist core.

But this time around, the Kremlin spin specialists are completely focused on keeping that basic support intact. This is why the list of United Russia candidates is topped by two political heavyweights who embody Russia’s newly gained assertion and escalation of confrontation with the West – Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and the Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergey Lavrov.

The choice of these two numbers is an indication of Putin’s own survival strategy.

In power for 21 years, the Russian president faces a society that has far exceeded his penchant for his majority regime. But the stalemate with the West offers a potential escape route. The examples of Iran, Cuba and North Korea prove that nothing is more resilient than a political regime identified by the American establishment as a threat.

The American containment of an “enemy regime” can last more than half a century, to the satisfaction of the dictators who can blame the difficulties endured by their people on “American aggression” and justify the repression with the need to protect themselves. mobilize against the perceived American threat. Needless to say, such an arrangement serves the interest groups and military industry in the United States, which thrive on the conflict. Political scientists call it external legitimation – when a perceived threat becomes the main source of legitimacy for an authoritarian leader.

Of course, Russia, with a well-connected and informed society, is not North Korea. But in the absence of other options, this confrontational strategy is worth trying and will likely allow the regime to buy a few more years before facing a level of public anger that it will not be able to. to face.

The Kremlin began to unfold its electoral campaign narratives with a programmatic article by Sergey Lavrov published in the Russian newspaper Kommersant, which accused the “declining” West of imperialism and tried to impose ideological “totalitarianism” on the rest of the world. world. Putin’s Ukraine-themed play is supposed to be the next in the works.

The danger lies in the rules of the political drama that prescribe that words must be followed by action – specific foreign policies, or worse, military action – closer to the date of elections. This is not something that is inevitable, as the appetite for a new confrontation with the West and the immediate neighbors is currently low. But if the West or Ukraine provided the Kremlin with an anchor that its propaganda could turn into a plausible narrative of Russia in the face of a threat, it certainly would.

Enter British Prime Minister Boris Johnson with his Global Britain plan to reaffirm his country’s great power status after it transformed into a marginalized peripheral European state upon exiting the EU. HMS Defender’s oddly communicated freedom of navigation exercise (its intentional nature was confirmed by a stack of documents left at a bus stop in Kent) may have served this purpose, especially given British memories. from the Crimean War in the 19th century.

But do such actions help resolve the ongoing military conflict between Russia and Ukraine? A fundamental problem with the reaffirmation of Ukraine’s sovereignty over Crimea is the lack of enthusiasm for this prospect among the people of the peninsula. A rare opinion poll carried out by the German think tank ZOiS in 2017 showed that a large majority of Crimeans preferred to stay within Russian borders. It is highly unlikely that the sighting of a British warship near Sevastopol will cause them to change their mind.

Putin’s propaganda machine brilliantly played the HMS Defender incident for domestic consumption – first, by projecting reserve and confidence in the handling of the incursion, and later – by warning the president himself that he would have no qualms about sinking a hostile ship if that happened again.

If Ukraine or its Western allies tried to test Putin’s resolve ahead of the election, he would likely jump at the chance.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeera.



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