🧵 Evgeny Prigozhin and Ramzan Kadyrov have recently criticized the army leadership going as far as to name and shame specific generals.
Some suspect they represent the "party of war" within the Kremlin or even nascent hawkish opposition to Putin. I disagree; here's why ⬇️
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This conflict invokes a pattern familiar to any scholar of Russian politics.
Putin sets up two or more centers of power and allows petty feuds between them. By now, this is almost an instinctive move for him.
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One such long-standing feud is between Rosneft, Russia's biggest oil company, and Transneft, an oil pipeline monopoly. Both are headed by Putin's close associates with a KGB background.
Rosneft's Sechin an Transneft's Tokarev often clash over oil transportation issues.
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Another long-standing conflict is between two law enforcement agencies, the Prosecutor's Office and the Investigative Committee (IC). At some point, the IC even tried to interrogate the son of the prosecutor general.
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Both conflicts were public and involved real sources of tension (money, turf wars). Yet neither led to any kind of destabilization of Putinism.
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Putin has been perfectly okay with such conflicts as they make him indispensable - who else can resolve them?
Furthermore, as long as the elite clans are fighting with each other, they will not unite to oust Putin himself.
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As simple as this tactic is, it has served Putin well during his 22 years in power.
To me, Putin's heavy reliance on Kadyrov and Prigozhin during this war represents the same old playbook ("Personalist dictatorship 101"), but there's a catch.
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It is one thing to play such palace games in peacetime and another to do the same during Europe's most brutal war in 75 years.
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As the military experts and war correspondents (including Z ones) point out, lack of proper coordination between Russia's motley crew of ground forces - the regular army, Kadyrov's troops, Prigozhin's PMC, Donbas militias - results in diminished effectiveness.
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Russia's "clan state" or "network state" is ill-suited for war which requires highly coordinated and rational organization that overrules any political feuds.
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Furthermore, Kadyrov/Prigozhin's attacks test the patience of the generals. Unlike Shoigu who is well versed in palace politics, the generals have never played the political games they are now forced to play.
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The generals are also easily thrown under the bus by Putin. They are given the weakest hand in this situation - maximum responsibility and no real political influence.
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Is it smart to alienate the generals during war? About as smart as launching this war itself.
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The bottom line: noises from Kadyrov and Prigozhin are well within the limits of typical Kremlin politics, but this kind of politics itself is out of touch with the reality of war that the Kremlin is waging.
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More defeats on the battlefield are coming and Putin will eventually have to face the political consequences of a lost war.
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Recent staff changes at the top in Russia reveal Putin's thinking about his entourage. Essentially, he divides his people into three categories: experts on the Anglo-Saxon conspiracy, old heavyweights and guys actually capable of working ("technocrats").
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Putin's clear preference lies with the conspiracy experts, as he's become such an expert himself. He likes to talk to them and hang with them, discussing Russia's historic mission and Western perfidy.
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However, he realizes that such cadres should not be appointed to the positions that require real work. As much as he enjoys listening to them (or to himself through their speeches), he reserves positions of responsibility for the "technocrats"...
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I am devastated by the news from Moscow. The death toll is terrible. I will not speculate about the perpetrators. Nor will I tolerate gloating comments here.
One thing I will note though. After such an attack, one wants to know the truth - and this is precisely the thing the Russian authorities cannot deliver.
In 2017, a bomb blast killed 16 and wounded 87 in Saint-Petersburg metro. The remains of a suicide bomber, Akbarzhon Jalilov, were found on site.
Despite everything, there is a tendency in the West to see Russian "elections" as actual elections.
That is, Putin's "victory" is seen as reflecting genuine popular approval of the economic performance, military successes etc.
It just doesn't work this way in dictatorships.
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Syria's Assad "won" with 92% of the vote while the civil war was raging across most of the country. It wasn't even clear which territories "voted" in his "elections".
Tunisia's Ben Ali "won" with 90%. A year went by and he was ousted by a popular movement.
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It's not a problem for consolidated authoritarian regimes to stage an electoral spectacle with any result they like.
For instance, this time Putin decided to go the Central Asian way with an almost 90% result. Easy.
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You know what's especially ironic? As part of the "smart voting" strategy, Navalny called to vote for the second most popular candidate in single-seat elections across the country. That candidate was usually from... the Communist Party.
For Navalny and his team, this was a tactic in the conditions of electoral authoritarianism.
They understood full well it's impossible to replace the authorities with voting in Russia, but they believed one could make a dent in the regime's stability...
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...with a strategic voting campaign, combined with street protests and a media assault.
In effect, Navalny called to vote for hundreds of KPRF candidates across the country. For this, he got a lot of heat from Russia's die-hard anticommunist liberals.
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Rustling through the pages of (relatively) old papers.
10 March 2022. Alexander Khramchikhin, a military expert who is highly patriotic and loyal to the Kremlin, but not devoid of common sense, struggles to find reasons for the invasion of Ukraine.
- Ukraine was not going to be admitted into NATO, both because of territorial conflicts with Russia and unwillingness of some NATO members to admit Ukraine.
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- Ukraine was not going to be the place where any US "offensive weapons" were installed. If needed, missiles could be installed in Germany, Poland, Romania. Moreover, the US would not risk advanced weapons to fall into Russian hands.
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Ekaterina Duntsova and Russian electoral dictatorship. A 🧵
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Ekaterina Duntsova is a local activist and journalist from Rzhev, a small town in central Russia known mostly for the gruesome WW2 battles that happened there.
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A few weeks ago she announced her candidacy for the March 2024 presidential election. Today, she was blocked from participating under some formal pretext.
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