For Vladimir Putin, the great global troublemaker, problems are mounting closer to home

There have been better years for Vladimir Putin. Rewind 12 months and all the headlines had him as a geopolitical magic worker; a man whose outsized influence belied the sum of realpolitik’s constituent parts. At home, he had seen off a protest movement while preserving personal ratings above 70 per cent. Abroad, he was both underdog and power broker; a mischief-in-chief.  

What has happened since has brought the Putin star down to size. Problems began as early January, with a constitutional ploy to bypass term limits that shocked in its brazenness. Afterwards came an ill-advised oil price war that sent already hard currency revenues tumbling. Then denialism and absenteeism in the age of Covid; historic levels of fraud during the public vote on the new constitution; major protests in the Far East that continue to this day; growing instability in Russia’s backyard; and an attempt by the Belarusian people to topple a fellow autocrat.  

Now, the poisoning of rival Alexei Navalny – and Europe’s clear-eyed response to it – has pushed Russia into an even darker and more isolated place.  

The veteran president is not a man to write off glibly. For two decades he has monopolised and redefined what political power means in Russia. He has a knack for surviving crises – many of his own making – before emerging stronger. His system has also proven adaptive. Putinism itself has evolved through several iterations – pick-and-mixing democracy, post-modernism, corruption and totalitarianism to arrive at the indefinable through-the-looking-glass autocracy it is today.  

But there are reasons to suggest the president and his system are in a serious bind. Major internal tensions aren’t going away. A stagnating, crony-led economy has meant six years of falling real-terms wages, necessitated unpopular reforms, and led to the tightening of purse strings during the coronavirus pandemic. As a result, trust in Putin is now hovering around all-time lows – according to one poll, this metric now stands at 33 per cent, down from 60 per cent three years ago. Just before his poisoning, Navalny seemed to be tapping into such disillusionment with an effective tactical voting campaign focused on regional heartlands.  

“Putin has reached a point that is almost inevitable from the controlling policies he has promoted,” says Sir Andrew Wood, the UK’s ambassador to Moscow from 1995 to 2000. “I don’t see how he is going to be able to change and he is losing the charisma that was his strength for so many years.”  

A great part of Putin’s historic domestic appeal came from perceived strength in foreign policy. The annexation of Crimea and Ukraine campaign, for example, led to three years of approval ratings above 80 per cent (as per the surveys of Levada Centre, Russia’s most independent pollsters). By the time of Syria, the picture was more nuanced, with polls recording frustration at the amount of money spent on military adventures.  

Now even the image of the president having any great influence is under question. After spending much of the last two decades demanding the west keep out of what Russia calls its “near abroad”, Putin is finding out his power there isn’t all it that it stacked up to be.  

In the conflict over Nagorno Karabakh, the failure of belated Russian diplomacy stands in contrast to the success of Turkish influence on the Azerbaijani battlefield. In Kyrgyzstan, Moscow was a bystander amid a chaotic coup, the third disorderly transfer of power in 15 years. In Armenia, he failed to stop a revolution from happening, and only accepted its outcome after the local security forces switched. His Ukraine policy was arguably disastrous – keeping the country out of Nato but at the cost of turning a nation against him. When the dust settles, the same may well be said of Belarus.  

“He thought he had a prize, some kind of new Yalta agreement where the west gave him all these countries to rule over,” says Maxim Trudolyubov, senior fellow at the Kennan Institute. “Instead, he’s surrounded by conflict and is finding he doesn’t have the resources to do anything. It’s all a bit of liability.”  

The fallout from the Siberian poisoning of Alexei Navalny has meanwhile undermined lines of communication with Europe. Moscow seems genuinely spooked by the unambiguous response of Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron. The latter even appeared to leak Putin’s absurd, but private claims that Navalny had poisoned himself.  

The imposition of personal sanctions on Putin’s political staff – including former prime minister Sergei Kiriyenko – was as close as the Europeans could be to accusing the president himself of issuing the order.  

“The Kremlin finds it hard to understand that law has meaning in the west, since it doesn’t in Moscow,” says diplomat Wood. “It’s reminiscent of the MH17 affair, and how they don’t understand that an inquiry into the downing of a passenger plane can’t simply be dropped by political order.”  

Europe’s move to impose personal sanctions on Putin’s inner political circle is a new development. On one level, of course, it is a largely symbolic gesture. Those on the receiving end of asset freezes and travel bans will be recompensed by the Russian taxpayer. But on a second level, the sanctions for the first time establish a personal cost for being associated with criminality. The strategy seems to be that imposing such costs will affect the calculus for some in governing elites.  

“Еvery round of sanctions increases the tension in the sense that people understand that working for Putin’s politics is dangerous,” says Sergei Guriev, a former Kremlin economist now advising Navalny from Paris. What it won’t do is affect Putin’s behaviour: “From Salisbury to Siberia to Berlin, he has shown he doesn’t care about sanctions. If you want to change the regime, you need to convince the Russian public that Putinism is bankrupt, and let them do the rest.”  

For the time being, the elites retain faith in Putin, suggests Ekaterina Schulmann, a political scientist and former member of the Kremlin’s human rights council. The president remains the country’s most popular politician, she says. “As consistent as his fall in popularity is, approval and disapproval ratings are still holding at a level of 2 to 1. There is no obvious alternative or source of legitimacy.”  

Yet the president’s former domination over domestic affairs is shifting. The number of official visits and meetings across the country has been on a downward trajectory since late 2014, suggesting decreasing engagement. 

This has combined with the ballooning of the government apparatus, and the growing dominance of security agencies in domestic politics.  

With such agencies at the helm, clampdowns are never far from the equation. Yet the lessons of Belarus would suggest that the viability of Putin’s regime is unlikely to be resolved by a show of force on the streets. The battles will be elsewhere – and largely in people’s minds. The Kremlin certainly has a sophisticated propaganda machine on its side, but equally has failed to come up with a convincing ideology or coherent vision of the future.  

“People like Navalny are a danger because the government can’t fight them on the new battlegrounds of YouTube,” says the former Kremlin adviser Guriev.  

“That’s why they decided to fight with Novichok.”