The Week in Russia: The Demonization of a Decade

The daughter of imprisoned Kremlin opponent Alexei Navalny accepted the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought on her father's behalf, as the government's push to shut down prominent human rights group Memorial headed for a meeting in late December amid condemnation from the West.

Russia's leadership rejected a proposal to require QR codes for access to public transport amid fierce resistance to the implementation of coronavirus safety measures, even as the death toll since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic surpassed 1 million, according to some estimates.

A German court said the killing of an asylum seeker and former militant from Georgia's ethnic Chechen enclave was ordered by the Russian state, one of several developments that underscored concerns about Russian actions abroad, from eastern Ukraine to Western Europe to West Africa and beyond.

Meanwhile, President Vladimir Putin described the Soviet collapse 30 years ago as the "disintegration of historic Russia," adding to concerns about his intentions toward Ukraine amid a troop buildup and the Kremlin's increasingly insistent demands for a binding pledge to refrain from further expansion to the East.

Here are some of the key developments in Russia over the past week and some of the ongoing achievements.

Call me a taxi.

Vladimir Putin became Russia's acting president on the last day of 1999 and has been president or prime minister ever since, for 22 years and counting: He could seek re-election in 2024 and could potentially stay in the Kremlin until 2036, after changing the constitution last year to remove the term limits he had faced.

While the timing must be largely coincidental, the fact that Putin came to power just hours before the end of the decade has proven convenient for the Kremlin from a propaganda perspective. Also convenient, of course, is the fact that world oil prices rose during his first two terms, in 2000-2008, fueling strong economic growth in resource-rich Russia.

Over the years, Putin has often referred to the 1990s as a chaotic, desperate, and troubled time, underscoring the uncertainty that haunted citizens and highlighting the economic struggles that millions of people faced behind the curtain of the communist system.

Putin did it again in a film broadcast on state television in prime time on Sunday evening, December 12, claiming that he sometimes used his car as a taxi, to earn money to supplement his income — a claim that seems at once overwhelming and probably untrue.

Pointless because so many people did it at the time — not just for a few extra rubles, but because the taxi system left over from Soviet times was unable to meet the growing demand caused by capitalism, so they were fulfilling a need that is now being met by online taxi companies, Uber and the rest.

Probably untrue for several reasons. Putin has said in the past that he only considered becoming a taxi driver. He had a steady job in St. Petersburg by May 1990, and by 1993, a legislative committee investigating an alleged multimillion-dollar electricity scheme had called for his dismissal. He was out of work for a few weeks in the summer of 1996, when he moved to Moscow and had his first Kremlin appointment; two years later, the veteran Soviet KGB officer was head of the Federal Security Service (FSB).

The taxi driver’s comment, which drew a flurry of derision from critics, was largely about the economy — and an attempt to show that he too “lived like everyone else.” But in the state-run television documentary, Putin took aim at the 1990s in geopolitical terms as well, calling the dissolution of the USSR in 1991 “the dissolution of historical Russia under the name of the Soviet Union.”

Separation is difficult to do.

The Soviet Union encompassed most of the territory held by the Russian Empire. And this remark was perhaps nothing new, considering it came from a leader whose most famous comment — with the possible exception of the one about killing Chechen militants at home — was to lament the Soviet collapse as the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the 20th century — or, in an alternative translation, one of the greatest.

But in the context of Moscow’s military buildup near Ukraine and the clamor over demands that NATO exclude Ukraine, Georgia and other states from membership and refrain from deploying certain specific weapons “close” to Russia’s borders, the comment was certainly provocative. Coming almost exactly 30 years after the Soviet Union ceased to exist, it could be read as a suggestion that Russia has a legitimate claim to 14 fully independent countries.

If this interpretation sounds far-fetched, consider that when Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, Putin claimed that the Black Sea peninsula was “originally Russian land” — even though, among other facts that cast deep doubt on this claim, historians say that the Crimean Tatars are the oldest population settled there since the departure of the Greeks in ancient times.

In any case, when it comes to Ukraine, Putin’s new lament for the Soviet collapse seemed to fit with a series of written and spoken comments in which he has either explicitly questioned Ukraine’s right to nationhood or full sovereignty, adding to concerns about the Kremlin’s intentions toward its neighbor.

A separate state television program echoed Putin's false claim that what is happening in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine amounts to "genocide" by Kiev — a piece of propaganda that appears to be intended to justify any future military action targeting the neighboring state.

On the day Putin's comments were broadcast, state television host Dmitry Kiselyov, seen as a major Kremlin propaganda outlet, criticized the 1990s and in particular Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin, who was Russia's president from 1991 until he handed over the reins to Putin on New Year's Eve in 1999.

Kiselyov portrayed Gorbachev and Yeltsin as puppets who received nothing in return for accepting German reunification and the withdrawal of Soviet troops, handed the former Warsaw Pact countries to the West on a platter, and, above all, failed to secure written guarantees that NATO would not expand eastward.

The monologue, as the BBC's Moscow correspondent Steve Rosenberg said, seemed intended to "enhance Putin's role in modern Russia", to "arouse resentment among the Russian public about Moscow's lost influence" and to "persuade viewers that Russia is under threat".

Threats and Demands

With Moscow suddenly pushing hard for legally binding promises from the West, including a pledge to end NATO's eastward expansion, Kiselyov's rousing speech may also have been designed to tell Russians that these demands are not only justified but long overdue — and potentially worth fighting a full-scale war for.

On December 4, multiple media outlets reported that US intelligence officials have determined that Russia is planning for a possible military offensive that could begin in early 2022, involving an estimated 175,000 troops.

Russia denies it is preparing for a new invasion of Ukraine, where it has controlled Crimea since March 2014 and supports separatist forces holding parts of Donbas — and whose war against Kiev has killed more than 13,000 fighters and civilians since April of that year.

But the Kremlin has undermined that denial by using the military buildup and the implicit threat of a new invasion as a backdrop for its demands on the West and Kiev, which is pressing to implement the 2015 Minsk 2 peace plan for the Donbas conflict, as Moscow interprets it.

And Russia also denies sending soldiers to fight in Donbas, despite what Kiev and NATO say is irrefutable evidence. Dramatic new evidence emerged this week, when media outlets uncovered a November ruling by a court in the Russian region adjacent to Donbas that referred to food rations intended for “military units of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation deployed in the territory of the separatist-controlled part of eastern Ukraine.”

Following a video call between Putin and US President Joe Biden on December 7, there has been a flurry of diplomacy and there could be more in the coming weeks. But tensions remain high and the threat of an escalation of hostilities persists.

On December 16, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg reiterated that Moscow cannot veto any country's NATO membership and said that Russia had increased the number of troops near Ukraine's borders.

“We see no sign that this buildup is stopping or slowing down,” Stoltenberg said at a news conference with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy at NATO headquarters. “On the contrary, it is continuing.”