Last year, Tatyana Stanovaya, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Eurasia Center in Russia, analyzed how the invasion of Ukraine affected Russian politics. Stanovaya has been explaining the political situation in Russia to foreign audiences since 2018, when she founded R. Politik, a political and analytical firm now based in France. She recently said stalled progress on the battlefield has left the Russian elite increasingly disillusioned with Putin’s leadership.
I contacted Stanova, who is more comfortable communicating in English via e-mail; we exchanged several rounds of questions and answers. Our conversation, edited for length and clarity, is below. In it, we discuss why Putin allows right-wing nationalist criticism of his policies, what effective sanctions can actually achieve, and what explains Putin’s Russia for the meteoric rise of Yevgeny Prigozhin, founder of the Wagner Group.
you recently wrote that Putin is more vulnerable than most people think. Why is this?
We tend to identify the Putin regime with Putin himself. One often hears that if Putin disappears, his regime will fall. However, I caution against this assumption, as the regime could prove to be more resilient, extended and potentially radical than Putin himself. It depends on the circumstances of Putin’s departure, but in my opinion, his regime can survive it. This is due not only to natural causes related to age and health, but also to the fact that the war radically changed the internal situation in Russia.
Putin, once a strong leader with a clear plan, vision and resources to ensure the stability of the state, now appears misguided and indecisive. He fails to offer a hopeful strategy for Russia’s exit from this crisis. If Putin had conquered Ukraine in the first months of the war, there would have been no questions. He not only failed, but also created a crisis from which there was no clear way out. I’m not saying he doesn’t have a vision, but the way he interacts with the elites and deals with military defeats fuels uncertainty and anxiety about Russia’s future.
This was especially acute from September to February, when Ukraine was conducting a successful counter-offensive in the Kharkiv region, and the West showed firm intentions to supply Ukraine with weapons. Putin responded with anti-Western invectives and threats, sometimes with nuclear allusions, but without a clear roadmap of practical steps. Today, uncertainty has eased due to the proposed stabilization of the front line, and doubts are growing about Ukraine’s ability to strategically change the military situation and retake its occupied territories. However, the general feeling among the Russian elites is that attempts to win are doomed to failure. This opinion is shared not only by the elite, who consider the war a catastrophic mistake, but also by those who believe that Ukraine as a state does not exist and should be “denazified” – which, simply put, means becoming pro-Russian.
Putin is becoming too “crazy” for progressive groups who understand the limitations Russia will face due to sanctions on its technological and scientific development, and too soft for those who believe that Russia should opt for total mobilization (military and economically) and unleash all its power on Ukraine. Moreover, within the latter segment, there is a growing part of the elite that believes that it is already too late, that Russia will have to suspend the war in order to start radical internal reforms with total purges of the elite, redistribution of property and the imposition of state ideology. so that he can return to the war in better shape.
Putin seems to be ignoring all of this. Putin’s deficit is growing in the Putin regime. If he doesn’t seize the initiative, and I think he won’t because the situation doesn’t seem so bad to him, the next crisis the regime faces could cost him dearly.
Putin has allowed certain criticisms of his policies in terms of what might be called his right: the head of the Wagner group, pro-war bloggers who want more brutality against Ukraine, intelligence agencies who say in your article that they want a tougher autocracy. . Why?
One of Putin’s main features, which should not be overlooked, is his sincere belief in his historical “mission”. This means that his actions are not always related to situational political maneuvering, but sometimes to his conviction that he is serving the state that he cultivates. It may seem to the Western viewer that I justify or sympathize with Putin, but as an analyst, I am trying to understand the inner motivations, motivations and logic of politicians. Whether we like it or not, Putin believes he is serving Russia’s national interest, even if the way he does it harms Russia more than it helps.
Through this lens, he makes a clear distinction between right and good opposition and destructive and hostile opposition. If you look objectively, Yevgeny Prigozhin, with all his public activities during the year, caused political damage to the regime, perhaps much more than Alexei Navalny, the opposition leader in prison. Prigozhin is much more politically dangerous. He split the elites, attacked regime pillars like the army, and challenged Putin’s appointees and even the presidential administration using his own militias and his media allies. He has a much more radical agenda, which is usually allowed to spread in the information space. And yet he remains untouchable, thanks only to Putin personally.
The main difference between Navalny and Prigozhin in Putin’s eyes is that the former has destructive intentions to destroy Russia and is often used as a tool in the hands of Russia’s strategic enemies, the West. Prigozhin, no matter how destructive he may seem, is guided by pro-Russian priorities and best wishes. In other words, Putin considers Navalny a traitor and Prigozhin a true patriot. It’s the same with all the radically pro-war public on social networks.
The problem is that only Putin sees it that way. For a significant part of the Russian mainstream elite, Prigozhin, along with the “angry patriots,” as they are called by the Kremlin’s handlers of domestic politics, pose a real threat that must be stopped. This is yet another division between Putin and the elite. Many in the leadership see Prigozhin as a threat to the regime, from technocrats who are terrified of him to the FSB who see him as a threat. But Putin allows him to be. I wouldn’t exaggerate the level of Putin’s positive attitude towards Prigozhin, but he sees him as a real hero who is sometimes clumsy and goes too far and needs to be reined in because of his frequent emotional outbursts. But he is not an enemy and deserves his place in the system, no matter what others think.
