Page 12 - Russia OUTLOOK 2023

unrest, but for the moment Russians feel they have more to lose than to gain
from a colour revolution, with Ukraine providing the object lesson to curb their
revolutionary zeal. That gives Putin a year to deal with the problem before the
2024 elections, but in the meantime, he is already shoring up his control to buy
more time.

The other key recent change was the change to the constitution in
June-July 2020 that allows Putin to stand for two more terms. His current term
expires in 2024, but he could stand again and stay in office until 2036 if he
choses. (He has not confirmed that he will run in 2024.)

The change was designed to prevent the inevitable jockeying amongst the
Kremlin fractions to find an acceptable replacement for Putin. He himself said
in November 2021 that the uncertainty over his candidacy brings stability to
Russian politics as that jockeying won’t start until it is clear that he is leaving.
The danger is that the jockeying would destabilise domestic politics and
reduce his power.

The showdown with the West has been a long time in coming but the
Kremlin has been signalling for over two years it was fed up with being bullied
by the West. In February 2020 Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov gave a
“new rules of the game” speech where he said that the Kremlin would no
longer tolerate the dual sanctions with one hand and business deals with the
other. He humiliated EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell, who was on a trip to
Moscow at the time, and followed up by threatening to break off diplomatic
relations a few weeks later. Diplomatic relations with Nato were broken off in
the autumn of that year.

The key issue was Putin’s insistence that the West commit to never allowing
Ukraine to join Nato. Putin had been warning about Nato expansion since his
famous speech at the Munich Security Conference in 2007 where he
threatened that Russia would push back if his concerns were not addressed.

The origins of Putin’s pique at the Nato expansion arguably go back to back to
the verbal promises made to Mikhail Gorbachev by most of the Western
leaders in 1990, and the US Secretary of State at the time, James Baker, that
in the meantime are a matter of historical record. Putin referred to those
promises in his Munich speech and has brought them up several times again
in the last two years. That is why he was so specific about asking for “legally
binding” promises this time round. And his paranoia about Nato’s expansion
was fed by former president George W Bush’s unilateral withdrawal from the
ABM treaty in 2002 and the Nato missiles that were put into place in Romania
and Poland subsequently, to nominally protect against “rogue states” – namely
North Korea.

The first manifestation of this change came in 2008, when the Russian Foreign
Ministry drew up a draft plan for a new pan-European security deal that
included a fair specific framework proposal released by the Russian Foreign
Ministry in 2009. That was rejected by Nato too. By 2020 he felt Russia was
strong enough to act.

2021 was marked by Russia moving troops up to Ukraine’s borders twice as
the Kremlin attempted to put pressure on the West, and the US in particular,

12 Russia OUTLOOK 2022 www.intellinews.com