POLITICAL SCIENTIST BORIS VARGA: "Through the elections, Putin wants to project the image that Russia is not actually at war with Ukraine, that there is a 'special military operation'"

 

 

What will Putin's choices be, is the only logical question if you bear in mind that after the aggression against Ukraine, Russia has turned into a neo-totalitarian state in which all human freedoms have been abolished or limited, and Putin is successfully restoring Stalin's regime. Although it sounds impossible in the fully connected and globalized XXI century, Russia is the best example of how a country of dubious democracy can overnight end up in mass arrests, repression, political murders and total darkness.

 

Killing in the gulag the personification of the opposition, Alexei Navalny, a month before the presidential elections is a clear message of how all those who oppose or do not support the tyrant will end up. It is difficult to say which type of suffering is more frightening - Siberia or the bullet that killed Boris Nemtsov in the center of Moscow. Or some accidental explosion of the plane in which the defector Yevgeny Prigozhin and the entire top of the Wagner family were blown up.

 

But no, Putin did not decide on repression to keep 140 million people behind barbed wire on free labor, fear and imprisonment. His "reality factories" are on a different mission. The war climax around the Kremlin is trying to portray Putin as a true and just world leader, who opposes Western NATO imperialism. The projection of a new good and free world, which, unlike Ukraine, even organizes elections under the burden of the universe.

 

The 'illegitimate' Zelenski

Putin wants to show that Russia, unlike Ukraine, has democracy and elections. The Russian propaganda machine is spreading the story that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky will soon lose his legitimacy, because his five-year presidential term is coming to an end. The term of office of the Ukrainian government has also expired, and the elections would have been held in peacetime in October 2023.

 

Although a state of war is in force in Ukraine and there is a consensus within the country and among key allies that it is not time for elections, the worm of doubt and discord has penetrated deeply into the wounded Ukrainian body politic. First of all, after the unsuccessful Ukrainian counter-offensive, the earlier dispute between President Zelensky and Chief of the General Staff Valery Zaluzhny was completely exposed in public.

 

In an atmosphere of mutual accusations about who is responsible for the bad assessment of Russia's strong defense and whether Ukraine is conducting a war of liberation well, General Zaluzhny's trust rating at the end of last year far surpassed Zelensky's, whose rating is in decline.

 

It was said that a Russian intelligence operation was involved, as in the case of the separation of the protagonists of the "Orange Revolution" Viktor Yushchenko and Yulia Tymoshenko. It was announced that if the president replaces the chief general, Zalužni will join politics. And there was a change, Zelensky appointed General Oleksandr Sirsky, who led the ground forces and brilliantly defended Kiev at the beginning of the war, in Zaluzhny's place.

 

Intrigues and shifts deepen the overall gloomy atmosphere and affect the weakening of Ukraine's military morale, which in the phase of the war of mutual attrition is now the most important. The war will last, and sooner or later Ukraine will have to call elections. While he has such an image of Ukraine that he doesn't have to edit much, Putnu is in a hurry with another re-election.

 

Projecting various realities

 

With the election, Putin wants to project the image that Russia is not actually at war with Ukraine, that there is a "special military operation" against the Nazis armed by the West. Anti-Western sentiments are always conducive to maintaining Russia's inner patriotic spirit. Frightening angry voters with "gay rope" and stories that "their sons will wear skirts" always succeeds in backward societies, anywhere in the world.

 

It is better that their father whips them, than that the West drinks the blood and cheap raw materials of a poor and on its knees Russia. Although public opinion polls in Russia are not realistic due to fear, they are part of the expected politically appropriate responses.

 

It is a completely different reality from the one seen from this side of the Iron Curtain, where Putin has been winning the war in recent months thanks to military cannon fodder and the sacrifice of thousands of recruits in an already demographically failing Russia. The Russian army is quietly mobilizing various social strata all the time that do not threaten Putin's power. First, he cleansed the national and religious minorities, the deep provinces, and then the cities.

 

The war in Ukraine will be won primarily by whoever is able to mobilize more people to the battlefield, and in order to control the mobilization, Putin needs a serf with his forehead bent to the ground. The Russian emperor knows that the people are dangerous when they keep quiet, so he directs them a play about elections.

 

Elections are always a chance for change

 

The elections are also important for Putin because of his foreign policy state ties, to show authoritarian partners, primarily from BRICS, that he controls the situation in the country and that he is a reliable ally. Putin pretends all the time that he is waging a part of the general war in Ukraine "for a better tomorrow" and in the name of the "global south".

 

And that story is not just a projection of Russian bots. Recently, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi boasted that Russia and China are creating a new paradigm of relations between major countries in the world. Putin is very useful for Beijing, because he does dirty work, offers cheap energy and accelerates geopolitical processes, which would have lasted decades without a big war in Europe.

 

The biggest challenge is Putin's attempt to create a vision of the future through a change in the paradigm of world politics and the rise of authoritarian powers, in which the restoration of Stalin's Russia would be a long-term reality. Thanks to the contribution to the victory over Nazism and fascism in the Second World War, Russia never faced the end with millions of its own citizens killed, genocide, starvation of Ukrainians, mass deportations of Crimean Tatars. Later, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Moscow tolerated the ruination of Grozny, the invasion of Georgia, and the annexation of Crimea.

 

Ukraine and Palestine are two different stories, and surely the wartime Russian propaganda with "denazification" and "demilitarization" of Ukrainians and NATO aggressors would have completely failed if the war in Gaza had not happened. The destruction, ruthlessness and unrestrainedness of Israel testify to the fact that the West does not have the strength to control the situation in the Middle East, and this is a chance for the "new Stalin" in the Kremlin to wash his bloody hands.

 

Although there is a minimal probability for this, going to the polls is always a chance to despotize the vulnerable heel. Putin would not have organized the elections if he was not sure that only the stronger would emerge after them. But in totalitarian regimes cracks can give birth to surprises and quick turnarounds. This happened with the kidnapping of Gorbachev, the failed coup and the sudden collapse of the USSR like a house of cards.