JRL NEWSWATCH: “Wartime Putinism: What the Disaster in Ukraine Has Done to the Kremlin — and to Russia” – Foreign Affairs/ Michael Kimmage, Maria Lipman
“It is tempting to see Putin’s war as a total failure. From Kyiv to Kherson, Russia has endured significant battlefield losses. It has solidified Western support for Ukraine … and provoked a formidable response from Kyiv. As Ukraine’s military improves, Russia’s prospects for ending the war on its terms are fading …. Russia also faces sanctions …. But … the Kremlin is hardly on the verge of collapse. Putin has used the war to clamp down on Russian society, to pull elites even closer to him, and to shore up his domestic position. No longer able to lean on his [foreign policy] reputation … [Putin] has instead focused on militarizing the state and the public sphere, purging those who openly dissent from the government’s position on the war, and stoking militant anti-Westernism among the wide swaths of the public that are, if not pro-war, at least genuinely anti-antiwar. * * * … Wartime Putinism is a reduced Putinism, and it would be impossible to describe today’s Russia (to Russians) as an ascendant power. It is, rather, an embattled power. This explains the frenzied media campaign to drum up support for the war, which masks the fact that Putin has committed Russia to a long cycle of stagnation. Isolation and sanctions will … contribute to … economic and technological decline. Nobody can say how long Putin can walk this dispiriting tightrope. Putin’s warpath … is a circuitous route that leads from point A back to point A. A fine-tuned method for avoiding failure, wartime Putinism has all the hallmarks of a dead end.”