At home and on the battlefield, seven self-inflicted traps are snaring Putin

Following the dramatic attack on the Crimea Bridge last weekend, Vladimir Putin was eager to wrench back the initiative. Since Monday Russia has hammered Ukrainian cities and infrastructure with long-range missiles. However, behind the sound and fury, the new tactics have exposed how the president is caught in a series of traps of his own making, not just on the battlefield but also at home.

BATTLEFIELD TRAP

Eight days ago General Sergei Surovikin was named as the new overall field commander for Moscow’s “special military operation”. Apparently known to his peers as “General Armageddon” — although that nickname only conveniently emerged in the Russian tabloids on his appointment — he is a competent, ruthless figure who presided over devastating air attacks on cities in Syria.

There is little a new commander can do, though. The Ukrainians have the initiative. They will use the last few weeks before winter to maximise their gains, notably in the southern region of Kherson. Freshly mobilised Russian reservists are trickling to the front but they are often untrained and unmotivated. At best they can help hold the line, not launch new offensives.

The bombardment has little strategic value and is burning through Russia’s dwindling stocks of weapons, which are hard to replenish. The retired general and parliamentarian Andrei Gurulyov, no dove, used an interview in the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda to hammer home the point: “don’t waste missiles.” It has been estimated that more than half of Russia’s arsenal is gone, including more than 80 per cent of the powerful Iskander systems. This has alarmed the high command, which wants to retain a strategic reserve for some future offensive or, more likely, in case of a new Ukrainian attack.

It has also angered regional leaders in whose fiefdoms the missile factories are located. They have been lobbying to exempt their skilled workers from Putin’s indiscriminate mobilisation. The savage assault on Ukrainian cities was, as much as anything else, a sop to the hawks inside Russia, a reaffirmation of Putin’s tough guy persona. It was not just that extremists on social media had been calling for reprisals for the bridge attack, which has credibly been blamed on Ukraine. He was also responding to the powerful leader of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov. Having loudly supported the war, Kadyrov is now a vehement critic of Sergei Shoigu, the defence minister, and the rest of the high command, accusing them of incompetence and cronyism and even calling for the use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine.

This highlights the political trap in which Putin finds himself. Once he could position himself between the extreme hawks and the more moderate technocrats. Now he is having to please one group, then the other — satisfying neither.

SOCIAL CONTRACT TRAP

When Putin opted to annex portions of Ukraine last month — including territory his soldiers were not even occupying — and began a partial national mobilisation, he broke not one, but two social contracts linked to the invasion.

Ordinary Russians had in effect been promised that, as long as Putin had his war, he would ensure that they did not suffer much. That no longer holds true. Mobilisation means that every family has reason to fear and economic hardship is beginning to bite.

He had also struck a tacit deal with regional leaders and the heads of key institutions. If they kept their domains quiet and put on a show of military enthusiasm, they would not be forced to abandon the pretence that they were there to represent local interests rather than Moscow’s.

Now these leaders feel that the Kremlin is reneging on its promise. Mobilisation and tightening federal finances have changed this equation too. Regional bosses are being called on to do the central government’s dirty work by assuaging public concern, funding the reconstruction of conquered cities and recruiting new “volunteer battalions” for the front. And they are becoming a problem for the Kremlin.

Every Russian leader worries about the regions: from Tsarist times to the present, the struggle to bring local leaders to heel has shaped the history of the largest nation on Earth. After Putin took over as president in 1999 the degree of central control that he reimposed on a chaotic state — through war and deft political manipulation — became one of the main pillars of his appeal. But now the Kremlin is having to squeeze more from regional and local leaders than they feel able to give, at just the moment that they feel emboldened to stand up to Moscow to protect their own interests.

Leaks from an internal report by the Investigatory Committee — sometimes considered Russia’s FBI — suggest a marked recent increase in embezzlement by regional elites. It complains that “at a time of national need, certain [officials] are concentrating on protecting their interests and establishing lateral alliances with business and criminal authorities in their regions.”

It brought to mind a scathing assessment I once heard from a former official from Khabarovsk, in the Russian Far East: “The local leadership had to say they were fully behind the war, though they knew it was stupid and unwinnable. They did the least they could get away with, and instead focused on their own corrupt schemes.” This was in 1990, and he was talking about how regional Communist Party officials in the USSR responded to the Soviet war in Afghanistan in the early 1980s.

There seems to be a striking similarity today: local officials despairing of what they feel is an out-of-touch Kremlin, paying lip service to the party line while keeping their heads down — or using the opportunity to embezzle what they can.

LEVERAGE TRAP

Those who are genuinely trying to lobby Moscow in the interests of their constituents are being listened to the least. Impoverished Dagestan has suffered disproportionately heavy losses in the war and its leader, Sergei Melikov, appealed in vain to the Kremlin for a respite from mobilisation. Others, like Khabarovsk’s governor Mikhail Degtyarev, have been able to get some men who should not have been mobilised released, but their efforts to get Putin to take a proper look at the process have been ignored.

As one Moscow-based political analyst put it, the Kremlin “doesn’t care about the cost to [regional leaders], it just wants them to do what they’re told”. At the same time, though, it needs them. This gives them leverage.

Alexander Dyumin, the governor of Tula, has been seeking a position in Moscow for a while. Having narrowly missed out on becoming the new emergencies minister in May, Putin’s former bodyguard is now making the case that, given how well he is keeping Tula’s arms factories running day and night, a defence ministry position might be a suitable reward.

Kadyrov, meanwhile, is engaged in his usual tactic to shore up the federal subsidies which account for more than 80 per cent of Chechnya’s budget. Time and again, when there is some risk to these funds, which perpetuate his rule and pay for vanity projects such as a huge mosque named after his father, he starts picking fights or threatening to resign. The Kremlin, dreading secessionist chaos without Kadyrov in charge and knowing it cannot afford a new civil war in the south, has backed down each time.

GANGSTERISM TRAP

Putin created a system which depended on dividing and ruling the elite. He encouraged infighting over status and money and made himself the sole arbiter of these disputes. Now that he is consumed by the war in Ukraine, these conflicts over shrinking resources are becoming more open.

The recent spate of mysterious “suicides” among prominent businessmen and officials, for example, seems to reflect a revival of murder as a business tactic, a feature of the pre-Putin “wild Nineties”.

Likewise, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the sanctioned businessman behind the notorious Wagner mercenary force, has long nursed grievances with Shoigu and the high command. He took advantage of Kadyrov’s criticisms to prosecute his own vendetta, saying: “Beautiful, Ramzan, keep it up. These punks should be shipped to the front barefoot with machineguns.”

Rustam Minnikhanov, the leader of Tatarstan, knows that many have demands on its oil assets, while the Kremlin carefully watches his region as an indicator of potential regional and ethnic tensions. As a result, he is taking almost comical pains to balance every interest, from Kadyrov to Shoigu. As a local political observer put it: “Minnikhanov doesn’t know where the knife might come from, so he’s trying to look every way, all the time.”

TRAPS INSIDE TRAPS

The regime is not under imminent threat. Regional and factional leaders are still largely vying for Putin’s favour or competing with each other. This is not yet open opposition, nor is there any credible prospect that the Russian Federation will fragment.

Rather, the emerging cracks in the system are both a symptom and a cause of stress. They reflect the way an authoritarian model depending on one man to control a fractious and self-interested elite suffers when he is absent, distracted or loses sight of the impact his actions have at home. His nuclear brinkmanship, for example, is meant to shake the morale of Ukraine and the West. What Putin fails to appreciate is that this is at least as terrifying to his own elites.

No wonder they are focusing on their own interests — even when it undermines the Kremlin’s efforts to maximise resources. According to the Investigatory Committee report, at least a quarter of funds intended to support army recruitment, for example, may be being stolen at the local level. But they don’t know for sure, not least because regional officials are covering each other’s tracks.

Caught between appeasing the noisy hawks and reassuring the worried technocrats, listening to the professionals and posing as a strongman, Putin’s room for manoeuvre at home is increasingly as constrained as it is on the battlefield.