There was a hint of a smile on Vladimir Putin’s stark features as he welcomed President Xi Jinping of China and Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India to a conference in the Russian city of Kazan last week.
This was the so-called Brics summit and since the Russian leader currently holds the rotating presidency, it was always going to take place there.
But the idea that this was a triumph for the killer in the Kremlin is belied by what actually happened in Kazan. Putin’s position received no expressions of support from the leaders of the world’s two most populous countries.
In particular, the revelation that Russia had supplied North Korea with 1,500 troops for its war in Ukraine ended badly.
Xi Jinping declared that there should be “no expansion of battlefields and no escalation of hostilities,” while Modi warned that the meeting should not be seen as a united front against the West: “We support diplomacy, not war.”
Vladimir Putin welcomed Chinese President Xi Jinping and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to a conference in the Russian city of Kazan last week
President Modi hugs Putin at the end of the conference. Modi warned that the meeting should not be seen as a united front against the West
It is said that the war against Ukraine is currently going well for Putin – at least in terms of territorial gains. But the Russians have had no breakthroughs.
And as our wise former ambassador to Moscow, Sir Roderic Lyne, put it to me: ‘Over the past two months the Russians have taken about 300 square miles – equivalent to less than a fifth of Essex – at a cost estimated at 60,000 casualties , deaths and injuries, so about 200 per square kilometer in a country of more than 230,000 square kilometers. No wonder they need the North Koreans.”
In other words, Putin simply cannot find enough Russians to continue waging his catastrophically stupid (and criminal) war against a people he claims are “brothers.”
A further demonstration of this predicament is the Kremlin’s decision, implemented this month, to grant freedom not only to prisoners, but to anyone before the courts, in exchange for their participation in the front.
As one Russian lawyer puts it: ‘The police can now arrest a man over the corpse of someone he just killed. They put on the handcuffs and then the killer says, ‘Oh wait, I want to go through a special military operation’ – and they close the criminal case.”
This will lead to a further collapse of Russia’s criminal justice system – and it is worth recalling that Putin had (successfully) staked his reputation on taking office in 1999 on a similar disintegration under Boris Yeltsin. Official figures show that organized crime has soared and that shooting on the streets of Moscow has become almost common again.
But the main reason for Putin’s popularity was based on his stabilization of the economy. Admittedly, this was mainly due to the coincidental rise in global oil prices shortly after he succeeded Yeltsin: since hydrocarbons are by far the largest source of Russian revenue, it is the source that keeps the population’s pensions paid.
At the conference, Xi Jinping declared that there should be “no expansion of battlefields and no escalation of hostilities.”
Within the so-called Brics summit where Russian leader Putin currently holds the rotating presidency
But since Putin launched his all-out invasion of Ukraine, revenues from this crucial resource have halved. The West’s sanctions may have proven porous, but China and India have been ruthless in price negotiations over the oil they buy from Russia — and Beijing, despite Putin’s pleas, has shown no interest in a Sino-Russian gas pipeline deal to replace it of the agreement that has now been concluded between Moscow and Western Europe.
Meanwhile, Putin has turned the domestic economy into something akin to the “structural militarization” that ultimately plunged the Soviet Union into poverty and division.
The intensity of the push for weapons production has starved other investment sectors – and even workers. This has consequences for the product that is of most concern to every Russian: food.
As a briefing paper from Global Intelligence Services points out: ‘Between January and July this year, production of tractors and seeders fell by more than 22 percent. In mid-August, suppliers of major food products informed retailers of upcoming price increases of up to 40 percent.’
Officially, the overall inflation rate is estimated at around 9 percent. But is that to be believed? An indication of the real situation was the announcement last Friday by the Russian Central Bank that it would increase its base interest rate by 2 points to no less than 21 percent.
This is a blow to the country’s housing market, especially since the government in July abandoned its subsidy scheme for homeowners, which had kept mortgage rates at 8 percent.
But it is far from just the real estate market that will now be banished by ultra-high interest rates – itself partly a consequence of Russia’s inability to borrow from international markets (the Chinese won’t even lend to them in renminbi, Beijing’s Chinese government bonds). official currency).
Last week, Sergei Chemezov, the CEO of Rostec, Russia’s largest state-owned industrial holding company, said of the latest rate hike: “If we continue to work this way, most of our enterprises will go bankrupt.”
Regarding the increase to over 20 percent in financing costs, Chemezov noted: ‘There is no profitability of 20 percent anywhere. Maybe in the drug trade, but even selling weapons doesn’t make that much profit.’
Coincidentally, Russia’s once booming arms export trade has also capsized, for the simple reason that the country now needs all of these weapons, and more, for its own use.
As Swedish economist Anders Aslund noted, “To its shame, the Kremlin has been forced to import artillery shells from its even more backward neighbor, North Korea.”
Does all this mean that even the stoic Russian people will turn against Putin? The punishments for this are so cruel that it seems unlikely. But if the continued disintegration of the country’s infrastructure leads to widespread loss of home heating in winter, that could be a trigger.
Last winter there was public discontent when almost 600 ‘major incidents’ affected critical infrastructure, causing 3 million Russians to lose their heating.
Given that the Kremlin had claimed that Europeans would die of hypothermia without Russian gas, this led residents to ask: “Why is it not Europe, but us?”
It is clear that Putin has focused on destroying Ukraine’s energy networks: but if his own people then suffer from rising costs, food shortages and even power outages, they will hardly take that as any consolation.
In this context, it is perverse for some Western politicians to conclude that the sanctions campaign against Moscow and their military aid to Ukraine have been a failure. And it is even more perverse to believe in the idea, promoted by the Kremlin, that there is an inevitable tide towards Russian “victory” (whatever that means).
Look again at those photos of Putin with the leaders of India and China at that summit in Kazan.
Is that really a genuine smile on the Russian president’s face? Or is it a grimace masquerading as a grin?